Escape Review: Palace Games, The Great Houdini Escape Room

What a fun game! Just finished The Great Houdini Escape. Suggested team sizes were around 8 however we did it with 6 team members (all mega bright hackers). This puzzle room was great. Originally, I thought there was only a single room but this opens into multiple rooms, with many hidden doors, and even involved feeling your way through hidden / dark corridors. There were a ton of very elaborate puzzles, but mainly 4 primary puzzles and 8 independent puzzles. They were all very challenging, some requiring multiple minds, but there were also so many puzzles that it required us to be consistently solving the puzzles in parallel. And the puzzles were very creative, including brail, music, general problem solving and even using our bodies together in creative ways. I also really enjoyed the theme, as there were a lot of historical artifacts and the game involved some fun historical trivia. The basic premises was that Houdini is having a party where he locks his 8 famous guests in a room, gives them 80 minutes to escape, and has tailored several challenges to their interests. I really enjoyed how our puzzle guide gave us some history of the Palace of Fine Arts, about Houdini, and the other characters of San Francisco that were involved in the Houdini Escape Room. I also thought the decor was spot on for the theme, the rooms had a retro, steam punk atmosphere. Ultimately we made it out, with about 5 minutes to spare. I highly recommend this escape challenge, it was one of the best I've done, both in theme and degree of difficulty. We also got to take communication and teamwork surveys both before and after the escape game, which were used to help analyze how well our team works together. I didn't really get the feedback here, but I thought it was interesting to do the self assessments of our teamwork both before and after the event. I had a blast and would do it again with this crew any day.