Back in the day, escape room owners would ask us, “How do I get you to come review my games?” and our answer was, “Have one of our friends get married in your city.”

We had near encyclopedic knowledge of the escape rooms our home market.

These days, we’ve more or less played out our home markets, so we find ourselves playing escape rooms far less frequently, instead traveling on reasonably tight budgets and playing in escape room destination cities.

Both modes of play have their joys and struggles, and I’m going to explore them.

Local Escape Room Play

When I say “local play” I am taking a slightly broad definition as, any region that you either live in or visit regularly, and play enough that you really know the market.

Most every avid escape room player is a local player somewhere.

Deep Knowledge

Avid local players tend to have extensive knowledge of their local market, having played just about everything that’s average or above… and they frequently have played a lot of the weakest stuff either out of curiosity, completionism tendencies, morbid curiosity, or as a joke.

A Sense of History

Local players develop a sense of history within their region. They see individual companies develop and progress with each subsequent game, watching that company’s style grow or refine over time.

The more curious and involved they are, the more gossip they absorb from within the community.

Newness Bias

They also tend to play games when they are new… and this can lead to skewed perspectives on those games.

Sometimes this means that local players are experiencing a game before it gets beat up or falls into disrepair.

Other times, local players experience a game before it has matured. This happened with the iconic game The Dome from Mama Bazooka back in the day. The local Dutch players visited while the creators were struggling to make everything work perfectly. Those of us who traveled to play months after it had opened saw a fully realized and complete experience. This led to some confused online discourse between the locals and the travelers.

Regional Flavor Part I

Most regions have a regional flavor to their escape rooms. The big chains and franchises don’t adhere to these, and there are always outliers. However, we see it in the rules, the gamemastering, the hint systems, the level of difficulty, the types of puzzles, and the way that story is expressed. What’s interesting is that most local players don’t know this.

It does present itself when extremely experienced local players from different regions get into arguments with each other in online spaces. For each player, the norms are slightly different, but they don’t have a great way of knowing this.

And for myself, one of the strange things about the New York City escape room scene is that it had a classic NYC melting pot vibe because early on we had companies from Russia, China, Hungary, Japan, and Israel. So we just walked down the street and played completely different styles. It was neat, and it was the thesis of our first Escape, Immerse, Explore Tour way back in 2017.

TERPECA Challenges

A common challenge for local players is that in most places (outside of a few hotspot cities), there are only a few rankable games in TERPECA, and even fewer nearby winners.

This leads to players wondering, “Are the games in [insert escape room hotspot] really that good?” And the answer is usually yes (as long as the local flavor is to your taste).

Local Pride

A common trend of local players is a deep pride in local favorites. You tend to find yourself recommending the same list of “must plays” to people and that list rarely changes.

Something that I love doing is getting to know the owners of my favorite games, and asking if they are open to me entering for free with my paying friends, when they buy tickets to the game (assuming I have the time to join them). This is a win-win scenario because the company gets my regular recommendation… and I get to hangout with my friends and watch them play my local favorites.

The Driving Radius

While some people jump straight to hopping on planes to hit escape room destination cities, most people in the US tend to slowly expand their driving radius for escape rooms. The path to becoming a traveling escape room player isn’t always a straight line, and it’s subject to a wide variety of outside factors, but it creeps up on most of us.

Travel Escape Room Play

Traveling to play escape rooms wasn’t something that we had considered until we were deeply involved in this community for a couple of years. For us it started with tacking on short layovers while traveling for work and life… and then slowly escape rooms became the thing that made us want to travel.

Astonishing Experiences

Our desire to travel for escape rooms is driven by the astounding quality of the games that we get to play when we travel. I assure you, if the games weren’t as compelling as they are, we wouldn’t do it.

We play far fewer games per year than we used to, but the average level of quality of what we play these days is sky high. Playing mostly while traveling is the only way for us to achieve this.

Regional Flavor Part II

I mentioned regional flavors earlier… but I want to impress upon you just how varied escape rooms can be when you travel.

Some of the more extreme examples will come from international travel. Tokyo, Beijing, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris, and Athens all offer vastly different styles of games both from each other and from games that you could find within the United States.

And even within the United States: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orlando, Charlotte, and Boston all have distinctive styles from one another. The differences may not be as extreme as the difference between Tokyo and Athens, but they are very real.

Regional flavors is a deep topic, and something that we’ll inevitably write about in more detail.

Treading Where Tourists Don’t

Traveling for escape rooms tends to send us to far more interesting places that are devoid of tourists. This means that we aren’t usually eating at restaurants built for tourists. As an example, New Yorkers don’t eat in Times Square. Honestly the only time that I have visited Times Square for anything other than a show was for a friend’s birthday party a couple years back.

Times Square is overpriced and under-qualitied… which is a common outcome in tourist-focused neighborhoods. Getting away from these places is far more fun, interesting, tasty, and affordable.

Planning & Cost

The inherent downside of travel is that it’s costly in terms of money, time commitment, and planning. It just takes more out of you than popping downtown to play a couple of games.

For our part, we do everything that we can to cut costs. We fly cheap, pack efficiently, use mass transit wherever possible, and stay with friends as often as we can… but there is no denying that travel costs money. We budget and save in other parts of our lives to make sure that we can do this responsibly.

Intensity

On top of the travel itself and seeing the sights, travel for escape rooms is inherently intense, because unless you’re blessed with an abundance of time and money… you gotta play lots of games in a short span of time.

There are different schools of thought, and we have lived most of them.

You can go hard and pack in as many games as possible each day. While it has been years since we’ve done this, it was common for us to play 8-10 games in a single day for multiple days in a row. We had to forgo good meals to make this happen, but it was doable.

These days we play half as many games, sometimes less, and prioritize having 3 good meals per day.

The choice is a value judgement. Packing more games in reduces the odds that you’ll miss something great, but it comes at the cost of comfort and opportunity to reflect. Slowing down provides more comfort, and lets us spend more time basking in the moment after a great game.

We used to play more at once, in part, because it was difficult to effectively research which games we were most interested in. There weren’t resources to tell us which games would be high quality. These days, we (and by we, I mostly mean Lisa) can and do put in a lot more research prior to planning a trip.

In my opinion, there’s no right or wrong option here. Just make sure that you’re leaving enough time in-between your games to arrive on time for each game. Stuff happens occasionally, but if you’re regularly showing up late or missing bookings, you’re being disrespectful to the companies.

A Privilege

I want to be very clear about that travel for escape rooms is a privilege, and it’s one that we don’t abuse.

A lot of people don’t realize that Lisa and I still work regular jobs on top of putting nearly all of our free time into Room Escape Artist and the escape room community.

