July 11, 2021: Escape This Illuminator?!

My family does a lot of road trips, and those have started up again since we're vaccinated and can rejoin the world. One of the challenges that being in a car presents is boredom; we're gamers at heart, so we look to portable play to fill up the empty time. Unfortunately, getting a full GURPS or Munchkin game going is a challenge while driving. But we've found an easy (and affordable!) solution: Escape This Podcast.

As the name implies, Escape This Podcast takes the popular "locked room" premise (which I dearly love) and turns it into a virtual experience – in a podcast. In each episode, participants try to get out of a virtual escape room, with one person serving as a facilitator (or "GM," as I like to think of them).

These are fun to listen to all by themselves. Even better for our needs, the rooms themselves are available to download and print. These printouts are perfect for in-car gaming, with one passenger serving as the room host and the others in the car trying to unlock its secrets. Obviously, the driver is at a disadvantage when it comes to some puzzles, such as those that require determining a code sequence or visual element . . . but with three folks in our car, this experience is great for our trips.

-- Steven Marsh