Our family enjoys escape rooms and I have maintained a list of the rooms we had done on my website for a bit. I knew it was mostly complete and for sure it had gaps. We were talking to another Escape Room Enthusiast recently and I decided it was time to get our list right. How many rooms have we done? This needed to be answered. But how?

The list I had was created from blog posts I had of rooms which was good but not complete. These days I blog pretty much every room we do, but I didn’t early on. Then I realized I had four sources of good information:

  1. My Blog: This was the source of my original list. I know these entries are accurate.
  2. Photos: We almost always, if not always, get a photo at the end of an escape room — but not always with our camera. Either way, my photo collection should have most rooms.
  3. YNAB: We use YNAB for personal finances and we’ve certainly paid for every escape room we’ve done. We’ve never paid in cash. Also, we have kept one YNAB file for a very long time so searches for rooms should match.
  4. Calendar: We’ve kept the same Apple iCloud accounts and calendars for a very long time as well, and that old data is still there. And we are diligent about keeping our calendars accurate even on trips. This was particularly useful for entries found in YNAB where we almost never paid on the same day we did the room.

After a very thorough and comprehensive scouring of all of these sources we now have 50% more rooms. We previously identified 43 and after a thorough review we are now at 65 escape rooms!

I still want to improve the information in the list. I have a spreadsheet now that is my source of truth and I’m using an overly complex formula to produce the Markdown I can use to update the website. It could also be fun to do some blog pensieve posts for some of the older rooms where I have a photo.

So now, our full and complete List of Escape Rooms!