Our dream is to grow our community to a place where escape rooms are a meaningful part of the broader culture. That’s what we’ve been working towards here since 2014, and it’s what drives us to continually build our knowledge, expand our capabilities, care for our team, and refine our work.

Whether you’re a local player diving deep into a specific region or traveling the world, you’re helping to support this powerful and rapidly expanding medium of escape rooms, and we appreciate you for that. Just as we appreciate everyone who supports us on Patreon, whether it’s $2 per month or more. Every single person who contributes to our work is doing a huge thing for us. We hope that all of the content – both free and exclusively for Patreon – is bringing joy and value to your life.

Thank you to our Patreon backers.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Pants, Angela Ward, Marti, George Inglis, Василий Кумаев, Tiger Oakes, Keith Dozois, Simon Rühl, Hayden Sawyer, and Lennard Manke

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.

The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.

The post Playing Escape Rooms: Local vs Travel appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

This has been a mantra of tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, better known as MKBHD, for many years. I’ve long agreed with the statement. If the tech doesn’t do what you need it to on the day that you purchased it, I wouldn’t bet on it suddenly meeting your needs later on, regardless of what the company behind it claims.

Over the past few years, I have found myself preaching an escape room equivalent:

“Never. Ever. Plan an escape room trip on the promise of a new game opening.”

Picking A Destination

If you’re planning a trip specifically to play escape rooms, you should plan it based on the games that you can book at the moment that you’re scheduling the travel.

If a company has promised an opening date, it’s not enough. It just isn’t. When it comes to launching games, escape room owners earnestly lie to themselves… but this can make them inadvertently lie to their customers.

You can believe that a new escape game is open when it’s open.

No Shade

I know that this reads like I am being mean. I’m really just trying to be honest and help everyone involved reduce stress and anger.

More often than not, when an escape room owner is wrong about when a game is opening, it’s because they are struggling. Building great things is hard, and creating one-of-a-kind experiences comes with a huge mess of variables that make timelines extremely difficult to project.

Often when an owner is declaring a future open date it is driven by a desperate business or personal need:

• “We need to hit this open date because it’s right before our busy season, and if we miss it, then we forgo a ton of revenue.”
• “We need to hit this open date because I am losing my %^&*ing mind. I cannot work on this $#!^ anymore. I just need it to open so that I can exhale and stop bleeding money and time.”

The brutal truth is that neither of these needs can force a positive outcome.

Set Yourself Up For Success

The best that you can do to make sure that you have a great trip is to design your journey based on games that exist right now.

This is a subject that has come up a few times over the past year in our wonderful Patreon Discord chat community. I won’t name names about the games that prompted the discussion, but rest assured, there are some exciting experiences likely coming in 2026. However, I’ve been around long enough to know that we should all be patient. Great things often take more time than their creators wish they would.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: David Rowan, Lo Co, Michael Swift, Jeremiah Sizemore, AJ Webster, Amy Schneider, Anjali Nath, Riddlehaven, Cath, Jonathan Cruz, Roger at Key To Escape, Anssi Tähtinen, Josh Russek, Chris Bittle, Brandi Miller, Katie Kasplode, and Emily Z. Jillette

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.

The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.

The post Never. Ever. Plan an escape room trip on the promise of a new game opening. appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

If you’ve ever come to one of our Tours or attended RECON, you’ll note that one of our defining characteristics is preparedness. We don’t %^&$ around at our events. I found myself wondering why we weren’t quite as prepared during our own trips, and the Problem Solving & First Aid Travel Kit was born.

What’s in the Kit?

The bag itself is a Peak Design Tech Pouch… This is far more decadent a bag than is required for this job, but Patreon (the company, not our community) gifted us one, so we put it to work.

The kit contains fixes for a few categories of problems:

• First Aid
• Period Supplies
• Comfort Issues
• Personal Property Struggles

It’s worth noting that I only keep two or three of everything in the kit. I don’t need to solve problems in perpetuity, I just need to solve small problems quickly and keep the travel schedule from needlessly coming undone. The kit is supposed to be light, and I can always restock it at home.

First Aid

• Alcohol Swabs – Don’t skim past this explanation – Yes, alcohol swabs do the whole antiseptic thing… but there is a second reason that they are included and that is because smelling rubbing alcohol can improve mild-to-moderate nausea and vomiting (Source: NIH). I learned this from RECON Producer Kate Wastl, and it comes in clutch.
• Assorted Band-aids – A few band-aids of every size: small, medium, large, and those silly ones for your knee. I buy latex free band-aids to limit the opportunity for an allergic reaction in a teammate.
• Blister Bandages – This item inspired the whole kit. The second time that I found myself in a pharmacy at a strange hour looking for blister bandages was the moment where I decided that I needed a kit.
• Cough Drops – Sometimes they help.
• Gloves – If you’re handling someone else’s damage, you should be wearing gloves. I stock nitrile gloves because they are durable, and they won’t trigger a latex allergy if that happens to be an issue for a teammate.
• Meds (acetaminophen, ibuprofen, antacid) – Something to take the edge off, or deal with heartburn.
• Neosporin – Another option for cleaning up a wound.
• NyQuil/ DayQuil – Sometimes people need the hard stuff.

• Splinter Out – This is my favorite find. These sterile contraptions are very good at removing splinters… and in my experience, splinters are by far the most common escape room injury. If you only keep one escape room first aid item on you, let it be this (and some antiseptic). (Amazon)

Period Supplies

These shouldn’t need an explanation.

• Liners
• Pads
• Tampons – (tampons have additional first aid applications)

Comfort Issues

• Dental floss – Don’t pretend like you’ve never had a less fun time in an escape room due to having something stuck in your teeth. It happens.
• Disposable earplugs – I always carry Loops for better hearing protection (and I wear them often, especially in horror games)… but if they get lost or damaged, I want a backup option. Also, sometimes other people see me wearing Loops and want hearing protection.
• Makeup Remover Towelettes – This is another thing that you don’t want to go searching for at a midnight.

Personal Property Struggles

• Laundry Detergent Packet – Sometimes you emerge from a game looking like you did demolition work. And sometimes that happened in half of the games on your trip because you’re in Spain. When this happens, sometimes you have to do laundry in the middle of the night.
• Small Sewing Kit – Most of the kit is dedicated to patching up people… sometimes the act of getting a hole in a person also puts a hole in their clothing.

A Work In Progress

This kit is a work in progress, so please suggest anything that you feel that I have missed in the comments. Ultimately, I am not trying to account for every single possible problem, I just want to make sure that I never have to sweat the small stuff. I want to keep this thing as light as possible so that we don’t find ourselves leaving it behind.

I don’t believe that this is all necessary gear on every escape room trip, but I absolutely recommend bringing this on trips to cities with physical games… or if your schedule is stuffed with little room for error.

