New Zealand round up and 2026 escape plan

New Zealand trip

We're finally back from our New Zealand North Island trip that took us from Auckland all the way down to Wellington. It was a fantastic trip that saw plenty of outdoor walks, children's activities, Lord of the Rings stuff, and of course, escape rooms!

In all, we ended up doing 19 escape rooms across 10 days, with the busiest day being the one when we played all 5 games at Xcape in Lower Hutt, just north of Wellington. I will be separately reviewing all 19 games shortly (hopefully soon), but in the meantime here are my general thoughts on NZ escape rooms:

• On the whole, the NZ escape rooms we played were pretty close in quality to their Aussie counterparts. That said, we generally chose rooms that were highly rated on Morty or recommended by enthusiasts on social media, so what we played were possibly the best the country had to offer.

• I had expected, due to the lower population (only about one-fifth of Australia's) and thus likely lower budgets, NZ's games would be relatively lacking in production value. On the other hand, due to likely lower rents, I thought NZ's games would generally be bigger and contain more spaces. Both of these assumptions turned out to be wrong. Many of the games we played in NZ had theming and set designs that were as good as the majority of Aussie games we've played (except maybe at the very top end). However, I was surprised that quite a few of the NZ games we played were either single-room experiences or had only 2 spaces, which are less common in Australia these days.

• The overall difficulty of the puzzles was also similar to what we have experienced elsewhere, though we did encounter quite a few puzzles we hadn't seen before, which is always a pleasant surprise. Puzzle designers never ceases to impress and amaze me.

• We had the opportunity to chat with a few owners and game designers, many of whom built their games from scratch, and it was awesome to see that passion for escape rooms is universal. The kids (Z and J) have been really getting into the design and technical aspects of escape rooms, so they really bombarded the owners/designers with questions about their use and sourcing of materials and technology, puzzle design, and space utilisation.

• I would say New Zealand's best rooms are probably mostly in or around Wellington (we played at 4 very solid establishments within a 30-minute drive of each other), plus Escapist in Hamilton (about a 1.5-hour drive south of Auckland).

• New Zealand in general is just a fantastic family destination. Apart from escape rooms and nature trails, some of our highlights included Skyline Rotorua (luge and zip line), Wonderworld aMAZEment park (giant mazes and puzzles), Redwoods Treewalk (which now also has an artificial glow worm cave) and Brewtown (huge complex that has activities like go karts, paintball, bowling, etc.). The top attractions for me personally were Hobbiton and the Weta Workshop, which incidentally offered a lot of escape room-adjacent insights into set design and creating cinematic experiences.

• We only did the North Island this time and can't wait to visit the South Island next time. I hear some of the best NZ escape rooms are in Christchurch!

You shall not escape this room!

Making progress

Our team is really starting to find its stride. On this trip, we ended setting or tying 3 all-time room records, setting one monthly record, and landing a top-5 spot on the all-time leaderboard for another. I put it down to finally communicating better and injecting more attention and effort into hunt and seek, which have always been our main weaknesses. We now also have more defined roles, with Z usually taking the lead, E handling all of the note-taking, J doing anything that requires good eyesight or dexterity, and me doing all the stuff that requires reading.

In other exciting news, both Z and J hit 100 rooms on our NZ trip and will soon be two of the youngest TERPECA voters in the world! E is still a few games back and will hit that milestone next week, when we play all 4 games at Escape Reality on the Central Coast.

2026 plans

The sad reality is that we are starting to run out of escape rooms in Australia. By my latest count, there's probably only about a dozen left in Sydney that we're still interested in playing, and that includes the Narrow Escape's brand new room The Hidden Temple and Elude's Magician's Lair, which just opened this week. There's apparently a new establishment called Urban Escapade that will be opening soon in Rosebery, so hopefully that means more to do. With escape rooms being such an expensive hobby, especially in Australia, I really do want to avoid wasting money on crappy games.

We're just about done with Brisbane and the Gold Coast too, and there's only a smattering of games in Adelaide, Perth, and Hobart that we'll no doubt tackle on future family trips. Melbourne is probably the only place left in Australia where there's a good chunk of games we'd still like to try, though we probably won't be heading back until at least when The Curium Experience's newest room is released (and who knows when that will be!).

What this means is that we will have to venture overseas again if we want more escape room adventures! In April, we are heading back to Taiwan, where I hope to tackle a handful of games, possibly even venturing further south to Taichung where the best games apparently are. Then in July, the big one — a family trip to Canada (via Japan), where I have already booked most of the TERPECA Finalists and a bunch of other nominees in Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec. I just hope our bodies hold up! New Zealand was kind of a trial run that included a lot of escape rooms in a short amount of time plus a significant amount of driving (around 1,300km). Canada will likely see double the amount of escape rooms and even more driving (at least 1,500km). Yikes.

On our way back from Canada, we'll be spending a few days in Tokyo, where we hope to play, among other games, Scrap's new Escape from the Blue Room, which I have heard some amazing things about. Will I be able to make it to 200 rooms and become a TERPECA nominator by October this year? Looks unlikely at this stage, but you just never know!