So your boss just announced your next team-building activity, and it’s in an escape room! If you’ve never played an escape room you may be feeling daunted, but you needn’t be, because your boss actually picked an awesome activity, and you’re going to have a great time! In this article we hope to turn any apprehension you might have, into excitement for the adventure you’re about to embark on!
Epic team-building adventures await
It’s Your Time To Shine
Escape rooms are an excellent way to show off those hidden talents you might have, so if you’ve been waiting for an opportunity to impress your colleagues with one of your skills, now is the optimum time to do so! Alternatively, you might find out you’re really good at something that you never knew previously, which could even inspire a new hobby!
Perhaps in your spare time you love watching murder-mystery movies, and joining in with your own deductive reasoning. Maybe you’re an expert at cryptic crosswords, great at math, or have perfect aim when it comes to hitting targets (and we don’t just mean sales targets)! There are so many transferable skills that come in handy in an escape room experience, and everyone in your work team is bound to have expertise they can share!
Get To Know Your Colleagues
You may think you already know some of your colleagues pretty well, but perhaps you didn’t know that Roger from accounting has his own TTRPG group, or that Shelley from HR has a keen interest in Greek mythology. You won’t just learn about your team-mate’s skills during an escape room, but more about them in general, and it’s so much better than the boring old ice-breaker where everyone stands in a circle and says something about themselves.
You’ll also be doing to a lot of communicating with each other to decipher clues and solve puzzles. As you split off and explore the room, you’ll need to convey all the information you find to your coworkers. Honing your skills at keeping a constant back-and-forth conversation inside an escape room, will likely improve your connection when you’re back in the office too.
Enhance Your Skills
Your boss has probably already given you a talk about how great escape rooms are for improving vital work skills, and you may have even rolled your eyes at the suggestion, we hate to say it…but he’s right! Escape rooms are excellent at building skills, but don’t worry it won’t feel like work, in fact, you likely won’t even realize it’s happening! You’ll enjoy every second of puzzle-solving entertainment, and come away with critical and lateral thinking skills!
It might also feel like being inside a real-life video game, and it will have similar benefits to one too, such as improving memory, adaptability, observational skills, and understanding logic, similar to how you find connections between clues in an escape room.
Satisfying Puzzle-Solving
Ok, so that’s enough corporate jargon about what you’ll learn during an escape room experience, let’s discuss what you’re actually going to do. For those who have never played an escape room before, we’ll do our best to briefly describe the experience! Essentially, you’ll enter a highly-themed and immersive space, full of locked doors, boxes, chests, and more. You’ll progress through the game as you solve puzzles, decipher codes, or gain keys, each of which will unlock or lead you to a new stage of the game until you eventually ‘escape’.
Most escape rooms are around 60 minutes in length, but here at The Escape Effect we love solving puzzles so much that we thought that was way too short. That’s why all our adventures are feature-length epic experiences, including Florida’s only 2-hour escape room experience, our medieval mystery A Knight To Escape.
Will I Really Be Locked In?
No. Don’t worry. We will never actually lock you inside a game, and you’re free to exit at any time should you need to. Being actually locked inside a small space with nosey Nancy or overbearing Oscar might sound on par with being in a Saw trap, if you happen to be surrounded by work colleagues with toxic traits.
Playing an escape room is actually a good chance to break down some of those barriers between colleagues who you don’t get along so well with inside the office. Once you’re absorbed in the game and racing against the clock, there won’t be any time for disagreements or work gossip. All your focus will be on completing challenge after challenge under pressure. At the end of it you’ll all share in the celebration, and might even feel a new connection with a coworker who you previously avoided at the water cooler.
Trust Us, You’ll Have Fun
We hope by now you are feeling excited about the prospect of your upcoming team-building activity. If this is your first escape room, we doubt it’ll be your last. It’s an experience that you’ll definitely keep talking about, not just at work, but also to friends and family who you’ll want to book a game of your own with!
Experience the extraordinary
Throw out the idea of boring team-building activities! Experience an award-winning escape room instead, and you’ll never look back!