Way earlier this year, I mentioned to our Patreon that I was testing two pieces of gear on our trip to Athens, Greece. The first were my escape room pants. This kit was the second. I was extremely happy that I had both on that trip. My trip was greatly improved by both.

I think that most of the community forgot that I was testing two pieces of gear, and stopped hassling me about it after we did the piece on the pants, but this really is the last piece of escape room travel gear… for now.

Thank you so much to our Patreon community. It really is a joy having this wonderful group of people to chat with, learn from, and bounce ideas off of.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Mauricio Collares, Charles Chiu, Zack, Ricky Hvisch, Chelsey Walton, 翊鸣 项, and Katie Liu

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.

The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.

The post Problem Solving & First Aid Travel Kit appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

I suggest that the Ask Why concept could also be applied by players during the game to help them understand the experience, its story, and its characters. In the ideal design, players should easily be able to answer the question of “Why are we doing this?” during each puzzle, task, and interaction. It’s the designer’s job to make this always apparent to the players, so that they don’t have to ask, but whenever the immediate motivation isn’t clear, players should actively consider the why to better appreciate the fiction behind the room.

Knowing Means Understanding

I’ll admit that there are times when I have underappreciated a designer’s talent, effort, and their overall end product because I rushed through puzzles without understanding their significance to the story.

I find that asking why as an escape room player often helps me understand the game’s story better; it helps me catch up on plot points and story beats I may have missed. If I can decipher exactly why we need to take on a particular challenge it usually helps me put the narrative pieces together as we play. I resist the urge to just do something because it looks like it could be done. 

I am not saying that players should be confrontational and refuse to proceed without knowing the why behind every single step. But in a general sense, knowing the creator’s story-based intent for things can lead to a more enjoyable playthrough. 

Narratively Inevitable

Escape room puzzles should feel narratively inevitable. This was a sentiment perfectly articulated by Brent Busboom during a chat on the RECON Discord Patreon channel. Players should almost always be aware of at least one narrative goal and the puzzles should be obvious, logical, and inevitable obstacles in their path. 

Nicholson writes, “The players should have a meaningful reason for taking on a task other than ‘it’s the next thing to do in the room’….puzzles and tasks are not simply there to be barriers to winning the game, but each challenge has a purpose and is tied into the larger narrative, giving the player a way to find meaning in their actions.” 

If you, as a player, don’t understand the relevance of a puzzle, ask why. Ask yourself, ask your teammates, or ask your host during the postgame. 

Why Open That Box?

I am not talking about design choices like using the time on a stopped clock as the combination for a locked box. I am saying that players should know why they need to open that locked box, what is in it, and how it can help with their immediate goal. They shouldn’t be trying to open it just because it is there or because someone found some random digits.

Retrieving the items from the box should be an obviously inevitable challenge required to reach the narrative goal without relying on the escape room logic that every locked box needs to be opened. “We need to open that box because a clue shows it contains the amulet” is way better than “We need to open that box because we haven’t opened it yet.”

Players actively asking why is our attempt at meeting the designer half-way. If we require ourselves to know why we are doing the thing before just doing it, we might have a conversation about the story or a character, or we might take a look around and take better notice of the relevant clues and signposting. Most always, we will proceed with a greater understanding of the game.

It Doesn’t Have To Be Deep

The why behind each interaction doesn’t need to be profound. If players are in a child’s bedroom during a horror game and the creepy voice of a character says, “Put my toys away,” that can be a valid reason for the next task.

Needing to fix all the broken systems on the spaceship or finish the scientist’s experiment are great reasons for doing a series of multiple puzzles as long as the larger narrative goal is understood.

The WHY in Solutions

Questioning the significance of puzzle solutions can sometimes be important to players discovering the true story in an escape room. Some story driven games reveal plot information in the solution to a puzzle or upon the completion of a task. Contemplating, discussing, and even explaining to teammates the pertinent information learned can help keep everyone up to speed as the experience progresses.

Most of the people I play escape rooms with are very generous in explaining how they solved a puzzle, but we often are less careful to make sure we all understand what that solve means to the narrative.

Caveats 

This won’t work in every escape room. The reality is that you just can’t Ask Why about every puzzle in every game. Sometimes there is no reason why, and that can be okay too. Puzzles and interactions can be included just for fun or for an extra challenge. Be prepared to just roll with it. Remember this technique is to help us appreciate the games more, not tear them down.

Players asking why too much can negatively affect their immersion. Picking apart the game while playing it is not the goal here. Occasionally asking why can be an in-world concept. Making sense of things should help us feel more like we belong in the game world. 

For designers, too strict of an adherence to the Ask Why principle could come at the cost of cutting fun or unique puzzles and props. Player enjoyment should always be paramount, so if you have a really cool interaction whose relevance is difficult to explain, just do your best and make sure your customers have fun.

Metagaming

We all do it. We use our experience of common escape room rules to help us make decisions on what to do next. All games need some form of rules of engagement to allow players to safely and confidently interact with them. A lot of escape room game mechanic rules are carried over from classic video games. Players can often use these rules, a form of outside knowledge, to help them process the information in the game.  

Players should still ask why. If we find a key, outside knowledge tells us we probably won’t finish the game without using it to unlock something, but when we find the lock we should still know why we want to open it. 

“We haven’t used this yet” and “We can’t use that because we already used it for something else” are not great answers to the questions that arise in narrative puzzle games. Players should look for story based reasons. We should try as much as we can to play the game as designed.

Creators should ask themselves when it is okay to bend or break these ‘rules’ to improve their product or the player experience. 

Be Their Partner

With almost all immersive art there are the waders, the swimmers, and the divers. (The “Waders, Swimmers, and Divers” analogy is often used to describe different levels of engagement or commitment in a given situation, such as an immersive experience.) Engagement with escape room narrative is not immune to this phenomenon, and that’s okay. Some players just won’t be interested in the story. They won’t care about the “why” of things.

Still, broadly, I think the players should be active in co-creating an experience. Making an attempt to be in harmony with the designer and the story they’ve written can go a long way. Players just cruising through the puzzles and advancing without knowing why or who the characters are or what is happening can make owners feel like they’ve failed to deliver. 

“It’s frustrating that they [players] are missing out on something we value highly and put so much work into,” one creator told me recently. 

Ask why. Understand why. Be involved with building the best possible experience for your playthrough. Partner with the room designer to create your adventure by asking why.

The post Escape Room Players Should Be Asking Why Too appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Can I Run?

When a gamemaster or performer says those words to me, I find myself wondering:

• How big is this game?
• Are the paths clear?
• Is it well lit?
• Are the ceilings consistently high enough?
• How are they going to stop me from crashing into my teammates or the performers?
• Is this a good idea?

