Locked In North Wales Abergele – Black & White

The Story:
Find a way out and Escape the human size checker board solving traditional escape room clues and puzzles before you completely lose your minds and get stuck in there forever.

Don’t worry though you don’t need to know how to play chess.

Once we arrived in Abergele, parking was nice and easy as there was a free car park just down the road at the library to the west, or a pay and display round the corner on Water Street.

We’d arrived quite early, but were welcomed in to the reception straight away where our host invited us to store our coats in the lockers provided.

We were also asked to leave our phones here, and while I appreciate and agree that any kind of recording in the rooms should be and was prohibited, I’d normally just turn my phone off and leave it in my pocket. The reception area was locked, and while I’m sure it was perfectly secure, with all the info I keep stored on my phone I’d have been a little more comfortable keeping it with me, but we did as requested. I guess I could have just left it in my pocket and said nothing, but… damn my honesty!

Locked In North Wales’ clue system was one that we hadn’t encountered before, in that we could ask for as many clues as needed (via intercom), but each one would cost us a minute of our time, and we ALWAYS need clues.

The room itself was decorated exactly as the description says – a human sized checker board with squares everywhere you look, which made quite a striking impression as we entered. Our host showed us the intercom, gave a few room specific instructions that related to a couple of the features in there, then left us watching a short intro video before the timer kicked off.

The puzzles themselves were quite varied and included a small amount of observation and searching, a couple of physical (though not strenuous) tasks, simple codes, and some maths…

Ahh yes, the maths, which I failed on miserably. It was a good job JM was with us as she used an ‘alternate’ method (yes, by which I mean ‘correct’) and saved us from sliding further behind than we probably already were. Note to self for the future… let someone else do the maths.

There was one tiny issue we had with the room, and that was a small amount of writing on a specific hidden item in there. Now, it was evident that this item had been bought with this text on there, but in the context of the room we found it to be quite misleading as it turned out to have a completely different function to what it actually said. Something as simple as a sticker over the top would probably solve this though. Hopefully, what I’ve said there is quite vague as I’m trying to be as unspecific as possible as to not give anything away, but hopefully if anyone has done the room then they’ll understand what I’m talking about.

Overall we really enjoyed the room, particularly the simple but effective theme, and we’ll definitely be back for more. We don’t really need an excuse to visit North Wales for a day out, but with the added temptation of nearby Escape Rooms we’ll hopefully be back sooner rather than later.