In case you haven’t heard of it, an escape room game is one where participants are locked into a themed room with their team. While in that room, the team has to solve puzzles, riddles, and clues to find their way out of the room before the timer runs out. Most escape room games run for an hour, so ensure you hit the bathroom first before starting.
If you and the rest of your family have never tried out an escape room before, it’s normal to have yourself wondering what all the fuss is. It’s a popular category of games, be it for families, friends, or colleagues.
As you plan out your next family game night, many compelling reasons may convince you to include escape room games in your choices. Here you’ll find an enumeration to show why and how games like Hour To Midnight Escape Rooms are excellent for families.
- Improves Brain Health
Children and adults need to work towards improving their brain health. For children, it’s essential for their comprehension and analytical skills development. For adults, brain exercises prevent the possible onset of memory problems.
Puzzles are great for this purpose, with escape room games among the top of the list. An escape room game involves a lot of thinking and deciding, and these contribute to the sound development of focus skills, brain health, memory, and concentration.
The improvement in brain health that happens here isn’t only one relating to its functioning. It can also go as far as including the emotional aptitude of the brain. When you win after solving puzzles, your brain experiences a spike in dopamine levels. This gives you that feeling of instant gratification. If you’ve had a long day at work and you feel like there isn’t anything much you can do well to contribute, this newfound level of confidence after successfully solving the puzzles may be what you need.
When you’re happier, the rest of the family stays happier as well. Remember that the best, healthiest, and happiest version of yourself is precisely what you can give to your family.
- Helps Develop Fine Motor Skills
Here’s something for young children. Indeed, escape room games are excellent for every member of the family, even the youngest ones. As parents, you’ll want to ensure that the games your children play are what they need for their development. One of those facets is fine motor skills.
Escape rooms cover everything from hand-eye coordination to spatial awareness. They are found to be one of those games that can help improve the rapid development of fine motor skills.
- Brings In Better Communication
One of the challenges families face is good communication between all the members, especially when there are teenagers that parents may find hard to deal with during their puberty stage. At this stage, teenagers may feel distant, with some thinking that their parents can’t relate to them because of generational gap and other factors. They also avoid opening up to them, so there is less time to talk with each other.
With that, it’s crucial for families to spend time with each other. This doesn’t mean you’ll be in the same room, but you’ll do your respective activities without talking. A better way would be to pick an activity where the whole family talks and helps each other to achieve a common goal.
Escape room games are perfect for such situations. Even one session can bring the whole family together if they have the chance, so let them practice what it’s like to make plans as a team, and allow them to communicate effectively to find ways to win the game. Remember that with escape room games, coming together to solve an immediate problem is one of the most critical decisions to solve the puzzle within the time limit.
- Improves Concentration
The fast-paced life that parents go through today has them in a position where they may find it hard to concentrate or focus. There’s that never-ending rush to complete some tasks within a shorter period. In the long run, this constant desire to do more within a day creates that unpleasant psychological effect of a hindrance in one’s ability to concentrate.
For children who are always on the move, sitting still and concentrating on one thing at a time becomes difficult to accomplish. This is where escape room games prove to be a winner.
Escape room games are all about concentration. They’re usually linear, meaning you must solve the first puzzle before moving on to the next one. This fact proves why participants should pull in all the focus they can so they can finish every puzzle accurately at the quickest time possible. After all, nothing beats the feeling of winning anything through coordination and teamwork.
Ideally, players must give all their attention and focus on a particular problem before moving on to the next one. This is one vital skill that translates even in real life.
- Comes With So Many Themes To Choose From
Just because you are members of the same family doesn’t automatically mean that you all like the same things. Naturally, it’s normal to have differences in preferences. For families, you can discuss turns during the family time which games appeal to you the most. Give each other a chance to prove the merits of each game, then decide as a family.
Escape rooms aim to please all family members with the different themes it offers. You can try out one theme per weekend to keep every member happy and excited for the next one.
- Can Improve Gross Motor Skills
Escape game rooms are not only limited to improving and developing fine motor skills. Gross motor skills are also tested and worked out. In contrast to fine motor skills, gross motor skills cover walking, jumping, and balance. Escape room games also let participants do these movements, thereby impacting their gross motor skills.
- Increases Problem-Solving Skills
Another skill that comes in handy in life is problem-solving skills. Not everything should be given immediately, especially for children, so they’ll learn how to solve problems by themselves. Among the many games the entire family can play together and choose from, it’s safe to say that escape room games are one of the top best choices for this purpose.
Besides, escape room games come with a wide variety of different problems to face. This can keep the momentum high enough, so every member is dynamic and happy to stay engaged and energized.
After regularly playing escape room games, you may begin to notice the positive effect of how your problem-solving ability may have improved. It’s not that you know how to solve every problem you face. Yet now you know what steps to take first to have a good start towards solving those problems.
- Enhances Teamwork
A family is essentially a team. They stick together, so no one gets left behind. As a family journeys through life together, they help each other face and solve problems they’ll encounter through the years. These are evident in the sayings ‘There’s no I in team’ and ‘With family, no one gets left behind’.
While ideal, this also isn’t the easiest to maintain for families. There will be instances in the course of family life where it will be challenging to be understanding of each other. Working as a team may not always be second nature to each family member, especially when misunderstandings and individual priorities also need to be fulfilled.
This is why it’s crucial to come together as a family now and then to rebuild that team camaraderie that may be fleeting away. In an escape room game, the cooperation of every family member is critical to the end. There’s that unified goal of leaving the room before the clock ticks zero.
Teamwork is shared and fostered when the family consistently bonds this way. This can be carried through not just in playing the games but also in real-life situations of dealing with and fostering good relationships with immediate family members.
- Exposes Individual Strengths And Weaknesses
Lastly, escape room games can reveal the strengths and weaknesses of every family member. This is essential to forming good relationships and understanding each other as you learn to become tolerant of each other’s weaknesses. In the long run, this may be one of the top secrets that can strengthen family bonds when there’s that newfound understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, escape room games don’t only suit corporate team building. If you want to play games with your family to foster better and more positive relationships, then escape room games are a choice to beat. If you think of it, escape room games can be more demanding than other family and team-building games, as they require individual presence of mind and collaborative team effort. It may exhaust you, but you’re sure to have loads of family fun, with new memories registered in your memory bank—one you can tell your grandkids and great-grandkids in the future.
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