Trust falls are passé. Paintball leaves bruises. The best way to bond with coworkers now is doing an “escape room,” a game in which participants are given a set amount of time (usually an hour) to solve a series of puzzles and free themselves from a locked space. A theme or conceit gives the game urgency—players are told they have an hour before a killer virus wipes out their city, for example, or they must break out of prison before the warden returns. One particularly meta room in Florida has corporate participants escape from an office.
The first escape room opened in Japan about a decade ago. Today an online directory lists rooms in 101 countries, from Cambodia to Colombia. They’re popular with students, overstressed urban professionals, corporate retreat organizers, and the Obama family, who busted out of a Hawaii location with 12 seconds to spare. It’s a relatively low-stakes way to learn how a team operates under pressure, outside the confines of the office.