Reinventing the Escape Room: How We Scaled Jidara Into a Global Team-Building Experience

What happens when you challenge the very concept of an escape room? What about when you want to design one that can be played simultaneously by thousands of players worldwide? This was the vision behind Journey to Jidara—a premium escape room and global team-building experience.

When we set off to build Jidara, we took everything we learned from creating The Jazz Heist (below!) and evolved this escape room experience to entirely new heights.

The Challenge: Global Immersion

Creating immersive experiences has been our passion for over a decade. We've designed games for hundreds of thousands of players, weaving together physical objects, digital interfaces, immersive actors, and compelling narratives.

Our previous portable, in-office escape room, The Jazz Heist, proved we could blend storytelling with mechanical ingenuity. But Journey to Jidara demanded something more ambitious.

1) It needed to be a game with physical elements and an immaculate set design.

2) BUT it also needed to reach players around the globe. Whether folks played in Mountain View, Zurich, Bangalore, or New York, the experience needed to feel equally intriguing and dazzling.

3) AND it needed to maintain the handcrafted feel that makes our events feel so special. (We hid Waldo in the designs – where is he??)

The Blueprint for Immersion at Scale

Our solution was to create an experience that embodied three core principles:

1. Premium Quality

Every component we designed was crafted to feel luxurious and satisfying to handle. We tested 15 paper types, 9 box designs, 6 printing styles, and 3 metallic finishing processes.

2. Intuitive Design

No instruction manual is required. We wanted players to be able to instinctively follow their noses to figure out what to do next. Figuring out how to play becomes part of the fun!

3. Flexible Engagement

The story and puzzles allow for natural breaks, making it enjoyable whether folks play in 15-minute segments or as one end-to-end adventure.

The Puzzle Box: The Heart of the Jidara Escape Room Experience

At Jidara's core is a component that was a unique project for us—a puzzle box—not merely a container for clues but a fully interactive, story-driven artifact.

Each piece inside and every element of the illustrations was meticulously crafted to balance intricate mechanics with elegant aesthetics.

Every item in the box had three levels of interaction – starting with the obvious and ending with an emergent surprise. From hidden compartments to tactile feedback mechanisms, every moment of discovery was designed to spark joy.

The Escape Room: Fusing Magical Wonder into Ordinary Props

Solutions from within the puzzle box unlocked distinct installations for players near the physical escape room. This connecting element brought the two-part experience together. What about remote players around the world? Their answers unlocked an online finish!

Our design philosophy fused principles of stage magic with experience design—subverting expectations while ensuring coherent gameplay and satisfying puzzle solutions.

Rigorous Testing: Breaking Jidara So Players Couldn't!

We subjected Jidara to exhaustive playtesting, focusing on:

• Anticipating the Unexpected – Observing how players might approach the game in ways we hadn't imagined.
• Balancing Challenge and Reward – Finding that sweet spot between frustration and satisfaction.
• Color Theory as Interface – Using color as an intuitive guide rather than relying on written instructions.

(And a special nod to our unofficial prototype sponsor—Pull-Ups diapers—whose packaging provided abundant cardboard for our early models!)

The First Victory

We deployed Journey to Jidara at Google's campus in late October 2024, with 600 boxes placed on employees' desks over a weekend. When Monday arrived, we got a notification that the first player had begun tinkering. We held our breath.

Would they experience the "aha" moments we'd designed? Were the puzzles calibrated correctly? Would the finale deliver the satisfaction we'd hoped for?

When we saw someone had unlocked the final treasure chest, we anxiously awaited their verdict. The result? A perfect 10/10!

This player became the first of hundreds who have adored the puzzle box and escape room experience—the very reason we created Jidara 😊.

From Corporate Campus to Public Storefront

After packing up the Google installation, we were eager to share the highly-rated experience with the broader Handstand community. Since 2014, we’ve had over 10,000 participants in our public events. We knew there was an audience hungry for innovative puzzle and escape room experiences.

In March 2025, we opened our first-ever commercial pop-up space to host Journey to Jidara (2024’s Jazz Heist pop-up was in an empty apartment)!

A Big Success

It has been awesome to see Jidara in the hands of Handstand fans, escape room enthusiasts, and the greater SF Bay Area community.

It has been awesome to see Jidara in the hands of Handstand fans, escape room enthusiasts, and the greater SF Bay Area community. We sold out halfway through and had to pause signups while we rush-ordered another whole palette of boxes! Best compliment we could have received.

While our temporary setup can't match the elaborate production of permanent locations, players are still consistently ranking our puzzles and technology among the best they've experienced!

The Dream Team Behind Jidara

Creating this experience required extraordinary talent from diverse fields:

• Glenn ⚡ – Calling him an electrical and mechanical engineering mastermind would be a gross undersell. Glenn turned wild ideas into real, functional props that had exceptional visual, experiential, and puzzle design. He's also the genius behind our peephole cinema engineering.
• Jack 🖌️ – Creator & illustrator of Light in the Mist, a game we fell in love with. One Instagram message later, they were on board for puzzle design & illustration.
• Mihai 🍕 – A software expert and game connoisseur we met at The SF Hunt. (Anyone who pins pepperonis to their shirt is someone we need on our team.)
• Alex 🖼️ – Our UX/UI specialist who ensured the experience flowed seamlessly between the physical and digital worlds.

Fifteen other brilliant souls spanning project management, procurement, set design, riddles, narrative, and beyond added their personal touch!

The Journey Continues

Journey to Jidara is, by design, a traveler—always seeking new destinations. Jidara is now available to organizations looking to enhance team collaboration and engagement! Custom options range from:

1) The Installation Experience: our puzzle box + complete escape room installation. Perfect for companies with a global workforce and a dedicated main office.

2) The Puzzle Box Experience: our puzzle box + digital game elements. Perfect for companies with a more distributed, global team.

If this sounds exciting to you, you're our kind of person. Reach out to us! We'd love to share Journey to Jidara with your company.

Feel free to also explore our other in-office escape room The Jazz Heist, or change up the pace and check out our corporate scavenger hunt events for a more active puzzle experience.

As for our next immersive global adventure...check back in November!