Entrepreneurs bet on escape rooms

LACONIA — Think you’re pretty smart? Smart enough to solve a complex series of puzzles before a 60-minute timer runs out? How about if you’re able to bring a few sharp friends with you?

That’s the premise behind escape rooms, a category of gaming businesses that set up rooms that challenge people to solve numerous problems. Escape rooms are a real-time, analog offshoot of the electronic and board gaming industries. The first escape room was opened in Japan in 2007, and since then they’ve swept around the world.

The Lakes Region got its first escape room just a few years ago. So, is it a fad, or a new fixture on the entertainment scene? There are now three in area: Escape Hour House in Gilford, The Escape Room Experience in Laconia, and, in Meredith, Crack the Code. Can the region really support three similar businesses?

Two home-grown entrepreneurs recently bet on the likelihood that escape rooms are here to stay. Jordan Tankard, 37, and Chris McCarthy, 28, took ownership of The Escape Room Experience on July 22. They see escape rooms as a burgeoning entertainment opportunity with room to grow and develop.

The Escape Room Experience, located on Main Street in the city’s parking garage building, was founded by Lori Harding as the region’s first escape room. Tankard and McCarthy had worked for Harding, so when she let them know she was interested in selling the business, they knew what they were getting into.

“Lori gave us an offer we couldn’t refuse. She knew she didn’t have the time to run it fully, but she didn’t want to see it dissolve,” McCarthy said. Harding opened her business as a side project, and when she was promoted at her day job, she didn’t have time left to further develop her escape rooms. “She wants to see it continue, she wants to see it thrive.”

The Escape Room Experience has three different challenges, and guests pay $25 each for the chance to try one of them. One of the rooms is a murder mystery, another is inspired by the movie The Hangover, and the third is about a visit to a fortune teller when things take a turn toward the paranormal.

McCarthy and Tankard said they plan to cycle out one of their rooms for a new challenge each year.

The other two local escape room businesses also have a few challenges each and, said McCarthy, once-bitten escape room attendees aren’t shy about traveling further and further afield for a new challenge. That’s why they don’t consider other nearby escape rooms to be competitors. Rather, they each help infect locals and visitors with a desire to visit escape rooms, and with only a few challenges each, their customers will soon need to venture to a new business.

Escape room attendees tend to be in their teens to 30s, they said, but they’ve seen guests as young as 10 come to solve a puzzle along with their grandparents.

“The one thing that took me by surprise was how much of a team experience it is,” Tankard said. “If you go in with family and friends, you will fall into roles, and those teams do very well.”

Tankard and McCarthy – who graduated from local high schools and have theatrical experience – plan to expand their business by offering board games for purchase, and by promoting a mobile 10-minute challenge, which could be brought out to public events or rented for parties or weddings.

Tankard said he’s not surprised that some people might think that escape rooms might fade away. However, he said he sees a growth trend in the opposite direction.

“Any time people come up with some new thing to do for fun, there are those questions,” he said. “As a young industry, this has just scratched the surface of possibility.”