A Tourist’s Review of Amsterdam Escape Rooms

In May 2017, we spent three days in Amsterdam as part of a trip to the Up the Game conference in the Netherlands and played 18 of the best rooms we could find in the Dutch capital. As per usual, we scoured the internet for advice, contacted enthusiasts and emailed owners. I’m not going to bother putting together a detailed list of where you can go to find information – Toby from the Escape the Review blog has done a great job of that already.

If you’re looking for the very best games in the city, then I’d highly recommend Sherlocked. Their two rooms, the Vault and the Architect, are two of the very best experiences I’ve ever had, with their only weakness being quality of puzzles. If you want something immersive but with a little bit more humour, then I would have recommended Chicago Boom’s Escape through Time. Unfortunately, they closed their game not long after our visit. The good news is that they’ve got a second experience opening later in the year called Escape through the Movies.

If a high-tech mission-style game with a good set appeals to you, then I’d recommend Judgement Day from MyEscape.Club, which is a Terminator-esque game which sees you break into a military bunker facility to bring down the AI robots. Many, many people recommend Questomatica and, while I thought their games were good, I didn’t enjoy them as much as their reputation suggested I would. Finally, I really enjoyed Logiclocks, one of the early games in the city but which is still going strong and has solid puzzle content and a pretty set.

In truth, though, the standard of games in Amsterdam was very, very high, and all of the 18 games we played would have been solid additions to any other city. You could easily play 20-25 games in the city and be happy with the outcome. If you want to read about the games in a bit more depth, you can do so here:

And here’s my Breda bonus – a review of three games in the south of the country that we visited just after the Up the Game conference.

The standard of GM-ing was high throughout. English was always spoken, and clues were generally offered when required but could be asked for. Staff were friendly and rooms were clean. They certainly know how to deliver a good customer experience in the Netherlands!

Anything else?

Yes – we didn’t visit Time Trip in Amsterdam because we’d already played their games, which are TRAP designed. I’d played Medieval in Budapest and it was a great (albeit fairly linear) game, while the rest of my team had played their Amazon-themed game, which is generally regarded as the weakest of the TRAP offerings.

That’s all, folks

I hope you found this write-up useful. If you did, then please let me know via email, and that will encourage me to write more in future. If you’ve got opinions on the above or, equally, if you’ve found some other gems that people should take a look at, do drop a comment below.

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