DelcoReviewSpring2017 - 10

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Team Building
Thinking Outside
the Locked Box

The Delaware County Bar Association's Newest Affinity Partner

G

et together at a place called
Xscape The Room in Media, PA
for a ridiculously, awesome team
building experience! What is it? A live
action group escape where you and your
team of 4 - 10 players are put in a locked
room with one hour to find the "key" to
get yourselves out of the room. The "key"
isn't just hidden under a rug-it's hidden away behind a series of interlocking
puzzles. Your group has to scramble all
around the room looking for pieces to
these puzzles, trying to figure out how
those pieces fit together to form a larger
puzzle, and then finally solve the brain
teasers that emerge from putting all of
those pieces together in order to get a code
or a combination that unlocks some other
part of the room, and then finally, after a
lot of teamwork, and a little bit of luck,
you desperately fumble with the final lock
(as the timer ticks down) to get out of the
room and win! Of course, there's somebody nearby who will let you out if you
don't solve all the puzzles in time. And,
they'll occasionally offer cryptic hints to
nudge you in the right direction if you're
getting totally off track. So, the conse-

10 | Spring 2017

quences of failure aren't
quite as dire as you may
think-but still these are
hard puzzles, expertly built.
It'll take you every minute you have to get out of
these rooms! A majority of
the groups who take on the
room don't finish in time
and that is what's really
worth talking about-the
human endeavor that persists in solving the game is
what makes it so awesome!
Because something very
interesting happens when
you have real human beings
playing together - the game moves from
being one of all logic to becoming a collaborative problem-solving puzzle. While
part of the game is about the pure reasoning, it's your team's ability to coordinate,
cooperate, and communicate that'll make
the difference between winning and losing
in these events. Teamwork is so crucial
for this experience that it's better to go in
with a coordinated team of average puzzle solvers than an uncoordinated group
of puzzle solving masters - because this is
seriously the best team building exercise
ever!
So, let's talk about how the mechanics
of the game roll out into the human

dynamics. There are basically three parts
to an Xscape The Room experience;
finding the clues, assembling the clues,
and using those clues to solve the puzzles.
The first great thing that rolls out is that
by breaking the challenge down into
these three categories the game becomes
accessible to all sorts of different players.
While a logic puzzle may appeal to some
but not others, players still have to search
the environment and interact with the
room creating a role for the exploratory
players who can now take on the tasks of
figuring out hidden locations and digging
out the most obscure clues. They can feel
like a hero when they finally uncover
that last piece of the puzzle needed to
make everything come together. At
the same time, you also need people to
coordinate-to know what everybody
is currently working on and make sure
that the right clues are all going to the
right puzzle-to make sure people
aren't accidentally working on a puzzle
somebody else already solved, and to
always keep information flowing back and
forth between all the players. Then finally
you have the puzzle solvers, the ones
who use the information given to them to
connect the dots.
But even with all these bases covered,
here in Xscape The Room at least, the
puzzle designers have gone out of their
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