The Idea

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:54:41 +1200

Sevy’s birthday is coming up in a few months. Of course she’s thinking about how she wants to celebrate, she’s always one to plan way ahead. A couple of days ago she decided she wanted to do an escape room with her friends. The whole family generally loves escape rooms and we’ve done plenty of them.

It’s a huge undertaking, but I thought that instead of going to an escape room, I’d try building one instead. I love tinkering with microcontrollers, so It’s the perfect project to put those ideas to good use.

Sevy is a theatre nerd. She loves all things theatre, especially musical theatre, so her mum thought that would be a perfect theme. With that in mind, I gathered a list of her favourite musicals and narrowed it down to a few that I know well enough to work with:

Wicked
Hamilton
Mean Girls
Six

One problem I really wanted to solve: there will likely be at least eight teens at the party (based on past experience) and that often means one person is solving a puzzle while a bunch look on, either shouting ideas or just bored. To address this, we’ll split the bulk of it into four sets of puzzles (one for each of the musicals). The entire group will start out together, then split into four groups. Each group will solve puzzles to reveal an artefact. The final puzzle can only be solved by combining all four artefacts.

This, of course, means it’s almost four escape rooms in one. Good thing I have five months.

Ideas on The Curtain Must Rise

The Idea