My wife and friends got together and gifted me an escape room adventure for my birthday. It was caliwandalous!
We went to the Armadillo Escape Room Adventures in Old Town Spring and undertook the Time Travel Trouble adventure. The scenario involves going back in time for your vacation. There are dire warnings that time travel is relatively new, the kinks are still being worked out, and should something go wrong you have 60 minutes to set things right again or be stuck in your designated time permanently. Nothing could go wrong, right?
We started the adventure and of course, Something. Went. Wrong.
The time machine broke down and we had to find three items to fix it. We ended up in Old Town Spring of the 1920’s. Upon exiting the time machine we had three areas to search for the items we needed to fix things – a camp site, a bar / saloon, and a mercantile / post office.
We split up. My group took on the saloon / bar area, while two other members of our party took the mercantile / post office area.
There were various puzzles in each area that we had to figure out. Some of them were quite clever and rather tricky to solve. None of them were straightforward. You had to look for various clues, then figure out the puzzles they lead you to, and ultimately to the item you needed to fix the time machine.
Before you start your adventure you can select to play on either ‘intermediate’ or ‘hard’ mode. They both allow you to get clues during the game, but you get fewer clues to help you on hard mode. Also, you had to look for the ‘golden armadillo’. We weren’t told what happens if you find it, just that if you did find it, you informed ‘mission control’. I suspect you get more time on your scenario if you find it. We went for the intermediate mode and I think it is probably a good thing we did. We needed a few hints along the way.
We finished the saloon / bar area before the other team finished the mercantile / post office area. We moved on to the campsite. There was one puzzle box that we were having a deuce of a time opening. We had all the right clues and knew how to open it, but we just couldn’t get the danged thing to open. The other team joined us after finishing their room. One of them was able to get the puzzle box open fairly easily.
Things were coming down to the wire. We had about two and a half minutes left when we found the third item to fix the time machine. We took another minute to try and find the golden armadillo (which we hadn’t found yet) but no luck. Time was counting down and we weren’t sure exactly what we had to do to finish the scenario. At a minute and a half left we gathered back in the time machine, then figured out how to put the items in place to ‘fix’ it. We managed to get it done in time.
Overall it was a ton of fun. I think I’d like to try it again some time.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum