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We Escaped! The Great Escape Room

The Great Escape Room – A Fun Mystery Night Out

What is The Great Escape Room

The Great Escape Room is a room escape game based on computer and mobile phone escape games, but you get to experience it in the real world! The room combines a scavenger hunt and puzzles to find your escape. At The Great Escape Room, you are locked into a room with up to 11 others and tasked with finding clues and solving the clues to escape the room within an hour.

Monday night I was invited to enjoy The Great Escape Room in Royal Oak with some fellow Michigan bloggers. There are two other locations (Orlando and Miami) and the room has 20% escape rate. The Royal Oak location will open on December 26, but has soft-opening slots available this weekend.

How The Great Escape Room Works

As you wait for the rest of your group to arrive, you will need to sign a waiver and they have a few puzzles to get your mind going. I was working on a wooden teapot 3-D jigsaw puzzle. A pool table was scheduled to arrive a couple of days after our visit.

Your group enters the room and is given a few minutes to set up while the door is locked. As you look around the room, you will see white boards for note taking, furniture, wall hangings, and more. The clues are broken down by color forming 4 separate clues to solve each of which will give you a component needed for your escape.

The Great Escape Room

Before the timer starts, you hear a message from Sherlock Holmes. Then, the timer starts and it is time to start searching the room for clues. Of course, ransacking might be a more apt description of how we tore the room apart. Under each whiteboard was a bin to put our clues in as we found them.

Ransacking the Great Escape Room

 

Once we found the clues for each color (or at least most of them), it was then time to try to put the clues together to solve that problem. While you could solve a particular problem without all of the clues, you could not escape with out solving all 4 problems. As you searched for clues, there were also 3 magnifying glasses scattered around the room that could be traded for a hint. We did end up using all of our hints to help us along the way.

We managed to escape in 54 minutes! Our 54 minutes was a record for the Royal Oak location (of course there had only been about 12 groups before us – of which only 2 others had escaped.)

We Escaped! The Great Escape Room

After your escape or your failure, the group re-convenes in the break room where there are beverages and snacks. Your guide from the Great Escape Room will review the experience with you. She talked to us about the clues that we never found and how close we had been to finding some of them. She also reviewed what we had accomplished. For example, I worked on the yellow and green puzzles, but not the red, so it was good to hear how they had solved that puzzle.

The Great Escape Room Experience

We had so much fun experiencing the Great Escape Room!  We were all asking when they would be opening a second room since you can’t re-experience a room since you know all of its secrets.

We experienced The Great Escape Room with just our group of 7, but you can have a group of up to 12. With smaller groups you will likely be paired with other small groups. I didn’t know all of the members of our group prior to the experience, but it still worked great since we were all working towards a common goal.

My daughter loves puzzles, and was excited to hear about The Great Escape Room and was wondering if it would be someplace she could have a party. The recommended age is 12, however in a group I would recommend age 15 when in a group of peers. However, I think at age 9 my daughter would have fun participating in a family group. She would definitely be able to help look for clues and even piece together some of the puzzles.

The Great Escape Room would be a great experience for families (I would recommend a minimum age of 8-10 with mostly adults), a mom’s night out, a date night, or a bachelorette/bachelor party.

The Great Escape Room Background

The Great Escape Room was conceived by Howard and Scott Sakowitz, a father-son duo who opened their first location in Orlando earlier this year. The second location was opened  in Miami. The third location, Royal Oak, is being opened by the son who is a dentist at University of Michigan. They actually devised the puzzles in the first room on his drive from Orlando to Michigan. Future locations re planned for Washington, D.C., Tampa, and Chicago.

There are plans for a second room to open in late January 2015 and eventually a third room. At some point in the future, the puzzles in each room will likely be changed up allowing return experiences.

The Great Escape Room costs $28/person on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. There is a 10% discount available to groups of 10 or more. Limited Weekday hours are available for $23. For larger groups of up to 25, you will be able to book both rooms for a larger experience at $38/person.

This weekend they are offering a discounted soft-open price of $18/person from December 19-21. Their official open is December 26. You can book your escape (either during soft open or after the official opening on their website).

I definitely recommend checking out The Great Escape Room! I’ll keep you posted when more rooms open.

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