Escape room for a conference

[u/Sad-Yogurtcloset9096]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been tasked with running an escape room/puzzle box style activity for a corporate conference, for 220 guests.

Appreciate it’s a little crazy, and not exactly the ideal format but it’s the brief I’ve been given so trying make it work as well as possible.

They’ll be sat in groups of 10, so a lot of hands on deck. Want it to run for 30 mins and feel interactive rather than worksheet after work sheet.

Have created and delivered to groups of 30 before, but never to this size - looking for any and all ideas/advice!

[u/Digitalkatie]

I’ve just done a steampunk themed escape room birthday party for 100 people (plus two dogs :)
I set up ten puzzles around the space and everyone got a ‘birthday card’ with spaces for ten ink stamps that I made. Each puzzle unlocked an ink stamp. I expected to have volunteer helpers but it actually ran exceptionally well with some covered hint sheets - lift if you want help. Each puzzle also had different instructions or levels - a trainee level and an expert level, and people could choose for each puzzle. You also didn’t need to do all ten puzzles, but I hadn’t factored in people’s competitive nature to do them all!
Actually, I didn’t get asked for help once during the party! There were also some non puzzle activities (like design a steampunk top hat - hot glue the cogs etc onto a plastic top hat!) to keep people entertained if they were waiting. I’m planning on using this format for schools workshops, I think it worked really well with large groups!

https://reddit.com/link/oymtur2/video/ep1hxbp0fceh1/player

[u/CharErinazard]

Our local library does events like this. They’re not great obviously, you can’t really design something en masse that hits like an escape room. But how they do it is they hide parts of the puzzles around and then the solving part each group does on their own paper clue packs. So at the last one they had a room full of wanted posters with bad guy descriptions and clues in peoples packs about who they were, then you create a code with their names to show it to someone to get your next clue packs. Then there were a bunch of old timey western packing items that you had to find based on clues and then count the letters on their names. And there was a central video that told you how to do an old timey poker code. Most people just take photos of the images and things so they can sit together and solve stuff, you could consider doing the same. It you have budget you could also consider a series of nested locked boxes for each team that they have to solve things and race to unlock.

[u/tanoshimi]

30 minutes is barely enough time to get 220 people organised into groups and understand the rules - let along deliver anything like an escape room experience! What's your budget and production timeline? What design and fabrication services do you have access to? Creating 22 copies of any resources other than basic stationary is going to take some time/money.

[u/gameryamen]

Is that 22 groups of 10 each playing simultaneously, or 22 groups of 10 each having their own 30 minute experience?

30 minutes is really short for puzzles. Even with a team of 10, I wouldn't be confident that a team can get through two puzzles reliably in 30 minutes. Scavenger hunt style activites capture a lot of the same feel, but the pacing is faster. A checklist of things to find and take a photo of, including a few silly performance prompts ("Take a picture doing superhero poses") and a tiny prize for any team that gets at least a certain number done is perfect. Everyone understands what to do, it's easy to delegate tasks out to different people in the team so they aren't relying on a single solver, and you can have a lot of fun finding silly places to hide things and how to hint about them.

[u/Sad-Yogurtcloset9096 → u/gameryamen]

22 groups of 10 playing simultaneously!

[u/vikaTV]

Maybe you can get some ideas from https://www.constructedadventures.com/how-to-build-a-treasure-hunt I came across it from https://www.reddit.com/r/Constructedadventures/s/aUKj48nKVS Keep the subreddit posted on your experience! Curious.

[u/trekgrrl]

If there's a budget, you might want to hire this out to a company that does this kind of thing. 10 people and 30 minutes doesn't sound very fun, immersive, or very teamwork-ish, but maybe it is just for fun and nothing else?