PALACE GAMES
The first stop on my escape room tour was Palace Games, located at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. This one-of-a-kind historical building inspired the establishment’s various rooms as each game is modeled after a historical figure that would have been present at the creation of the building during the 1915 World’s Fair. Some of their popular games include the Houdini, Edison and Roosevelt rooms. I had the opportunity to speak with Palace Games’ Operations Manager, Amy Adams to hear her story, as well as see a few of their highest-rated rooms.
photo courtesy of Bloomberg
Amy came to California in hopes of escaping the unforgiving Midwest winters. In 2016, she saw a posting for an opening at Palace Games and figured that it would be a way for her to be introduced to work life in San Francisco. Seven years later, she has progressed through the company and is now their Operations Manager.
“I have always been a puzzle mystery fan. I read a lot of Agatha Christie novels and the chance to do that for real was just very exciting. The story that I like to tell people is that I didn’t have friends who liked to play escape rooms so I had to go work at one, and that has turned out to be very fulfilling,” Amy said.
Palace Games has a fairly extensive training program for employees before they can be certified to run rooms on their own. The staff is most concerned, however, with giving each team the full experience of an escape game. What is most important is being able to handle the range of peoples’ abilities, interests and interactiveness which requires several months of training for the game managers.
“Because it’s such a commitment to come [to Palace Games,] we want [customers] to have a complete experience of a beginning, a middle and an end,” Amy said. “We want teams to have the joy of discovering how the puzzles work and so that means that we can’t do too much intervention to get them through it… we also want to craft their experience so they don’t feel like we just pushed them out in the last 10 seconds.”
Amy told me that Palace Games began as a passion project for the owner who aspired to build the kind of room that he wanted to play. As the company grew, the team expanded and brought on employees with more puzzle, team building and theatrical experience. Now, Palace Games has four rooms available as well as four online games as a result of the pandemic.
“So, when the development team meets there is a lot of brainstorming about what kind of story we want to tell and what kind of experience we want people to have,” Amy said.
The process from the first brainstorm to the opening of a new room can take years to complete. Palace Games’ first game, the Houdini room, where teams attempt to escape a challenge created by the great magician himself, took less than a year. However, their most recent game, the Attraction, took two and a half years. The general rule seems to be that the more dreaming done by the creators, the more sophisticated a room is and the
longer it takes.
We aim to dream big and swing for the fences
- Amy
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Hearing Amy talk about the blueprints for each room, I knew that I had to see the completed games. On a Saturday evening, I walked through the ethereally lit Palace of Fine Arts and made my way to Palace Games. I walked in to find a colorful waiting room with a red telephone booth in the corner. When I showed up, Amy was getting a team ready to take on the Theodore Roosevelt room and let me listen in on the rules of the game the team would be attempting to escape and “lead the nation into the War to End All Wars.”
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Palace Games remains true to its historical roots, with artifacts and photos that pertain to each historical figure that is highlighted in each room. When I asked Amy if she had a favorite room she told me that while “we love all of our children equally, our highest-rated escape game is the Edison room.”
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I got the chance to look at their clue setup and how Palace Game employees are able to communicate with each team in order to promote their motto of giving each group a “full and complete escape experience.”
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“We have a lot of benchmarks so [that] a team should be this far by this point or else we intervene. Behind the scenes, we can re-adjust the difficulty of the room. Since the lockdown, we have put in clue screens that we did not have before so now, we have a number of automated clues to help keep [teams] on track.”
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As Amy took me through the building we talked about the thrill of doing an escape room and I wondered why it was still a fairly unpopular choice of activity.
“Some people are just too anxious about the countdown of time. Some people have said to me ‘why would I do that when there are bars?’” Amy said.
Amy gave me some personal insight into what working at an escape game would look like. What I loved most was her commitment to each team not feeling stupid, which is remarkably easy when you’re locked in a room and asked to solve a variety of clues and puzzles in under an hour.
“We want people [coming out of the room] feeling that they challenged themselves and beat the challenges. You don’t want to go into a room to feel stupid; you want to go in believing you’ve got a shot at it.”
With one escape business under my belt as well as insider information from Amy, I was ready to move on to my next Bay Area escape room: