1,000 Escape Rooms 🤯

This week, we hit 1,000 escape rooms… and it comes with a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions. Before I dive into them, I’ll answer the question that many of you are wondering:

What game was your 1,000th?

The Depths from The Escape Game. They just opened up a new location near our home in New Jersey. It’s at the American Dream Mall in the Meadowlands. That mall is a bonkers place with a theme park, a water park, an indoor ski slope, and all sorts of other crazy things.

It has also been under construction for most of my life… I think construction began back in the mid 90s. It was weird finally setting foot inside.

How was your 1,000th game?

A full review is coming, but The Escape Game is super consistent. It was a fun time.

We also unintentionally set a record… which seems fitting.

Did you have escake?

Yes and no. Lisa and I shared a brookie with dinner after the game.

We’re planning on making a proper escake to celebrate, but between RECON Boston planning and gearing up for our Escape, Immerse, Explore Tour to New Mexico… we haven’t had the time to bake something fitting for the occasion. It will happen, and we will share photos.

Moving on…

Random Thoughts After 1,000 Games

Doing 1,000 of anything is a lot.

When you spend another hour or two per game writing about it, it becomes even more.

1,000 is a strange number, it feels like both an achievement and a diagnosis. To my non-escape room friends, we’re not just “the crazy couple who spend all of their time doing/ writing about/ supporting escape rooms…” we’re now, “the crazy couple who spend all of their time doing/ writing about/ supporting escape rooms, and have played a thousand of them.”

I’m honestly looking forward to both the sincere conversations that will emerge from this… and the snarky condescension that we’ll get. I feel like it will be fun.

Counting Escape Rooms

Counting escape rooms is hard. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

This is what we’ve counted as game 1,000… but honestly, there’s a whole lot of grey area in there.

We probably counted a few things that some wouldn’t… and we certainly left out some things that could be counted.

Is this game 10XX? Or game 9XX? I don’t know… and I don’t really care that there is a margin of error in the data.

Ultimately, it’s all a journey. Escape rooms have grown with us, and we’ve grown with escape rooms. These games have changed in such a way that we can’t always tell you if something truly is an escape room, and that’s the way we like it.

Our Community Made This Possible

This wild journey is possible because of the people who support us: the people who read, listen, and watch our content… the folks who come to our events… and the people who put their dollars down to help us grow and work towards sustaining ourselves while supporting this industry that we love so much.

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