FANS of a thrilling escape room experience which opened in Basingstoke last year will be delighted to hear that the business has expanded.

Exciting Escapes has opened three new rooms in the town, after securing a new 1,000 square foot venue in Feathers Yard in the town centre.

The expansion takes the number of escape rooms in Basingstoke to seven, meaning enthusiasts who have already completed the four which opened in July last year in Wote Street, can now set themselves a new challenge.

David Gale, who launched the business with his brother Peter, said the nail-biting activity is fully booked every weekend, attracting customers from Basingstoke and beyond, who race against the clock to solve a series of clues.

He said: “We get a mix of local people who are shopping, or having a meal, and who want to do something else, lots of businesses doing team building days, and tourists who might be passing through on their way back from somewhere else. There are also the people who just love escape rooms, the enthusiasts who travel across the country trying out different rooms. It’s addictive.”

With each room set in a different period, two are from the 1920s and one is from the 1970s, participants are transported back in time and given a mission to complete as secret agents.

Two of the new rooms are set in 1939, when problems in Europe are escalating and British Intelligence has an issue on home soil.

A city banker is apparently providing funding and support to the Third Reich and he must be stopped.

The new mission, called Banking on Trouble, will challenge players to compete against each other in teams of two to five, with one team in each room racing to finish first, offering players a different dimension to the experience.

As a result of the expansion, Exciting Escapes will be able to employ additional staff, taking its team to 24, all recruited from the local area.

David, a father-of-two from Alton, said it took several months to create the new escape rooms, from designing the layout to sourcing authentic items to use in the rooms.

“Lots of the ideas for clues come from finding materials,” he said. “There have been lots of trips to car-boot sales and antique shops. It takes a couple of months to build then we always test them before they open to the public.

“People are wonderfully different so however you think it will work, it always goes differently when you put a team of people in there. You could put 10 different teams in there with the same puzzle to solve and they will all tackle it in a different way. Our challenge is to build a room which allows that to happen, as well as ensuring that most teams will solve it with just minutes to spare. We spend a couple of weeks re-shaping and re-designing.”

More than 28,000 players have experienced the thrill of Exciting Escapes since it first opened in Southampton in 2016, and the team are now looking forward to welcoming even more people through the doors to take on the challenge.

For more information visit excitingescapes.co.uk or visit the Exciting Escapes Facebook page.