I love games. Hide-and-Go-Seek was a staple among the neighbourhood kids, Christmas with my family is traditionally card game central, and Apples to Apples is great to play among friends. When escape rooms started popping up around Edmonton, therefore, I knew I needed to check one out and soon! Luckily we had another young adult night come up for June so I finally got to check off one of my bucket list items by planning a Breakout Night!
The six of us got together last Friday, ready to check out PvP at Breakout Edmonton East, a convenient hop, skip, and jump from St. Nick's. Unlike other escape rooms, in PvP our group was split up into two teams and had to compete against each other by completing a series of identical puzzles that, once solved, would give the winning team access to a key that would get them out of the room. In the spirit of determining whether previous experience with escape rooms would give an edge, we split up according to whether we had done a breakout room before or not. The customer service agent then took us to the room, explained the rules, and began the clock.
Now, I won't give away what the puzzles looked like, but I will say that those puzzles were hard! The first one I managed to solve simply by a lot of trial and error, but the rest had our team stumped! We tried absolutely everything: working on puzzles together, splitting up, switching puzzles... it was insane how difficult they were! Eventually, though, our team got a second one finished, but we were out of time! Luckily there was no one in the room after us, so the staff offered to let us continue playing until we solved all the puzzles. They also gave each of our teams the same clue that significantly helped us as we worked through the remaining puzzles. Soon another puzzle was solved. And another. But alas, the other team, the one with previous experience, managed to solve the final puzzle before we could! Turns out that we weren't far behind at all, and in any case the whole experience was still fun. We all agreed, however, that next time we needed to try a more classic room where we were all together and had no idea what we needed to look for.
After all that hard work of using our brains, our group decided to stop by Fargo's for some much-needed drinks. It was also nice to just sit and chat, sharing stories and laughing. That's my favourite thing about planning young adult events: sometimes it's enough to just be with and get to know each other, knowing that at the very least we share the same faith.
It was a great evening, indeed, and I'm definitely looking forward to the next one!
Joyanne :D