3 Essential Skills to Win Your Escape Game

Photo: Mar Newhall

It really does take all sorts of people to successfully solve an escape room. Everyone has different strengths and different ways of looking at things. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some essential skills that every escape game player can benefit from.

Power up these essential skills and you’ll become the fiercest escape gamer your group has ever seen. You might even leave us Krakit Escape Game staff quaking in our boots!

1. Observation

There’s a good reason we’re so obsessed with all things Sherlock, and that’s because there’s no one better at this essential escape game skill. Observing requires seeing what’s really in front of you, not what you expect to see in front of you.

Training yourself to analytically see details rather than the bigger picture takes some time and concentration to perfect. Here’s a guide from Lifehacker to get you started.

2. Pattern recognition

The next essential escape game is pattern recognition: being able to take everything you’ve observed and see how it all fits together. This requires stepping out of an analytical mind frame and into a more inventive one—shifting brain gears, if you will.

Get started on building your pattern recognition skills with this handy guide from Predictable Success.

3. Problem solving

Now comes the skill where you put it all together: problem solving. This is the only skill that will lead to you cracking each puzzle and ultimately the entire escape room.

Problem solving is definitely the most creative of these three essential escape game skills, often requiring novel thinking. However, while intuition and creativity are an important facet of problem solving, those “aha moments” aren’t going to happen without all the analytical and logical thinking that came before.

Start with Business Insider’s “5 Steps to Becoming an Expert Problem Solver” to level up your skills.

Put your essential escape game skills to the test in one of Krakit’s four themed escape rooms. Book here: http://bookeo.com/krakit.

Crack Team Assemble! Corporate Team Building in Vancouver

With the huge number of hours we spend with our workmates, it makes sense that a lot of workplaces are putting tons of energy into creating good environments for their staff. Sure, we can’t all offer the perks of the Google campus, but there are plenty of ways of perking up a team that all businesses and workplaces can engage in.

Getting groups of co-workers to bond over an interactive activity is something we’re highly familiar with here at Krakit Escape Game. Below we share our top places for team building in Vancouver that are both fun and effective.

Krakit Escape Game

We are have no doubts about the fun factor at our four Vancouver escape games, and we’re also have no doubts about the bonds solving an escape room builds among team members. When you’ve only got 45 minutes to save you and your officemates from lobotomization, people quickly put on their cooperation hats.

Grouse Mountain Zipline

Heading out for a day on the mountain’s zipline is definitely high on the fun factor. But not only does it get everyone’s adrenaline pumping and allow workers to interact offsite, it also offers opportunity for any scaredy cats to step up to the plate and any hidden leaders to shine.

Sunshine Coast Rafting

We live in one of the most beautiful places on the planet, so why not take advantage of it and head out into nature on the Sunshine Coast. Nothing spells teamwork like trying to keep your boat afloat, right? There are plenty of companies that cater to groups, including training for any novices.

City Scavenger Hunt

If you’ve got a crack HR team, then perhaps a self-devised scavenger hunt is what the team-building doctor ordered. Splitting co-workers into small teams and then having them race to win is a great way to see how your company’s workers both cooperate and compete.

6Pack Archery Tag

Forget paintball or laser tag—times have moved on to archery tag. 6Pack Indoor Beach in Richmond will let you rent out their whole space, and then you just have to let organized chaos ensue as the entire office takes out their frustrations by launching foam-tipped arrows at one another.

Tips for Solving Escape Room Puzzles

Whether it’s your very first time or your sixth visit, the moment the timer starts to tick down on an escape room is an exhilarating feeling. You’ve got 45 minutes to solve a series of puzzles set up to tantalize your brain—and maybe the future of the human race or the safety of yours and your friends’ brains is on the line.

It’s easy to get off to an energized start, with everyone pumped and ready to outsmart the escape room designer! But sometimes your team can hit a lull. That next clue or puzzle just isn’t materializing—and you start to feel at a loss.

You can always ask for a hint (more often than not, one is needed!), but what if you’ve run out?

If you find yourself in that situation next time you’re playing one of Krakit’s four Vancouver escape rooms, just take into consideration some of the tips below.

1. Scour your environment for hints

This is the most basic step when it comes to an escape game. Not just a Sudoku puzzle on a sheet of paper or a Rubik’s Cube you can hold in your hand, the entire room is a piece of the puzzle.

Remember that even if an element isn’t an actual clue, it still might be subtlety pointing you in the right direction. It’s easy to focus intently on the details and miss the big picture. So slop, slow down, and take another scan of the room, looking for larger patterns and anomalies in those patterns.

2. Gather all of the clues in one spot

Whether you do this physically or on a piece of paper, keeping all of the clues you find in one spot is helpful. Even if you don’t know how an element fits just quite yet, by having everything side by side, you’ll be able to piece it together when the time comes.

Plus, when you’re playing on a larger team, you want to make sure everyone has a chance to investigate each clue, so that no one is missing out on a vital element.

3. Take a second look

Maybe you found one of the later clues very early on in your game, and you didn’t even realize it. In the hustle and bustle, it can be easy to forget about such clues. And after just a few more minutes of gameplay, you may view that original clue entirely differently. Don’t forget to periodically turn your attention back to unsolved clues, reshuffle and review them, and see if they are now fitting differently into the puzzle narrative.