Most of those questions are about the physical layout of the space, because while little kids can zip around in fairly small spaces… adults need space to run… and space to stop. We also – and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way – tend to have a lot more mass. If we crash into something, the odds are pretty good that something or someone is getting damaged.

I’ve played in some very large escape rooms, and I cannot think of a single one that felt like it was actually built for running. If the space isn’t designed to handle adults running, then it’s pretty negligent to tell adults to run in it.

Should I Run?

No. You shouldn’t run in escape rooms. Even if the gamemaster or a performer told you to run.

• You should not run in enclosed spaces.
• You should not run if the path isn’t clear, or if you are unsure that the path is clear.
• You should not run in darkness or low light.
• You should not run if the ceiling is low.
• You should not run if there are people around you.
• Running in an escape room is a bad idea.

Honestly, don’t even rush if you are unsure of your footing. Move at your own pace, and move safely.

I have played so many intense horror games, and the truth is that the game will progress at your pace. If a performer is pursuing you, they will always be nipping at your heels, regardless of the speed that you’re moving. That actor will only catch you if they want to, or if you’re being a disruptive jerk. And if they catch you because they want to, it’s because it’s part of the script… whereas if they catch you because you’re being a jerk, that means they are ejecting you. Either way, the speed that you’re moving isn’t really the cause of the capture.

Move safe, and move smart. Enjoy yourself, and remember that you will not have fun if you hurt yourself.

If someone tells you to run in an escape room, smirk and move at your own pace.

Marathons, Not Sprints

Since April, we’ve been going hard over here at Room Escape Artist. We ran two Tours this past spring, ran a virtual RECON that shattered attendance numbers from 2023, and produced a large volume of some of the highest quality written content that we have ever put out, not to mention all of the podcasts that we produce.

The pace has been relentless, and we have another couple months of intensity before things calm down a bit for the winter.

The team’s output has been astonishing both in volume and quality, and I could not be prouder. It’s also only possible because of the support of our Patreon community which only continues to grow… and we have plans for that community. We are blessed and cursed with endless ideas and a drive to bring them to life. Our Patreon community makes absolutely all of the effort worth it.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Toby Powell, Emma Liddell, Ricki Heicklen, Howard, Caro Murphy, Rémy Strobbe, Jennifer Fonfara Tactical Escape 101, RoRo17, Bent Vent, Jordan Q Jordan Q, and Mauricio Collares

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.

The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.

The post 🏃‍♂️ Running in Escape Rooms appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

My obsession first began while visiting the Disney parks as a kid. I’ve always had a collector mindset, and Disney’s community around pin trading instantly sucked me in. With exclusive sets to complete and rare Hidden Mickeys to track down, I traded with every crew member I encountered and meticulously organized my collection in a big binder.

In more recent years, I found myself with a growing collection of pins from various escape rooms, tabletop puzzle games, puzzle hunts, and immersive shows. For a while, this treasure trove lay hidden in a box in the back of my closet, but about a year ago, I purchased a black corkboard and turned my pin collection into an epic mosaic. Each individual pin is a miniature work of art, and together, they form a unique and personal travelogue.

Pins are compact, affordable, and easy to display. You can put them on clothing, on bags, or display them at home. I love usable merch, but my closet is overflowing with t-shirts and sweatshirts, I’ve just about run out of surfaces on which to affix stickers, and I have enough mugs to last a lifetime… yet there’s always room for one more pin.

Pins vs. Buttons

Most pins fall into two categories, based on their back attachment style:

1. Tack pin: One or more small prongs on the backside attach into a “butterfly clutch” — those little metal circles that you pinch to unlock. Most enamel pins are this style.
2. Pin-back button (or button badge): A circular metal disc has a safety pin affixed to the back. This style is especially popular with political campaigns.

Note that the specific terminology used to refer to these variants can differ country by country.

For escape room merch, I strongly recommend enamel pins over buttons. While buttons are usually less expensive, they’re also lower quality, they don’t attach to as many surfaces, and their safety pins can easily be bent or damaged. In contrast to political campaigns, which run for a finite length of time and thus don’t require durability, escape room pins are mementos meant to last.

Enamel pins aren’t just higher quality; they’re also more interesting. You can make the pin any shape, and even play with special techniques like glitter or glow-in-the-dark enamel.

Getting into specific production variants, I can’t say I have a strong preference between hard enamel, soft enamel, or die struck pins. They all look good when produced well, so choose whichever suits your intended design the best.

How To Design A Pin

What types of designs work best for pins?

Enamel pins look best with clear, simple images and pronounced line patterns. The simpler you can make your design, the better. 

In general, your lines will be bare metal, and your colors will be created with enamel. Your colors must be outlined with metal, so keep your colors separate. Think of it like a coloring book, where each outlined region can only have a single color.

How does pin design differ from sticker design or other merch design?

Printed merch can handle color gradients; enamel pins cannot. However, you can use glittered enamel in place of a gradient for a similar effect. 

Also, text on an enamel pin must be big enough to be legible.

What are some common pitfalls when designing for this medium?

When designing an enamel pin, make sure that your image:

• Uses vector graphics
• Is 300 dpi
• Consists of Pantone colors
• Has solid colors separated by lines

As with all printed or manufactured materials, really scrutinize the pre-production proofs. If something is wrong in the proof, it will also be wrong in the final production run.

Finally, I highly recommend getting locking pin-backs to secure your enamel pins.

Make Them A Set

Maybe you plan to create just one pin of your escape room company’s logo. Great!

But why stop there? I love when escape room companies have a different pin for each of their games, and there are a few things to consider when designing a cohesive set.

Above all, make sure the pins look good together as a group. Even if each escape room has a very different theme, aim to have a shared style across all the pins. It also helps to keep them similar in size and shape.

On that note, there’s no need to design pins that are overly large. Jumbo pins are more expensive, they take up more space, and much of the joy of enamel pins actually comes from the detail in miniature. Just make sure to scale your design properly so it reads clearly at a smaller scale.

As an example, The Escape Game sells a small, circular enamel pin for each of their games, with “The Escape Game” and the game title around the perimeter and an icon representing the game in the center. Their “Monthly Mystery” series also releases a new pin each month. TEG sometimes even offers a laminated “passport” page onto which you can affix the pins you’ve collected.

Presentation Is Everything

So now you have some snazzy pins. How do you get players to buy and display them?

Enamel pins typically can cost around $1 each when buying in bulk, and they typically retail in the $5-10 range, though larger or more premium variants can cost more.

I’ve seen a handful of escape room companies that gift players enamel pins upon escaping. For instance, Sherlocked in Amsterdam gives each player a pin of their logo — a pair of crossed keys — upon completing each of their games, proof of their membership in a special society. Each pin is individually numbered, and the color is different for each experience.

