The clock is ticking as you scramble to find clues. Everyone is racing to solve puzzles before the hour is up. Suddenly, you solve the puzzle which reveals a clue to solve your final challenge: unlocking the door and escaping the room.

Escape rooms have been popping up in various locations recently. Even though all of them include the same basic elements, puzzles and decorations, the specific features of the rooms make each experience unique.  The Escape Detention room at A Game of Rooms in Rockville has interesting, unique puzzles and a choice of three rooms at varying difficulty levels that make it a fun experience for beginners and more experienced escape room players. They also have a great staff that is nice, friendly and helpful.

The goal of the Escape Detention Room was to solve about ten to fifteen puzzles, in an hour, to escape detention before the teacher came back from their meeting. The puzzles in the Escape Detention room included mixing different liquids together in a science experiment and using a blacklight and a projector. These kinds of puzzles rarely pop up in escape rooms and allowed our room to be more fun and engaging.

Most escape rooms allow you to ask for hints from your host, but sometimes they give too much or too little information. Our host, however, gave us hints that simply pointed us in the right direction without making the experience too easy. She only gave us hints when we were focusing on the wrong thing or really struggling. This allowed us to utilize our time effectively while solving the puzzles independently.

While the puzzles and staff at A Game of Rooms are outstanding, the decorations in the room were mediocre. The room was designed to look like a classroom; it just had a couple of desks, lockers, and posters. During the game, you had to unlock another room that was barely decorated. It was supposed to look like a science lab, but it only contained a table with puzzles and a cabinet with squirt bottles that was meant to be an eyewash station.

Despite the mediocre decorations, A Game of Rooms still shines because of their amazing puzzles. In contrast, Escape the Room DC has well-decorated rooms, but their puzzles were all very similar and lacked creativity.

A Game of Rooms is within walking distance to CESJDS making it a convenient location for students. However, the rooms are quite pricey; they cost $30 per person plus tax and $240 for the whole room. You are, also, only getting one hour to escape, which is not a lot of time considering the high price, but you are receiving amazing customer service and well thought out, creative puzzles.

If you are new to escape rooms, Escape Detention is the perfect escape room. Though the decorations could have been better, the experience was fun and challenging.

Escape Detention is their beginner room, but it still offered many challenging puzzles. Although I have participated in three other escape rooms in the past, I still found it fun and relatively challenging for a beginner room. All eight people, who had a wide range of ages, in our room were able to participate and all seemed to be having fun.