This is going to be fun!
It's going to be a lot of work. Like, a lot. But, designing your own escape room is incredibly fun and when your crew yells A'ha! as they solve a puzzle you'll feel the emotional fist-bump-in-the-air to end all others.
If you're short on time we've got some ready to play escape room kits, as well as a Classroom Kit for teachers. They're super easy to customize and you can be playing in under 1 hour.
But don't chicken out! These kids managed to design their own game. You can too!
The 4 Steps To Building Your DIY Escape Room
Need a hand? Grab these templates:
Step 1: Sketch a captivating story
It's the foundation you'll build the rest of your game on.
It ensures every last detail feels designed.
It's also one of the most fun parts of designing your own escape game. So, grab your inkwell and quill and start by answering these questions:
1. Who will be playing your DIY escape room game?
The theme, game length, and puzzle complexity all depend upon the answer to this question.
For example, your 8-year-old 'My Little Pony' fan and her friends would feel more at home in an enchanted winter wonderland than a suave 1920s-themed mystery. Add puzzles that require advanced logic skills and your little players have already checked out!
Our Example:
For our game, we're going to be making a DIY escape room for a 12-year-old kids birthday party. Her name is Eva and she loves playing escape room games on her tablet. She's also annoyed she never gets to play with her parents. Until now...
2. How long will the game last?
It could be anything from a 10-minute icebreaker for your classroom to a whole day-long scavenger hunt around your neighbourhood. Better yet, why not do a scale-recreation of the One Ring's journey into Mordor!
- Kids get bored after 30-45 minutes.
- If you have a larger group, think about how long it will take for everyone to have a go. For example, 5 teams and a single room could require over 5 hours to complete!
- If it's your first DIY escape room keep the playtime under 30 minutes so you'll be playing sooner and are less likely to give up before finishing. Even this is a lot of work.
Our Example:
3. What's your escape room's overall theme or flavor?
We're building an Egyptian themed room since Eva's been studying it at school and current know's King Tutankhamun's birthday better than your own...
Some great sources of inspiration are your favorite movies, games, books, past escape rooms you've played, or our big bag of enchanted escape room theme ideas..
- Players will use their imagination. So, use a Post-It-Note to transform that egg flip into a Lightsaber.
- You?re not making this game for publication, so you don?t need to worry about copyright issues. Therefore, if your kids know every word to every song on Disney's Frozen it's time to transform your living room into Arendelle. (Tip: Get a head-start by using our Frost escape room kit)
- Keep the story simple for your first DIY escape room. One overall goal is best.
- Kids and teens enjoy 'saving the world'. Conversely, adults enjoy nuanced challenges like 'Hacking the office computer to increase the Christmas party budget'.
If you're after some inspiration check out our bag of enchanted escape game themes.
Our Example
4. What's the Quest your players are trying to win?
Having a goal, and knowing something dire is in store if that goal is not reached, adds urgency and an extra level of fun to your adventure.
"Thwart creepy, evil Sherlock's plan to assassinate the chief of police"? Awesome. "Help the Wolfpack work out what really happened in Vegas"? Classy. - ?Explore the Winter Faire before your magical whisp-friend loses it's memories, forever?? Magical.
?Find a dangerous artifact and return it to its proper place in the warehouse?? Epic. - "Solve a murder before your party runs out of drinks"? Can't beat a classic!
?Save the cheerleader, save the world?? Obscure already? "Escape from your mom?s place"? Ummm ? maybe pass on that one ?
Our Example
Download The FREE Escape Room Builders Kit Designed To Help You Through This Guide
This kit is the blueprint you need to get started crafting your DIY escape room masterpiece. Complete with step by step instructions, editable templates, and fun puzzles. Signup below to download the kit and start designing:
5. What Doomsday event will happen if players don't succeed?
- Fail to repair the time machine? Get trapped in that past with a bunch of dinosaurs like in our Escape Quest game.
Fail to find the secret Nazi plans? Live forever in a world in which the fascists won WWII. Fail to get Princess Peony back to the Garden of Eternal Happiness before she wilts? Eternal Not-Happiness. Fail to defuse the bomb? You'll never know...
