Puzzling

It was an eventful weekend, starting with an Evan Reynolds magic show at the girls' school Friday night, on through Rachel's piano recital at the Hard Rock Cafe on Sunday, and finishing with my date with Lydia Sunday night. Saturday night we had a babysitter and went to an escape room to celebrate Nicole's birthday with our neighbor, Matt. His wife Ganelle was supposed to join us, but their kids were not feeling well, so she backed out.

I did a puzzle room once before, with my work colleagues as a team-building event, back in November. It was a lot of fun. So, when our earlier plan fell through because the venue was sold out, and Matt suggested an escape room, I was excited to try it again. The three of us arrived and joined seven or eight others at Ninja Escapes, where we worked on mission number one, Hack Attack. We had to solve a series of puzzles in the locked office of an arch-villain to rescue the 87 billion dollars he had stolen from orphans of the world.

The escape room concept seems to have taken off in a big way, at least in this area. There are a number of instances to choose from. I picked Ninja Escapes because it was close by. The one I did with work colleagues was not technically an escape room, because the door was never locked, but was essentially the same concept. It was very different working with a group of strangers, all younger and more energetic than us, but we still enjoyed ourselves, and were able to contribute to the puzzle-solving. Unlike my earlier experience, the puzzles this time were chained together, in the sense that we had to solve one in order to make parts of the solution to others available. However, like the other, all the pieces were distributed throughout the room waiting to be found, such that it was not clear how they fit together until they had been completed. I think I prefer the inter-dependent puzzles.

Our host claimed that only ten percent of teams solved the puzzle and escaped from the room. We're skeptical of the statistics, but in any case we managed to complete it with about five minutes of our allotted hour to spare. Nicole and Matt both expressed interest in trying mission number two sometime. I highly recommend this as a form of entertainment!