Atmosphere makes all the difference! This is true for any DIY escape rooms you build as well as other at home escape rooms. You can make the flow chart by hand, but since you might change it many times it can make sense to use a free flowchart software such as yEd for this. Your resulting flowchart might look something like this: If you did the groundwork by deciding on the setting and plot, you are already ahead of most people trying to make their own escape room at home. Good job!

The plot is the second big decision. Almost all escape rooms have a plot and the challenge of completing the game is explained to the players in the form of a challenge within the plot. The plot is what motivates the players to complete the game and without a plot, an escape room would just be a thematic set of puzzles with to purpose. You can make additional thematic decorations for the room. Just make sure that the decorations do not interfere with the game or misguide the player because they look like they contain information. Keep it simple and avoid decorations that repeat concepts, symbols, shapes, or words that appear in your game.Access to a pre-made playlist, video introduction and video ending are also included to fully immerse all the players in the game. The biggest challenge, though, is that there typically isn’t a finish line. Most designers start with a puzzle. The first puzzle leads to another puzzle. That one leads to another. Then another. Then another. After a while, the team gets frustrated. There is never a light at the end of the tunnel.

Like in other story-based media such as novels and movies, plots can often revolve around a conflict between different parties, e.g. players wanting to escape, but someone else wanting to keep them trapped. Trapping people in rooms, however, is not the only plot there is. Here are 10 other examples of common plots from Scott Nicholson’s paper “The State of Escape”: By the way, if you are looking to build a challenge on your own and don’t know where to start, this game can help. It will give you some good ideas, and it is inexpensive. My Rich Uncle Team Escape Room Set a Goal for the Group: The best stories have an ending. Make sure to set the goal for the group. Let them know what the end game is. Set milestones along the way. This way, they know that they are getting close to the end. We tell the participants in the My Rich Uncle Event that the end goal is to get all six digits of the combination. So, if one team has four digits, they know that they are closing in. The energy of the group increases.Don’t forget that these games are all about the experience, not just the puzzles! When you are all done with setting the clues and the puzzles, sprinkle in more fun! You already feel like the greatest game master ever, because you’ve already figured out all these challenges and you connected them into an amazing escape room!

As with the setting, the plot must be delivered to your players. Printable escape rooms for home printing, such as Houdini’s Secret Room or The Gilded Carcanet, almost always deliver the plot as a written introduction to the players. This can be done in the form of a letter. In the plot example above this could be a letter from the intelligence agency that gives you the document retrieval mission.By drawing a flow chart you can also see whether your game is mostly linear or non-linear. Linear games are ones where the tasks are like pearls on a string and non-linear games are the ones that contain branches that allow players to work on more than one task in parallel. In the example above there are two branches that join at “Decode the combination” since two clues are needed to do the task and those two clues can be obtained in parallel. Escape rooms can also really help you mix it up from the usual boardgames we’re all used to playing and they involve both teamwork, activity and competition which is unique compared to many types of conventional boardgames. How about running a leaderboard with your family and friends? Can your guests beat your best time? It might require some thought but with some pointers and inspiration, you can formulate your own escape room experiences that are highly personalised to you and your environment. The Puzzles