7 Lessons You Can Learn From A Murder Mystery Escape Room

Playing a murder mystery escape room is a blast! You race against the clock to solve the clues and escape with your lives. After successfully escaping the room, you and your teammates can party like it's 1999!

But did you know that escape rooms can also teach valuable lessons? That's why companies increasingly use them as team-building exercises. Schools use them to reinforce lessons and teach students real-world skills.

Escape rooms teach communication, creative thinking, teamwork, and many other skills. We'll look at the seven skills you'll learn from a successful escape. Who knew that education and team building could be so much fun? We did! And we'll show you the seven biggest skills you can learn while having fun escaping.

The best teams communicate well. Whether it's Frankenstein and Igor, Holmes and Watson, or Calvin and Hobbes, the best teams always keep clear channels of communication open. They almost know what their teammate is thinking. This level of communication is what makes a great escape room team.

Players need to learn to communicate clearly and concisely. The player working on solving a riddle may need information from a player on the other side of the room. So your mate Tom's long-winded explanations (usually starting around the demise of disco and ending up with what he found), will sap valuable time and energy from the team.

Quick bursts of disconnected words also hurt the team. The message needs to be clear and timely. If you know that the team is trying to find the combination of a three-number lock, telling them that you found what seems to be a five-letter combination doesn't help. Hold on to the information until you reach that puzzle.

At the start of the game, players should scour the room for clues. Report your finds to the other players so that everyone will know what's in the pile as you begin working on puzzles. Clearly communicating the clues found at this stage may be the key to solving later puzzles, as the team may work on more than one riddle at a time.

No one beats a murder mystery escape room on their own. Even Holmes needs his Watson. It takes the entire team to find the clues, solve the riddles, and decode the ciphers. Most escape rooms recommend no less than four players to a team.

To escape, everyone needs to be on the same page. All players must understand the game narrative, the current puzzles, and the clues found by the team. They must continually check with each other to ensure their current game plan has them on the right track.

Escape rooms also teach teams to ensure people are placed where they can shine. If Kim knows math, she should handle any number related problems. Sid should take the lead on word puzzles if he knows languages well. Of course, you can always help in areas where you are not known to excel — everyone has moments of clarity — but make sure the best person for the job takes the lead.

This is what makes escape rooms such a golden team-building activity. Applying these techniques to work and school will help raise your team's productivity. Placing people where they have the best fit will lead to faster progress, happier team members, and more post-project completion happy hours!

Very few escape room puzzles can be solved with straightforward thinking. Most have a Sphinx-like quality to them, requiring the team to look at them in a different light. A team that thinks outside the box well should escape the mummy, zombie, or serial killer.

Finding the combination of a three-number lock may require matching the years on a wall calendar to the pages in the journal of the last victim. The launch codes for nuclear missiles may be hidden in the recipe for sweet potato soup. The mad scientist's spouse's phone number may open the safe with the code needed to exit the final door before the lab is covered in the mysterious green Nickelodeon goop.

The thought processes needed to solve these riddles won't be found in a company's decision tree process or in a leadership manual. The team has to expand the realm of possibilities before they make the connections needed to solve the puzzles.

Your team will feel like a group of Perry Masons when they escape and retell the now-tall tales of their miraculous feats. If they can bring this expanded creative thinking back to the office, they may be able to escape project snags that have persisted far too long.

Everyone gets stuck. It's true. Einstein got stuck. Edison got stuck. Scooby-Doo got stuck. It happens to the best of us.

While the humble ask for help, the proud remain stuck. The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results. In escape rooms, this means continuing to work on a problem without seeking assistance.

The first place to look for help is your teammates. They may be searching for other clues and working on other puzzles without realizing that you're stuck. Bringing in a fresh set of eyes may help to solve the problem. (This is an important lesson for students. Check out this article to set up an escape room in your classroom). Consider asking for help without telling them what you've already tried. You want a fresh perspective, not a revisit of your futile attempts. 

If your teammates can't solve the puzzle, turn to the Gamemaster! The Gamemaster has all of the answers. You can ask for a hint (or even a solution) to get you on the right track. Sure, you may suffer a time penalty, but you still have a chance of escaping.

Most time penalties are three minutes. If you worked for 15 minutes on a puzzle before asking for the solution, you penalized yourself more than the game did! And you still had to ask for the solution and suffer the time penalty!

Of course, you won't ask for the solution to every puzzle. However, if you and the team are genuinely stuck, asking the Gamemaster for a hint is the smart path.

In life, there are no gamemasters. If your team is making no progress on a project, you may need to ask for outside help. Having sought assistance in the make-believe world of mystery murder escape rooms will make asking for help in the real world much easier.

Quitters never win, and winners never quit. Giving up in the fun environment of an escape room seems ridiculous. If you can't solve the puzzle, ask the Gamemaster for help and move on.

As silly as it may seem, this simple philosophy successfully translates into the real world. Stuck? Search out a fresh set of eyes to get you back on track. While the person you ask may not have the solution sheet in their hands, they may help move you forward.

We all face adversity daily. If we view life as a murder mystery escape room, it might be easier to move forward rather than wondering just how we ended up in such a drab place!

Escape rooms require intense attention to detail. Numbers on posters scattered about the room may solve a four-number combination lock. The number of vases on a shelf may be the key to unlocking a coded message. A number on a desk may be the best place to call for post-escape pizza.

Without the focus needed to recognize these clues, you can easily wind up a permanent resident of King Tut's tomb. You want to avoid this result. Their wifi is awful.

While the real world isn't filled with ciphers and combination locks, attention to detail can help in all aspects of your life. You can avoid typos in work emails. You can find solutions to problems more quickly because you see the details others missed. And you can make sure that your red socks don't go into the load of whites that you're bleaching.

Escape rooms are the ultimate time deadlines. You have 60 minutes to escape before you suffer an unspeakable fate. Besides being eaten by zombies or killed gruesomely, you may have to take a picture that says "we failed" for the escape room Facebook page.

Most escape rooms force you to solve 7-10 puzzles in 60 minutes to escape. That leaves little time for any one puzzle. You have to ensure that you don't get stuck working on one puzzle, or you'll have no time for the rest.

At the same time, despite impending doom, you have to stay calm. Rushing and panicking are surefire ways to miss clues and fail to escape.

Facing time pressures in the real world? Starting your taxes on April 14th? Remember at 10:00 p.m. that you have a term paper due first period? Escape room time-pressure lessons may not help. You can escape from a murder mystery escape room in less than 60 minutes. You may not be able to finish a paper on the meaning of life in Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury in one night.

Assuming you start on time, the lessons you learned while escaping will help you proceed through your project in an orderly manner. You will be calmer and more focused. You will succeed more often.

The more murder mystery escape rooms you play, the more you'll enhance these seven skills. 

Escape rooms are practice for life, which makes them perfect team-building activities for both workplaces and classrooms alike. As you know, practice makes perfect. 

So get to an escape room today to improve your life skills!