An Intellectual Game and Team Bonding Evening
The idea to look at the Dāvanu Serviss offerings came while brainstorming about how our small but lovely team would celebrate the company anniversary. The quest "Baker Street 221B" organised by Find Exit caught my eye - a minimum of two participants required, maximum four - perfect. Even though none of us is really a fan of detective fiction or specifically Arthur Conan Doyle's work, there was a great temptation to experience a quest.
Moreover, in this kind of game - as we later confirmed ourselves - participants' personality types are revealed: one is very deliberate, thinking first, then acting; another acts first and thinks later; yet another tries to do everything themselves without involving the others; the last one voices many ideas and guesses, generating options, but actually does little and only gets involved when a door-opening code needs to be entered.
The quest was booked for 18:00, so a little after 17:00 we headed towards the address given in the confirmation email. Better safe than sorry - a Friday evening and Riga city centre traffic jams. Pleasingly, a parking space for one car had been reserved outside the building on Tērbatas iela, so that concern fell away.
The game master greeted us and introduced the legend: "A series of horrifying crimes has taken place in London and a suspect has already been arrested, but they are not the real culprit. An innocent person is about to be wrongfully convicted - your friend. Sherlock Holmes has mysteriously disappeared somewhere, but you gain access to his apartment (Baker Street 221B), where various investigation materials have already been collected. You must find and announce the real killer's name and the location of the next crime as quickly as possible. You have one hour."
The following hour felt subjectively like it lasted about 15–20 minutes (time was short). When we hit a dead end, the quest master joined in and helped with guiding questions through a microphone. We opened the first doors fairly nimbly, jointly working out and spotting the needed code, but later it didn't go as smoothly. Especially when we had to calculate the real suspect's shoe size. The safe also gave us trouble (ah, a life of bank robbery is clearly not our calling).
In several situations we realised we had a tendency to overcomplicate things rather than see the object and simply use it for what it was meant for. Well, this was our first quest ever. Perhaps if we'd played more, the answer to "what do we do now?" would have come much faster. All's well that ends well - we managed to get both in and out of the locked Sherlock Holmes apartment in just under an hour.
A good aftertaste and a keen desire to visit another of the quests recommended to us by the game master - a kind and obliging man. One other quest, by the way, is precisely a bank robbery on Baker Street. Ha ha - interesting to see how those who aren't on friendly terms with safe-cracking would get on there?!
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