Trapped by The World’s Most Famous Escape Artist at ‘The Great Houdini Escape Room’ (A NoPro Escape)

Palace Games’ popular escape room combining real-life history and challenging gameplay

Rumor has it that Harry Houdini built the world’s first escape room a hundred years ago as a challenge to 8 brilliant innovators — Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, John Philip Sousa, William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Helen Keller, and Luther Burbank — to see if they could escape in time.*

And it’s no coincidence that all eight of these figures were involved in the 1915 World’s Fair, which was held at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco; and, of course, the Palace of Fine Arts is also the venue where the escape room company Palace Games runs some of the most exceptional rooms around.

So whether we believed the rumors or not, were my friends and I up to the task of completing The Great Houdini Escape Room and escaping in 80 minutes, the very same challenge he tasked his famous friends with? My team of seven began our experience with a short history lesson from our game master around these prominent figures of the time, all of them experts in their own fields.

Then… the clock was on.

(Minor spoilers ahead.)

We were soon confronted with eight independent character puzzles (with each person corresponding to a specific color) as well as a few larger, linear puzzles. Each character’s individual puzzle contributed to a larger meta-puzzle, which fit into the overall solution for the room, but our team was directed to start with the larger scale puzzles per the game master’s advice. Unlike other escape room experiences, at The Great Houdini Escape Room, as time went on, it was entirely possible to play to one’s content and never have any downtime or feel like you were intruding on a teammate. If you were missing items that were yet to be discovered or unlocked, you could just put the current puzzle down and see if a teammate needed help elsewhere; this is the type of room where having lots of extra eyes and hands helped.

The theming of the room allowed for a pleasing variety of tactile puzzles based upon the characters’ interests and expertise, which ranged from everything to botany to silent films. Most of the items we encountered were appropriately themed and consistent for the time period. A John Philips Sousa puzzle hinged upon multiple pieces of sheet music scattered about the space. Helen Keller’s puzzle cleverly incorporated a board with Braille upon it, while a Henry Ford-associated puzzle used a series of interlocking gears.

There was, quite frankly, always something to do in this escape room and it was spacious enough to spread out when needed, which had its own tradeoffs. I never encountered a few of the different character puzzles due to the hive of activity around me, especially as we broke out into smaller groups of two or three at a time. If your team’s standard operating procedure is to create a discard pile, well, you’d have a hard time finding where to put all of the bulky physical items in this experience. And on occasion, we were even separated! But because of the required separation, it was easy to lose track of our status on the eight character puzzles, as our solution to each one needed to be manually entered on a single piece of paper corresponding to the larger meta-puzzle. This piece of paper might be in a different player’s hand out of your line of sight, or just hard to discern at first glance amongst the piles of props and pieces scattered around the room.

A few members of our team were repeat players for The Great Houdini Escape Room and expressed pleasure in getting to do puzzles they hadn’t been able to work on the first time around and took to hanging back on ones they still remembered the solutions for, as this seems to be one of the few repeatable escape rooms around. This style of parallel play allowed participants to find challenges that suited their strengths, as well as occasionally coming together as a team to collaborate when we were momentarily blocked or gated.

That said, Palace Games’ rooms can be quite challenging even when based on easily graspable concepts like assembling wooden pieces in place or re-ordering a grab bag of similar items. Luckily, our game master was at the ready with hints when needed after a search failure or two, additional pieces of scratch paper (of which we needed many), and help opening some custom locks (of which she admitted were prone to sticking). A few of us also had concerns around the usage of color in the dim light, often second-guessing whether we were looking at pink versus purple or red versus orange. I hope that more escape room designers consider that a good portion of the population is color blind (both men and women) and even for those who aren’t, it can be hard to distinguish similar looking colors in stressful situations and low light.

But, as I’ve found in previous experiences with Palace Games, the way the disparate pieces of the theme come together for a big ending is incredibly satisfying, as your blood, sweat, and tears all pay off in a big way. I’ve also experienced smart, stunning “reveals” from Palace in the past and they were able to surprise and delight me similarly with this room as well. And luckily, with help from our game master, our team escaped with several minutes to spare. (Whew.)

I bet the Great Houdini himself would be proud.

* This is, of course, a fabrication, but let’s run with it, shall we?

The Great Houdini Escape Room at Palace Games is open now; tickets are $400 for each group, with a maximum of 10 players. We recommend 7–8 players.

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