In an effort to find a good outing spot in the Egyptian capital that, for once, does not revolve around eating and shisha-ing, we jumped at the opportunity to head to the latest addition to Cairo’s activity scene, BreakOut.
Founded by the brilliant young mind of Tarek Safwat, the idea behind BreakOut is to lock a team of people inside a room for an hour and leave them to escape by figuring out clues before time is up.
BreakOut currently offers three themed rooms: “Public Toilet”, “Prison Cell” and “The Cursed Tomb”. Each one is realistically decorated down to the smallest detail (like scent!) and features clues according to each theme. More rooms are planned to open up in the near future.
Players group themselves into teams of two to five people. Each team then gets to choose the room from which they will spend the next hour of their lives trying to escape. We’re afraid we can’t give away any more details about what happens after that – what happens in BreakOut stays in BreakOut.
We can say, however, that each one of the eight people in our group had a blast trying to work their way out of the rooms. We were completely consumed and very much into the game, letting our inner Sherlocks out, and we hardly noticed the time passing.
It was also great as a team building exercise, as each member was focusing on how to find a way out of the room for the entire team. Leave no man behind, right?
Forget about the stress and routine of daily life and meet your colleagues in a different, unique atmosphere where you get to time travel together into the mystery you’re trying to solve.
The activity highlights each person’s strengths and it gave us a chance to leave all distractions behind, with the entire team having one sole target: to break out before the time runs out.
And once you do manage to escape, the rush you feel is incredible! It’s a mix of success, excitement, team spirit and genuine happiness. You’re not just colleagues or friends anymore, but a team of warriors that put their minds and abilities together and managed to achieve their target.
Ever since the revolution, we’ve been taking sides – “You’re either with us or against us” has become an Egyptian motto. We tend to forget that we all want to reach the same goal at the end of the day. BreakOut is a great experience to forget about our differences and work together towards an ultimate goal.
The rooms available at the moment are all of the same level, but in the future, the levels will get harder and it will become more difficult to escape from the rooms. There’s one room that we can’t wait to open called “The Nutty Scientist”, where you have to break out before the mad scientist returns to experiment on you!
BreakOut also plans to have a score system with a list of highest scores, encouraging teams to challenge others to try and beat their best times.
Besides the three foundational rooms, BreakOut also customizes rooms for special events as well as companies that are looking to have a tailor-made challenge for their employees, and then have their talents assessed based on their performance in the room.
All in all, we highly recommend that you grab your friends or co-workers and head to BreakOut. You will get to spend one hour with no phones and no connection to the outside world, wracking your brains together and actually spending quality time with one another.
BreakOut is located on Street 90 in Tagamoa. For booking and information call +201210529695 and check them out on Facebook and Instagram.
WE SAID THIS: Don’t miss 6 Steps to Building a Committed Team at Work and #100DaysOfMyDubai: Getting in to Get Out at @HintHuntDubai.