Last weekend, my team and I had to defuse a bomb. Well, we do this (somehow) on a regular basis at work, but this time we only had 60 minutes to do it, and we got to see time running out on a large screen. We were locked inside this room filled with military gear, and had one hour to figure out how to make it out alive by defusing the bomb placed inside the room.

It took a lot of reasoning, logic, teamwork, and some out of the box thinking to make it. We failed at times, were given hints, but one by one, we managed to put the pieces together and unlock doors, lockers and find clues that finally helped us defuse the bomb. We barely made it – five seconds more, and the bomb would have exploded.

An hour filled with adrenaline! As you can imagine, it was a game – but the challenge felt so real!
It was an amazing team building experience for us, a fun activity for a group of four people. We kept talking about it after the hour passed.

It’s called Escape Room and is run by the people at X Hostel in Bucharest. There are two such Escape Rooms (now we’re looking forward to trying the second, which looked even harder to solve), and solving them has already been listed the number two activity in Bucharest on Trip Advisor.

Daniele Colombo, the founder and CEO of X Hostel, told Romania-Insider.com he would like to open more rooms, after opening these first two a month ago. People have been asking for a third room already – after you played one room, you want something else, it’s no fun playing it again. Colombo, who runs X Hostels in Spain, Bulgaria and Hungary as well, would like to expand the Escape Room concept to Spain and Bulgaria as well.

So far, locals and hostel residents try the Escape Room, and many people offer the experience as a gift to their friends or colleagues. „Time will come soon for team buildings as well,” Daniele tells Romania-Insider.com. He started the Escape Room concept in Romania with the help of a team who run similar rooms in Budapest.

It’s not the only „out of the box thinking” kind of project Daniele and his partners run. In June, they will open Camp X near Curtea de Arges, a place that will give guests the real army feel, with week-long packages, as well as weekend and four day plans.

Meanwhile, X Hostel, which has 85 beds, making it the largest hotel in Romania, says Daniele, saw a 60 percent occupancy rate in April, but the founder hopes it will reach 80-90 percent during the months of summer. Australians and Americans make the biggest groups of guests at the hostel, but there are a lot of Western Europeans, especially British guests as well, Daniele explains.

Corina Chirileasa, corina@romania-insider.com

(photos Escape Rooms on Facebook)