Constructing your own escape room
As escape rooms increase in popularity and numbers, people are looking for ways to share this experience with friends, family and church youth groups. Escape rooms cost between $20 to $30 per player and are cost prohibitive for most church youth groups and family reunions.
A solution is to create your own room, DIY or duplicate another design.
Latter-day Breakout offers room designs for constructing your own escape room box. Hundreds have downloaded the plans and many have constructed their own escape boxes. The room designs can also be utilized to collect puzzle ideas to create your own escape rooms / box.
Purchase design
$10
Locks / Puzzles
11 / 14
Cost of Materials
$110 to $216
Hours to Build
about 35
$10
5 / 13
$75 to $175
about 5
Backpack Break-in
(not yet available)
NA
12 / 13
Challenges to constructing your own escape room
There are 4 challenges to building your own escape room (DIY escape room):
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Designing an escape room involves a lot of creative energy, puzzle work and time. The room must keep 8 people busy for 60 mins with puzzles that are unique, intriguing, immersive and logical. The better designs include puzzles that require teamwork.
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The cost for just the materials per room (to duplicate our design) is from $75 to $220. For starters, locks are an average of $6 each. The construction manuals include low cost options.
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It takes a LOT of crafty time to put together.
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One room can reasonably entertain 8 people at most, so either you need to run the room back to back (1 1/2 hours apart) and reset between each 8 players or build multiple rooms. We built 3 room kits at first - so we could run 24 youth at the same time.
With these factors, most don't pursue constructing their own room and that is totally understandable. I suppose we are the crazy ones!