COASTAL COMMERCE
Puzzle rooms in demand, intellectual fun, teambuilding alternative
Fleeing Bored Games
The 60-minute limit was up. Escape Room Adventures manager Ethan Kuzyk left his post full of television monitors where he had been watching the Ramos family scour Brandon’s Totally Tubular Bedroom for clues. He walked down the hall and opened the door. “Aw!” was heard from one family member. And then, “That was great!”
The Ramos family had used all three clues and hadn’t found the candy stash, and therefore hadn’t “solved the room,” but the outing to celebrate Dakotah’s 13th birthday was a hit. They were pleased with their teamwork, patience and strategy―all qualities that have been making this type of experience popular with businesses seeking team-building opportunities and friends looking for something to do beyond bowling, Hulu and happy hours.
Zev Schlasinger and three partners opened the escape-room concept last December in a second-floor suite in the Pinewood Plaza next to Bell Tower Shops in Fort Myers. Schlasinger, a boardgame inventor from Naples, had attended an industry convention in Canada and tried out an escape room. He was impressed. “There are so many physical games. We need something intellectual, too,” he says. “And this is good because players have to
It’s about problem-solving, observation, the ability to see connections between things, and communication.” —ZEV SCHLASINGER, ESCAPE ROOM ADVENTURES CO-FOUNDER
talk to each other and communicate information.” There were no such puzzle rooms in Southwest Florida at the time, so he began scouting a location and found an office space that didn’t need much alteration.
At Escape Room Adventures, two rooms challenge up to six people each. Brandon’s Bedroom, for instance, is full of ’80s memorabilia like Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots, a quilt with a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe theme, a movie poster from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and other dated items. About 33 percent of players solve this room, Kuzyk says.
The goal for the Area 52 room is to find the alien’s name and the coordinates of its home planet, among the lab coats, test tubes, chart of the elements and other space-age paraphernalia. This one’s harder. Only about 15 percent solve it, Kuzyk says.
The earliest puzzle room opened in Kyoto, Japan, in 2007 and by 2012 had spread into Asia before taking hold in Europe and Australia and finally the United States. Google, Amazon and Facebook all have taken their staffs to an escape room in Great Britain, where they are particularly popular. Themes range from simple to elaborate, from a World War II POW camp to a room with someone costumed as a zombie who gets closer to the players as time elapses.
It’s hard to tell who will be successful at moving through the levels, Schlasinger says. “It’s not about real-world knowledge,” he says. “It’s about problemsolving, observation, the ability to see connections
between things, and communication. We had a group of six doctors in here who wouldn’t use their hints and couldn’t solve it.” Not succeeding is common, though. Michelle and Howard Jordan and their sons Howie and Josh had to try four times before they could solve an escape room while on vacation in Tennessee. But they liked it so much they came home to Marco Island and opened Xtreme Escape in November 2015.
Xtreme Escape offers three rooms: “Lost in the Everglades,” in which your plane has gone down in a remote location and you must connect with a rescue crew; “Calico Jack’s Lost Treasure,” in which finding that treasure sets you free from the ship on which you are held hostage; and “Cell Block M,” where you have served seven years of a sentence for a murder you did not commit and look for evidence you need to prove it.
Michelle Jordan says the puzzle rooms have been busy with a variety of ages and interests. Around Christmas, quite a few businesses held holiday parties there, she says. One man proposed to his fiancee in Cell Block M. “We (st aff and the fiancee) hid her clue in one of the last things t o find in the room, in a safe. There she found an evidence bag and a love letter from her fiancee,” Jordan says. “As soon as she turned around, he was on one knee.”
The Jordans also expect to open an Xtreme Escape in Naples.
Google, Amazon and Facebook all have taken their staffs to an escape room in Great Britain.