27 Feb 2015

Our Escape Room Games History

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Welcome to Adventure Rooms Canada – Canada’s 1st Real Life Escape Room Game!

Here’s a little bit about our Escape Room Games history!

Our Escape Room Games History begins In 2013, the AdventureRooms Escape Room game was discovered in Bern, Switzerland, while Adventure Rooms Canada’s owner Lisa Thomas was traveling overseas.  It was a fantastic experience and a highly ranked tourist attraction for the city of Bern.  Lisa knew that it was something that she definitely wanted to be a part of.  Shortly after returning home to Ontario, Adventure Rooms Canada was formed and became the first international franchisee of the original Swiss Escape Room game, which was developed by Swiss Physics teacher Gabriel Palacios, and his brother, David in early 2012.

Opening in 2013, Adventure Rooms Canada was just a few weeks shy of being Canada‘s first real life escape room game.  Nevertheless, we were the first escape room game to open outside of British Columbia, in all of Canada, and because Exit Canada is a 45 minute duration game, we are Canada’s 1st 60 minute Real Life Escape Room Game!  Our fans in the Kitchener-Waterloo and surrounding areas showed incredible support for our launch and helped us to achieve a #1 ranking on TripAdvisor after just 3 weeks! Which we still maintain to this day: Including, for a time, for all of Ontario! – however TripAdvisor unfortunately changed our ranking category in the fall of 2014 to an “activity” instead of an attraction when we outranked the Horseshoe Falls themselves 😉

We started in Kitchener with our Original Adventure, which opened in the fall of 2013.  In March of 2014, we opened our Alternate Adventure, also located in Kitchener.  We were having a blast with all of our Adventurers, with rave reviews and tons of fun, so in early spring, we started thinking about new locations to bring the experience to even more people.  In Summer of 2014, we happened upon a great facility in the old downtown of Niagara Falls, Canada and opened our doors, with Game 3: The Missing Finger, in January 2015.  Since then we have opened a 3rd game in Kitchener (our 4th game) called The Vault, which opened in August 2015, as well as a 5th game (our 2nd in Niagara) The Collector, which launched in February 2016.  We also launched our 6th adventure: The Mayor’s Office (Kitchener) in August of 2016!

After the pandemic started, we were closed off and on for some time, however still managed to launch our 7th game Moonshine (in Niagara Falls) in 2020, as well as transition 3 of our successful adventures to a live-hosted, virtual format that was playable over Zoom (The Original, The Missing Finger and The Mayor’s Office) and now have launched our 8th game called Stool Pigeon in Niagara Falls as of July 2021!

In addition to Bern, Switzerland and Adventure Rooms Canada, there are many other countries that host AdventureRooms games.

We are truly one of the largest escape room game franchises in the world!

Here is a listing of the other international locations and website links for AdventureRooms, as of August 2017, in case you are planning a world trip:

With many more in the future!  You can keep up with them all at http://www.adventurerooms.ch

All locations have unique variations of the game and differing design/layouts to add to the excitement.  We all use a combination of our own individual, and our collaborative, puzzles and design elements to create new experiences for all of our fans in each city.

We hope to bring you many more games, for many years to come!

Thank you for your continued support – we are thrilled that you love Adventure Rooms Escape Games as much as we all do!