Over the break, we had the opportunity to spend a lot of time doing fun things somewhat locally.  One of the places we visited was the Amazing Escape Room in Princeton.  I’m sure you’ve heard of escape rooms by now, they seem to be all the rage.  We couldn’t wait to see exactly what all the fuss was about and we excited to be invited to check it out for ourselves.

Amazing Escape Rooms can be found in many locations in the United States.  We selected the Princeton location.  At this location, we encountered some very fun and helpful employees that made our visit a great one.  We had reserved the Cabin, which allows for 6 people to work together to solve riddles to escape the room.  For our family, that meant that we had a private room.  Most rooms you can choose allow for a larger group of people to problem solve together, which could be a really great team building experience or an interesting way to get to know strangers. In our experience, though, we were escorted to “the Cabin” where we were about to get hit by a blizzard and needed to escape the room before the storm hit and we were stuck for a long time without supplies and heat.  We were determined to make the deadline.

So how does it work? A monitor in the corner of the room allowed our game master to communicate with us, if needed.  He could see us in the room, but we could not see him.  If we decided that we needed to get some help with a clue, we just had to wave our hands and ask the monitor, where we could be given hints. We had one hour to solve a series of riddles that would allow us to “escape” the room.  We had no real set  of instructions beyond that, so we had to put our heads together to figure it out.  As soon as the timer started, we began turning the room upside looking for clues, we quickly encountered some, which began a series of other riddles.  We found that the riddles were very tricky!  Turns out, unbeknownst to us, we had selected the hardest room at the facility.  As we solved riddles, but clues together, and unearthed other hints, we felt a sense of accomplishment and found out things about each other that we didn’t know before.  As the clock was ticking away, we really began to feel a sense of urgency and realized that we might not escape the room. With 2 minutes left on the clock, we discovered a major last clue, but couldn’t quite make it work out in time.  We didn’t escape!  Ugh!  After the clock stopped, our game master showed us that we were just one step away from escaping.  We were surprised that we had made it so far.

Even though we didn’t escape, we had an excellent time as a family playing the game and disconnecting from everything else.  It is something we all loved and definitely would like to go back to try another room!  I highly recommend this experience to you for a really fun day out with the family!

You can find out more about Amazing Escape Rooms and book your own experience by visiting them online.

*we were invited to visit to facilitate a review, all opinions are my own.