Breakout Kansas City – Brain Teaser and Team Builder

January 25, 2016 / in Business Recommendations / by Jason Terry

Post author: Jason Terry

Recently, Mic and I took Missy and Trista to Breakout KC. If you haven’t heard of Breakout KC, it’s an experience where you get locked into a room and have to solve puzzles to get out. And you only have sixty minutes to make it out. Yikes!

Breakout KC is located in the River Market area. There’s plenty of parking, but it’s a little more north than most people go in the River Market, so you should give yourself extra time to get there, get parked and into their building.

There are four different game room themes:
River Quay Casino: 31% success rate
The Truman Room: 24% success rate
Room 13: 34% success rate
Szechuan Secret: 19% success rate

We walked into the lobby of Breakout KC not really sure what to expect. We got signed in (you have to sign a waiver to participate) and waited for our game room to be ready. When it was time, we were taken to “Room 13” and given some quick verbal instructions.

And then the timer started!

When I saw the countdown begin, my stress levels went up. I’m a competitive person when it comes to games, and I wanted to make it out of the room before the sixty minutes ran out.  That’s why this can be such a good team building experience. You get to see first-hand how people work together under pressure. You will definitely learn something about your friends, your family or the people you work with if you do this as a group.

There’s a TV monitor up high on the wall in the room. A game operator monitors your progress and will give you text hints along the way if you are struggling. I think our game operator did a great job letting us figure things out while not getting stuck too long on any one puzzle.

I don’t want to explain exactly what we did in Room 13 because you need to experience it for yourself. Part of the fun is walking into a completely unknown situation and working together to figure out what needs to happen next. What I will say is that there were plenty of fun puzzles and a couple of really tricky ones. And as far as Room 13 goes, a REALLY big surprise about halfway through. We didn’t make it out in time, but we got through about 80% of the puzzles. The rooms are set up for 8 people to play and it was just the 4 of us. I’m sure we would have done better if we’d had more friends with us.

My Recommendation?

So Breakout KC was a blast. I didn’t know what to expect, but ended up really enjoying the experience. I definitely recommend that you try it out. It’s about $30/person to play and a good value for getting to do something really different and fun.

People come from all over the country to play the game rooms at Breakout KC and it’s right in our back yard. (In the lobby, there’s a map of the United States with push pins showing where people have come from to play. Most of the country has pins in it.)

It would be an excellent team building event for your staff. It will give your brain a workout!