Tips For Solving an Escape Room

Escape rooms are theatrical adventures ripped right out of movies and storybooks.

One or more players enter a room and enter a race against time.

You’ll have to use intelligence and teamwork to work your way past dozens of puzzles, contraptions, and secure a treasure or escape the room within a set time limit.

Escape rooms are quickly becoming popular among teens and corporate types alike, as they require coordination and problem solving skills in a way that tests social bonds and intelligence.

With rooms popping up all over Hungary, Russia, Asia, Australia, Serbia, South America, Hong Kong and New Zealand, you’ll need to arm yourself with the right knowledge to successfully conquer the escape room of your choice.

Here are some of the best tricks and tips you can use to beat an escape room and set records while you’re at it.

7 Tips To Help You Escape!

Think inside the box

Each escape room comes with its own backstory and theme.

Your gamemaster has painstakingly prepared your room with these in mind, so never underestimate the clues and information you can glean from a simple backstory.

The introductory movie or briefing contains the stories of people that affect the room and the puzzles within.

• Crime scenes require you to put yourself in the mind of an investigator looking for clues.
• Espionage rooms require you to infiltrate rooms and escape with a valuable artifact.
• Rescue rooms require you to defuse threatening scenarios to save the victim from harm.

Become your character and think inside the box

A good memory and eye for detail will let you squeeze every bit of value from the backstory and give you an edge over people who never pay attention during the briefing.

Divide your room into manageable pieces

The single worst thing you can do is have all your teammates crowd around a single clue and try to interpret it.

Escape rooms are filled with tons of little details that are meant for more than one person. Break your team up and divide the room between teams .

A surefire way to lose is to have everyone focus on a clue and endlessly debate.

Escape rooms come loaded with red herrings so you’ll want to cover as much ground as possible, and acquire all the information you need before you decide what’s real and what’s not.

Vocalize everything

Clues never announce themselves. After you’ve broken into teams, have everyone speak out loud the symbols, numbers, letters or objects they see in their designated quadrant.

This way, everyone in the room has the same information while they focus on their quadrant so you can quickly decide what pieces of a clue go where and see how the components of a single puzzle are split across a room.

Have everyone carry pen and paper to jot down facts and information they uncover for easy access.

Don’t neglect the beginning

Escape rooms are constructed to be challenging while meeting the time limit.
Don’t waste your initial moments, get moving!

If you’re aiming for a record time, ask for clues in the beginning.
This lets you clear the easy puzzles out of the way first and allows you plenty of time to solve the hair-raising puzzles in the end.

Don’t squander the time in the initial puzzles only to fail at the end puzzles due to lack of time.
People are too relaxed in the beginning and rush at the end, when you want precisely the opposite for a successful escape.

Mark your progress

Leave little markers behind that show you’ve already examined an area.

Little pieces of paper can be ideal for this, as you don’t want to go over shelves and drawers over and over while the real clue lies completely ignored.

The speed and efficiency at which you handle information is crucial. Mark everything examined, take everything unsolved with you so you don’t waste time in backtracking.

Lots of clues picked up in the early phases become important in the middle and end puzzles.

Delegate and rotate

Knowing your team strengths and weaknesses is crucial.

People good at maths should focus on the number-based puzzles, geography buffs should focus on the historical and contextual logic, and some people simply have a storyteller’s instinct that lets them guess things out of nowhere.

If solving a puzzle isn’t going anywhere, remember to rotate people to keep things moving.

The most successful teams are often very democratic, with no single leader hogging the attention and where everyone knows each other well enough to take on puzzles suited for them while their team mates cover up their weaknesses.

Keep these tips and tricks in mind the next time you’re at an escape room. You’ll feel like a champion when you break the standing record and walk away with an unforgettable experience.

 

Trapped! Escape Room Las Vegas, 4760 Polaris Ave, Las Vegas, NV 89103, (702) 907-8078. Here is a map to our Las Vegas location: