Matt and I joined several friends at a local Escape Room. An Escape Room is a place where you are locked (or rather "locked") in a room and have to solve several puzzles to find your way back out of the room. Portland has several Escape Rooms to choose from. We chose Escapism Portland and the Ritual Room for our first Escape Room appearance.
Here were the rules for the room.
Our team of eight people solved our puzzles and escaped from our room in 36 minutes (of a total possible 60 minutes.) Unfortunately, I can't tell you anything about the puzzles, but I can tell you they were well-crafted and varied and the entire experience was fun in that "pretty neat" way that makes you sound square when you are talking about it.
Here's a picture of Matt's back, hard at work at one of the puzzles. The most interesting thing about the experience was that after our guide locked us in the room (due to fire code, there was a second door that was unlocked) we heard a short scene-setting announcement (we had to solve the puzzles to join a powerful secret society) we had to figure out where to start. I do not often find myself in a space with no instructions, so figuring out where to begin was quite fun.
Escape rooms are hip (or square) enough to be featured on the Big Bang Theory as in this excerpt. We didn't solve as quickly as the BBT cast did, but we were impressed with how quickly we did solve things.
Whoa, I've never even heard of this before (I don't watch BBT). I'm intrigued, although I feel like I wouldn't be very good at it. I don't do well with puzzles. Anyway, I looked it up to see if there are any here, and there are! They're closer to downtown LA, but I think I might see if some of my friends would be interested in trying it out. Thanks for the idea! Also, congrats on figuring it out so quickly. I'm glad you had a good time!
ReplyDeleteWhat a fun date night outing. BBT was my first hearing of such a thing. Very cool! Or at least very nerdily cool!
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