By Alex Birk, 12th-Grade Student

Escape Room games* can be quite entertaining, especially when your whole school gets locked into two small themed rooms for an hour. Our job was to figure out a way to escape.

As a reward for the hard work and dedication Derech Emunah students put in to successfully raise $10,000 for the school through raffle sales, the administration invited the entire student body to go on an unusual adventure, located just 30 minutes from school.

It was a fantastic team-building exercise that also happened to be truly fun!

The first of the two escape rooms used the theme of discovering pirate treasure. Seven girls followed the clues and managed to escape with 15 minutes remaining.

The second escape room was an Egyptian theme, and nine girls escaped with just 5 minutes remaining. Whew!

Teamwork is essential in this game, and it was exciting to see who took what role in the process of finding clues, uncovering mysteries, and who took leadership positions.

Our adventure was without question a fun and exciting reward for our successful fundraising efforts.

* An Escape Room Is a 60-minute real-life adventure game in which a team of players cooperatively discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms to progress and attain a specific goal in a limited amount of time. The goal is often to escape from the site of the game.

Whether you complete your mission in time or not, your Game Guide meets you at the end of the game and opens the room if you haven’t escaped yet. While it is exciting to be able to escape successfully, escape rooms are still lots of fun for groups who don’t manage to make it out during their first attempt.