You read it right!
For one of our team activities, FIRST headed over to Escape Masters, New Zealand’s first real-life escape game, to experience a real adrenaline rush (like we don’t already have enough at work 🙂 ).
Escape Masters had lots of experiences to choose from – zombie invasion, alien abduction, rescue mission, gangsters’ room and cyber crime. Our main goal was to escape from a room by finding hidden keys and clues, cracking codes, solving puzzles/problems and linking them all together to reveal the code or uncover the location of the key to the exit door before the time was up. Each room had a Help button which we could use three times in case we got stuck.
It was everyone’s first time which made it more exciting! We chose the Zombie Invasion experience and the hard level (oh yeah!). For this experience, there were two identical rooms – same set-up and puzzles to be solved. Our team was randomly split into two with six members each to see which was the fastest team to escape from the room. Below are the teams and their team names 🙂
Team Bite Me
(From left to right: Xavier Wallach, David Neubauer, Greg Storey, Isikeli Raicebe, Francois Gendronneau and Katherine Steffensen)
Team Breathers
(From left to right: Danny Parker, Eamon Hoolihan, Kim Charette-Duck, Zharina Pelea, Grant Osborne and Mike Child)
Game On!
We had 50 minutes to find every clue and solve every brainteaser in the room to get the code to unlock the exit door. The moment the time was started, everyone scattered and went through everything but the floor and ceiling to look for hidden keys and pieces to puzzles and clues. Pieces of furniture were turned upside down and everything in sight was scattered on the floor. It seemed like the zombies have already gotten in the room. But nope! It was still us.. humans.
Thirty minutes in and Team Breathers decided to push the Help button as there were still quite a few locks unopened. Team Bite Me managed not to push the Help button and worked on their own in finding the code to escape.
And The Winner Is
Team Breathers won finishing at 36 minutes! Team Bite Me finished at 49 minutes, just 1 minute before the zombies invaded the room. It was an awesome team activity for all of us first-timers. Would definitely come back for a fun and unique experience at Escape Masters!