One day - it was midway through my shift - a team was late. Normally when a team isn’t on time, we give them a call, you know, ‘are you on your way’, and we tell them about our fifteen minute cut off point. After that time, we’ve got to make changes to the game to make sure they still have a good experience, or if they’re really late sometimes we recommend rescheduling.
Anyway, I called the team. The woman who picked up the phone sounded super stressed, and she explained that it was her son’s eleventh birthday party - he and his friends had just watched Spider-Man: No Way Home at the cinema and it had been longer than they’d expected, which was why they were running late. She said they’d be there in about twenty minutes.
Now, normally if they’re that late we suggest they come another time instead, but it was the last game of my shift and I didn’t have anywhere to be afterwards, so I figured I’d still run it anyway - it was a birthday party, after all. Eventually this group of very excited eleven year old boys came in. The mum sneakily handed me a birthday card and I hid it in the room for her, a surprise for the birthday boy!
I went to start the brief and when it got to the ending of the explanation of their mission, I decided to throw in a few quick Marvel references, just for fun. Since they’d just seen Spider-Man I told them there’s no athleticism needed in the room - there should be no crawling on the walls or hanging from the ceiling just like Spider-Man! And no using technological devices like Iron Man, no super strength like the Hulk, that kind of thing. They were loving it - it was actually a bit difficult for me to calm them down and get them into the room, they were that excited!
They were having a hilarious time inside the room comparing themselves to the Avengers and very much enjoying themselves. Towards the end they unlocked the place where the birthday card was hidden - it was Spider-Man, of course! And at the end, the mum came to thank me for the effort I’d put in to tailor it for her son’s birthday, and then she asked me who my favourite Marvel hero was.
I decided not to tell her it was Deadpool.
When she’s not running games at clueQuest, Celia spends her time trying to figure out why Robert Downey Junior is still called Junior, even though he’s ‘old now’. To try your hand at being a super spy like Black Widow, you can book one of our four escape room missions here.