Virtual Escape Room – Saturday Night Brain Workout with Macmillan
Last Saturday, myself and my family took on the task of solving a series of mind boggling puzzles set out in ‘Trapped! An Escape Room’ by Macmillan Cancer Support. I had seen a random post on Facebook about these game packs that Macmillan were offering and decided to investigate. Macmillan currently offer four different game packs which you can access at home and play virtually with a team. Note that you will need to set up a virgin fundraising page as they recommend giving a donation – the instructions on how to do this are sent to you via email and on the website.
Now as I said, we tried the escape room pack and if you haven’t experienced an escape room before, the basic aim is to solve clues within a locked room (normally with a time limit) and ruffle about through drawers, bookcases and anything you can find, pulling pictures of the walls until you find the key to get out. I wondered how they would imitate this experience online but I was impressed with how they managed to recreate the game virtually. So the computerised version of this game went like this:
- We were given a role play scenario explaining how we ended up in our predicament of being trapped. As the host and prior to the start of the game, I had to assign all players to a cell. There were six players and four rooms so myself and my partner Andy had a cell each and I shared the two remaining cells between the two other couples. Each cell is set up differently so at the beginning of the game, each of the cell mates have a different PDF that they have to look at – you are told not to share the images with anyone else.
- There are six puzzles or levels to get through together. If you are the host, I recommend you have two laptops at your disposal as you will need to share your screen displaying the main puzzle page plus look at the PDF documents in detail. I used Google Meet to host the meeting as you don’t need any software to use this – participants are invited via email and that’s it. Easy.
- You will need to enter codes/passwords for each puzzle in order to move on to the next. There are clues available in each puzzle – click on them! This game is so hard, unless you have the IQ of a Chaser if you don’t read the clues you will be on for days.
- As I said, in some of the puzzles you will need to download PDF’s so make sure you have your email software open and ready to send off copies to the rest of the group so they can have a good look at them. Screen sharing does not work for looking through multiple documents as you will be constantly flicking back and forth between sheets which doesn’t provide much fun for you – the host. If you are a participant, have your emails open too.
- There is a ‘reveal answer’ button if you are really stuck which we used once in order to move on. Remember not to take it too seriously, better to cheat a bit and keep playing than give up all together!
To summarise you will need:
Host – two laptops (or a tablet/phone to view PDFs), a notepad and pen
Participants – laptop, a notepad and pen
The game took us just over two hours which I was very surprised about – I thought this would be an easy, half an hour activity but I was so wrong. My brain ached after this and it really got us all thinking. A lot of work has gone into this game and it’s surprisingly sophisticated so a huge well done to Macmillan. If you like the sound if this, they also offer three other games: Horse Racing Night, Whodunnit and Quiz Night so have a look at their ‘Games Night In’ website to see if any take your fancy.
Let me know in the comments if you have played and what you’re time was. You’ve got a record of two hours to beat 😉