Accidental 600th

I completed my 600th escape room. At the time, I didn’t know it was my 600th escape room. C’est la vie!

The good news is it was an extremely worthwhile room to have been number 600. We played the Vampires room at Mindtrap (Montgomery, IL). It’s a seventy five minute adventure through a huge set filled with secret passages, animatronics, and clever gadgetry. It’s one of those rooms you could use as the set for a short movie.

The puzzle design was very well conceived and I loved how nonlinear the game was. I’ll go more into depth on that in a separate review, but the short version is that the room was extremely impressive.

Back to the #600 issue- I currently maintain my escape room log on a Google Sheets spreadsheet. It works acceptably except for a few small details- the first is that unless I remember to update the sheet immediately after the room, there’s a decent chance I’ll forget about entering it altogether. A few times recently I’ve realized that I never added a room I played to the sheet- most commonly this happens when I play a new room at a location I’ve been to before and realize I don’t have the first room I played there on my list. The second issue is the one that led to my predicament here- I need to manually refresh my pivot table every time I want to check on my room count.

Alas, I entered the room thinking it was #599. Christina wasn’t with me, nor was my dad. I had a great group of friends with me, though. The team worked very well together and we stayed organized and effective throughout.

I usually like making my hundredth milestones special, and thankfully, everything lined up for a special day. We even got steak at Chicago Prime Steakhouse that evening- completely unrelated, but I can retroactively link the two together!

I can take this moment to give a shout out to some of the cool tools being used today for tracking escape rooms- any of these would have solved my problem. The Morty app is on the verge of being released for Android, so hopefully soon I’ll be able to use that to track most of my games. The Morty team are great ambassadors for the escape room industry- they’re the ones who sponsor all the escape room Meetup groups around the United States, including the Chicago group I’m involved in. Lockme is another great tool that does the same thing for Europe, run by the brilliant team that also built ERChamp and the Escape Tales home games.

All in all, my 600th escape room was a great experience. It’s hard to believe there are this many amazing experiences out there, and I look forward to 600 more.