Escape from the Ordinary: Part 2
Welcome to Part 2 of my escape room project! In this series, I’m sharing how I designed and built my own escape room in my home office.
During the build of this escape room, I built a variant of Agile sprints. The idea was to make a low fidelity prototype, playtest it, and then refine or revise based on feedback. This helped me:
- Establish a deadline so I actually made progress.
- Get feedback early and often so I didn’t go too far down a path that didn’t work.
- Entertain my friends and family! Maybe against their will, but still.
Describing this process for all of the puzzles would take a long time, so instead I’ll lay it out for one puzzle: the Origami Puzzle.
Monday & Tuesday: Initial Build
As part of the “Use Your Hands” pathway in my escape room, I wanted to include an origami puzzle. I love origami and have never seen an origami puzzle in a commercial escape room — I suspect there’s a puzzle durability issue. So I thought it would be unique to play and fun to build.
I envisioned a puzzle where players would assemble a 6-sided origami cube to reveal a number, which would combine with two other numbers and an ordering puzzle to form a lock combination.
Here’s a picture of the 6-sided cube I had in mind:
I’ve made this cube many times, but I recognize that most people aren’t that comfortable with origami.
So I folded the pieces myself and marked them with parts of the clue. Players would need to read and execute the assembly instructions, and then they’d be able to read the clue.
Geometry Bites
However, after I made a puzzle prototype and took it apart, I started to understand the hidden complexity.
There are 30 unique ways to assemble a 6-sided cube if you don’t care about the orientation of the sides (6! divided by the number of symmetries of a cube — guess who spent a lot of time drawing diagrams today?!). And in this case, each piece can also be flipped 180 degrees and affect whether you see the clue.
I do not have a talent for combinatorics — although I did learn that word today. But as far as I can tell, there are between 30 and 1920 unique ways to assemble a 6-sided cube where orientation matters.
This is a problem because drawing a number on the sides only works if the players assemble the cube in the exact way I did.
To solve this, I added an orientation hint: a red dot covering one and only one corner of the cube so that players knew to assemble those three pieces together.
Tuesday Playtest: Dan
I asked my husband Dan to playtest the 3 number puzzles and the ordering puzzle together on Tuesday night. Dan promptly solved the other number puzzles and the ordering puzzle, but refused the origami cube entirely.
Instead, he said, “I hate that kind of thing,” and entered all of the options into the lock until it clicked.
So, success?! I got some customer feedback and learned that there was an escape hatch.
Wednesday Playtest: The Engineer & the Doctor
Next, I tested with two friends, who made quick and correct work of all of my other puzzles.
My friends figured out the goal of the origami puzzle, and assembled the cube correctly. They even aligned the dot!
Unfortunately, they managed to find one of the remaining unintended combinations, and so the clue stayed hidden. My fix didn’t solve the underlying geometry.
Thursday: Pivot
My quick playtests made it clear that this puzzle was:
- Polarizing to puzzle solvers
- Very error-prone. I would definitely need to do more math to figure out how to ensure player success.
So I took a deep breath and radically simplified. I switched to a 2-piece modular origami design — a Shuriken with only 2 possible configurations.
And then, before I got another chance to playtest, my sprint was over.
Integration Playtest: Back to Dan
A couple of days before the launch of my Escape Room, I did a full playtest in my home office with Dan. Like a software integration test, this was meant to test whether the refined puzzles worked, how they functioned in the real space, how they flowed into each other, and the overall time it would take to solve the room.
I was very excited to playtest the Origami Puzzle v2.
Unfortunately, I forgot my user. Dan skipped the spatial nonsense and brute-forced the lock again.
But he also agreed that the puzzle looked simpler and more approachable, and I was out of design time, so the Origami Puzzle v2 went to production without another full test.
Conclusion
This puzzle was on the more complex and innovative side of the puzzles in my escape room, and at the end of the day I didn’t fully realize my vision. But I was able to make something unique, learn quickly, adapt my strategy, and end with something playable.
Maybe some day I’ll go back and learn the math I need to make the cube playable. Or maybe not!
The last part of my series will talk about how launch day went (including some of the difficulties of setting up an escape room in a living space). To find out how it all played out and what I learned, stay tuned for Part 3.
