Liz Wikstrom
All that stands between us and a major pile of cash — $400,000, to be precise — are two teeny combination locks and an enormous steel safe.
Well, that and the solutions to some truly devious anagram and number puzzles. And the fact that the countdown timer in the other room is getting painfully close to zero.
My friends — the architect, the doctor and the math teacher — and I have spent most of the last hour in a room in a nondescript building between a tattoo parlor and Cheba Hut on Gilman Street, trying to put one over on the Mob. We’ve been trying to beat a casino-based scenario in the Madison version of Escape Chambers, a fast-growing regional attraction that also has outlets in Chicago, Des Moines and Milwaukee.
The Madison location has been open since May, and is currently running three rooms/scenarios. We’re tackling something called All In, but we could also have opted to be DEA agents looking to find evidence to nail a drug trafficker or victims trying to escape a basement before a serial killer returns. The ultimate objective is the same: in the course of an hour, solve a series of theme-based puzzles and escape.
Escape chambers have been part of the pop-culture landscape for a few years now — perhaps you saw one on The Big Bang Theory last season, or maybe on Big Brother. Or maybe you were like Aaron Larimer, the owner of the Madison outfit, who spent a truckload of time in college defusing e-bombs in online escape games.
Given his background, Larimer is understandably psyched that Madison is the first college town to host an Escape Chambers.
“Every year, there’s a new class of people who aren’t 21, don’t have a fake ID and don’t want to sneak into a bar,” says Larimer, who creates the scenarios and puzzles himself. “This gives them another option for something to do.”
So far, college students have only made up a sliver of the Escape Chambers audience. Larimer says the Des Moines location has become a haven for corporate teambuilding — Target and Wells Fargo are frequent guests. In Madison, so far, most players have come in with large groups of adults.
Typical weekday evenings see around four groups going through scenarios. On weekends, when Escape Chambers is open for 13 hours, they’ll pack in as many as 12. Keeley Garrett, Escape Chambers’ perky games master, can reset a room — even one that’s been turned inside out by a team of vigorous players — in as little as four minutes.
That’s impressive, given how many puzzle pieces are involved here. For the scenario we’ve chosen, the puzzles are a clever mix of logic and trial and error, involving everything from casino staples like noticing patterns in playing cards or craps dice to a search for hidden compartments and secret passageways. Failing to scour the room for tiny details and hidden clues means you might miss something important. But just because you think you’ve found something doesn’t mean it’s critical to your next move.
Our group ends up only two puzzles short of cracking the safe and recovering the cash before the timer expires, but Keeley gives us a few extra minutes and some gentle nudges. Turns out we’ve managed to solve at least two of the tougher puzzles in an unorthodox way. Um, winning?
Larimer says it’s the storytelling that makes the experience more engaging. We weren’t just a bunch of guys solving puzzles; we were looking to stick it to the Mob. Garrett is great at setting the stage and serving as the “eyes in the van,” monitoring the in-room action through video cameras and dispensing handy clues via souped-up baby monitors.
“We work like goalies,” explains Larimer. “If a customer’s reading a book that’s not key to the puzzle, we kick ’em back into play. That said, we try to keep from breaking the fourth wall.”
Larimer likens the experience to riding a rollercoaster, with a buildup and the relief and adrenaline rush that comes with solving a maddening puzzle.
“It’s frustrating, but it’s supposed to be frustrating,” he says. “We get people frustrated, and then we reward them. It’s like a good video game.”
The escape chambers are one-and-done affairs — a group only gets one crack at each scenario — and there’s a whopping 80% failure rate. In an interesting psychological twist, groups of strangers succeed more frequently than groups of friends.
“It has to do with how well you work in a group,” Larimer says. “We’ve never had a single person beat a room. We have people who think they can do it.”
Sometimes, says Larimer, people will try to hack a room — one time, a magician brought a lock pick along — but the rooms are designed to thwart shortcuts. In some cases, items you acquire by solving one puzzle may not be useful until you’ve solved another puzzle or found another item. One surprising thing players don’t do? Reveal the puzzle solutions to their pals.
“Why in the hell am I going to tell my friends so they can beat my time?” asks Larimer. Good point.
