7 Must-Know Escape Room Tips and Tricks
Socializing is one of the best things for our physical and mental health. According to Summa Health, socializing can boost our mood, reduce stress, slow cognitive decline, and improve our quality of life. What better way to socialize than by beating an escape room with your favorite group?
Escape rooms are tough and intimidating to some, but with the right escape room strategies, they're less intimidating. But what sorts of escape room tips and tricks should you focus on?
If you're curious about winning escape room techniques, we're here to offer our assistance. Here are the best ways to find the room puzzle solutions with your group.
- Work Together
- Split Up
- Remember the Difficulty
- Don't Overthink Things
- Be Careful for Tricks
- Keep the Theme in Mind
- Pace Yourself
1. Work Together!
The most important of all escape room tips and tricks is also the simplest: work together! Escape rooms are a social activity that takes teamwork to be able to tackle correctly.
Many escape rooms are made for as many as ten people, which we offer several of. Some are made for as few as five.
However many people you have on your team, make sure that you're working together and not getting frustrated. As the timer ticks down and time feels short, it's natural for the adrenaline of the situation to lead to some raised tempers. Oregon State University insists that arguments aren't just unpleasant - they're bad for your health.
Do your best to treat each other with kindness and not let the puzzles come between you. Practically speaking, this will impact your team's ability to solve the puzzles! Personally speaking, it's just not very fun to do an escape room with people snapping at each other.
There are some escape rooms that are meant for a single person where this advice won't apply. But since most are group efforts, we thought it best to make sure this was first and foremost.
2. Don't Hesitate to Split Up
Part of working together is to understand each other's strengths and weaknesses. Who's best at what kinds of puzzles? What team members work best with each other and will work more efficiently toward the same goal?
These are difficult things to know if it's a group you aren't highly familiar with. Are you doing a team-building exercise with coworkers you don't know well? In that case, you may not know every strength and weakness of your partners.
Don't hesitate to let some people work on one solution while others work on another. Many of these team-based escape rooms have a large number of people, so everyone working toward the same solution becomes a detriment.
3. Remember the Difficulty
When you go to sign up for an escape room, there's usually some way to tell the difficulty. Sometimes it's from knowing the completion rate, and other times the escape room will blatantly tell you what the difficulty is.
You should keep this difficulty in mind when coming up with escape room strategies. Many team-based escape strategies will overlook the difficulty and overshoot what the puzzle is offering.
If the puzzle is easy and you go in expecting an exceptional challenge, you may feel underwhelmed when your group solves the puzzle too quickly. Similarly, if you're expecting some family fun and find a remarkable challenge, it may leave a bad taste in your mouth.
4. Try Not to Overthink Solutions
Another important part of understanding the difficulty is to not overthink solutions. If you're expecting a greater challenge than what's on offer, you may fail the escape room by missing the solution.
That's because you were looking for complex solutions where the fix was simple. Maybe you were looking too deeply into the clues, or maybe you expected there to be more clues to look into.
Whatever the case, do your best to aim for the simpler solutions first and build from there. Doing so can help you find even the most complex of room puzzle solutions without overshooting the difficulty.
5. Be Careful for Trick Puzzles
Speaking of finding all the clues, how often have you found yourself tricked by clever wording? It's most common in riddles, but you'll find plenty of riddles and puzzles on display in the average escape room.
Many escape rooms have instructions that are in the form of a riddle. These instructions give you hints about the solutions, but they're rarely complete or give you all the information.
In almost every escape room, there's also a timer going down. Because of that, many of the puzzles are designed to mislead you and burn your time up chasing false leads. Stay vigilant and do your best to keep all paths open!
6. Keep the Theme in Mind
Good winning escape room techniques start with remembering the theme. Every escape room has some sort of theme that the experience is built off of.
That theme is often important when it comes to finding solutions. A pirate-themed adventure may focus on treasure maps or compasses. A ghost-themed puzzle might have an emphasis on occult imagery like Ouija boards or an exorcism.
These sorts of themes can help lead you toward good room puzzle solutions. Because of that, it's great to do escape rooms that are in line with your interests. You can use your knowledge to find out the most about your adventure.
7. Pace Yourselves!
Finally, always remember to pace yourself. It feels backward to think of moving slowly when there's a timer coming down, but haste makes waste. According to Psychology Today, rushing can lead to mental health problems, which is a good way to impact your escape room!
It's common for teams to end up losing because they rushed. When this happens, you miss obvious hints or clues that you otherwise would have caught. Move quickly, but not so quickly that you aren't able to spot the obvious solutions.
Mastering Escape Room Tips and Tricks
Knowing the right escape room tips and tricks will help you form winning team-based escape strategies. Pace yourselves, remember the difficulty, and treat your fellow escapists well.
Alcatraz Escape Games is proud to be the premier escape room provider in Draper and Lindon. Our escape rooms vary in size, difficulty, and theme to provide you the best challenge in all of Utah. Contact us to schedule an unforgettable experience today.