Puzzle Break Room Escape

Have you ever played an “Escape the Room”-style game? There are a few video games built around this sort of premise, like 999 (Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors) and numerous mobile apps. In these games, your character (and possibly several others) is trapped in a room and must solve puzzles to figure out the way to escape. The video games proved popular enough that several people decided to bring the experience into the real world.

Real life “Room Escape” games can be found all around the country. They allow a group of friends (or groups of strangers, if you can’t get your own group together) to play an intense game of escape. The group is locked in a room full of puzzles and clues — some out in the open, some hidden — in order to construct still more puzzles and clues that will allow them to eventually find a secreted key and escape the room. Players have a limited amount of time to figure out all of the puzzles. (And don’t worry about becoming genuinely trapped; a staff member will always be on hand in the room with you to ensure that all is well and that no one gets too claustrophobic.)

If that sort of adventure seems exciting to you, then you’re in luck: there are several within an hour’s drive from Vista del Rey apartments, most of them up in Seattle. Puzzle Break is one of the oldest and most well-known, offering their original room-escape game as well as “Midnight Carnival” and “20,000 Leagues” versions (what could be more exciting than trying to escape a sunken submarine?), and more. Other room-escape venues in the area include Ninja Escape! and Sherlocked.

If you’d like to learn more about how fun room escape games can be (not to mention how great they are as a team-building exercise) from some expert game designers, check out this video. Have you ever done a room escape game? Let us know about the experience in the comments!