Best Escape Room Puzzles

December 18, 2020 10:44 AM

Hey escape room fans, what's the best escape room puzzle you've ever come across? I'm a relative newbie but would love to hear about creative puzzles and innovative puzzlers!
posted by storybored to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (6 answers total)

My favorite escape rooms have more physical puzzles than logic-y ones.

In Orlando there was a prison break one that had us using wrenches to unscrew bars, fashion coat hangers into hooks to snag keys, etc
posted by bbqturtle at 10:58 AM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

My absolute favorite moment in an escape room was noticing two metal hooks across the room from each other, then finding a card with a picture of Captain Hook and the caption "Remember Circuits 101."

I got my family to hold hands across the room and grab the hooks to connect the circuit and open a trap door.
posted by rabbitbookworm at 12:37 PM on December 18, 2020 [4 favorites]

rn, w/ lockdown, have gotten into virtual escape rooms like Escape this Podcast which has puzzle rooms one person DMs and the other solves (listeners can download each room to play on their own).
posted by Geameade at 1:47 PM on December 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

Best one I've seen recently was a whiteboard with some random numbers, letters, and lines on it (it was a science/lab themed room), with a folder nearby with a bunch of transparencies with similar patterns. You had to use magnets on the whiteboard to hold up the transparencies in the right positions which revealed certain compound structures you needed to move on. Later in the same room, you get a clue which indicates you need to modify the original arrangement to get a new compound to use on another puzzle.
posted by _DB_ at 2:54 PM on December 18, 2020

As someone who does engineering, sometimes related to electrical safety, that hooks one makes me maaaad. (Let's just run current through everyone! No, maybe it's low signal voltage. But your resistance is too high for that to work!... Wow, I am a DORK.)

I enjoyed one where we had found little specimen jars around the room and had to arrange them according to various clues also found around the room. The blue ones will fight if you put them next to each other, the red ones have to be facing away from each other, every specimen has to be able to see another specimen of it's species, etc.
posted by Lady Li at 6:08 PM on December 18, 2020

I did one once with a little plastic capsule in the bottom of a bottle attached to a table, and the bottle neck was too narrow to reach into. You had to take the water from a nearby vase or fishbowl or something and fill the bottle with water to float the capsule to the top.

I also liked one that involved folding origami according to some instructions and doing so put the writing on the sheet back into a readable format.
posted by music for skeletons at 4:31 PM on December 20, 2020