Room Escape Artist

Escape room trips come with dense and hyper-specific schedules… and I have found myself looking for the nearest open pharmacy at a strange hour far more than once.

If you’ve ever come to one of our Tours or attended RECON, you’ll note that one of our defining characteristics is preparedness. We don’t %^&$ around at our events. I found myself wondering why we weren’t quite as prepared during our own trips, and the Problem Solving & First Aid Travel Kit was born.

What’s in the Kit?

The bag itself is a Peak Design Tech Pouch… This is far more decadent a bag than is required for this job, but Patreon (the company, not our community) gifted us one, so we put it to work.

The kit contains fixes for a few categories of problems:

• First Aid
• Period Supplies
• Comfort Issues
• Personal Property Struggles

It’s worth noting that I only keep two or three of everything in the kit. I don’t need to solve problems in perpetuity, I just need to solve small problems quickly and keep the travel schedule from needlessly coming undone. The kit is supposed to be light, and I can always restock it at home.

First Aid

• Alcohol Swabs – Don’t skim past this explanation – Yes, alcohol swabs do the whole antiseptic thing… but there is a second reason that they are included and that is because smelling rubbing alcohol can improve mild-to-moderate nausea and vomiting (Source: NIH). I learned this from RECON Producer Kate Wastl, and it comes in clutch.
• Assorted Band-aids – A few band-aids of every size: small, medium, large, and those silly ones for your knee. I buy latex free band-aids to limit the opportunity for an allergic reaction in a teammate.
• Blister Bandages – This item inspired the whole kit. The second time that I found myself in a pharmacy at a strange hour looking for blister bandages was the moment where I decided that I needed a kit.
• Cough Drops – Sometimes they help.
• Gloves – If you’re handling someone else’s damage, you should be wearing gloves. I stock nitrile gloves because they are durable, and they won’t trigger a latex allergy if that happens to be an issue for a teammate.
• Meds (acetaminophen, ibuprofen, antacid) – Something to take the edge off, or deal with heartburn.
• Neosporin – Another option for cleaning up a wound.
• NyQuil/ DayQuil – Sometimes people need the hard stuff.

• Splinter Out – This is my favorite find. These sterile contraptions are very good at removing splinters… and in my experience, splinters are by far the most common escape room injury. If you only keep one escape room first aid item on you, let it be this (and some antiseptic). (Amazon)

Period Supplies

These shouldn’t need an explanation.

• Liners
• Pads
• Tampons – (tampons have additional first aid applications)

Comfort Issues

• Dental floss – Don’t pretend like you’ve never had a less fun time in an escape room due to having something stuck in your teeth. It happens.
• Disposable earplugs – I always carry Loops for better hearing protection (and I wear them often, especially in horror games)… but if they get lost or damaged, I want a backup option. Also, sometimes other people see me wearing Loops and want hearing protection.
• Makeup Remover Towelettes – This is another thing that you don’t want to go searching for at a midnight.

Personal Property Struggles

• Laundry Detergent Packet – Sometimes you emerge from a game looking like you did demolition work. And sometimes that happened in half of the games on your trip because you’re in Spain. When this happens, sometimes you have to do laundry in the middle of the night.
• Small Sewing Kit – Most of the kit is dedicated to patching up people… sometimes the act of getting a hole in a person also puts a hole in their clothing.

A Work In Progress

This kit is a work in progress, so please suggest anything that you feel that I have missed in the comments. Ultimately, I am not trying to account for every single possible problem, I just want to make sure that I never have to sweat the small stuff. I want to keep this thing as light as possible so that we don’t find ourselves leaving it behind.

I don’t believe that this is all necessary gear on every escape room trip, but I absolutely recommend bringing this on trips to cities with physical games… or if your schedule is stuffed with little room for error.

Way earlier this year, I mentioned to our Patreon that I was testing two pieces of gear on our trip to Athens, Greece. The first were my escape room pants. This kit was the second. I was extremely happy that I had both on that trip. My trip was greatly improved by both.

I think that most of the community forgot that I was testing two pieces of gear, and stopped hassling me about it after we did the piece on the pants, but this really is the last piece of escape room travel gear… for now.

Thank you so much to our Patreon community. It really is a joy having this wonderful group of people to chat with, learn from, and bounce ideas off of.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Mauricio Collares, Charles Chiu, Zack, Ricky Hvisch, Chelsey Walton, 翊鸣 项, and Katie Liu

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

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