A new entertainment form, Escape Rooms, have begun springing up this summer. An escape room is a themed 45-hour minute group puzzle. You and your friends sign up for a time slot, put down your $20, and then are ushered into The Room. The room is full of clues, mechanical tricks and traps, and neat props. You have 45 minutes to solve the mystery.

Some mysteries are 'find the way out of the room'. Others involve figuring out the message left by the previous room's occupants. Either way, you either succeed or fail by time's end.

The one I played was in Alexandria, VA, and was themed as a Sherlock Holmes piece. The backstory is that Holmes had solved the mystery, ran out to catch the perp, then got caught, and if we couldn't figure out who and where the villain was from clues Sherlock left behind, he'd get axed.

Other escape rooms take a spy theme-- you have X minutes to escape the room. Or a zombie spin-- you have X minutes to escape the room, plus a zombie is there on a slowly-extending leash. Or... well, you can see the variety inherent.

Wikipedia calles them "Real-life room escape" and notes the first was in 2006. Asia took the lead in building the first few, and many started cropping up after 2010. I've found there are at least 3 ventures operating near DC this year.

Although Escape Rooms fit, I think, in the field of Live Action Role-Playing (LARP), they aren't LARPs per se. Much as "True Dungeon" calls itself not-a-LARP, because it de-emphasizes role-playing but does include character stats and skills, Escape Rooms remove even the character sheet and let you just be you. It's all about the puzzles.

From an RPG standpoint, these are "merely" LARP your-character-is-you non-combat line courses. However, anytime you have to put multiple modifiers to shoehorn it into an existing genre, I think it's easier to just consider it a valid spin-off. In all cases, it looks like we have yet another potentially profitable live game form to enjoy. My first thought after playing was, wow, now I want to build my own!

Until next month,
Sandy
p.s. this was to by my July column, but it's late. Should I start doing bi-monthly, or keep with monthly?