Kansas City Makes Their Escape – Almost
A tape outline on the floor marked where the murdered body was found. But the office of private investigator John Monroe was quiet…too quiet. The Kansas City Brunchette Detective Squad knew the murder had taken place at 2pm, and was likely someone the victim knew, but that was all. And they had an hour to solve the mystery and escape the locked room before the coppers arrived and carted them off to jail as the main suspects! The game was afoot!
For our January brunch, the Kansas City chapter met at Broadway Cafe to sample their artisan coffees and made-from-scratch pastries. Their muffins were ginormous and tasty!
Meeting at the coffee shop allowed about 10 of us to gather and chat before our true adventure began. Topics varied as usual, at one point leading several ladies to haul out their impressive lipstick collections. You never know what will be discussed at a Geek Girl brunch!
We also loved Amber’s hand-painted Star Wars shoes.
From the cafe, we walked a few blocks to Clue Pursuit, one of Kansas City’s newest escape rooms. They have three rooms available for sleuthery, each with a different story and clues. With 12 Brunchettes, we were placed in their largest room, which was “The Office of John Monroe.” The room has a 35% escape rate – no pressure!
Only a couple of our members had been to an escape room before, so most of us didn’t know what to expect. After a brief tutorial and best practices session from our gamemaster, John, we entered the room – and the door was locked behind us. The clock was ticking – we had 60 precious minutes to figure out not only who killed our murder victim, but also trigger the mechanism to release the door.
As we entered, we immediately began looking everywhere for clues, trying to determine what might be relevant, and what was perhaps just a cool prop. Squeals of triumph and joy echoed throughout the locked room as someone revealed something important. Many items we found were codes or keys, and we had to use them to unlock something, in order to reveal the next clue. It was tricky pairing up the codes or keys with the right lock! But we persevered.
When we seemed off-track, our trusty gamemaster stepped in and used a display screen in the corner to offer suggestions for where to look next. Always handy to have a Phone-a-Friend on call!
After about 50 minutes, we did indeed discover the treacherous murderer – but the door remained tightly closed. We returned to our search for more clues, but alas, the time ran out. John stepped in and assured us we were “so close” and probably would have achieved our escape if we’d had just a few more minutes – far better than many groups fared in that room, so we comforted ourselves with that fact.
As we left the room, many Brunchettes remarked about how fun the event was – one even asked if we could try another room right then! We continued to receive remarks on our Facebook Page on the success of the event, and requests to do another escape room outing. We’re definitely up for another mystery!