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Escape Room - Game Night Goblins

ROLE

TYPE

Designer

Experience

DESCRIPTION

It started as a game night like any other, until the Game Night Goblins struck ruining the plans for the night and locking up the cabinet of games. To get the night back on track, the cabinet needed to be unlocked and it seemed they left some clues and puzzles for us to solve to open the locks. By working together we could foil their plans and get back to a night of games.

Participants

12

Time to Complete

87 Minutes

Location

Game Design Elements

Word Puzzles

Riddles

Scavenger Hunt

Jigsaw-like Puzzle

Cryptograms

My Apartment​

BACKGROUND

I wanted to create a multi-faceted experience in which I could test creating a variety of interactive pieces and see what works best both with my audience and my space. This also would allow me to create a lot of different content to see what I’m drawn to most with designing games.

 

This pursuit led me to converting my own apartment into an Escape Room for a night and the only way I could simulate the feeling of an, “Oh no!” moment in an escape room would be to trick my friends into a “Puzzle Game Night” with no explanation of what we are doing until they arrive and we begin.

Design Challenges

Escape Room Standards

There are none! I looked up how much time it should take, how many puzzles to include, how many people and there just aren’t really homemade escape room standards. I knew I wanted to include as many of my friends as I could while keeping a relatively small sample size. Generally, I found 1.5 decently challenging puzzles for each person would end up around the 60 minute mark assuming each group is about 6, maybe 8 people.

 

Unknown Number of Participants

I tried to limit it to 10, but in trying to keep it a surprise people wanted to join and I felt bad telling people, “no you can’t come over to my house for game night.” I made the puzzles assuming 10. We ended up with 13 and a couple of the people were not really into Escape Rooms and bowed out after about 15 minutes.

 

Familiar Space

I was planning to do this inside my apartment where my friends have been dozens of times. In an escape room, it looks put together. It looks like everything belongs. To make components that would stick out as different or new but make it still feel like it is my apartment would be challenging.

 

Not Really Escaping a Room

I couldn’t very well lock my friends inside my apartment and make the goal for them to leave, so I needed to create an objective that was inside the apartment for them to accomplish. Typically an escape room involves a lock of some sort so I decided to find somewhere/some places to incorporate locks to open that weren’t already built into the doors.

OVERALL DESIGN

Meta Story

Because I hold regular game nights, sometimes with a theme, I decided to use a “Puzzle Game Night” as the backbone to which I would create the story. 

 

We were supposed to have a game night but some mythological creatures known as “Game Night Goblins” could smell our fun coming from a mile away and decided to ruin our night and lock up my cabinet of games. Fortunately for us they left behind some clues for us to unlock the cabinet and get back to our game night while they watch us struggle through their tricks.

 

There were 4 locks on the cabinet: 2 that needed a key, one that needed a letter code, and one that needed a number code. The Players would need to solve smaller puzzles to get the codes/keys to open the locks. Once all 4 are opened, the “Escape” Room would be complete.

 

The Chalkboard mounted on the wall next to my board game dining table would serve as the home base of where most of the puzzle information would be held and where there would be space for the puzzles to be worked out.

Smaller Puzzles

  • Unlockables

    • Number lock with separate puzzles to obtain numbers

    • Word Lock 1 that needed a jigsaw puzzle for the letters, with a clue on the board for the order that gave a key to one of the Key Locks

    • Word Lock 2 that needed multiple puzzles to find letters and order

    • Cryptex that needed a scavenger hunt-like puzzle for the letters using the Drink Menu with a clue on the board for the order.

    • Key lock with the key location being hinted at in a poem

  • Jigsaw Puzzle inside a resealed deck of cards with letters drawn out across the faces of the same suit to be reassembled.

  • Limericks to find Scavenger Hunt Items

  • Poem

  • Crossword Puzzle

  • Trivia (with the answers being physically accessible in the room)

  • Translations

    • Italian to English

    • Morse Code

    • Cryptogram

  • A lot of Matching Puzzles to line answers up.

Learnings

I occasionally heard that some parts were easy until they realized the “easy” part was just a component of a larger puzzle. Seeing them split up, take on pieces alone, rejoin and share information, was so much fun to watch.

 

I ended up learning that some puzzle types worked better than others with my audience, but when it came to designing the various puzzle components, the parts I enjoyed most were the most complex ones; the ones that needed to hint to a larger puzzle, the ones that needed to be combined with other pieces, the overall meta-puzzle and complex system is what I really enjoyed designing.

 

Despite the challenges, the 13 people who were present completed the puzzle in 1 Hour and 23 Minutes with 4 Hints given, which felt like a success to me for balance for the most part. The parts that had the most issues were things that were too integrated into the space that nobody saw them as out of the ordinary. Things need to be more obviously a puzzle component if in such a common space.

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