Easy do-it-yourself LDS escape room (complete with printable instructions)

Whether it’s a youth mutual night or Relief Society activity, this LDS escape room is much easier than you think. Plus, it is almost guaranteed to be an instant hit. So, check it out!

I had never been to or created an escape room before this activity. But it wasn’t as hard as I thought. I got a lot of my ideas for this escape room from A Girl and a Glue Gun. Plus, we added our own special touches. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I emphasized the importance of scripture study throughout the experience so the youth could get something spiritual out of it as well. Here’s how you can do one as well.

Download and print your escape room instructions

Before you do anything, you’ll need to download and print your LDS Escape Room instructions. Just click on the link below:

Click here for your LDS Escape Room instructions

These instructions include everything that you need in order to organize this LDS escape room. However, you can also make your own variations to this escape room based on your situation. I presented this escape room to our class presidency and they made some tweaks of their own. Here’s a video of what we did:

Collect your escape room supplies

Aside from the downloadable PDF instructions, you’ll need various supplies for each of the specific rooms. If you can’t get all of the supplies, you can alter the instructions accordingly. Most of these supplies can be found around the house and in the church library. The rest can be purchased on Amazon. Here’s the list:

10-15 Books of Mormon
Mirror
Magnifying glass
Antique suitcase to put the “Introductory letter” in (optional)
Toy safe with single digit combination
Pictures of latter-day prophets
Primary song book
Carry on suitcase with zippers that can be locked with a padlock
Word combination lock (can set your own word)
Green, blue and pink yarn (can use different colored yarn, but you’ll have to make a new sign with dots)
Measuring tape
Invisible ink pen with black light
10-15 random books
Box with a padlock
Antique keys to give away with the paper quote

Before you start your escape room

Mini Rooms
This LDS Escape Room has three mini rooms with clues. We just separated our young women rooms at the church with the dividers and that worked great. But you could also do it at a house or in different random rooms throughout the church building. The theme of the escape room is the scriptures. Our goals was to get the girls excited about the scriptures and the importance of them in their lives.

Small Groups
Before you start, you’ll want to divide everyone into groups of 3-5. We made the mistake of having all of our 15 girls do the escape room at the same time and it was too chaotic. Let team one go and once team one has moved into room two, let team two go and so forth.

Guides for each room
Our class presidency really wanted to be involved with the escape rooms, so each of them stood in the rooms as a “guide” to help the girls figure out the clues if they needed help. Plus, they have to give items to the guides in order to pass on to the next room.

Room #1

When the girls enter the first escape room, there is a letter inside of a suitcase on the table. The letter explains how the game works. Throughout the letter, there’s randomly capitalized letters. When you put them together, it spells “Under garbage can”.

Then, they’ll find a tiny, tiny note under the garbage can that reads, “A chapter a day will light the way.” They can use a magnifying glass on the table to read the tiny note if they want.

Finally, the girls can sift through the many Books of Mormon scattered throughout the room. Inside one of the books is a letter with flipped lettering. They have to use the mirror to read the words, which tells them to give the note to the guide and answer some questions about the Book of Mormon. Once they answer all the questions correctly, they can move on to the next room.

Important note: Make sure you hide the Book of Mormon that has the paper with the flipped lettering really well because our girls actually found it before they had even finished the first clue. It wasn’t a big deal but it kind of put a damper on the fun.

Room #2

Once the participants enter the second room, they’ll see a tiny safe on the table that requires a combination. In order to figure out the combination to the safe, they have to look at pictures of specific prophets taped to the chalkboard. Each number on the safe corresponds to a specific prophet. For example, if the first number on the combination is 2, then tape a picture of Brigham Young on the board and so forth. The primary songbook will be open to “Latter-day Prophets” to help them out.

This took our girls a little while to figure out but they eventually got the combination and opened the safe.

Inside of the safe is the scripture Moroni 10:3 cut into strips like a puzzle. Once they put the puzzle together and read the scripture, they’ll realize that the word “read” is left out of the scripture twice. You can write the number 60 on the board as clue #2, which gives them a hint that the scripture has 60 words, not 58.

Finally, they can open the word combination lock that is connected to the carryon suitcase in the corner of the room. The combination is “read”. Inside of the suitcase there is a sign attached to the lid that says, “Sift through the crumpled up distractions of the world until you find the piece of paper that says, “Search the scriptures”. Then participants give the paper to the guide to gain entrance to the next room.

Make sure you put about 20-30 crumpled pieces of paper in the suitcase that say words like, “Facebook” and “Work” and things that distract us from scripture study.

Room #3

This is the final room of the LDS escape room. Inside this room, it says, “Clue #1” on the board pointing to a piece of paper that has green, blue and pink dots on it. The participants are supposed find a four-inch piece of green yarn, a nine-inch piece of blue yarn and a nine-inch piece of pink yarn on the table. Participants will need to measure three lengths of yarn using a measuring tape on the table to determine a page number. They’ll need to find the page number in one of many different books scattered throughout the room.

Once they find the correct book, they must read a secret message in invisible ink that says, “Call the Bishop for your last clue”. In order to read the invisible ink, they will need to use one of the secret agent pens on the table.

Once they call the Bishop he will say, “The KEY to happiness is closer than you think.” Our class presidency wanted to change this up a little bit and decided to hide a cell phone in the room and have one of them call it during the escape room. That was fun too.

Participants will then need to find the key to a box locked with a small lock sitting in the middle of the room. Figure out a difficult place to hide the key. We hid ours behind a push pin that was holding up a piece of paper on a cork board and it took them a long time to find it.

Once they find the key, they can unlock a box hidden in the room. Inside is a quote that says, “Scriptures hold the keys to our spiritual protection” and a small antique key is attached. Each participant can take one home. Our girls loved these antique keys.

Conclusion

Take a moment to talk about the importance of daily scripture study in their lives. Encourage them to put their antique key in a place where they can see it everyday to remind them to read their scriptures daily. You can also suggest that the girls put the key on a chain so they can wear it as a necklace to remind them to read their scriptures every day.

Afterwards, we went into the kitchen at the church and had refreshments. Overall, I thought this LDS escape room was a big success. The girls talked about how much they loved it and it really wasn’t that much planning. I would recommend it to any youth or adult group.

If you didn’t see the link to the downloadable instructions above, here it is one more time:

Click here for your LDS Escape Room instructions

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