Recreation is so important in Grand Junction. Mesa County is ideal for those who love the outdoors and wine; however, it appears to have little to offer outside of those activities. Even though I love a good hike, I’m still more of an indoors person.

Being a college freshman, sophomore, and on occasion a junior, is rough because the lack of activities. Everything non-alcoholic seems to be geared towards teens and most of-age friends always want to go out to clubs, pubs and breweries. So finding things to do here is not the easiest task.

About six months ago, I stumbled upon Epic Escape Game by accident. I took a wrong turn one day and drove by the building on Grand Avenue. After mentioning it to my mom, she surprised me with tickets for my birthday. Walking in, I ended up waiting for my family and was greeted by Zach, one of the managers of Epic Escape Game.

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We went over the three different kinds of locks used in the games- basic combination locks, letter and number locks and directional locks. After that, our clue master lead us to our room, where she went over the basic guidelines such as how hints worked, what was and was not a part of the game and the basic story plot.

The room my family ended up in was called The Hunted. It follows a storyline of us, as hunters, seeking shelter from a storm. Upon getting in the cabin, the door quickly slams shut and a note on the fireplace read that the owner of the cabin was giving us a one hour head start to try and escape before we became the hunted.

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Other than the note, we really didn’t have anything to start with except that we could ask our clue-master, who was watching us through cameras. We started by splitting up to examine different areas of the room. We looked through the firewood in the firepit, flipped through the books on the shelves, dug through the coats hanging on the rack, etc.

What we discovered would help us solve the next clue, which would help us open up various locks that would give us more clues, which would help us to open up the next lock and so on and so forth. The goal is, after one hour, to unlock the final lock – the door to the room. While my family and I didn’t escape, we came really close. We were only one lock away from making it out. But we did have a lot of fun trying.

I thought I had a really good understanding of what escape games are going in. It’s difficult to explain what escape games really are. Most of the locations take place in residential-like houses, where rooms are renovated to fit different story-lines centered around escape-situations. There are certain aspects to each room that stand as clues for groups to figure out and then work their way through the different puzzles and locks to get out of the room.

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According to Leslie Kell, a manager at Epic Escape Games, escape games originally started in Asia as computer games and only recently came to the United States about ten years ago. Since then, it has expanded and grown as a popular recreational activity. Epic Escape Game in Grand Junction was opened Dec. 26, 2016, but has seen many changes since their opening.  

“When we first opened, we only had The Hunted, which is our most popular game, and that’s all we had. We’d start maybe one group a week, some weeks we wouldn’t have anything,” Kell said. Kell quit her job at a hotel to join her parents in their operation of the new business. Epic Escape Games is a franchise with 11 locations, but the Grand Junction and Englewood locations are family-owned and operated.

After mostly face-to-face marketing, they have more than doubled their numbers in the last year. Now with a following on social media, they have taken to Facebook and Instagram. From there, they joined the Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce, which allowed them to stay connected with other businesses in Mesa County.

Now Epic Escape Games has four game rooms in their Grand Junction location. Current rooms include: A Grand Illusion (with a 46 percent completion rate), The Hunted (with a 39 percent completion rate), The Watchman’s Chambers (with a 22 percent completion rate) and The Abandoned Mine (with a 12 percent completion rate).

Tickets cost $27 a person, but CMU students can benefit from a student discount found in Student Savers located all around campus. It’s recommended to have between four and six team members per game ages 12 and up. To book a room and to purchase gift vouchers people can visit the website or call 985-4080. Epic Escape Game is open Wednesday through Sunday from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.

“It’s a way for adults to have fun,” Kell says. “Kids have so much […] where they get to play pretend and have fun and adults don’t really get to have that. And so for adults, I feel like we forget how to play, and just play the game for the sake of playing the game. It gives adults the opportunity to think differently and creatively.”

A word of warning – escape games are really addicting.This will definitely be a location I return to in the near future. I love that there are multiple games to try and I can’t wait to travel to some of the other locations to experience more rooms. There really isn’t any limit to what rooms can be or where they will go in the future.