Escape rooms are growing in popularity worldwide. If you haven’t challenged yourself yet, go ahead and grab your old school sports teammates and head off to an escape room for a memorable reunion. Remember all of the things your coaches taught you about teamwork? You can use those skills that were drilled into your head by your coach to achieve success when playing an escape room game with your former teammates. Here are a few of those skills you’ll be able to effectively use during an escape room challenge.
Utilize Strengths
Before heading to the escape room, meet your teammates for lunch so you can learn more about each other and the strengths and skills you each may have picked up since you were on the team. That way, you can take advantage of those strengths and skills. It may be helpful to figure out who has electrical skills and who is mechanically inclined. For example, someone who has trained as a structural engineer may be able to recognize certain clues faster than others.
Work Together But Apart
You’ll want to work together as a team, of course, but separate from each other when in the escape room so you’re not all bunched up focused on the same area or clue. It’s fine for two or three of you to focus on one thing at a time but not the entire team. This is the same concept every team sport relies on. On the football and soccer fields, you don’t see the entire team right on the ball at the same time.
Organize Items
More than likely, you and your teammates will acquire various items and materials to either use, hopefully, or discard, unfortunately, as you try to escape the room. You may need to create a pile to place the discarded items onto so you don’t inadvertently try to reuse an item that has already been proven not to work. For example, if there are a number of keys in the room and you’re trying to match a key to a lock, discard the keys that do not work into the pile.
Communicate
Whether you played soccer, football, basketball, or other sport together, your coaches likely wanted you to communicate with each other during gameplay. You’ll also want to do this when you are in an escape room. Talk out loud about any clues you see. Don’t roll the ideas and thoughts around in your head. Speak them out loud so your teammates can hear while keeping your ears open for what they are saying. That way, someone may be able to pick up on a clue that someone else had missed.
Involve Everyone
Even if your sports team was competitive and some players sat on the bench the entire season, everyone was still involved to some extent due to taking part in practices. Keep everyone involved in the escape room challenge, because it does take a team effort. If someone on the team struggles with the challenge, post them to keep watch of the discard pile so they can stay involved.
Don’t Panic
Remember the feeling of panic you felt like a team when you collectively realized that you were losing a game? Panic tends to lead to risky behaviors that could have jeopardized your game even further. The last thing you’ll want to do is to have anyone panic while trying to successfully complete an escape room challenge. Remind yourself and others to take a deep breath so you can concentrate on completing the mission. Don’t worry so much about not completing the game successfully as you can always try it again another time.