15 guides for the person running the game
How to plan, set up and run an escape room game at home, at school or with a big group: ideas by occasion and age, puzzle types, riddles with answers, how to give hints, the rules, and plans for birthdays, teen parties, adult game nights, date nights, classrooms, youth groups, team building, Halloween and Christmas.
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For 4 to 8 colleagues who want a day out, book a venue; for a remote team, a hosted online session; for 8 to 24 people in your own meeting room, a printed game that runs several teams at once.
A birthday escape room at home works when the game fits the youngest child, one adult runs it without playing, and the cake waits until the box opens.
Teenagers can tell within a minute whether a party game was written for them or for a little brother, and a case with cute characters and rhyming clues is over before it starts.
The length of your class period decides which escape room games for the classroom will work, before devices or head count come into it.
Wait until the team is truly stuck, then give the smallest hint that helps, and climb one level at a time: a nudge, a pointer, a near-answer.
For a child's birthday, the pick is a locked present box: the gift goes into a sealed box, three or four clues hidden around the room lead to the code, and the party ends when the box opens.
Every escape room puzzle has the same three parts.
The usual family escape room game at home has one set of clues, a 5-year-old who can't read them and a 15-year-old who solves them before anyone else has sat down.
Eight is the number that decides an escape room party at home for adults.
If the youngest guest at your Halloween party is 5 and the oldest is 13, the scare has to fit the 5-year-old, and the game can still feel like Halloween to the 13-year-old.
Here are 12 escape room riddles with answers, grouped by age from 5 to adults, each with a one-line note for the host on how hard it runs.
An escape room date night at home works when the game is built for two and neither of you has to run it.
A youth group meeting is usually a 90-minute slot with a crowd that changes from week to week, and an escape room for a youth group fits it when the group plays in teams of three to six at separate tables, one leader hosts without playing, and the night ends with the whole room at one table and a short debrief.
Escape room game rules come down to the five on the card below, and they are the same at a venue with staff and at a kitchen table with a printed game.
For the usual Christmas table, grandparents and one or two children under 7 among the adults, the game that works is one short story with three kinds of jobs: the little ones hunt, the readers solve, and the grandparents judge.
