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No escape room? No problem! Leader creates her own interactive puzzle for troop.
LEEDS—When Troop 454 expressed interest in visiting an escape room to work towards completing a Social Butterfly badge task, Troop Leader Mandy Clary was determined to make it happen. Instead of venturing out to established businesses like Maine Escape Games or The Escape Room in Portland, Mandy decided to take matters into her own hands by building her own.
“Never before have I done an escape room, so this was quite the challenge. Our girls have been looking forward to some fun and different ways to complete badges, and so I happened to come up with the idea to be more engaging,” said Mandy.
Since this is a multi-level troop, a few Seniors were able to help guide five of the Juniors through the interactive puzzle challenge to help rescue the trapped bear, Valentina. Mandy says it was her clever riddles that really stumped the girls and offered them a chance to put their heads together and push through as a group.
“They used teamwork the most when it came to figuring out the riddles to the first few letters of the combination. It was hard to think of rhymes and clues, so they really had to think outside of the box,” said Mandy.
Throughout the evening, the girls answered questions, solved riddles, unscrambled words, entered codes, and most importantly, had fun. For the final piece of the homemade escape room, the girls had to decode the last letter of a combination written in white crayon on white paper. Mandy says they uncovered the letter using color pencils just in the nick of time to determine the hidden password and save their Valentine’s Day bear!
“Teamwork makes the dream work. The hive mind was hard at work during this activity,” said Mandy.
See photos of the escape room here.
