The craze of escape rooms has been growing in popularity over the last several years. Picture it, you are locked in a room and need to use teamwork and your brain to decipher clues around the room in order to escape in under a certain amount of time.
Now, The Walt Disney Family Museum, located in the Presidio of San Francisco, is offering their own twist on the escape room, virtually! I had the opportunity to take part in their virtual escape room last week, and it was surprisingly a lot of fun.
I'm a big fan of escape rooms in real life. I've done them in Budapest (where they are said to have originated), London, and New York City...and now online! Having done these in real life, I was a little skeptical about how well the Walt Disney Family Museum would be able to pull this concept off virtually, but I should have known better because they nailed it!
We all logged into a zoom call with our lovely host, Kate. She explained how it would work and together we worked as one team to solve the clues to escape three virtual rooms at the Walt Disney Family Museum. We used the combination of a zoom call to communicate, along with a web site the museum has set up for the virtual puzzle rooms. It was also really cool as since I had never visited the museum in real life, this was a great peak inside and now it's right at the top of my list!
One of their more popular exhibits, a huge scale model of Disneyland, plays a role in one of the puzzles. Participants in the virtual escape room get a unique view of this model with close up shots of many parts of the model. The model is so big and brimming with so much detail, you could never get that close to these details in real life making it a unique highlight of their virtual escape room!
While the answers to all of the puzzles were Disney related, the great thing is you don't need to be a Disney nerd like most of us to be able to solve the riddles. You just need the ability to read the clues, and think outside the box. I mean ok sure, the jumbled letters that spell out EPCOT will pop out to a true Disney fan maybe a bit more quickly than the casual observer, but we don't have to reveal all of our secrets.
It definitely makes for a great virtual work team activity if you are looking to build relationships among teammates. It could also be a great activity for a virtual birthday party or other celebration and serves as a great virtual fix while the museum is closed to in-person visitation. They do cap the rooms at 10 participants (though they admitted they might push it to 12 so it might be worth asking if you have more than 10). The cost is per room, for one hour. The more guests you have, the cheaper it will be per person. The museum recommends trying to sign up at least a week in advance to ensure availability.
So if you're looking for a unique, fun, disney-related virtual activity to get through these final months of lockdown, head over to the Walt Disney Family Museum Virtual Experiences online and book one of their virtual escape rooms! Once you're there, you can also check out taking a virtual tour of the museum as well!
Here are some more images courtesy The Walt Disney Family Museum: