The Great Houdini Escape Room

I have done many Houdini themed rooms, and this one is near the top of them. This is a great room for players who love a puzzle heavy experience. The setup of the room allows for a lot of dividing and conquering. We did this with 6 enthusiasts, and there was still plenty for everyone to do. A fun experience!

The Great Houdini Escape Room: The 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco attracted the brightest minds from around the world. The famous magician Harry Houdini allegedly built the first escape room as a challenge to those geniuses. Our less than brilliant group had 80 minutes to attempt the same puzzles and challenges that these legendary innovators faced over 100 years ago. The Roosevelt Escape Room: This room had some connection to Theodore Roosevelt and World War I. Although the historical narrative made little sense, we knew we had to solve puzzles to escape. Pros: Both rooms had awesome, AMAZING sets. High-tech, elaborately decorated rooms created an immersive feeling for game-players. The puzzles were all tied to the theme and were creative and unique to this escape room. A mix of puzzle types but many mechanical elements. The Houdini Room had a great storyline that carried throughout the entire experience. The storyline was less clearly articulated in the Roosevelt Room and seemed more of a hodgepodge of history. Puzzles were difficult in both rooms and definitely required the whole team. Palace Games is an absolute MUST-DO for escape room addicts. Cons: The game moderator's opening speech was too long and detracted from our initial enthusiasm. The large group size (they encourage 12) is way too big. These are such great rooms, it would be nice to take them all in with smaller groups. This may make it more difficult to solve the sheer number of puzzles in time, but the reduced stress level and ability to focus and listen to your teammates will create a better and much less chaotic experience in the end. Less is more in our opinion. We don't like to miss what's happening by having too many distractions.

Awesome room, tons of puzzles to sink your teeth into! This might be one of the most parallelizable experiences I’ve ever done to date— very good option for larger groups. Everyone can easily be working on something alone. One note: the company is very open about the fact this is their oldest room and lots of the items in this room are very very old and irreplaceable, so unsurprisingly some of the mechanics were a bit finicky and didn’t work perfectly even when we had the right answer. But this didn’t detract too much from how enjoyable this room was! A don’t miss!

Such an interesting concept!!! I can’t say enough about the palace games group! I feel like my reviews of all their games sound the same but they truly are excellent products. Be sure to have more than 4 people as there are ALOT of things to do.

I think this one was the least favorite of the Palace games. We had trouble with a sticky lock in one of our puzzles. But still worth the play personally.

This is one of the Palace of Fine Arts faster games. We ran out of time but they let us finish anyway! We were just over 2 minutes but had a great time overall. Lots of high tech puzzles and ties into the other rooms quite a bit as they all reference each other a little. Would recommend for an experienced group of 4-6!

This escape room pays homage to Houdini's legendary escapes, and it helps to know a little bit about his colleagues during that time period too. There is the traditional pen and paper aspect, and some puzzles that require physical interactions, which makes for an exceptionally challenging time. We had a group of 6, and there was plenty of us to do. I would recommend a group of 6-8 for this one. The room is nonlinear, which allows folksto split up and solve for their individual puzzles. Our game master came into the room as Houdini's apprentice to help and he gave us a little nudge in the right direction when we asked. This is the hardest room out of all the rooms in the Palae of Fine Arts so if you get this one done, you have joined the echelon of the greats.

Done in 2017 as a corporate event. Very cool puzzles that required multiple ppl to solve. Storyline was not fully linear so ppl were able to work on multiple things at once instead of loitering around. I appreciate the side quest puzzles. This is the second escape room I've ever done and it is still in my top 3 of all time 8.5/10

Loved the room, but it is not friendly for those who are color blind

Played this in 2016 and I still talk about it when people ask me what my favorite escape rooms are. You do need a larger group for this one (6-8 is good) as there is a ton of stuff to do and some of the puzzles require multiple humans to work together. Highest recommendation.