What is an escape room?
Escape rooms are a growing entertainment trend offering a thrilling experience. It is a real life escape adventure!
You and your friends are “locked” in a room. Your goal is to escape the room by solving puzzles and hunting for keys & codes throughout the room to open combination & key locks and ultimately the exit door. You must hurry! Your group has a 60 minute time limit - then you fail. Sounds like the scene of a suspense thriller movie?! Yep….and you are the real character.
The best escape rooms include creative & unique puzzles, quality room props and immersive themes. Escape rooms are also called live escape, escape games, puzzle room, riddle room, breakout, exit games, get-out games, or adventure rooms. Regardless of the name, these rooms provide a heart racing & mind bending “escape” from your regular routine and cell phone.
Thanks to the sudden influx of escape rooms across cities in United States, there are a range of game settings and themes to choose from: secret agent to mad scientist to murder mystery to bomb squads.
Escape room is an experience to share with others. The adventure ushers in real time bonding and team building among family, friends, and coworkers.
What is Latter-day Breakout?
Latter-day Breakout is an LDS themed escape room that is played in your own home or church. With so many other escape themes being offered, why not an LDS themed room? The room includes puzzles and themes that can be found in a missionary apartment. As with any good escape room, you do not need to know trivial facts or memorized information. Everything you need to escape is within the room.
The best aspect of Latter-day Breakout is that it is mobile! Your family / youth group / friends can enjoy the adventure within your home or church. The mobile room does introduce logistical challenges, but with some clever design, the room can be setup and played in a variety of locations and operated by those not familiar with the room.
The other great feature of Latter-day Breakout is that it is affordable! At $25 a room rental, this is a reasonable amount for an escape group activity and a ward youth budget. Most escape rooms cost $20 to $30 per person.
Story behind Latter-day Breakout
Escape rooms are my new found hobby. I enjoy the mental challenge and thrill of the escape! I also enjoy sharing the bonding, team-building experience with my family.
After playing several escape rooms in the Kansas City area, I was determined to design and construct an escape room for our LDS youth joint activity. I recruited a few creative and committed youth leaders (including my understanding & loving wife) to create the adventure. After a month of brainstorming and construction sessions, the room was ready for beta testing.
In October 2015, we ran the first session of Latter-day Breakout for our ward's youth joint activity. We built three identical room sets and ran the rooms at the same time with the players racing against the timer and the other groups. It was a huge success! The youth loved the unique and creative activity.
Success of Latter-day Breakout
The word spread quickly of the awesome escape room activity. Thanks to the blog of our Young Women's President (Shelley Beatty's blog) and Pinterest, many others have learned of the activity.
Latter-day Breakout has been played over 400 times in the last two years including joint activities, youth conferences, date nights, camp fundraisers, YSA events, family activities and friend groups. We receive several emails each week from others wanting to construct the room design or looking for ideas to build their own. We have helped others construct their own version of our room design in Hawaii, Florida, Idaho, Georgia, California, Arizona and Canada.
We operate breakout sessions for local ward activities and stakes. Rental boxes are available in Utah: Pleasant Grove and Vernal.
Can I construct the Latter-day Breakout room?
Yes. We want to share the enjoyment and experience with others. Your youth group, family and friends will love it! I am willing to help you recreate the room design and puzzles - DIY Escape Room. More info is found at Construct Your Own. We charge $20 to download and use the room design.
We have received dozens of inquiries over the past year about recreating the room and several have gone on to construct the room. There are challenges to building your own escape room and are listed on the Construct page.
With all of the inquiries, we have worked to make the escape game more available in Utah with rental room kits. Mailing the room kits is not reasonable due to size of boxes and shipping costs.