Clue HQ Kingston-upon-Thames: The Dungeon of Doom

We managed to get a booking for The Dungeon of Doom at quite short notice. I had previously played a few Clue HQ games in Birmingham and hadn't had any bad experiences from this franchise.

Our team of 5, ranging from a couple of teens through to adult, hadn't played any games altogether before but had had various degrees of escape room experiences.

On arrival, we were briefed as a big group with other teams playing the other games on site and then taken to our games by our games master. Unfortunately there was a group of children there for a birthday party so the reception area was rather noisy and possibly if you were there as first timers listening to padlock instructions etc could have been difficult in this set up. But not a problem for us. Our games master didn't really tell us the back story of our game just that we had to be separated into 2 groups for the start - the prisoners and the team. This was a concept I've only ever done at one other game before so made the beginning of the game challenging. She also mentioned there would be a lot of padlocks in this game. We managed to complete the room with around 5 minutes to spare. However, not much can be said for the variety of puzzles as the game consisted ENTIRELY of padlocks, meaning it was just a case of solve a 3/4/5 digit number or find a key and use it on the corresponding padlock, rinse and repeat. Most of the padlocks where colour coded although there were some where we had to try the code on multiple locks til we found the correct one, so not particularly logical in that sense. We were given support through the in-room monitor and sometimes were given hints when we hadn't asked and weren't particularly stuck.

On completing the game and exciting the room we waited for our games master to meet us, she then took our photo but we had no debrief unfortunately.

Overall, still a fun game and another successful mission to add to the ever-growing list.

We did this as two adults and two kids aged 12 and 9. We really enjoyed it and the challenge level was just right. A great variety of puzzles and lots for everyone to get on with.

At the beginning one of your group is locked up and the others have to free them. This was fun but I was glad it was only for the first part as it was nice to be able to work as a team for the main solve.

This was well constructed and well hosted and I highly recommend it. 

An immersive, interesting room with some really complex puzzles. Slightly boring in parts but another really good room for first time players. Hosting was great as always.

Team is divided at the beginning.

A really enjoyable room. Not big or flashy but crammed with puzzles and a huge variation of them at that. With two of us, none of the puzzles were insanely difficult but the sheer volume of puzzles meant we had lots to do. A great deal of fun.