Youth Social Evening – Escape Room Chaos - By Andrew Barkley

Following a successful escape room social before the summer, the young people requested another escape room evening. However, this time they wanted it to be harder (honestly). As someone who enjoys a challenge, I set about creating puzzles and challenges and turned the church hall into two identical escape rooms.

The theme of the evening was The Mysterious Box of Rev. Francis Ive. He was called that because “Rev. F. Ive” spells five, which was used as part of a code. There were ten puzzles to solve, and each one resulted in finding a key. Once all the keys were discovered, the final box was presented, and the young people had to find the right key to unlock it and receive the prize. The prize was just packets of Haribo, which may not seem like much, but I’ve found that teenagers are very fond of sugary sweets.

There were some brain-teasing challenges involving codes and maths. It was brilliant to watch teenagers standing around, bickering about sums. One example of a puzzle was:

Add together the number of original members of One Direction with the number of brothers Joseph had (in Genesis in the Bible). Take away the number of starting players on a football team from the total, and the number you get is the second digit.

For those who prefer more physical or energetic tasks, there were some of those included as well. As I love the saying “like a needle in a haystack,” I decided to change it to “a key in a haystack” and hid a small key in a load of hay. There was also 40 metres of string thrown all around each side of the hall for each team to untangle. I definitely had more fun throwing the string around and tangling it than the young people did untangling it!

If you’ve ever done an escape room, you’ll know that some things in the room are just there to trick and confuse you. During the planning, it was agreed that we should include some red herrings—so I took this literally! There were ten pictures of red herrings hidden around the room, some with random forfeits written on them. None of the young people realised what the red herrings meant, so they found them all and ended up having to complete the forfeits.

One of the challenges was also frozen into a block of ice, which the young people had to extract. There were some very imaginative methods used to break the ice, including hitting it against things, sneaking into the kitchen to find salt, and even trying to bite into it!

Overall, the evening went really well. All the young people involved enjoyed themselves, as did the leaders, who were laughing at some of the attempts. If you’re good at creating puzzles and are interested in helping come up with another escape room or youth social evening, please come and chat to a member of the team.