For a while before my wedding, nearly all my time was dedicated to getting the wedding arrangements in order. Christina and I still had some adventures, but time was minimal for doing pretty much anything else. It was a huge shift to spend more than a week “taking it easy.”
No, I haven’t vanished without a trace. The past few weeks have been very busy wrapping up Christina’s and my wedding plans, and now we’re only two days out.
There’s never been a better time to be a fan of puzzles. Escape rooms are the most obvious recent development, but the worldwide enthusiasm for puzzles didn’t stop there. One of my favorite new developments is the online puzzle challenge.
As someone who keeps track of how many escape rooms I’ve done, I’ve got a predicament of what counts toward that total.
It’s been a few years since I’ve taken a close look at the Geocaching website. The mobile app gives me the full toolkit I need to find and log caches, so I’ve never felt the need to go online. On a whim I took a look yesterday, and all I can say is “WOW.”
You’re opening a new escape room and you only have one opportunity to beta test it. You can either bring in a team of family and friends who generally like the idea and enjoy puzzles, or you can bring out a hardcore escape room enthusiast, say one who solved an escape room in every state in under a year. What do you do?
Christina and I recently completed a negative experience at a nearby escape room, Panic Escape Room. I don’t like speaking negatively about escape rooms regarding subjective elements that I personally didn’t like, but Panic had enough objective issues that make it a perfect case study for simple things to avoid in room design.
Many escape room businesses offer some kind of prize for winning. Whether it be a small prize like a sticker or a big prize like a T-shirt, or even proof of victory like a digital leaderboard or a stamp on a “passport,” there are a lot of prizes out there right now. So what makes a good prize? I’ll break down my thoughts on a few of the prizes I’ve encountered:
Originally conceived as video games, escape rooms only came into mainstream awareness when designers started making real-life versions. Now the activity is coming full circle, with advances in virtual reality opening the door to new types of video games that work to combine the best of what both real world and video games do best. It’s a really interesting space to explore, and the people at No Escape in Buffalo Grove & Aurora IL are at the forefront of testing these new digital frontiers. I visited both locations and tried multiple experiences with their different VR rigs, and I was […]
Here’s a potentially controversial statement – an average escape room with a great game master provides a better experience than a remarkable escape room with an average game master. Christina posed this to me as a hypothesis, and thinking back to the most memorably bad experiences I’ve had, I have to agree. The top four or five experiences that came to mind all had issues with the game master.
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