This Escape Room-in-a-Box Is Perfect for Quarantine Brain Stimulation

Escape rooms are a lot of fun, like a real life version of the puzzle-filled point-and-click adventure games that so many of us love to play. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced most escape rooms to close or at least implement heavy restrictions. You can always go back and play Pony Island for the fifth time, but you lose that special something that comes from interacting with tangible puzzles. Playful Technology is a YouTube channel that covers a lot of technological builds, but it has had a strong focus on creating escape room puzzles. To keep that up during the pandemic, they have spent the past few months building an escape room-in-a-box and have a series of videos going into detail on the project.

That goal of this project was to fit all the fun and physical puzzles of an escape room into a portable box that can be enjoyed just about anywhere. Theoretically, a box like this could be delivered to your door so that you and your family can play. The logistics of that would be a serious challenge, but the box itself can be built by anyone with the right skills. In this case, Playful Technology also wanted the box to be fairly modular, so that new puzzles can be swapped in as needed. That would make it much easier to develop new “rooms,” because you could easily design new modules that you know will fit inside the box. This project started with the creation of the modular box and then progressed to the individual puzzles, before finally reaching the stage where a narrative for the puzzles could be fleshed out.

Puzzle modules in the box can be purely mechanical, like a combination lock that opens a compartment that contains a clue. But Playful Technology likes to create more interactive types of electronic puzzles. For example, we covered a knock-based puzzle that they created in the past that required a microcontroller. Arduino boards are perfect for that job, but Playful Technology needed a way for them all to work together. For instance, maybe an LCD should only come to life after a specific compartment is opened or a key code has been entered. Playful Technology decided to use PJON (Padded Jittering Operative Network) for that communication. That is a network protocol intended specifically for embedded systems, such as those made up of microcontroller and single-board computers. It’s a bit like a home network or CAN (Controller Area Network) bus, but optimized for applications like this.

After learning how to use PJON for communication, Playful Technology was able to start construction on the box itself. He used a large aluminum flight case to house the puzzles, which are mounted to a wooden frame. Each puzzle is contained within one of six equally-sized spaces on that frame. The puzzle modules were then built using the kinds of components we usually see in maker projects, such as Arduinos, seven-segment display, and good ol’ arcade buttons. Playful Technology has a total of 10 videos on this escape room-in-a-box so far, so be sure to check out their YouTube channel to get all of the nitty-gritty details on this project.