In Sydney, Australia, The Cipher Rooms takes the presentation a step further, placing a pin for each player in a velvet-lined wooden box at the end of the game. This small yet meaningful gesture clearly communicates: “This is a gift for you, and I’ve taken the time and care to make it special.”

Gifting pins like this is thoughtful and generous, though by no means necessary. It’s reasonable to treat pins as premium swag that is available for optional purchase, and to acknowledge that not every player will want one. If anything, giving a pin (or any other swag) to each player risks being wasteful for players who don’t want it but might take one anyway to be polite.

A nice display goes a long way. Players are more likely to know your pins exist if they’re pinned to a small corkboard or worn by gamemasters, rather than sitting in their plastic packaging in the back of a display case.

The focus on presentation continues past the point of sale. Make pins that your players will proudly display, and even share on their social media. Don’t pack too much text onto the pin itself, but consider including more info — including your social handles — on the cardboard backing card. If you make new merch, show it off, and don’t forget to upsell returning players.

Design pins that are cool enough to make someone like me transform the box in the back of my closet into a conversation piece.

The post Why I Love Enamel Pins As Escape Room Swag appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

However, we planned to do a lot of rooms in Montreal. Could our kids handle the load–especially because many of the Escaparium rooms are longer than an hour? It was time to figure out…

How far could we push our children?

Our kids are older now (17 and almost 13); we wouldn’t have tried this two years ago. That said, last year we went to City 13 in Milwaukee (RIP) and played Save the City, a four-hour experience combining all four of their rooms with a fifth overarching story. It was awesome, but we got horribly hangry in the middle and almost killed each other. Thankfully, a lunch break revived us. 

Learning from that experience helped us prepare for this one! We wound up doing 17 rooms in five days, and the only time tears were shed, it was because the trip was over.

Here’s some tips to help your family nerd out marathon-escape-style on your next vacation.

Test Limits Ahead of Time 

At the very least, find somewhere close to home and do two rooms back-to-back. This will give you some insight into your family’s stamina. Also figure out your kids’ biorhythms—for instance, a kid might struggle with a 10-minute break between rooms; thrive with a 45-minute break between rooms; and get squirrelly during a 4-hour break between rooms.

Knowing where the breaks need to be is critical to scheduling your marathon.

Ramp Up

Before your big trip, do some mini-marathons! If your kids can do two rooms in one day, can they handle three or four over two days? On your big trip, we advise against doing 6 rooms the first day. Start with one or two, which hopefully will leave your kids wanting more, which is the mindset you want heading into a long day!

Build in Other Kid-friendly Activities

If your vacation budget allows it, combine the usually adult-leaning escape rooms with another kid-leaning activity. Gurnee, Illinois, contains both the excellent 60 to Escape and also a Great Wolf Lodge, just saying.

Respect Bedtimes

This is the most important thing we learned! On day 2 of our recent Montreal marathon, we finished our third and final room of the day, and our 12-year-old literally jumped up and down begging to do one more. We didn’t.

That night, unbeknownst to us (he had his own room in our AirBnb), he stayed up way too late reading. The next day, he was toast after one room. Make sure everyone gets enough sleep!

Snacks are not Enough!

In David and Lisa’s previous marathon articles, they stress the importance of bringing snacks to keep energy up in between rooms. With kids, that might not be enough, especially if your schedule overlaps your usual mealtimes. Pack a lunch if you can. More substantial food will be a better reset for your kids than just a bag of chips.

Debrief

Your schedule should include some time for short family meetings to make sure everyone is having a good time. Siblings can get frustrated with each other, and kids are sensitive to issues of “fairness.” So, have some check-ins where praise can be given, grievances can be aired, and feedback can be offered (hopefully constructively). 

Focus on Fun!

Finally, remember that the point of this trip is to have fun experiences together! Try to coach your kids not to put too much emphasis on “beating” every room. It’s ok if you don’t quite make it!

Use this focus when you schedule, too. On day four of our trip, we scheduled four rooms total. After the first two rooms, our 12-year-old was exhausted. Then we had some downtime in the AirBnB, and he did NOT want to go out again. Our third room was not a barnburner, and he was on the edge of collapse. Thankfully, though, because he loves the show Stranger-Things, we had scheduled a Hawkins-focused room deliberately as the last room of the day. The second he saw the Christmas light alphabet on the wall of the Stranger Things-inspired room, he was back on board! And at the end of the night, he was happier than he’d been all day!

Destination: Escape Rooms

We mostly fell into marathoning with our kids because we would hear about a great set of rooms in a farther-away location. It made more sense to do most of the rooms a place had to offer in a day or two than traveling there over and over again. And once we started, we realized our kids could handle several rooms in a day. Now escape rooms are a cornerstone of our family vacation planning. Not every family is going to want their spring break dominated by escape rooms, but if your crew is into puzzling, consider giving family marathoning a try. 

Escape Room Marathoning Guides

• A Player’s Guide to Escape Room Marathons – This is Room Escape Artist’s original guide from 2017. It still holds up.
• Packing for an Escape Room Marathon – Kids or no kids, you’ll need the right gear.

*Editor’s Note: The REA team is recently back from running this event again in 2025. Here are the tour survey results and an updated Top Escape Rooms of Montreal for 2025.

The post Tips for an Escape Room Family Vacation appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Team photos can be powerful marketing tools, yet all too many companies still take their photos against a blank wall with a crusty old iPad and kitschy cardboard signs, resulting in generic, blurry, or boring photos that likely do not represent the quality of the experience. Even when the image is interesting, many photos still turn out poorly due to bad lighting, bad composition, or bad cameras.

This negatively affects not only individual companies but the escape room industry as a whole. Team photos are not just a bonus add-on; they’re a key part of the overall escape room experience that should be thoughtfully designed, just like set, puzzles, and story.

Whether you’re a creator or a player, here are a number of tips and tricks to help you level up your escape room team photo game.

Where to Take Team Photos

Escape Room Sets

Team photos taken on escape room sets tend to be far more memorable and visually appealing than those taken in lobbies or hallways.

Yet in an effort to avoid spoilers, many escape rooms prevent players from taking any photos in the game space, including team photos. I’d like to push back on this mindset. Even if you want to keep the overall environment a surprise, there’s almost always an area of the room that will intrigue rather than spoil potential players.

Furthermore, you can design the set around having a designated spoiler-free photo area that’s representative of the overall quality of set design. In other words, consider what you want team photos to look like while you create the set, not as an afterthought.

This principle applies more generally: when an escape room company uses clip art or stock photos on their website, it looks unprofessional and may lead players to think that company has something to hide. Look at REA reviews for examples of how to take spoiler-free photos, focusing on early-game spaces and close-up details of thematic props.

