As you may know, all of the rooms at Escape Room Herndon are designed and built in-house.  So, you may have wondered in the past, how we get our room ideas. Well, it’s a long and sometimes overly complicated approach, but can best be compared to a monkey throwing chalk on a board to see what sticks.

In our operations room, there is an entire wall made out of a black chalkboard. It gets a ton of ideas scratched onto it throughout the year. Sometimes, we pick a room by vote (Magician’s Workshop), and sometimes it will be based on a scene from a movie we like (Cursed Crypt, Mary In the Black). On some rare occasions, the mere idea gets everyone onboard immediately (Last Hope).

Board.JPG

Most of the time, we will throw around ideas with the staff and see what gets the most interest. With the retirement of Mystery of Room 213 coming up early next year, we’ve been long discussing what will replace it. We thought we had an answer all the way back in February but over time that idea, Bloody Mary, faded in excitement. So, we had to start back at the beginning.

Once we have an idea, we ask ourselves a few simple questions.

First and foremost, does this room sound fun? This is the more important question and the first thing we ask. For instance, playing on a haunted island sounds more fun than playing in a haunted office.

Can we create a story around this idea?  What is the purpose of the game, what are you escaping from or trying to solve? It’s nice to have a goal when you’re solving puzzles, even if it’s as simple as finding why weird things are happening in a room. Most of our rooms have an underlying story that goes beyond the introduction. It’s our guide as to what kind of aesthetics, designs, and puzzles we will create.

What “WOW” moments can we create? Each room should have at least a few unexpected surprises. This is probably the most fun aspect of the room to design. We love treating our guests to a few “whoa” moments in their game.

Can it be done professionally and well? We aren’t professional carpenters but what we do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills we have acquired over a very long career. We need to make sure what we imagine we can also create with those skills.

Finally, in the case of the replacement for Room 213, will it be scary? When replacing our scary room we need to make sure the next one is just as creepy, if not MORE!

After a few months, we think we’ve come up with the theme for our next upcoming room.
Details coming soon…

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