Our first family escape room

At the weekend we treated Harry to an escape room for his birthday treat. This was the first time that we had tried such a thing as a family, although my husband and I had both separately completed an escape room before. A few years ago my parents and I did Time Lock: Mission Berlin in Worthing. We were terrible at it! I don't know if the room was particularly difficult or if we just weren't very good, but we were constantly asking for help, and even then we only just made it out in time!

The escape room that we did at the weekend was another of the three in Worthing, which are all run by the same company. Smugglers Ruin is inspired by local history, as you attempt to retrieve a precious barrel of gin from the town hall. Once booked, all of these escape rooms are exclusive to your group, which was a big plus point for me.

I was a little apprehensive as to how we would get on. Harry can get overwhelmed quite quickly, especially when there is a time pressure, and Mia can get frustrated if she doesn't understand something. I was worried that I'd be spending the whole time trying to keep everyone happy, rather than actually solving puzzles! But in the end I needn't have worried, as we did brilliantly. We solved the room in just 43 minutes, and we didn't need a single hint!

Obviously no spoilers, but we were helped massively by the fact that Harry has a particular knack for a certain type of puzzle that I think would have taken the rest of us much longer to solve. We all worked really well as a team finding all the things that we needed for the puzzles, and we all chipped in with our own ideas which helped us to solve them together. We had an enormous amount of fun, and were talking about it for days afterwards. 

I would love to do a few more escape rooms but unfortunately it's not a cheap hobby. I can understand  why it's expensive - only a few people can take part at a time, it takes a long time to run the room and to set it up each time, and once someone has done a room they won't be coming back even with a different group of people. It was worth it but was definitely a treat rather than something that we'll be able to do regularly, even though we all loved it! There are plenty of others to try locally, so I'm hoping that we will be able to do another one together soon.

Have you ever tried an escape room?