- You'll add extra $$ to the bar tab for each team that completes the escape room at your team building day. So each team wants to succeed to not let their colleagues down.
- Middle school aged kids will need to drink a 'gross' thick shake made of crisps, M&M's, ketchup, and milk. (Admit it, you were like this once too).
- The losing team at a dinner party pays for the pizza.
Our Example
6. What are players doing at the start of the quest?
- Gulp... the building lift just stopped. And you need to go to the toilet...
The dragons used to be kind and caring. However, on your birthday morning you woke up they'd destroyed the party decorations and eaten the cake! You're a team running a busy New York cafe with customers out the door. Everything is good until the coffee machine breaks at 8:45am...
Your players may be themselves. Or you can give them identities that fit within your theme like archaeologists, spies, classy detectives, village-girl-turned-hero, fairy godmothers, soccer moms, or even pizza starved zombies.
You?re [doing this thing] when [something happens]. You must now [accomplish this goal] before [this horrible thing occurs].
Our Example
You?re walking beside the River Nile when you feel the ground shift, and you tumble down a stony shaft into a long-abandoned tomb. You must now find your way out before the tomb becomes your own.
7. What are the story building blocks we can attach puzzles too?
In order to [accomplish this goal], you must:
- [
Do this ] - [
Do this ] - And [Do this].
Our Example
- Tomb opening: Open a stone door by decoding an ancient message.
- Sarcophagus room: Solve the mummy's riddle by balancing the mummy's heart and the feather of truth.
- Maze: Work out the directions to navigate their way through a maze and out of the tomb.
8. Choose which objects will be in your world
We're jumping ahead a little, but here's what some of the objects ended up looking like in The Lost Mummy.
Our Example
In The Lost Mummy, players will find these objects:
Tomb opening: Hieroglyphics (I can already tell these will make a great code to decipher!). A hieroglyphic decoder (like the Rosetta stone). Stone walls and doors. Pile of rocks that once fit together. Lots of sand.
Sarcophagus room: A sarcophagus with a mummy inside. Paintings on the walls. Treasure. Canopic jars full of guts
Maze: Engineers drawings of the tombs maze. Ancient tools for measuring and drawing. Miniature models of buildings and statues.
9. Finalise your story plan
Our Example
You?re walking beside the River Nile when you feel the ground shift, and you tumble down a stony shaft into a long-abandoned tomb. You must now find your way out before the tomb becomes your own.
The chamber you?ve landed in is too deep for you to climb out, and a large stone door adorned with hieroglyphic writing appears to be the only exit. There's a large rock, similar to the Rosetta stone you saw on YouTube, as well as a pile of old stones that appear to fit together somehow.
Once you make it through the stone door, you find yourself in a chamber with a large sarcophagus in its center and no apparent way out, aside from the door you just came through. Canopic jars full of guts sit nearby. In order to get past the sarcophagus, you must weigh the mummy's heart against the feather of truth.
If the heart weighs the same, a secret door appears behind the sarcophagus. You crawl through it and find yourself in a third chamber that leads into a maze.
In order to find your way out of the tomb, you must navigate through the maze by reconstructing the original engineer?s plans.
Boom! Check it out! You?re finished Step 1. Onto the puzzles...
Before you go on, are you short on time?
If you're finding this is taking too long why not download one of these printable escape room kits. They're ready-to-play games that you can customize before printing. That way, you get the experience of being the designer without all the grunt work.
Convert your Story Plan into Post-it-Notes
- Navigating from one room in your house could require players to solve a maze (like in our 'Envy' escape game).
- Opening a lock might require a numeric code of 4 digits. (Or maybe just a secret passphrase, like it does in our 'Frost' escape game).
- Discovering a secret suggests a cipher like a coded note or postcard.
- Defeating zombies obviously requires a nerf gun (or you just want to play with a Nerf gun. But hey, whatever works right).
Tip: At this point, you may realize you need to make some adjustments to your story. That?s perfectly okay! Your story isn?t written in stone ? (it isn?t, right?) Go ahead and change whatever you need to make your puzzle ideas fit your narrative. Epic quests are rarely linear ... and neither is storytelling.
