Escape Room Tips & Tricks: How to Escape FAST
Speed Up Your Escape(s)
Do you jealously eye the 1st place times whenever you exit an escape room with minutes left to spare? Do you want to be the MVP of your next team builder and/or date night?
I’ve got you.
After designing, testing, and operating escape rooms for several years (plus escaping hundreds of them in the process), I’ve wrangled together five easy-to-digest tips in a helpful, SEO-friendly listicle.
While this advice (probably) WON’T get you out of an actual 1920s jail cell, booby-trapped Ptolemaic dynasty tomb, or defunct submarine, it WILL help you accomplish what’s important in life: spending less time in a locked room that you paid money to be in.
1.) COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE
The #1 reason that teams fail at escape rooms is poor communication. The #2 reason is players who accidentally pocket keys. These things are related.
By nature, almost every player in an escape room is going to be working with an incomplete set of information. Different players will notice different things, handle props differently, and find different clues.
Very few escape room puzzles require prior knowledge to solve, which means that your biggest advantage as a team is your ability to view situations from different perspectives. If being vocal about your thoughts and theories doesn’t solve a puzzle outright, it could always be the nudge that another player needs to *CLICK* things into place.
That’s only if you’re VOCAL about it, though. Don’t be that guy who spots something clever and then keeps it a secret. It makes for a REALLY awkward team dinner afterward.
2.) WORK BACKWARDS
The moments after you first walk into an escape room can be overwhelming. A good escape room will have interesting scenery, locked objects, interactive props, and esoteric information to start finding IMMEDIATELY.
A less-good escape room will still probably have plenty of locks on display.
All of this information can be a lot to take in, especially if you don’t have a clear idea of where to start. Most escape rooms, however, are linear, which means whatever you find behind one lock will likely help you on the next one. The faster you open your first lock, the better momentum you’ll have going forward.
To that end, once you get into the room, it’s a good idea to take a full inventory of all the locks and interactive elements you can find. Get a close look at all of the locks and see what sort of combination you’re looking for: is it four numbers, five letters, or a small key?
Once you know what you’re looking for, you’ll have a lot easier time finding it. Puzzles that could otherwise be strange and obtuse can make a lot more sense if you know what format of answer you’re trying to get from them.
3.) TEAM SIZE MATTERS
Different escape rooms will have different maximum group sizes, but that number usually falls somewhere in the 6-8 range. It can be easy to think that more eyeballs = more advantages, but this isn’t always the case.
In fact, two years of data showed us that the most successful groups were often HALF of the max room size — usually 3-4 players.
Granted, the escape room will never actually tell you this, because they want you to bring as many people as possible (even if it means that everyone is going to be CRAMPED inside).
If you’re considering bringing a large group to an escape room, consider calling them beforehand to ask if they’re comfortable running two rooms simultaneously. Most will be.
Not only does racing another team make for an even more exciting escape room experience, but it also provides you with a place to put all the players you DON’T want to spend an hour in a locked room with. Win/win/win!
4.) USE YOUR CLUES
Most escape rooms operate on a clue system. The exact mechanics will vary, but these are typically a chance for groups to get nudges on the puzzle they’re stuck on.
USE THEM. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, USE THEM.
It can be really tempting to be that “We don’t need any clues at all” guy. Unfortunately, that has a lot of overlap with being the “Man, we probably COULD have gotten out if we used our clues” guy.
Most escape rooms balance their difficulty with the knowledge that guests will use their clues. They can also be a lifesaver for groups that have the right idea on a puzzle but got a minor detail wrong along the way.
The best time to use one of these clues will vary from group to group. Our (as in, my) escape room regulars will usually call for help if we’ve gone more than four minutes without making meaningful progress on a puzzle.
Sure, there are plenty of people out there who consider asking for help to be a sign of weakness. Speaking from plenty of personal experience though, calling for help and solving a puzzle is A LOT more rewarding than milling around for 11 minutes while triple-checking incorrect solutions.
5.) STOP OVERTHINKING
Well-designed escape rooms will almost never require outside knowledge, although pattern recognition and decent math skills can often help you speed up puzzles. Beyond that, all the information you need to escape is usually within the room.
Keep in mind that most escape rooms are designed to be solved by family groups, which means using information that’s understandable and digestible for kids. That’s not to say that every escape room will feature kid-friendly difficulty, but it means that you (probably) won’t have to do any calculus to escape.
Below is an (incomplete) list of outside knowledge that we’ve seen players TRY to use on puzzles:
The name of General Patton’s pet Bull Terrier (Willie)
Data architecture for the NES Original Super Mario Brothers cartridge
Approximate start (and end) dates for the Boshin War
Proper RV engine maintenance techniques
The atomic composition of Darmstadtium
Pre-debut names for the members of KPOP superstars BTS
What Rocky Mountain Oysters are ACTUALLY made of
Out of all that delicious brain-learning, here’s all the information from that list that actually came into play:
Notice a pattern here?
Once you adopt these five handy strategies, you’ll be smashing records and steamrolling escape rooms in no time. Whether you’re solving the mysteries of an ancient tomb, unraveling a spooooky family dynamic in a haunted mansion, or trying to argue your way through a submarine launch, these tactics will get you out the door before you have time to feel stuck.
Do you have any escape room recommendations? Have you played on that left a lasting impression? I’d love to hear from you!