Photobooths & Backdrops

Even if you choose not to take team photos inside the room, there are still many ways to get creative with the background.

Escape My Room in New Orleans positions players in framed windows within a distinctive backdrop. This design embodies their eclectic branding, and a stationary camera ensures a perfectly positioned photo every time.

Terror Isle in Texas City (now closed as an escape room, but still open as a haunt) built a pirate ship facade in their lobby. This elaborate 3D photobooth utilizes a similar style and build quality to their escape room sets, just with better lighting for photos and no concerns about puzzle spoilers.

We’ve encountered countless escape rooms that take their team photos in front of a sign with the company name in the lobby or hallway. While this provides clear branding, it often ends up looking static and forgettable, and it’s often not well designed or positioned for photos. There are exceptions, of course, like Don’t Take A Breath in Athens, which features a bright pink sign of their logo that’s instantly iconic. You can also integrate a sign with the game’s title into the set itself.

What to Include in the Photo

Signs

“I escaped!” “Teamwork makes the dream work!” “I’m with stupid.”

A basket of silly and punny signs was a core part of the classic escape room experience. At this point, there’s something almost nostalgic about this tradition, but I think we can do better. Let’s be honest: most of these signs look pretty cheap, and they’re often in terrible condition. Laminated signs in particular are flimsy and prone to glare.

Upgrade your sign game with a nicer material like engraved wood. Stick to a single sign that features the game’s title, and make sure the font is large enough to be readable in a photo. Including the team name and time can add nice personalization, though make sure that the dry erase marker isn’t dried out and that the GM’s handwriting is decently legible.

Physical Props

Escape rooms often offer a range of thematic props for photos, but not all props are equal.

Larger items usually read better in photos, and including too many props can make a photo look cluttered. Choose props that can prompt a dynamic action, and which give players something to do with their hands (because posing is hard!)

If you offer players an open selection of props from throughout the game, it can be helpful to suggest which items will look good in photos and aren’t puzzle spoilers. Alternatively, we’ve seen some companies create duplicates of props from the game specifically for photos. This can be a good way to avoid spoilers, ensure photo props stay in good condition, and even create oversized versions that work better for photos.

Props can also be combined with lighting for fun effects.

Costumes

Players wearing street clothes likely don’t match the immersive environment around them, but costumes can help to bridge this gap.

Whether you provide costumes for the entire experience or just for the photo, offer an inclusive range of sizes and remember to clean costume pieces regularly, especially making sure to disinfect hats and masks. Not every player will feel comfortable with the cleanliness around the sharing of costumes regardless, so don’t overly push costumes on the players.

I personally love wearing costumes in escape rooms. If there’s a mysterious cloak or colorful jacket, I’m going to put it on immediately. That said, escape rooms can get quite hot when wearing extra layers. If players take off their costumes mid-game, it’s ok to gently remind them that they can put the costumes back on for a team photo.

Digital Frames and Stickers

Some escape rooms further enhance their team photos by overlaying digital elements.

A digital frame can turn a team photo into an alluring movie poster, sometimes also including info like company name, game title, team name, completion time, and even credits. Whether the frame is an elegant border or a more maximalist piece of digital art that integrates the photo, make sure that the photo stays the primary focus. Services like Buzzshot offer escape-room specific software that can automatically add special effects to post-game team photos, including digital frames or stickers.

The Tale of the Heartless Pirate at Dream Labs and Ghosthunter Brandon Darkmoor at The Room, both in Germany, offer particularly polished examples. The final image feels like a cohesive unit, with lighting and coloration of the photo that matches the vibe of the frame.

Less Branding

This might seem counterintuitive, but team photos are generally better marketing when they aren’t overbranded. Players don’t want to share something that looks like an ad. They’re more likely to share photos (and wear merch) that looks cool, and other people will organically want to learn more.

How to Take a Great Photo

If a photo is blurry, grainy, poorly cropped, or poorly lit, players are less likely to like and share it. Without getting into a full-on photography course, here are a few fundamentals to keep in mind when taking a great photo.

Camera

It goes without saying that a nicer camera takes nicer photos, and an ancient iPad isn’t going to cut it. That’s not to say you need to invest in a multi-thousand dollar DSLR. New flagship smartphones can take professional-quality photos without the need for tweaking any manual settings. Make sure to regularly update your phone’s software.

Composition

Photographic composition refers to the arrangement of elements in a photo such that it is balanced and aesthetically pleasing.

An immersive environment designed to look and feel a certain way while you’re in the middle of it isn’t necessarily also optimized to look good in a 2D photo, so here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Is there enough room to comfortably fit teams of all sizes? Will the photo look too crowded with 8 players? Too empty with 2 players?
• If players are standing around an interesting set piece, make sure they’re framing it, not blocking it. Also ensure that any props they’re holding aren’t unintentionally blocking their faces.
• How can players physically engage with the space around them? Are there easy poses that you can recommend? 
• Make sure the photo doesn’t consist of too much blank floor or ceiling, and that it isn’t crooked.
• Follow the rule of thirds.

Lighting

The lighting utilized during the experience, especially for rooms with dark or colorful atmospheric lighting, isn’t always well suited for photos.

Possible solutions include:

• Pick a designated spot that already has good photo lighting.
• Purchase portable photographic lighting that can be brought into the room for photos.
• If you have control over the room’s lighting, create a separate lighting setting that’s specifically calibrated for photos.

Editing

The raw photo doesn’t need to be the final product. Whether you’re working with suboptimal lighting or just want a specific aesthetic, play with saturation, brightness, and contrast, or with various filters, to make a more polished image. Once you’ve found the right balance, make a preset to save time in the future.

Different photographic styles can also suit different eras and themes. Is your escape room set in the 1940s? Slap on a nice sepia filter. Set in the 1970s? Make it look like a Polaroid.

The Photographer

Game hosts are typically expected to take team photos. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve politely asked a gamemaster to retake our photo after seeing it’s crooked, uncentered, blurry, or awkwardly cropped. Being a great photographer isn’t a requirement of the job, but these basics are all easily teachable skills.

Create a few reference photos that demonstrate how to frame the background, where the photographer and players each should stand, and how to creatively pose players. Ensure consistent quality by having a nice camera available in case gamemasters or players only have older phones that would take lower-quality photos.

If you’re taking photos on a player’s phone, they’ll appreciate having 3-5 decent options to choose from rather than 30 nearly identical photos clogging up their reel.

Also, read the room. Some teams are dying to take a team photo. Do it immediately! You can explain whatever you were explaining later. Some teams clearly aren’t interested. You can skip this part of your script if they obviously want to leave in a hurry.

Who Is In the Photo

The answer to this question may seem obvious: the players. However, there are also some other special cases.

