We created an escape room with a Harry Potter theme for teens and adults. Participants signed up for a half-hour slot, with four people to a time slot. We read them a short introduction, and then they had 30 minutes to solve all the puzzles we created in the room. This included finding keys, figuring out codes, translating runes and searching for clues with a black light wand.
Fans of Sherlock Holmes, particularly those that love the BBC "Sherlock" series, were invited to enjoy an author Q&A, crafts and an escape room. Texas author Alan J. Porter presented his experiences writing Sherlock Holmes stories, then patrons participated in activities. Crafts included Perler bead character magnets, adult coloring, and decorating mugs and 221B Baker Street notebooks.
For the past year our library has had a great deal of success with our escape rooms and have planned to continue adding new ones. As the pandemic threatened to bring these events to screeching halt, I knew there had to be a way to build a new escape room and still keep it within the COVID guidelines.
Duchesne County Library Roosevelt Branch Library's fantasy role-playing game is a new twist on the traditional escape room. Participants assume a role with specific strengths and weaknesses that dictate who can complete which task.
The guild must complete a series of puzzles and find an artifact before time runs out, making sure not to lose all their lives along the way.
Roosevelt Library's escape rooms have been a new way for our library to provide fun, educational programming for our patrons, both young and old. They have even drawn people to our little library from neighboring counties and those who normally do not use the library.
Our Harry Potter Escape Room required that participants use multiple senses (sight, hearing, touch and smell) to answer a chain of clues. (See the clue chain under Attachments at right.)
An escape room was one of those things that I figured was out the question for a library as small as ours. For one thing, we don’t have any separate rooms to lock people into; our entire library is just one large room. Where would attendees escape from? Plus, escape rooms are complex, high-tech and expensive; it would be impossible to pull it off in a tiny library, right? Wrong!
