It’s Saturday night at approximately 8pm. Your work phone rings. You and your elite team of CIA agents are called upon from the President’s Special Intelligence team for a top secret, highly-classified investigation. After 10 years of being an agent, this is one of your most important missions ever. You are assigned with the task of gathering incriminating evidence from the office of the international businessman, Mr. Dupree. There’s intel on Dupree having gained access to codes and coordinates for nuclear explosives. Our intelligence team is only able to get you into Mr. Dupree’s office for 60 minutes. You and your team must get out before he returns or the case is blown. Collect evidence of specific illegal activity, solve the puzzle, and escape the room before you are caught…
Thankfully, we made it out after saving the world from certain doom with enough time to relax and grab a celebratory beer. That was my first-hand experience at Escape MSP when a few friends of mine brought me out for my birthday to try a new-ish and highly popular group activity. Currently, Minnesota has over 20 facilities throughout the entire state which all offers some form of escape rooms. 17 of them are located right here in the twin cities.
Escape Rooms all the rage
For those who are unfamiliar with the concept of escape/puzzle rooms, an escape room is a team-oriented, interactive adventure game. They’re usually in a warehouse or building dedicated by a business that maintains and operates them where players are “locked” in a room with the goal of escaping in a set amount of time by solving puzzles.
These puzzles consist of a series of stories, codes, locking systems, keys, clues, and hints which are necessary to complete and solve the puzzle thus escaping the room before running out of time.
These could be anything from pad-locks with hidden combinations, hidden keys for locked chests, combinations for locks, and even clues hidden within secret compartments. For my first experience, we had to find a secret code only visible with black lights in the dark.
Each company has completely different scenarios, plots, puzzles, and themes to accommodate for their brand. Most of them are categorized in different ways depending on scenarios, difficulty, duration, and how many players are allowed in at a time.
What’s great about a lot of these places is that they promote such an entertaining and positive experience. They require some strategic thinking, which stimulates our brains, while strong teamwork is key to successfully escaping a room. So when you consider who you want on your team, look for your best family members, friends, and co-workers for your next group outing or adventure.
There is an abundance of options with varying scenarios, difficulties, and locations. The following is a list of all the Escape Rooms across the Twin Cities for you to check out. Who knows? Maybe you can save the world as well.
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