I first heard from my sister in Canada about a new game called the Adventure Rooms.  After doing some research, I found out that there was also an Adventure Rooms in the States and one of them just so happened to be in Hartford.  Awesome! So this past weekend while we were in Connecticut visiting family and friends, we decided to give it a try.

Adventure Rooms are gaining popularity in Canada and Europe, but still relatively unknown here in the States. Basically, Adventure Rooms started in Switzerland as a corporate team-building event.  Apparently locking a bunch of people into a room and letting them figure out how to escape really builds camaraderie.  The game was such a success that it started expanding across Europe and into Canada. They just opened their first location in Connecticut this past March.

You go through the challenges with a team that consist of anywhere between 2-8 members.  Ideally, 4 member teams work best because you have enough people to help figure out the puzzles but not too many that you’re stepping over each other.  Our team consisted of myself, Fausto, Sandro, and Laura.  We were given a brief history of the game and some key information before we started. It was emphasized that we do not need to climb walls or break things to get at the clues.  I guess it has to be said because people react oddly when under pressure.  We were taken to a room in the back and handcuffed to the wooden poles (it’s not as kinky as it sounds).  “For better or for worse” we had to figure out how to get ourselves untangled and break free.

The Premise of the Game: You and your team have to work together to figure out how to unlock (there were a lot of locks) and get yourself out of a series of rooms within the one hour time frame.  The rooms we were in had 32 puzzles that we had to solve, but we only needed to solve about 24 puzzles in order to escape.  The puzzles were not too hard, but required a lot of thinking outside of the box.  There are different tools that you find along the way that can help unlock the clues, but they are not obvious.

I don’t want to give too much away because that’s part of the fun.  We came into the game not really knowing what to expect aside from the fact that the escape rate is only 30%! We didn’t even know how many rooms we had to go through before escaping.  We quickly found out that it was not going to be an easy challenge when we escaped through the first room to only find ourselves inside another enclosed space.  Adrenaline was pumping as we raced through the rooms, barely escaping at the end with 5 minutes to spare.

I am always up for trying a new challenge, so this was right up my alley, but I am happy to say that everyone else in our group also had a lot of fun.  This thrilling adventure was different from anything else we’ve ever done.  If you are in the Hartford area and want to do something different this weekend, give it a try.  If you are from other parts of the country, don’t worry, they are planning on expanding to other major cities soon including Las Vegas and Boston. There are multiple live-action adventure rooms that you can choose from and the costs varies between $29.99 to $34.99 per person.  Hope everyone have a great Labor Day weekend.