Adventure Rooms Cardiff: The Black Queen (Cardiff)

A fun room with some great puzzles we haven’t seen before

You are trapped in the mansion of a mysterious figure, the “Black Queen”. Each clue you solve will allow you to better understand the Black Queen and bring you a step closer to freedom. You have one hour to make your way through her lair and escape before your time is up….

In a modern building slightly out of town is the home of ‘Adventure Rooms Cardiff’. They have a large and comfortable waiting area and the host welcomed us and we chatted while we waited for the rest of our team to arrive, a good start. Once they arrive we were briefed on the rules and then taken to the room to begin.

We started the room handcuffed to the wall so it was pretty obvious where we needed to start. Once we freed ourselves of the handcuffs we were able to get going and see what puzzles the Black Queen had in store for us.

We made short work of the first two rooms we encountered and felt like we were going through at record speed. In one of the rooms it involves simply finding something but due to the way it was ‘hidden’ it did a good job of making you not realise it was there – then when you find it you slap yourself.

We thought we had everything we needed to solve another puzzle but after wasting a good few minutes trying to solve it we realised we didn’t and continued on with the room. Eventually we found the remaining parts that we needed and because of our earlier work we knew what to do.

At one point we thought we had finished the room, really early. We opened up a door thinking it was the exit, only to be confronted by another room with more puzzles! Demoralising but also great news! This room moved along with the story of the Black Queen and there were some nice features in here, no ‘wow’ factors, but still solid.

There were a fair number of padlocks in this room, at one point I would guess there was about six of them on one chain that you needed to solve in order to progress, but as they were different types of padlocks requiring differing codes we didn’t mind too much.

This is a good room and is actually (to date) the favourite room I have done in Cardiff. It does help that a friend of ours did it and we beat her time, so that’s a boost, but it was just a fun room. It’s one of the few rooms that we’ve done with this team where I actually felt like I made a decent contribution. We haven’t done any of the other rooms at this venue but judging on this one, I’d like to.

PUZZLES

A good mix of puzzles in this one, one or two simply involved finding things, another involved sound, and one even involved heat, something which we hadn’t seen before. One puzzle frustrated us but that was simply because we didn’t have everything we needed and when we did, it became clear.

A puzzle involved a piece of specialist equipment which was a nice touch, but it was very fiddly to get the settings exactly right and that also became frustrating.

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

It wasn’t the prettiest of rooms, think concrete walls and floors, and didn’t really make you feel like you were immersed in the world of someone calling themselves ‘The Black Queen’. Ignoring the immersion aspect of it, the room design was good and everything flowed nicely so if you can look past the stark surroundings, it’s a good room.

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

The GM was attentive like you would hope and expect and gave us a friendly nudge when we were spending time on a puzzle that wasn’t possible to solve at that point. We didn’t require any clues but if we did they would have come through on the TV screen.

ANYTHING ELSE

Credit to Adventure Rooms Cardiff for trying to introduce different technology in the room, it’s by no means a 3rd gen room but it is a great room and definitely one to do if you’re in Cardiff.

Success / Failure

Final Rating:

Team: 4 people

Address: 5a, Longcross Court, 47 Newport Rd, Cardiff CF24 0AD

Website: https://www.adventurerooms.wales/