Building your own escape room/cooperation adventure can be both exciting and challenging. This page is meant to give you a large collection of mini challenge ideas that you can mix and match to create your own quest.
Consider this a 'compendium of conundrums' that you can consult for all your crusade-construction challenges.
(or two!)
An easy quest can start with the simple challenge:
'can you open this box?'
You can use a keyed lock or a combination lock.
Which ever you choose, there's all sorts of ways to turn the challenge of getting what you need (be it key or code) into a really awesome game.
Get a bunch of dollar store hide-a-key boxes. Hide 'em places. (Trick people into thinking they found the right one by hiding a noisy object inside.)
Attach the key to a key-ring floater. Drop the floater into the bottom of a narrow PVC pipe. Fill the pipe with water so the key floats to the top. Make the pipe hard to fill with water....
This time the problem isn't finding the key. It's finding the RIGHT ONE.
Bwuahahahhahaha!
Buy some ping pong balls. Buy a paint pallet. Create a matching game. Make the ping pong balls hard to collect in the first place. And hide the paint pallets somewhere.
Get the 'spine' for comb binders. Tuck two together like zippers. Figure out the hint you want to provide. Write one letter per 'tooth.' Scatter the pieces. Give them chopsticks to pick them up with.
Get a few 24-piece puzzles. Put 'em together, flip 'em over, write your hints to the combinations on the back. Mix 'em up. Packet 'em up. Hide the packets.
There's a fantastic duet of books by Istvan Banyai called Zoom and Re-Zoom. Buy the paperbacks. Chop the spines off. Put a message on the backs of *some * of the pages. Shuffle their order. Hand out the pages and say nothing more.
Sometimes you gotta give 'em a hint. But they still gotta work for it...
Line up popsicle sticks. Write a message on it, put a picture on it, something. Scramble the sticks. Boom. Easiest home-made puzzle in the world.
Get some transparent plastic sheets. Layer them on top of each other. Write scattered pieces of the message on each layer. Separate and scatter your transparent pieces.
Write across the break in two tiles. Rotate. Write some more. Rotate. This is hard to describe....
You know what, just watch the video, it'll be easier.
Get four pieces of colored cardstock. Write your message across them. Cut each paper into a puzzle. Mix 'em up. Lock the pieces into boxes. Hide the keys.
Make a table. Write out your hint, one word per cell. Fill the rest with random words. Make a decoder window sheet. Then make two of everything and don't tell them which goes to which.
Fill a page with words. Reverse many of them. Give your participants a mirror and see if they can find the necessary message.
I get it. Putting together conundrums is actually quite fun once you get the hang of it. Here's a link to my Escape Room Pinterest board. There's so many ideas there that I want to try!