An escape room is a physical type of game where a group of players is trapped in a room. They have access to clues and hints about how to escape and need to put it all together. They might be trapped in just one room or it could be a series of rooms they need to get out of.
The Wikipedia page on escape rooms, found here, shares that the players have a time limit to escape. The rooms are often designed after fictional locations such as a castle, a spaceship, or an abandoned prison. The clues and puzzles will follow the theme of the escape room such as a cowboy hat is a clue in a western themed escape room.
Escape rooms have become very popular over the past decade. It was in Asia that the first permanent rooms were designed by businesses. Today they are found throughout the world including North America, Europe, Australia, Russia, and South America. There are more than 8,000 escape rooms around the world.
Getting an escape room business up and operating is pretty inexpensive. It can be as little as $7,000 to rent the space and decorate it with a theme. Each party of guests usually has 4 to 8 people in it all of whom pay about $25 to $30 for an hour-long session. Really popular escape rooms can make several hundred thousand dollars a year.
https://lockdownrooms.com/pick-a-las-vegas-escape-room/ is the URL for a Las Vegas escape room. They have three locations and 11 themes in total. Among the themes this business offers are hostage rescue, crazy professor, western dual, pharaoh’s curse, and cursed cabin. Like a lot of these types of businesses they also offer team building times to local businesses who have their employees take part in an escape room session.
Escape rooms have evolved since the first one was established. In the beginning, the problems people faced were mostly solved using a pencil and paper. Later on, padlocks were added which, when opened, led to hidden keys or other items that could be used to get further in the game. Nowadays a lot of technology goes into these rooms such as automation.
Teachers are also getting in on the fun of escape rooms. This article in the Great Forks Herald shares how a local school teacher is using the idea of escape rooms to educate her children. She uses puzzles in class such as multiple types of locks to figure out, blacklight flashlights, and ultraviolet pens. The teacher says that of course the students aren’t actually locked in any room but the end result of working together and figuring clues out is the same.
In order to further incentivize her students, this teacher has bags that they can unlock. If they are successful in unlocking the bag, they might get some extra points in the class or the answer to a problem on an upcoming test. After each session is completed, she will talk with the students about what strategies they followed and how these skills they used might be useful out in the real world.
