Escape rooms are popping up all over the place and so naturally we wanted to try creating one for our Vintage Library Book Party! We decided to create our own so that we could include a personalized touch. With a few simple steps you can create one for the birthday/party celebrant or to use as an activity for any bookworm’s special day!
WHAT IS AN ESCAPE ROOM?
If you haven’t gone through an escape room before, you’re missing out!!! They’re super fun, immersive games and involve solving a set of puzzles, problems, or clues in order to **usually** escape a room (or the ‘escape room area’). Generally, they’re timed as well, so that adds some extra challenge to the game!
While you can typically think of physical escape rooms as literally escaping a room / area, some of them end up in opening a locked box or item. If you’re low on space, you can definitely go this route. Instead of escaping the room, the locked box can have a prize, treasure, or trinkets.
There are also a ton of free digital escape rooms that have popped up recently – we’ve been pleasantly surprised by just typing in ‘escape room’ and some of our favorite topics/books and found some amazing person has already created one & shared it! During our search, we stumbled upon a great breakdown of free digital escape rooms that are broken down by category (great for some extra activities to add to lesson plans OR just for fun): Free Digital Escape Rooms for Kids and Adults by survivingateacherssalary.com.
THE THEME
Since we created this escape room to go along with our Vintage Library party, we of course had to set this in a room with a TON of books! Now, all of us bibliophiles can dream of having libraries that span walls of the entire room and need ladders to reach the tallest shelves, BUT if you’re like me and don’t have an entire room dedicated to a library in your home, the room with the bookshelf will have to do 🙂
So, in our escape room, we had to ‘escape the library’ by solving a number of different clues and puzzles. We did have a few standard escape room clues (finding and solving puzzle pieces, using clocks for numbers, decoding a periodic table, etc) but also added in a personal touch 🙂
THE PERSONALIZED TOUCH
We added our personalized piece at the beginning but you can definitely switch it around. Basically, we had a set of clues that lead you to books; for example, if you have 10 clues, they will lead you to 10 books where a piece of the next puzzle is hidden. Once you find all clues, you put the puzzle pieces together & that leads you to your next clue/puzzle.
The personalization piece comes with the book choices: If you’re creating the escape room to celebrate an occasion for a special someone, try to find out some of their favorite or well loved books. If you’re creating the room for a larger group like a family or classroom, pick a few favorites or books/stories you’ve read together. You will need the actual physical books (or maybe just a picture of them if you really can’t find the actual book).
We opted to mix in some favorite or well known quotes from the books AND some nice little anecdotes that only our birthday kid (or those who knew the birthday kid well) would know, e.g: “This was the very first mystery, chapter book you read” (we hid the clue in a Boxcar Children book) and “You get what you get and you’ don’t get upset!” (we know all you Pinkalicious fans can get that one easily! 🙂 )
Here are a few other examples of some personalized clues that you can mix into your set:
- The first book you read on your own.
- The first book you read without pictures.
- The last book of the first series you read from end to end.
- The book you would ask your mom and dad to read over and over and over again!
- The book you LOVE way more than the movie.
- The first chapter you book you read.
- Your favorite book.
- The book you always buy to give away cause it’s sooo amazing!
- The book with your favorite character.
And that’s just the beginning! If you have some sweet little stories associated with books or books that family/friends love, those would go in great as well!
OUR DETAILED BREAKDOWN
Now, when designing the rest of your escape room, you can definitely mix and match with other clues you’ve seen around. We thought we’d share ours from end to end just to complete the pictures. But, there are tons of resources out there to help you create your own, so get creative & try them out! 🙂
We had a total of five different tasks for our room. If you’ve got escape room experts, you could definitely add a few more but we kept it at five since some of them had multiple steps within.
Task 1: Find the Personalized Clues.
For our first task, the guests had to find a total of 10 clues (these were the personalized ones – a mix of quotes from favorite books & little anecdotes related to the birthday kid). To keep in the theme, we printed the clues all on antique paper.
Task 2: Find the Books
Once all 10 clues were found, they had to figure out which book corresponded to the clue. Each book had a different piece of a paper puzzle inside.
You could merge Tasks 1 & 2 together. They just won’t be able to move on without finding the 10th puzzle piece.
Task 3: Solve the Puzzle – Periodic Table
Once all 10 puzzle pieces were found, they had to put them together.
We just printed out the next image, modified it slightly by adding some #s on the side & cut those up into 10 pieces. You could make it a bit more difficult and cut more pieces and hide multiple pieces in a book (from Step 2) OR put multiple pieces in each book.
Task 4: Identify the Elements
For all you chemistry buffs out there, you’d know that each element has an abbreviation of one or two letters as well as a #. BUT, we’re not doing chemistry experiments here. The goal of this task was to figure out there were #s written along the side of the page as well as figuring out which letters they corresponded to. We picked 9 (F) 88 (Ra) 7 (N) 58 (Ce), to spell out FRANCE.
Task 5: “Unlocking” the Box
As the previous clue spelled out ‘France’, our final task was to head over to France (or the best you can do when you can’t travel but have some books at the ready 🙂 ). We had a locked book / box with an image of a French landmark – Book Safe – and the kids had to unlock the box by solving a final clue. You could also pick up a Decorative Book Box without a lock if you think they’ve had enough problem solving. You can usually find some at craft stores like Michaels or Joann’s as well as online.
And inside were treats & trinkets! Once they unlocked the box, they could pass those along and enjoy!
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you so much for checking out our party planning article. Hopefully it gave you some great ideas for your next celebration!
If you did enjoy this, please let us know below or follow us on Pinterest. Also, If you haven’t already and are still looking for that perfect party theme, feel free to check out some of our other Party Guides or Ideas for Booklovers!
Happy Party Planning 🙂
