[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
Images: Catherine Frederick”][/title]

There’s a mystery begging to be solved in downtown Fort Smith, Arkansas. Everything you need to unravel this puzzle rests inside a redbrick building on North 10th Street, in one of the oldest parts of the city. There, you’ll be challenged to find the clues that could uncover who murdered Sophia Blake, a wealthy young woman who lived in Avington Manor in the early 1900s.

 

This tragedy, thankfully, is fictional. But the quest to unravel “who done it” is real. And if you’re curious and clever, then you’re the perfect candidate for a trip to ClueMasters, the city’s first Escape Room venue.

 

If you’re not familiar with Escape Rooms, they work something like this. You enter a room with a few of your friends or family. You’re told a story, and then given a mission. In ClueMasters’ Murder in the Manor room, for example, you’re trying to find out who killed Sophia. You go inside, the door snaps shut behind you, and a short video begins to play. You learn a bit about the unsolved crime, the rules of the game and how the room is set up, and then you’re asked to solve this mystery in one short hour.

 

It sounds deceptively simple, but that’s only if you haven’t done it. Murder in the Manor is one of three themed Escape Rooms at ClueMasters. It’s a little over 100 square feet, dimly lit, and decorated to match the time period. Once the introductory video stops, the screen shows a timer with looming numbers, counting down from sixty minutes to zero.

 

That’s it. There’s no other direction. And so you search, looking under tables, lifting items, even running your fingers along the frame of a large portrait on one of the walls.

 

In less than a minute, you’ll likely find the first clue. This is when you and your friends could get a bit cocky. Don’t. It only gets more difficult from that point on. There are word puzzles and cryptic messages left on now-yellowed letters written by Sophia, old photographs with messages penned on the back, and diagrams you believe might hold special meaning, although you’re not altogether sure. You’ll find actual, physical keys, and you’ll have to discover which locks (there are several) they fit. Once you open the locks, you’ll find yet another clue, which will lead to another piece of the puzzle. In addition to the traditional locks, there are others that require a combination to open. How do you know what the combinations are? Well, you don’t. Those are revealed by solving even more puzzles. Figure out all the puzzles and you’ll find a device that stops the timer.

 

It is a lot like being inside a life-size version of a video game. And if you’re going to find out “who done it,” you have to work together.  Early on, you’ll figure out which person on your team is the word-master. They’ll be decoding those crossword-esque puzzles like a king. The logical thinker will keep you from the helter-skelter antics of the creative. And the creative one will rule the clues that require leaps of imagination.

 

But back to that clock, with its seconds disappearing as regularly as a heartbeat.  That is, as regularly as the heartbeat of someone whose adrenaline isn’t spiking. Because when you’re in the middle of this adventure, your heart is racing. You want to win. You really, really want to win.

 

Before the hour’s up, you’ll be addled and baffled and confused. That’s OK. If you get stuck, you can ask for a clue. Even the team I was on had to ask, although just once, and we didn’t quite finish in an hour, but close enough. The fastest time on record when we played was closer to forty-five minutes. When we finally solved the mystery, we looked around. The room, perfect when we entered it, was in disarray. Drawers opened, clues scattered, keys dangling from open locks.

 

It felt as if we’d conquered something monumental.

 

This is the part where I could tell you what became of Sophia, the heiress who was born with money but not longevity. But I wouldn’t do that. You’ll want to find out for yourself. And that’s what Devin Kuhl, one of the four partners in ClueMasters, is banking on.

 

Devin thinks that players will tell their friends, who will come in to play, and have so much fun they’ll pass the word along. Devin sometimes hears the players from his spot in the front lobby. There’s a lot of laughter, and strategizing, and clues being read out loud. While this in itself is exciting, it’s not what he likes best. “I was drawn to the business, because how often do you put down your phones for an entire hour, talk, work together, and have fun?” Devin asks. “Even at a movie, you’re not talking to each other. And I think that aspect, for groups and families and even as team-building exercises for companies, is going to be good for the community.”

 

The community aspect is important to the owners of ClueMasters. They all grew up in the area—Devin is from the tiny town of Hackett. And each of them (Devin, Chad Summerhill, Shane Jennings, and Jeremy May) knows a good deal about marketing.

 

In August of 2015, they visited an Escape Room, had a great time, and came back with the notion that they could create one that was even better. They got to work, researching, and looking for furniture that could be adapted to have hidden compartments. One of their wives even wrote the story for Murder in the Manor. One of their biggest challenges was finding the right location.

 

They knew that they wanted to be in the downtown Fort Smith area, which will one day be home to the planned U.S. Marshals Museum. They’ve seen traffic rise recently due to the Unexpected Project, which brought in world-renowned artists to paint eleven murals on buildings in the downtown area, during a weeklong festival in September of last year. They believe downtown is going to boom, and they want to be part of that revitalization.

 

Devin says the first Escape Rooms can be traced to Japan in 2006 or 2007. They grew in popularity, moving to the U.K., and made it to America a few years later, mostly in big cities with a lot of tourist traffic, and some of those are extremely difficult. “There are some rooms in L.A. and Toronto that have like a fifteen percent success rate. I don’t think that makes people feel good about themselves. We want people to feel good about accomplishing something.”

 

Right now, there are three Escape Rooms at ClueMasters, each with a different theme, including one called Clue Pig Sooie, which is a search for four tickets to a Razorback game. Those will be changed after a while, to keep things fresh.

 

Devin thinks people from all walks of life will have a great time solving these puzzles. He also believes corporations will be using the Escape Rooms as a fun way to teach teams how to work together, and to see each employee’s strengths.

 

Exploring an Escape Room for an hour costs eighty-five dollars for a group. The recommended number of players is four, and you have to be at least fifteen years old to play without an adult. It’s smart to book your adventure ahead of time, to make sure you don’t miss out.

 

ClueMasters did a lot of testing before opening a few weeks ago. They found a few things that needed adjusting, but overall they’d gotten everything just right. Devin smiles as he talks about the process. It was like a puzzle, he says, but that didn’t worry him at all. He happens to be great at solving them.

 

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