To lift the team spirit and have a bit of fun we decided to go to Escape House in Lund. The concept is that you and your friends are locked inside a room with a lot of different puzzles. A puzzle can be a regular sudoku, a riddle, closing a circuit with something you find inside the room, etc. Usually there is too much information and you have to figure out what information is important to unlock the next puzzle and what you can forget about. You have one hour to break out of your room.

iiiii are very experienced at escape rooms; they only had one room left of the three rooms in Lund, where the task was to steal the holy grail. They managed to get out with quite a margin to the hour, impressive!

I joined from __future__ import solution, since none of them had done an escape room before. We were in a room where a crazy chess player had murdered someone. We got stuck at one puzzle in the end and get out after 58 minutes. However we asked for a clue, which gives 3 minutes penalty time. Anyway we had fun and enjoyed the experience.

All in all, this is a nice way to force collaboration, which also is needed during programming contests.