The Great Houdini Escape Room

The puzzles were well designed and parallelizable. There was a good amount of puzzles that required holding clues until the relevant cue revealed itself, which I personally like. My chief gripe with the experience was that certain puzzles were finnicky in their mechanical design such that you would have to configure them multiple times despite conceptually having solved them.

The gameplay did not flow well. You’d start working on one puzzle and not be able to make progress or finish it because the remaining parts would be in a later room, but you wouldn’t have known that. Multiple puzzles were available up front but wasn’t clear that they had to be solved in a certain order. Some puzzles were not intuitive at all.

Fun room! I love the puzzle quality for this room more than the attraction. There was plenty for everyone to do. Very very searchy room!

I had a great time with this room, and it held up really well despite being their oldest room. The puzzles were extremely parallelizable (we had four ppl which was a perfect size imo) and enjoyable. Story wise it wasn’t anything special. There were still a good number of scavenger-hunt-type things in the room (find all the pieces to XYZ), but to a level that I enjoyed. The things that keep this from being a heart for me are that a lot of the puzzles are pen-and-paper-esque, and that the room isn’t as immersive as other rooms. But I really liked it, overall super solid room that I’d recommend!

Great for an older room. Upper end of thumbs up bordering on a heart for me. Theme and puzzles were very solid! There’s a LOT of individual pieces you have to find for this room.

This room has a lot of layered puzzles but they flowed well… the set design was good for the theme…

I preferred Edison to this room. Houdini is very puzzle forward. Also not really about Houdini. Challenging time and glad we did it. Was tough with 4 of us and I’d recommend going with their suggestion of 6 or more.

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.