General Escape Room Terms

Heist Crew

Whoever's playing the escape room game with you.

They're your trusted companions who will get you through any sticky situation no matter how bad it gets! (unless you run out of clean underwear... in that case they may abandon you)

Clue Stash

Anything that's relevant to the game like clues, ciphers and puzzles. You need some way to distinguish what's important because you're gonna have a lot of junk in every room of your house that's totally irrelevant

Make it clear by starting the escape game with the Clue Stash on the table or in a limited area of your house. Feel free to throw in a few random objects to lead players astray just don't overdo it unless you want to have your friends still hanging around your home at 2am...

Master Challange

Is the hardest puzzle in your escape room.

You want to start players off with a few simple challenges to help them get into the game but then slam down a Master Challenge to make-or-break them

Ciphers, Codes and Encryption

Plaintext

A plain old normal message written in English or whatever language you prefer. No crypto, no funny business

You encode Plaintext to make it into Ciphertext

Ciphertext

That garbled mess you make with a code or cipher. For example:

Normal text:

this is super hard to read

Ciphertext:

uijt jt tvqfs ibse up sfbe

Steganography

Rather than encoding a message into ciphertext simply hide it inside another message or photo. For example:

Combine every 4th word in an email to make a message

To crack it you'd need to work out the rule. This one's usually easy to detect since the paragraph wont quite feel natural unless the encrypted message is very short