Escape Room Games: The Cooperative Puzzle Experience Hits the Table

The clock is ticking backward from sixty minutes, the game has begun! You and your friends sift through various objects, looking for some sort of clue. One of the people in your group sees something. “Look,” she exclaims, “I think these letters mean something!”

- Jon Den Houter

If this scenario sounds familiar, you’ve likely been to an escape room. The first escape room in the U.S. opened just five years ago. Called “Real Escape Game” (and later, “Real Escape Room”), Kazuya Iwata started it in San Francisco as a branch of his friend Takao Kato’s escape game company in Japan. At first, Kazuya only ran real escape games — large group puzzle-solving events that didn’t involve escaping from a room. “Escape from the Mysterious Room,” which opened December 2012, was their first actual escape room.

Teams of up to twelve people , consisting of friends or strangers , were locked in a room and given 60 minutes to escape and asked to complete three basic tasks : scour the room for clues , arrange the clues into puzzles , and solve those puzzles . The ultimate solution of all the puzzles opened the door out of the room.

Since that time, the growth of escape rooms has been nothing short of revolutionary. There are now escape rooms in all 50 states , and according to RoomEscapeArtist.com, there are over 1 ,700 in the U.S. alone (with thousands more worldwide) .

The first U.S. -based escape room company, Puzzle Break, was founded in Seattle in August 2013 by Nate Mart in and Dr. Lindsay Morse . For their first room, “Escape from Studio D,” Morse designed all the puzzles . “At the time, there were no other escape rooms in the country except ‘Escape from the Mysterious Room’ in San Francisco, which Lindsay and I had already played,” Mart in reminisces . “I wanted to play another escape room.”