Actors

If there were performers in the game and their presence isn’t a spoiler, consider including them in the photo. Actors likely are pros at posing for photos, and they can also help players to strike more dynamic poses.

Even when a character isn’t physically present in the room, you could include them in the photo in some other form. Ghost Patrol elegantly demonstrates this idea, using a digital sticker to include the titular ghost alongside each team.

Solo Moments

Beyond team photos, escape rooms can also offer individual photo ops.

13th Basement at Exit Game in Anaheim, CA allows players to freely take photos throughout the game. One particular torture device lends itself to particularly photogenic solo photos that I’ve seen dozens of players share over the years. Free publicity!

During a recent visit to The Alchemist at Sherlocked in Amsterdam, after taking our team photos, my teammates and I each proceeded to take solo photos in front of the iconic central altar. They turned out amazing, and my favorite photo instantly became my new profile picture on multiple social media platforms.

Extra Credit: When and Why to Take Team Photos

In-Frame Photo Ops

Most team photos are taken after the escape room. The game ends, the magic circle closes, and the gamemaster either enters the room or guides the players back in to take a photo.

But does it always have to be this way? Depending on the specific context, can we take the team photo while players are still in the game world — and perhaps also justify the reason for why we’re taking a photo altogether?

Within certain narratives, it’s not hard to justify an in-game photo op. A fantasy character takes a selfie with you, excited to prove that they met humans. You take an expedition photo before heading off on a dangerous mission. You visually document a discovery to send to your past selves before stepping back in a time machine.

On-Ride Camera

At amusement parks, it’s standard practice to position a camera at a specific point alongside a roller coaster or haunted house in order to capture guests’ expressions at just the right moment.

Why not also try this in an escape room? Hide a camera right by your most interesting jump scare, or capture players’ faces as they enter a wondrous new space. But unlike amusement parks, don’t sell it to them. Also, make sure to delete these photos regularly. People don’t love other people having candids of them.

Phones Allowed

Certain escape room companies, like The Escape Game, have fully embraced the value of user-generated content and allowed players to have their phones out to take photos and video throughout the entire game.

This is a double-edged sword. On one hand, this puts players fully in control over their social content, producing significantly more shareable candids in whatever formats the players prefer. It makes escape rooms feel more casual and approachable. On the other hand, freely allowing phones can take players out of the immersion if they’re focusing too much on documentation or getting distracted by outside communications.

V is for Video

An often neglected bit of escape room documentation are the live video feeds that game hosts use to monitor players throughout the game. At a tiny handful of escape room companies, including Mama Bazooka in the Netherlands and TheStart in Belgium, players are shown video highlights from their experience after their game ends. This is a creative way to let players relive the coolest moments from a different perspective, and in the case of TheStart, it showcases amazing actor performances that players may not have fully appreciated while in the chase.

To note, neither company allows players to record or share these videos.

The Mystery of the Deveaux Family at Panik Room in Paris takes this a step further. The experience is centered around a unique premise: one player at a time goes into a haunted mansion with a blindfold and a livestream camera, while their teammates guide them around from a separate control room. Panik Room offers a download of the full, edited recording for an additional charge, allowing teams to own a feature-length horror film starring themselves.

One final example comes from a challenge arcade: Beat the Bomb. In their classic paint bomb mission, teams attempt to defuse a colorful paint bomb. Whether or not they’re successful, almost all teams choose to let the bomb go off, leading to a dance party and a highly shareable collection of photos and video.

Short-form video is currently dominating the internet, with many platforms trying to copy TikTok’s success. If you give players compelling video clips to share, you’re setting yourself up for marketing success.

Share Your Team Photos!

For most escape rooms, even many globally top-ranked escape rooms, team photos are an afterthought. Companies build an awe-inspiring escape room set, and then we get a generic photo in front of a random door.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Hopefully by this point, you’ve realized both that a lot of thought can go into this part of the escape room experience, and that a little effort goes a long way. Team photos are not and should not be the focus of the experience, but for people who weren’t there, this is likely the only part they’re going to see, and for people who were there, this is all they have to remember their experience by.

If you’re running an escape room, make sure it’s easy for players to share their photos. If you take the photo on one player’s device, will they remember or be able to share it with all their teammates? If you take the photo on the company’s device or the gamemaster’s device, you have a bit more control.

By using a system like Buzzshot, each player who fills out a waiver will receive an email with their team photos. It’s nice to have a standard, easy way for everyone to cares to immediately get their photo.

Eliviascape in Quebec City even built their own photo-sharing system, where players can scan wall art in the lobby and select the game they played to immediately receive the team photo after playing the game.

And lastly, if you’re a player, whenever you enjoy an escape room and get a cool photo, share it! This helps individual escape room companies and the escape room industry as a whole.

The post A Picture-Perfect Guide to Escape Room Team Photos appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

This style of bypassing is common in the United States because it keeps a game in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Americans are often surprised to learn that the ADA (and American law) doesn’t exist outside of the United States.

Crawling Through Europe

Escape rooms in Europe are well… crawling with crawling. It’s one of three uncomfortable parts about European escape room trips.

Crawling is incredibly common in TERPECA-winning European games. Creators do some interesting things with room geometry and game design using crawling as a way to transition scenes and make clever use of space. The effect of the crawling is cool, even if the act of crawling is painful.

Countries like the Netherlands and Belgium are pretty tough on the knees… but after trips to Spain and Greece, I felt like my knees were begging for mercy. Some of this is the amount of crawling… and some of it is a lack of good padding.

Either way, I needed a solution so that I could truly enjoy my escape room trips.

The Search for the Perfect Kneepads

Last year I spent a lot of time reading Amazon reviews of kneepads, and ordering an assortment of different types to test for escape room viability.

I tried them out during house projects to see how I felt putting them on, moving about, crawling, and doing house projects. Everything that I bought sucked.

Some were too bulky and made me look like a fool. Others felt like knee braces squeezing my legs. And all of them were clunky to put on.

I thought that I had failed, but after my trip to Spain last year I came home with painfully bruised knees, so I took another stab at finding a solution.

My Kneepad Requirements

The kneepads must:

• provide good knee protection while crawling
• maintain maneuverability
• be easy to put on, or keep on
• ideally not make me look like an idiot, lunatic, and/ or total %^&*ing dork

That last requirement seemed challenging given the fact that I am the kind of total %^&*ing dork who spends a silly amount of effort testing to find the perfect kneepads to enhance my escape room playing experience. The odds seemed stacked against me.

Behold My Escape Room Pants

On my quest I found that Carhartt makes the finest escape room pants. They have built-in kneepads, and they look like completely normal pants.

The kneepads are exceptionally comfortable, they are always there, and they are nearly invisible. I can go from playing a horror escape room and walk into a restaurant… and I look like my normal awkward self instead of an extra awkward visible-kneepad-wearing version of myself.

