Over the weekend, our household reached the point where all of us are fully vaccinated for COVID-19. We celebrated this milestone with an escape room outing. That got me thinking about my little escape room model, the Quandary Den. You can read more details here`, but the short version is that the Quandary Den simulates a game where a player has to “solve” the challenge of the room. My family’s in-person escape room involved lots of combination locks, and here on the blog we simulated some password challenges of a similar sort. In our initial visits to the Quandary Den, we also simulated a challenge where a player had to “solve” the room by tagging the opposing players without getting tagged. That might not seem like much of a puzzle for a real escape room, but when the information about where the opposing players are has to be learned through exploration with feedback, the difficulty goes up a bit. In a real escape room, we can reduce the difficulty (and increase the fun) by adding friends. Does that work in the Quandary Den?
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