The 16 best Escape Room Ideas: How to create your own DIY Escape Room at home?

>>Read more: Would you like to play our ready-made Escape Room for children at home?

Escape Room ideas: What do I need to think about in advance?

When making the Escape room at home or at another location there are a number of things you should think about beforehand.

The 16 Escape Room ideas in this blog

In this blog we share our Escape Room ideas and experiences on creating an Escape room game. Do you want to see how we made our Escape Room for kids? Then order the Escape Room for children (9 - 13 years).

You can order it and play it at home. A complete and ready-made Escape Room at home, with a script, explanations and materials. We get a lot of nice reviews about this game, so it will certainly inspire you - besides being a great experience to play.

Have fun!

So either make sure that all the stuff you want to keep private, is gone or communicate very clearly that all the stuff the players need can be found without having to open cupboards, drawers, etcetera.

No secret doors
Unlike the real Escape Rooms you probably won't break down walls and create secret doors to other rooms. Which is not really necessary if you are going to use multiple rooms, which are all connected to each other. Just stick an A4 sheet on each room and give it a name or number, so players will know which room they are allowed to go to when they have solved the room they are in.

It is nice if the players have a place in every room to put things down and to puzzle. A table or desk will come in handy. Chairs are certainly not necessary, because players tend to walk around and you can stimulate that by hanging certain puzzles or information on the walls. By hanging information in various places, players have to walk back and forth and have to cooperate and communicate well with each other. And that makes your escape room game extra fun.

Tools and material for creating the Escape room

If you're looking for fun Escape Room ideas, don't miss the specific tools and materials. If you have ever visited an Escape Room, you know how nice it is to find all kinds of materials with which you have to do something. We'll walk you through some Escape Room ideas about materials and tools.

#2 Communicating on your Website 

If you have your own website, you can easily create a page where players have to fill in a code to get to the next website page. In WordPress you have the possibility to change the visibility of your page for example to 'Password Protected'. How nice is it when the players find a letter with the link to that website page in the box with the combination lock. And that they first have to crack another code to continue.

#3 Escape Room idea: Autoresponder Whatsapp 

A very surprising effect is the WhatsApp. If players get stuck in a room, you can give them hints. Of course you can be present in the room and tell them the hint. But... with WhatsApp it can be much more fun. You can install the App Auto responder for free on all Android phones.

Then you tell the players that if they want a hint, they have to attach a certain word to the number (that you give them before the escape room game starts). The Auto responder will then automatically respond with the hint.

#4 Hiding hints of keys in a book

A great Escape Room idea that doesn't have to be difficult is hiding something in an old book. You can easily cut a square out of an old book. In which you can put a hint or a key, for example.

#5 Voice mail 

If you have a number (preferably prepaid) that you don't use very often, then you can consider dialing in a voice mail. And the outcome of one of the puzzles is a phone number that they will have to call. We know from experience that this brings a lot of excitement and hilarity. Because most people find calling an unknown number quite exciting.

#6 Cryptex

This is one of the best Escape Room ideas you may not miss. If you really want to surprise your group, you can consider a real cryptex. In several YouTube movies you can see how to make them. One thing is for sure: with the cryptex you will drive your group crazy. If you don't feel like spending so much time on it, there are many other variations possible.

Make your own cryptex with a toilet roll and some paper.

#7 Jigsaw puzzles

You regularly see pieces of jigsaw puzzles scattered around in a room. Solving the jigsaw puzzle means that something becomes visible which can help you to move on. Sometimes there is a question on the jigsaw puzzle or it is a map, with which you can find the next object. You can also do it easier, by cutting an A4 sheet into a number of pieces. On that piece of A4 paper you can put the text or image that they eventually have to solve. A not hard to make Escape Room idea, but very nice to solve.

#9 Skill games

Everyone knows the games of the past. This requires some craftsmanship of course and takes a lot of work. But then again, the result is incredibly cool. For example, you can work with magnets and a glass plate. The players can't reach the other side of the glass plate with their hands, but by placing the magnet on the other magnet (with a small key attached to it, for example) and by following a maze (which is also under the glass plate) they can move the key to an end point where they can take the key with their hand.

#10 Mastermind

We think that one of the most amazing Escape room ideas is mastermind. As a player you have to put colors in the right order to be able to crack the code. You can arrange it that somewhere else in the room you can found out which number belongs to which color.

#12 One of the beste Escape Room Ideas: Morse code 

One of the Escape Room ideas that has been used for a long time is the Morse code. Dots and dashes represent letters. You have hidden the Morse decoding somewhere. Without that decoding, players can't make words or sentences. Use the online morse code generator. 

Try our escape rooms at home

#14 Using light in your DIY Escape Room

You can always do nice things with light. For example, you can make it reflect between mirrors. Because when the players rotate the mirrors the right way, the light will find its way from the starting point to the end point where a code will appear on the wall. You can do this, for example, by using black light. Without this light you will see nothing on the wall, but with this light you can suddenly read the secret message in your escape room game.

#16 Create secret messages with invisible ink

You won't believe it, but there are really crazy ways to create invisible messages. For example with cola. If you really want to surprise your group, this tip is one of the top 16 great Escape Room ideas.

DIY Escape Room ideas and inspiration

Now that we have gone through the list of escape room ideas and puzzles, the success of your escape room game all depends on creating all those puzzles and assignments with various tools and materials. And even though we have already mentioned several things, a little extra Escape Room idea is still welcome, right? So here are some Escape Room ideas and tips that you should definitely check out to get enough inspiration for creating your escape room game.

Use Pinterest for great Escape Room ideas

For all the games we make, we always use a number of sources of information. When making the Escape room we visit several escape rooms in a short time. Not to steal from them, but to help the creative imagination and to come up with some really good Escape Room ideas. However, with all the games we have created, one source has always proven to be very valuable. Pinterest. If you don't have an account yet, create one right away.

If you search for Escape room ideas, you will be overloaded with creative ideas in terms of puzzles and materials.

Handbook, Rules and Hints in your DIY Escape Room

Once the Escape room game is finished, there are still some things to think about. It is useful to make a script for yourself, that describes the whole game. You describe all the rooms, from A to Z,  what should be in them, what should be glued, hung etc. And also the puzzles with the solutions, the codes, the logical order of the puzzles; you write down everything. This will be your script.

After each game, it is relatively easy to put everything back in its old state, so that a next group of players can start playing again.

If there are game rules, you have to communicate them clearly to the players before the game starts. Put them on an A4 sheet so you will never forget to tell them. It's annoying if you don’t want them to look inside the cabinets and you forget to tell them, and all the cabinets are pulled upside down and leaving you with a huge mess to clean up after the game.

Hints Escape Room

Finally, you will undoubtedly need hints in the escape room game. Only the perfect player will get through all your rooms without help. The reality is that it is often more difficult for players than you might think. In order not to make the game too easy, you make some hints, which you communicate to the players somewhere in the game. As described earlier, you can do this fully automatic, for example, with the auto-answer app, but you can also just use extra envelopes, which are numbered. They always have to open envelope 1 first to read that hint. You can then think of a penalty time for every hint they use.

We hope this blog has inspired you enough to create your own Escape Room game. A lot of work of course, but once you have finished, you can invite a lot of people to come and play your Escape Room.