Just finished my 7th escape room. Sadly we didn't finish in under an hour. It was my second company which allows you to run overtime just to finish the room, which I actually appreciate because then you get to see the room to completion. Turns out we only needed three more minutes to complete the room.
We had a two brand new players along with my wife and myself and I think I tried to do too much puzzle solving to compensate and not a good enough job searching. I've been trying to figure out the best way to introduce new people to the hobby, but I end up wanting to try to hard to complete the room versus letting the new people really get their hands dirty. I think I have to step back and let them learn too, but when there are only a limited number of escape rooms in my area, I would hate to waste escape rooms where I didn't try as hard as I could.
I've also discovered two excellent escape room podcasts:
That's all for now. I've been so busy with life I haven't had time for more posts, but I wanted to connected with my followers. Let me know if anybody has a better idea of how to introduce new people to escape rooms.