L.E. Hall - Planning Your Escape: Strategy Secrets to Make You an Escape Room Superstar

A paper prop from the Spark of Resistance escape room

This is the scenario for Spark of Resistance, an escape room that I opened with five friends in 2014 in Portland, Oregon.

In the story, the players were a team of spies, activated for a secret mission: to infiltrate a double agents office.

Our double agent has missed a vital check-in, and we fear that something has happened to them. We need you and your special puzzle-solving skills to investigate the double agents office and figure out where theyve gone.

Over the span of sixty minutes, players explored the office, met up with the double agent, were betrayed when the agent escaped the building without them, and then freed themselvesbut only if they completed all the puzzles in time, of course.

It was the first escape room in the state and one of the first in the Pacific Northwest. We learned a lot from designing and building it and even more from watching thousands of people play it.

Is a couple good at communicating with each other? Is a work team well synchronized? Does a family have a strong dynamic? Drop them in an escape room, close the door, hit the timer, and find out.

Escape rooms are the perfect exercises in communicating, assessing information, and making decisions quickly. As such, every player has their strengths and weaknesses.

What this book aims to do is help you identify yoursand use that knowledge to slay every room you encounter. (With your similarly armed friends, of course!) In fact, you can use the tools in this book to improve not only your escape room game but also your chances of solving any puzzlebecause, as youll learn, they all operate from the same set of principles.

The makers and players of immersive puzzle games come from many different backgrounds. Still, one thing we all have in common is a sense of curiosity and a willingness to challenge ourselves.

I design escape rooms and puzzle games for a living, and while its been a long, meandering road to this point, I have definitely always loved mysteries.

I grew up reading about kid detectives like Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown, and I loved stories about strange events and hidden treasures, like Graeme Bases childrens book The Eleventh Hour.

In college, I discovered the interactive, live Internet games called ARGs, or alternate reality games. (In fact, thats how I met my partner, who created the first ARG I ever played.) ARGs play out across the web, with codes hidden in websites, phone numbers leading to live actors, and, sometimes, actual buried treasureall reached by solving puzzles.

I was officially hooked.

When we moved to Portland, we were welcomed by someone I knew through the ARG community forums but had never met in person. He introduced us to a monthly puzzle-solving event called Puzzled Pint. Every second Tuesday of the month, people gather in bars and restaurants to solve themed puzzles on paper alongside their friends.

With Puzzled Pint, I honed my skills and started thinking of myself as a puzzler for the first time. I also met an amazing group of people with a similarly deep interest in this admittedly nerdy pursuit. When we heard that an escape room had opened in a nearby state, we immediately hit the road.

Id never seen anything like it: it was all the stuff I loved from detective stories and puzzle games, but life-sizea room with objects, padlocks, and clues that you could actually touch.

On the drive back, we were ecstatic. This mediums incredible potential was already clear: escape rooms were like live, participatory theater crossed with video games.

Lets make one, we said. How hard can it be? (Spoiler alert: very!)

After a lot of sweat and a little bit of blood and tears, we opened Spark of Resistance. And since then, weve been lucky to make many more exciting adventures for the curious at heart.

My goal with this book is to open up the world of escape rooms to as many new players as possible and give them the tools to succeed.