by Henry VIII attempts a corporate team building escape room and discovers a puzzle considerably harder than surviving his own court
I once escaped considerably worse than a locked room through pure force of will and the occasional well-timed execution of a rival. The escape room defeated our entire team of six with four minutes still remaining on the clock.
The Briefing
A young man named Callum briefed us on the scenario, something involving a cursed pharaoh’s tomb, a theme I found mildly insulting given my own considerably more relevant expertise in actual historical tombs, though I kept this observation to myself out of professional courtesy toward Callum’s clear enthusiasm for the material.
The First Puzzle
The opening puzzle required us to align a series of symbols using a UV torch that revealed hidden markings on the wall, a technology I found genuinely magical and slightly unsettling, having spent most of my original reign assuming any invisible writing was either witchcraft or, more likely, a forged document requiring immediate investigation.
The Team Dynamics
Dev quickly emerged as the team’s natural leader, a role I attempted to contest on the basis of extensive prior experience commanding people under pressure, only to discover that commanding actual people and solving a padlock puzzle require entirely different, largely non-transferable skills, a humbling realisation I reached roughly halfway through a locked chest I could not open.
The Final Puzzle
With four minutes remaining, we stood before a final locked door requiring a four digit code derived from clues scattered across the entire room, several of which we had solved incorrectly, several more of which we had entirely overlooked, and Callum’s voice, piped in through a small speaker, offered us a hint with the gentle, disappointed tone of a schoolteacher who has clearly seen this exact failure many times before.
The Verdict
The buzzer sounded before we cracked the final code, the door remained locked, and Callum entered to reveal the answer had been hidden inside a small wooden box we had, as a team, unanimously agreed was purely decorative. I have escaped considerably more genuine peril in my time. I have never once been quite so thoroughly defeated by a room with no actual danger in it whatsoever, and I have already booked us in for a rematch.
The Rematch
Our team has already booked a rematch at a different escape room across town, Callum’s colleague having promised a scenario involving considerably less Egyptology and considerably more genuine peril. Dev remains team leader by unanimous, if slightly reluctant, agreement, and I have accepted my role as the member most likely to overlook an obviously important wooden box.
Callum has already started planning a considerably more elaborate scenario specifically for our return visit, a challenge I am simultaneously dreading and quietly looking forward to. Losing, it turns out, builds considerably more team spirit than I ever expected from a locked room. Losing that badly to a locked room belongs properly in the art of losing your head. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: the original account of my own return to Britain, the proper London pub where history finally sat down for a pint, the internet itself being formally declared dead by its own users.
