Complete an escape room

“The first few minutes in the room are hectic and disorienting, with no clear sense of where, or even how, to begin. There are two bookcases along the back wall, which is covered in a geometric yellow pattern. (Is it just hipster decoration? Or a road map filled with crucial clues?) A portrait of Bill Murray hangs on another wall, overlooking a couch, a stool, a few desks and random objects everywhereincluding a Darth Vader mask. We decide the best approach is to divide and conquer. One person starts flipping through books; another rifles desk drawers. My boyfriend fiddles with a suspiciously heavy can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I examine a series of colored, numbered vases. The next 20 minutes are a blur as we fumble around, examining tchotchkes and maps of D.C. streets, trying to be useful. Mostly we are just lostyelling out scattered directives and questions that dont get a response: Time is running out! Have we used this big metal key for anything yet? We need to communicate more! Why is there a blond wig on the floor?”

“At one point we discover a brain teaser, and I feel panic welling as we read it together. But a man behind me blurts out the answer immediately. “Look at you!” I cheer and give him a high five. Maybe morale boosting will be my chief contribution. With 20 minutes left, the nine of us crowd around a whiteboard staring at a word weve written, a word were sure contains everything we need to root out the double agent, unlock the door and win the game. The word is pickle. Which is what we are in, but at least now were all working together, focused on manipulating the letters of this briny vegetable into a way out. It takes a few minutes of retracing old clues and trying different methods of translating the letters into numbers, but eventually we do it. Some 28 minutes after we first walked into the room, the nine of us emerge, just four minutes shy of record time.”

“The room was filled with colourful drapery and gold accented furniture. There was also a screen on the wall that genies would pop-up on to give us more clues and congratulate us when we were correct. There were voice-overs, gold coins, and lots of riddles! We spent the first 10 minutes trying to solve each puzzle together, but quickly realized that we needed to split up to cover more ground. We would announce to each other whenever we had managed to solve a puzzle so that we were all in the loop of what was going on. We also used the tactic of keeping all the clues together in the middle area so we wouldnt get confused about what we had or hadnt done yet. Thankfully, the person running the room gave us some hints because we did get stuck a few times. In the last 5 minutes of the game, we started to panic and raced to finish as we were only about 60% of the way through the puzzles in the room. Within those few minutes, we somehow managed to jump to 80% finished (according to the person running the game), so we were pretty close to escaping.”