How Do They Work?

At their core, these are work pants that have room for adding kneepads in-between the layers of fabric in front of the knee.

Carhartt also makes these yellow hexagonal patterned knee inserts that can be slotted into small holes in the pants. This is essentially a one-way trip as there are no easy ways to remove the kneepads once they are in place.

Effectiveness

My padded Carhartt pants were incredible escape room pants… or as we started to call them: “horror pants.” As in, “I need to go back to the hotel and change into my horror pants.”

Before I had these pants, I would think very carefully before kneeling or crawling in an escape room. I would be very careful both in how I moved on the ground and how often I would kneel or crawl. I would do all sorts of things to limit contact between my knees and the ground.

Within one game of wearing my padded Carhartt pants, I stopped thinking about my knees or crawling. I moved freely throughout the games. I wore them for a whole week in Greece, exploring a collection of games that normally would have been brutal on my knees. At the end of the week, I had no pain or bruising at all. (This is in contrast to my trip to Spain last year when I came home feeling like a broken old man.)

Additionally, they really did just look like pants. I didn’t wear them while doing touristy things if I could avoid it, but that had more to do with the pants weighing a bit more than normal jeans. I had no problems wearing them out and about.

Washing

Upon coming home, I was able to throw the pants with the kneepads into the laundry without issue.

I did a cold water wash in the washing machine, and then let them air dry.

Buying the Pants

There are two options for buying these pants. First, you can order them, along with the kneepads, from Carhartt’s website.

• Men’s Utility Double-Front Pant – Relaxed Fit – Rugged Flex® – Canvas (style #102802)
• Women’s Double-Front Pant – Relaxed Fit – Rugged Flex® – Canvas (style #105999)
• Knee Pads (style #103193)

Personally, I’d recommend going to a retailer (or even better, a Carhartt store) to try them on and make sure that you have a good fit. The fit matters because as I mentioned, those kneepads are going on a one-way trip into the pants. You want to make sure that you get it right before you insert them.

None of the links here are affiliate links… and that’s not out of desire on my part. Carhartt are cowards who wouldn’t even respond to our attempt to join their affiliate program. In spite of their radio silence on any and all communications, I am so thrilled that this product exists. I know that I have found an atypical use for their kneepad system… but it’s about as perfect a solution as I could have hoped to find.

Similarly, I am thrilled to have the ongoing support of our Patreon community, because they allow us the budget to keep the machinery of Room Escape Artist running… including spending a silly amount of money trying out different kneepads. We could not do the work that we are doing without all of you.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Mia Lepaus, Farzad Razi, EscapeCouple, Kristine Jacobs, Adam Johnson, and Jayna Shea

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.

The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.

The post Plebs! Look Upon My Escape Room Pants With Envy! appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

In January 2025 I was again convinced to visit Athens, Greece for an escape room vacation, this time with a stopover in Spain on the way home. Our itinerary was packed full of horror games. I needed to be ready to put my own suggestions to the test with a new set of games and teammates. To my surprise, I returned with nine new tips for anyone interested in trying this popular genre.

Getting Prepared

We were to play 38 games throughout Greece and Spain. I did my research and found that not all of them would be considered horror, but the majority did have a “scare factor” rating around 7 on the escaperoomers.de scale and 66% of the games were rated “actively scary” by TERPECA. I knew that most of my days would be tension filled. I needed to be ready.

How Did It Go?

Honestly, I am likely never going to be the person who willingly enters a dark room first. Nor am I thrilled with being the last one in. But I surprised myself with the frequency that I was willing to take on a solo moment, be left alone in a room, or travel down a corridor to complete a task on my own. Each experience gave me a little more courage. 

New Revelations

I am pleased to say that I came away from this trip with nine more suggestions for anyone who is curious about playing scary escape rooms. 

Do your research. If you are not the person booking the escape room, be sure to ask your teammates if the game has different modes available and which mode your game was booked as. You can do research or get spoilers about what playing on “midnight mode” or “with physical contact” or some similar mode name really means. Don’t rely on specific terminology being consistent across companies. Terms like “tension mode” seem to mean different things in different games. If the game is booked for a level you are not comfortable with, let your teammates know. 

Can’t touch this. In almost every game, we were able to inform our game master if one of us didn’t want to be touched or separated from the rest of the team. When we did have a game with a true cold start, we proclaimed our preference loudly to whomever was listening. In nearly every case, we were accommodated. Pro Tip: If your team has a player with a specific request, have them wear a very distinctive article of clothing, such as a hat, that makes them easily identifiable to the staff.

Self selection. The majority of escape rooms allowed us to self select the player who would experience a solo moment. Usually, this meant one person would have to travel alone, back through the space, to accomplish a task. Other games challenged specific players to face their fears and accept solo missions, but in almost every case they either chose to pick on the most willing player or allowed us to send the most willing player. This has the notable side effect of a team’s bravest player getting rewarded with a bunch of private scenes and effects during the course of a week’s worth of horror games.

Earplugs. The escape rooms in Greece and Spain are loud. The music is loud. The sound effects are loud. The performers are loud. One member of my team said he felt less startled, more comfortable, and enjoyed the games more when he used the earplugs suggested by David Spira. 

“Go into the light” was a phrase we said frequently. The best experiences we had were in games that masterfully led us through the space with the use of lighting cues. This also means players should not move in the dark. I was reminded of this when I bent over to tie my shoes in the dark and slightly hit a performer as I stood up. Just don’t move unless there is light. 

Touching, feeling, squeezing… each other. My teammates were comfortable with touching the shoulders of the person in front when walking down the dimly lit hallways, feeling their heels as we crawled through a tunnel, or squeezing their hands during high tension moments. If you feel this will be a benefit to you, be sure to confirm with your team that they are comfortable with the contact as well. 

No running. Never, ever did we actually need to run from a character in a game. Having said that, there were times and I got caught up in the moment and moved rather briskly while being pursued around a desk. Our team always reminded each other not to run. This is especially important to remember when traversing stairs, unlevel ground, or when it’s dark (see the Go into the light tip). 

Trigger warning. Let your team know if you have specific triggers or fears that may negatively impact your experience. If you know a game may be an issue before you play, you might just want to sit that one out. If you play a game that surprises you with content, your team may be able to shield you from it. 

Find the humor. I can not tell you how much I enjoyed watching my teammates be startled by a performer or a loud noise. Watching a person who is taller, more muscular, or more experienced have such a reaction can really lighten the mood. I also laughed at myself when I was frightened by an actor appearing out of nowhere. 

Horror games may not be for you, and that is ok, but if you are horror curious, I hope that these tips help give you the confidence to give these great experiences a try. 

Read more of our player tips here.

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