You can create a few completely separate puzzles or (more fun, but also more work) string several challenges together so that players must find the answer to one in order to solve the next, and so on. (If you?re interested in designing a game for publication, you?ll definitely want to do the latter; check out the Advanced Tutorial for tips on doing this.)
Picking Out Puzzles
As I was writing the narrative for The Lost Mummy, I was already imagining some of the puzzle possibilities.
Challenge 1: Figure out how to open the stone door
Challenge 2: Weigh the mummy's heart against the feather of truth
Challenge 3: Navigate through the maze by reconstructing the original engineer?s plans
If you'd like a head start there's some easy to edit puzzles in this free downloadable kit.
This kit is the blueprint you need to get started crafting your DIY escape room masterpiece. Complete with step by step instructions, editable templates, and fun puzzles. Signup below to download the kit and start designing:
Decide How You?ll Present Each Challenge to Your Players
We came up with some awesome ideas, but now we have to figure out exactly how they'll look when players encounter them. This is where evil genius begins getting practical!
Physical challenges may need props or setup (a string laser maze is only cool if you ? you know ? get string and tie it to stuff). Pencil-and-paper puzzles can be presented on a (wait for it ?) piece of paper. Obviously, this is way more fun if you give your piece of paper some thematic touches. Riddles can be written or spoken aloud. You can hang signs on things around your house to tell your players what imaginary objects they?re looking at (?This door is a portal to Pylea. You can only go through it in the convertible.?) You can tell your students the floor is lava, or you can place red construction paper in the areas where they can?t touch the floor. - You can use real combination locks (players will know if they got the right code if the lock opens) or you can give them a picture of a lock and tell them if they got the code right.
(This youth pastor made a simple combination lock the centrepiece of an exciting escape room event for his group) Got clues the escapees will need? Hide, stash, and store them anywhere hard to find.
Designing the Puzzles
First, I realized that The Lost Mummy players aren't psychic. They're 12, so they will need a set of clues. I created a simple clue-delivery method in the form of an explorer?s journal, filled with scribbled notes that would come in handy during the game.
Challenge 1: Figure out how to open the stone door.
Challenge 2: Weigh the mummy's heart against the feather of truth.
Challenge 3: Navigate through the maze by reconstructing the original engineer?s plans.
Make a ?Shopping List?
Of course, you'll need drinks and snacks if you're going to host a fashionably high-brow house party.
Also, if you plan to use a cipher, you?ll need to write down your original message and then write it out as it will look in the cipher. For now, it?s enough to just have these things figured out. When you get to Step 3, you can make them look all cool and stuff.
My ?Shopping? List
Because I wanted The Lost Mummy game to be playable as soon as it was printed, I didn?t include any puzzles that required props (although there were plenty of places where props could add to the fun!).
A set of cards to stand in for the journal with clues scattered throughout the pages. An image of the ?door? with ?recessed spots? where a set of ?stones? would be positioned and hints regarding their correct placement. Images of the four ?stones? containing images that matched up to the hints on the door. A card containing a ?Rosetta stone? displaying part of a cipher key and a set of cut-out pieces to complete the key. A message written in hieroglyphics. A card containing an image of a set of four canopic jars with anagrams and equations on them. A card containing a cut-out jigsaw puzzle with a riddle written on it. A place to record the jar placement with another arithmetic equation on it and a picture of a feather with clues to calculate its weight. A card containing a map with spaces to place the three-dimensional pieces. A set of cards containing the outlines of each three-dimensional piece that would fit perfectly on the map once cut out and taped together. A few cards introducing the story, explaining the transitions, and congratulating players at the end.
Step 2 done. Let's Start Building!
Step 3: Build Your Escape Room
Your imagination The items on your shopping list A decision: Do you want to make digital or non-digital (analog) cards? Digital Format: This PowerPoint template Theme-related images (downloaded)
Analog Format: A set of 5? x 8? index cards Theme-related images (drawn, printed, cut from magazines ? it?s up to you) Art supplies if drawing; glue if using printed or cut-out images
A goblin workforce (ok, not essential, but� super helpful!)
