Bank robberies, murder scenes, hijacked planes and being stranded in a jungle are situations most people would not want to encounter in real life. However, more and more people are willing to pay to go through a simulation of these situations through escape rooms.

Escape rooms have been increasingly popular with more people choosing to spend weekends and birthdays solving intricate puzzles with family and friends. Escape rooms are team building, fun, and challenging exercises. At Jefferson, where students tend to perk up at the word “challenge,” an escape room is a perfect activity.

Jefferson’s escape room club was created last year and has been gaining popularity ever since.

“Last year we didn’t have enough spots for people to go through the escape rooms so this year we decided to do two rooms to have more space,” Senior Jack Liu, co-founder of the TJ escape room club said.

In addition to the extra room, there has been other changes and challenges the club has faced in its second year at Jefferson such as new recruits and having more people to manage. In the beginning of the year, the new members were gathered during 8th period to find ideas for escape room themes. The idea for a space themed room came from the 8th period sessions and the fantasy escape room was the result of planning with another club.

Building escape rooms is a difficult process, such as coming up with ideas. Along with the design process, there were also challenges in building the room itself.

“I would say the biggest difficulty is gathering materials. Often times, people will have great ideas for puzzles that will require parts that are expensive or will take a long time to ship or just aren’t things that people typically have laying around in their houses,” senior Noah Holloway said.

Although acquiring materials was the biggest issue, there were other difficulties management wise.

“Another issue is coordinating all the different puzzles people are working on because we obviously can’t have one person do every single puzzle. An escape room is a combination of different puzzles and you have to have everyone who’s working on their own sub-puzzle in the room able to collaborate effectively together so everything matches up in the end,” Noah Holloway said.

Overall, despite the difficulties, the members of the escape room club thoroughly enjoyed creating the two escape rooms.

“It’s honestly a surprise to see so many ppl interested which is awesome and it’s a little hectic to get everything organized but it’s a lot of fun,” Liu said.

For some students like Noah Holloway, the best part of escape room is the freedom of coming up with a theme and making it come to life through puzzles.

“I think that adapting some ideas, somethings that’s more publicly accessible so that you don’t have to have read for example, The Lord of the Rings series to understand them is something that’s really challenging but really entertaining as well,” Holloway said.

Many other club members agreed on the way the themes were integrated into the rooms.

“I think it’s really interesting how we’re drawing from both The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter books which are fan favorites and building this immersive room. I think it’s really awesome,” senior Priyanka Mehta, who mainly worked on the fantasy room, said.

Not only did the club members have fun, but there were also positive responses from the people who took on the challenge of escaping the rooms.

Senior Sriram Amirneni played the spaced themed escape room with officers from congressional debate for team bonding.

“It was exciting, it had a lot of riddles and was really intricate, elaborate and had a lot of stuff you would see in movies, detective shows, that kind of stuff,” Amirneni said.

Freshmen Melissa Wu agreed that the puzzles were fun to solve and that she had enjoyed her first escape room experience.

“They were really creative and the puzzles were really smart,” another freshmen, AJ Seo, said.

The positive reactions show a promising future for when the escape room club opens another round of the escape rooms in January.

“I would definitely be willing to come back to try out more escape rooms,” junior Medha Gupta said. “It’s a fun team bonding experience. Even if sometimes we get into fights and argue a lot, it was still fun for all of us and I definitely think this is a really cool club.”