Ancient Egyptian Escape Room

My once little Abigail has recently turned a much bigger girl twelve, and to celebrate her life I threw an Ancient Egyptian Escape room party. Now these can be as simple as photocopying the whole game and playing it as is, or going all out to the point of near hysteria… I’m sure you can all guess which option I chose? I may have gone a little bit over-the-top but it was huge fun seeing all my ideas come to fruition. The actual escape room game comes from lockpaperscissors. I’d had a few months to plan it, and had decided to turn our dining room into an ancient Egyptian mummy’s tomb…

All Hands on Deck: Decorating for the Ancient Egyptian Escape Room

I worked solidly all day Friday and all of Saturday morning, and dragged in as many helpers as I could. Also, I made a video of it all taking shape and Thomas filmed the end result before the intrepid explorers ‘fell’ down a hidden shaft and into the tomb below.

My goal throughout it all was to create a fully dark room…but this was just the start of the madness which followed!

As you can see it was all starting to come together. It was still a little light for me, however, so I asked Thomas to put up black bags on the exterior of the windows, which he did.

Creating Task Areas for the Ancient Egyptian Escape Room

We also started to create little task areas. There were approximately ten tasks which I situated in numerical order going clockwise around the room. We hung a huge blanket between the living and dining area which had a small space at the bottom. This acted as our shaft. The first and second task were right by the shaft:

Task One

There was a papyrus scroll to read first, introducing them to the predicament they found themselves in, stuck in an ancient Egyptian tomb. The first task was to retrieve the diaries of their great grandfather, Howard Carter. I had covered a shoe box with brown paper and added some black card on top and a black card pocket at the front. And I wrote the word ‘Open’ on the black card in hieroglyphics, leaving a decipher card in the pocket. The rest of the box was decorated with gems. I wrote ‘Task 1’ on a piece of papyrus and lit a candle for added atmosphere.

Task Two

After task one came…yes, you guessed it, task two!

Task two consisted of using their newly acquired diaries and working out how to unlock the stone lock. These were originally photocopies, which I had printed out onto glossy photo paper. First, I cut them out and cut out eight pieces of card from Amazon packaging, sticking them together with the photocopy on top and giving them the thickness of a real stone slab. Second, I did the same with the smaller stones, making them four card thicknesses. Lastly, I then cut the stone shapes out of the stone lock and they were ready to go:

Once they had created the long snake and unlocked the stone lock, they received a key. I had made this up myself. This key unlocked another box around the room to reveal the missing pieces of the Rosetta stone:

Task Three

The key enabled task three to be carried out:

I made the Rosetta stone using a thick photograph frame which I covered with black card and then stuck the photo of the Rosetta stone as provided in the game. The box opened to reveal the missing pieces of the Rosetta stone:

Using their diaries, the girls had to place the missing pieces onto the frame which gave them the code needed for the next task:

Task Four

Task four required the use of the stone to decipher a quote from the Pharaoh himself:

Even Charlotte got in on the action:

As they read out the decipher, they turned to see a mummy lying on the table in front of them.

Task Five

There was another scroll to read before advancing to task five:

I had made four canopic jars by wrapping jam jars in brown paper and sticking the photocopies supplied on the front. It was these photocopies which contained the clues. On the left was the name of the body part which was to go into each jar. I used the plastic body parts from our educational skeleton:

On the right was a simple maths question, which they needed to solve in order to complete task 7.

Task Six

Their diaries gave enough information that after finding out which part of the body went in each jar, the girls could deduce which head needed to be on the lid of the canopic jars, thus completing task six:

Task Seven

Task 7 required the girls to piece a puzzle of the heart together to find which order the jars should sit and therefore which order to place the answers to the maths questions for task 7:

The girls then needed to transfer the number answers, in the correct order, to the supplied sheet. This gave them the weight of the pharaoh’s heart:

The balance sheet also had a number puzzle using ancient Egyptian numbers:

The girls worked it out to find out how heavy the Feather of Truth was:

And found that the Feather of Truth was the same weight as the heart! Phew, the Pharaoh was free to continue his journey to the underworld! They weighed them just to make sure, using an actual feather and the completed puzzle of the heart (which serendipidishly weighed exactly the same 🙂 )

Check out my rather excellent scales (even if I do say so myself!):

Task Eight

Task 8 was beckoning and with it the hardest puzzle to solve/ to understand, so much so the company have a video on how to solve it:

No problem for our girls as they rope their older sister (who I had shared how to do it with):

Unfortunately I didn’t get any photos of the completed task, which is a shame 🙁

Dinner and a Walk after the Ancient Egyptian Escape Room

After the escape room was completed, we all went for a long country walk and arrived home just in time to enjoy our normal birthday food of baked potatoes and toppings:

And Abs had a wonderful birthday cake made by Becs and Gary and decorated by Becs and Charlotte, with as many Egyptian themed decorations they could fit on:

A lovely end to a really rather special birthday!

This Ancient Egyptian Escape Room was the first time we’d done anything like this. I really recommend it!

Ancient Egyptian Escape Room – Further Info:

Lock, Paper, Scissors

Ancient Egyptian Homeschool Posts