Use This Free Downloadable To Start Making Puzzles The Easy Way:
Decide How Many Cards You Need
If you want to give your game an extra little professional flourish, create a title card with the name of your game and a picture that sets the mood. Add ?An Escape Adventure By [Your Name]? to it if you want. Take pride in your work! You can tell your players who they are, where they are are, and what their mission is, or you can make an introductory card that introduces the story and fills the players in on their quest. Use images that establish the setting and tone of your narrative. When you completed Step 2, you figured out how each puzzle will be delivered. If the delivery method for any of your puzzles is paper, that's a card (or several)! - Make cards for any cypher keys you don?t plan to use actual objects for. Blend the key in with the images or text on the card. Don?t make it too easy to find!
Counting Cards
The Lost Mummy game has 18 cards.
1. Title page 2. Story intro 3-6. Journal pages (to provide clues) 7. Door puzzle 8. Rosetta Stone 9. Cipher puzzle 10. Story transition from first chamber to second chamber 11-12. Canopic jar and weight-of-the-heart puzzles 13. Story transition from second chamber to third chamber 14-17. 3-dimensional pieces and map for final maze puzzle 18. Final story card heralding escape
Show Off Your Mad Design Skills
Or you can use the PowerPoint template I?ve provided. This gives you a lot of extra design options since you can find images online that match what you want, use fancy fonts to write your instructions, and even print the whole thing on thick cardstock at an office store if you want it to look super polished and professional.
Here's the Final Game I Made:
The example storyline, puzzles, and photos in this guide are from The Lost Mummy, a kid?s escape room kit I co-designed.
You can download the final game here. It's a great activity for birthday parties, Ancient-Egypt units in school, youth groups, and more!
You did it! Your escape room should be ready to play.
Step 4: Theme it up with these escape room design hacks
Dress the Part with themed costumes
Sherlock theme? Grab an overcoat and scarf. - Frozen? Glam up your princesses (or use the printable dress-props that come with Frost)
Escaping from Cell Block 52? Rock up in your pyjamas. Wizarding school? Break out your finest dress robes. Zombie theme? Um ... tomato sauce? - Partying like Gatsby? Grab a fancy shirt and some cut-out moustaches - just like this suave date night!
Add props to your escape room
Candles or battery powered lanterns take your crew back to the past. Glow sticks add a futuristic or post-apocalyptic dynamic. - Bring in a few branches from your garden to teleport your group back to the time of the Incas.
- Cardboard boxes can easily become the walls for an ancient Egyptian tomb.
Make some photo booth props
We've bundled extra photobooth props in both our Frost Escape kit and Envy Escape kit. And they're a riot of fun! Depending on your theme you can either make these by hand, and stick them onto sticks for awesome posing, or jump on Etsy to look for a kit that matches your tastes.
Psst... you can download the photo booth props in the pic above for free here:
Use background music to set the feel
There are a bunch of free soundtracks on this background music site.
For example, typing in ?zombie background music? takes you to this page, which features a number of different options of different lengths.
Host a Fabulous Feast
- Breaking out of the slam? Pass around cheap white bread and water instead of hors d'oeuvres.
Stealing a senator's little black book at a gala fundraiser? Fancy canapes on silver trays are just the ticket. Trying to find a cure before zombies break through? Might be a good time to pass around some green and red jello. - Wizard school hijinx? Bring on the Butterbeer!
Play Your Game!
Finally, if you're planning an epic escape party, consider going all out with these bonus tips.
You crushed it!
Plus, escape games encourage folks to use their imaginations, to think critically, to use their problem-solving and communication skills, and to live in the moment. Notice how everyone put their phones down when the game began? You made that happen.
OR, try this! Design a game with your kids or students! Teach them to use their imaginations to develop stories and think through puzzle elements. They?ll learn invaluable skills and have a ton of fun sharing their games with their friends.
Finally, if you design a game that works out really well, Lock Paper Scissors is always looking for game-design partners to join the ranks of the escape wizards. Make sure you read these advanced tips and make the applicable adjustments to your game, then check out our escape-kit publishing page to find out how to submit your game for review.