Kid-friendly, neurospicy-friendly escape room in Seattle area, please?

March 2, 2024 9:16 PM

My kid turns 10 in October and the most "tween-y" birthday party theme she could think of was an escape room. We live in Seattle. Attendees would be in 2nd to 4th grade and some of them are various manners of neurodivergent. Please help me figure out how to do this, as the only escape room place I know of is way too creepy AND involves math and geography these kids haven't learned yet. I'm open to something packaged that we can do at home as well. Thank you!
posted by centrifugal to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (4 answers total)

My kid and her neurodiverse elementary-age friend group had a good time at one of the Conundroom locations in Redmond. Their room was Harry Potter themed and she is not the most courageous kid out there (in particular, spooky things often make it hard for her to get to sleep) but had a great time and slept just fine the night after. I think this was for an eighth or ninth birthday, so same general age group.
posted by potrzebie at 10:08 PM on March 2 [1 favorite]

Conundroom could definitely work, they have a Harry Potter room and a Minecraft themed room and looks like they even do parties. Puzzle Break in Seattle also has family friendly rooms. The biggest limiting factor will be group size as most rooms I can think of in the area cap out around 8 people. A lot of the more horror themed rooms will have age limits anyway.
posted by wsquared at 11:05 PM on March 2

My experience with escape rooms and 4th graders is that they are not a good match for each other in most cases. Add in differences in experience with neurodiversity, and it is a recipe for a meltdown from frustration.

Might I recommend one of the numerous paid scavenger hunt companies in Seattle? Rather than locking potentially reactive kids in a room, exploring parts of the city at a more leisurely pace could be a good experience that is gentler and has less pressure. I haven’t done one in Seattle, but have in other major cities and on the whole the kids I’ve brought along loved them.
posted by Geckwoistmeinauto at 4:45 AM on March 3

If you want to try something similar in a more controlled at-home environment, Exit The Game is a sort of escape room in a box. These are single-use games; you will be drawing on things, cutting pages out of the instruction book, tearing the box apart, cutting cards up with scissors, that sort of thing. But at about $15 for an hour to 90 minutes worth of entertainment, they're pretty great. They do have difficulty ratings, and those rated at 1 or 2 dots would be appropriate for the age range, perhaps with a little guidance from a parent or older sibling. Some of the games come in larger boxes and have puzzles to solve; I find that in general, the Exit games with puzzles included have somewhat more esoteric riddles and require more lateral thinking. They're quite fun, but I think they'd be a little frustrating for that age bracket.

There are other, similar "escape room in a box" games; "Unlock", "Escape Room In A Box", and "Escape The Room" are the more commonly-found series, but having tried a lot of these games with our board gaming group at home, I really feel like the Exit games deliver the most bang for the buck, in terms of overall enjoyment, how much sense the puzzles make, and how approachable they are to solve. We found that with some of the "Escape The Room" puzzles, you had to be inside the game developer's head to reach the same conclusion and solution, given the clues provided. We're all experienced board gamers and room-escapers, and a couple of the Escape The Room puzzles left us going, "Well, that was quite a stretch. Not sure how we were supposed to get from A to B on that one."

(I am not affiliated with these Exit games; I just really like them and have done most of them.)
posted by xedrik at 9:24 AM on March 4 [2 favorites]