It’s a really good idea to map out the tasks your players will carry out in your escape room with a flow chart. Escape rooms are otherwise quite hard to write down and they are not too easy to remember either. You will need to give your tasks some titles such as:

Also, having your own DIY escape room is awesome for hosting your own escape room events. Birthday parties, family games sessions, games nights with friends, neighbours, the list goes on! Since you’re in your own home, you won’t be time-constrained or limited in your session times either so you can keep going if you have some frustrating near-misses from annoyed friends and family members. Escape rooms and home puzzle games follow a logical flow and you’ll need to draft everything out and come up with a flow diagram of sorts. The idea is to point players to certain milestones or clues, where they’ll complete a task and then move onto the next clue. Sometimes, clues can be hidden randomly amongst the environment, prompting a mad scramble from players as they rush to find the first clue.

Want to Create the Entire Activity from Scratch in True DIY Fashion?

Consider that the puzzle we just created takes away the document (hides it in a safe) and instead gives the players a post-it note with the code for the safe. We can make the puzzle longer by continuing this line of thinking and also removing the post-it note with the code and giving the players something else instead.

By the way, if you are looking to build a challenge on your own and don’t know where to start, this game can help. It will give you some good ideas, and it is inexpensive. My Rich Uncle Team Escape Room The more specific you can get, the more ideas will come to your mind that you can use in the later steps. Imagine the difference between “Tourist attraction” and “Abandoned tourist attraction outside the coast of Turkey in 1995”. You can make the flow chart by hand, but since you might change it many times it can make sense to use a free flowchart software such as yEd for this. Your resulting flowchart might look something like this: This concludes the tips for puzzle creation. If the puzzle ideas don’t come naturally to you, don’t worry. We recently published a list of 24+ DIY Escape Room Puzzles that you can just grab today and there are plenty more to be found on the internet. Can you imagine creating your own escape room? I am notnecessarilytalking about creating an escape room for business purposes, more like turning your home into an amazing experience that your loved ones will remember forever.The plot is the second big decision. Almost all escape rooms have a plot and the challenge of completing the game is explained to the players in the form of a challenge within the plot. The plot is what motivates the players to complete the game and without a plot, an escape room would just be a thematic set of puzzles with to purpose. I guess you’re thinking “well I am not a novelist, how could I make this kind of story?” Don’t worry my friend, I am sure you can do it, just unleash your hidden creativity and follow these few steps: They span 3 difficulty levels and are designed to for everyone ranging from beginners to escape room enthusiasts. Don’t underestimate our escape rooms just because they’re set up at home! They’re tough and will certainly challenge you. If you think you have what it takes then what are you waiting for?!

Before starting the game, inform the testers that they are testing a new game and if they fail to complete it without hints or fail to have a good time, it is a fault of the game and not because they are stupid. They are not the ones being tested here. Also, inform them that there will be no time limit for the test because it is more important that all content is tested. My first escape game was a real blast. It took me almost a month of thinking, searching, creating, buying some stuff, and setting all of it up in my living room, but when it came down to the actual playing, I felt like the Superman of the Game Masters. Actually, it was a surprise party for my escape room crew, and btw, I’ve played many escape games with them.

Even though making an escape room at home is not difficult, it does take a bit of time. And unfortunately, if you didn’t align yourself with the process beforehand or start off on the wrong foot chances are that you will throw in the towel sooner or later. Like in other story-based media such as novels and movies, plots can often revolve around a conflict between different parties, e.g. players wanting to escape, but someone else wanting to keep them trapped. Trapping people in rooms, however, is not the only plot there is. Here are 10 other examples of common plots from Scott Nicholson’s paper “The State of Escape”: Atmosphere makes all the difference! This is true for any DIY escape rooms you build as well as other at home escape rooms. Ok, you already have the story, but how can you create puzzles when you have zero experience? Well, it is challenging and time-consuming, but for me, it was the most fun part of the process. Believe me, there is a ton, a million ways to invent puzzles, some of them you can conjure up just by using things you already have in your drawers.