We’ve compiled our top 23 escape room tips and tricks that we’ve used to achieve greater than 85% escape rate on 100+ rooms in the United States and Europe. The tips can be broken up into five categories: make a team, work together, manage puzzle items, be comprehensive, and solve puzzles efficiently.
Book the whole escape room for your friends or coworkers if you can. Especially for large-group games, teams work better when there’s a common context for communication. It’s not fun for a group of 20-somethings to play with a family bringing their kids, the play styles may clash when teamwork is required. This clash is infrequent but can happen if you’re unlucky. Public booking is usually fine however in a pinch or when you’re travelling!
Playing at the maximum team size means 1) physical crowdedness 2) not enough things for everyone to work on 3) fewer “aha!” moments 4) additional overhead in getting everyone up to speed. We generally recommend approximately 70-80% of the maximum capacity although this can vary by game or group.
Work Together Having multiple people to look over a clue can help!
If you’ve been staring at a puzzle for too long and can’t figure out the solution, enlist a fellow team member to help or take over on the puzzle. This helps make sure that puzzles don’t get forgotten, and that there are enough eyes on each unsolved puzzle. This can continue until a few people can’t figure it out – that’s usually a sign that you don’t have all of the information yet (or that you need a hint!).
Escape room teams function best when they try everything. So if your teammate has a crazy but somewhat reasonable idea, listen to them and try it with them! If you think it’s a bad idea, still encourage them to try it nevertheless. As long as the crazy idea is reversible, it might just move you closer to the final solution. At the very least, it will be fun!
This tends to be fairly chaotic but very effective. Escape room games are won and lost based on how quickly two team members who found related items can match them together. This includes things like a code and a key, a key and a lock, or a pattern that appears the same way in two different places.
This helps spread apart your team and have each team member be maximally effective. There’s a tendency to dismiss or skip over some puzzles that are “too hard” to do at first glance. This leaves some puzzles forgotten and undone until someone realizes that they’re needed.
Be a contributor to a puzzle and not a spectator. It’s too easy to be a spectator when interesting progress is being made on a puzzle, but people are more effective when they’re spread out and working on what needs to be done! If there’s only one puzzle open however, by all means let the whole team brainstorm!
A key is almost never used more than once. Leave it in the lock for your sanity! This will help prevent the key from being used again, prevent someone else from trying out another key on the lock, and prevent you from accidentally locking the object again. In very rare cases, a key may be used more than once, so keep that in mind too as a last resort option.
Separate objects in the game into a “used” pile and an “unused” pile. This helps prevent team members from examining the same object again and again. This also helps you connect certain “unused” items by placing them in physical proximity! Note that in some escape rooms, objects may be “used” more than once.
This helps keep the room tidy, so you can find what you need. This also lets you keep together related objects, so you can find all of them right when you need them. Some examples:
Stack related books together
Spread apart an important piece of cloth
Place loose objects on the table on the room
Put all unused keys together in a central location
There are many more useful tips on the internet, but this will get you started. Have Fun!!!
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