ESCAPE 3340 was a one-day, holiday-themed, student-designed escape room for the Yale community. Participants had to solve electronic puzzles to escape, including an RFID "present matching" puzzle, a digital "power generator" puzzle, a Hall Effect-sensing wooden sleigh, and an interactive "naughty/nice map." Escape Room Designers watched from the control room, and were able to send commands to help/hinder escape room participants through a fully-networked interface.
At the end of the escape room, the social deduction element was revealed to participants. The day before, one participant from each group was notified that they are "The Grinch," and were instructed to sabotage their group's progress. At the end of the escape room, participants were to vote out who they thought was The Grinch.
Find all code here: Escape 3340
Credits: Eric and Cindy
Our first idea for a final project was to have an interactive, networked social deduction game, similar to an in-person version of Among Us. After discussion, we pivoted to a more classic escape room, but we retained the surprise element of an "impostor" reveal at the end of the game.
We spent time discussing various holiday-themes puzzles to implement that would both be technologically impressive and personal to Yale students. We wanted players to draw on their liberal arts education and critical thinking.
When designing the flow of the game, we wanted players to be able to "split up" and work on many different puzzles at once. So, we designed a "progression tree" that mapped out what prerequisites each puzzle has. We eventually came up with the below puzzles.
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Credits: Eric
First, players have to read five characters' "letters to Santa" that are placed around the room. They have to match up each character's name to the gift that they desire. To do this, they use logical deduction based on the letters to Santa and perhaps even previous knowledge about Christmas lore (lyrics to famous songs, etc). Players place wooden tokens written with the names of gifts to their corresponding spot on a small wooden board.
Technically, RFID sensors detect the presence of RFID tags on the back of each wooden token. Each RFID tag has a unique ID, so the program knows when the correct solution is tapped. When the players get it right, the puzzle sends a signal to the receipt printer to print out the code to a lock box that contains a "power cord" prop.
Some challenges were figuring out how the multi-device communication protocol worked. One of the RFID sensors never ended up working, which was a pain to debug since I thought that I had done something wrong. Also, we discovered that the sensors interfered with each other if too physically close.
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Credits: Alicia
In order to turn on the generator, players have to input the correct 4-digit code into the keypad. All four numbers in the code are given, but out of order. Players must decipher the image attached to the generator to find the right order for the code. On the wheel, players can find four symbols, each of which appear once in the image as well. There is one symbol per layer of the image, giving the correct order of the symbols that correspond with each number. By finding the order of the symbols, players can turn the wheel in that order to see the respective numbers in order as well.