The Game Show Hiding Behind a Castle Pines Escape Room

Almost everyone I know in Douglas County has heard of ClueClock. Escape rooms, Castle Pines, five stars on Google about a thousand times over. What almost nobody knows is that the same building has a second thing in it, and that second thing is a full live game show.

The sign out front says CLUECLOCK ESCAPE ROOM. That is all it says. There is nothing on the storefront, the window, or the door that would tell you a game show exists in there.

Eleven of us went to find out what it is.

What it actually is

It is a real room, not a corner of the lobby. Dark walls, a lit stage, a scoreboard mounted up in the corner, a floor-to-ceiling prize wheel, a Plinko board, a buzzer podium that glows red and blue, and a retro TV frame built into the wall. Somebody spent money in there.

Your group splits into two teams and you play all four games in one hour. You do not pick one. That surprised me. I assumed you booked a game; you book the show.

Spin To Win is the wheel one. You spin, you buy letters, you try to solve the puzzle before your money runs out. The wheel is big enough that you have to use both hands, and it has a DUEL wedge on it, which matters later.

Name That Price is the one where you match prices to products. This is where the whole tone of the place gave itself away. The prizes sit on a shelf under handwritten price cards: a tub of Red Vines, a box of Blistex, a coffee mug. It is not trying to be Vegas. It is trying to be funny, and it is.

Friendly Feud is survey answers, strikes and steals, played on a buzzer podium with the board lit up behind you. This is the one that gets loud.

Jackpot Falls is Plinko, and it closes the show. You drop a puck from the top of the board and it clatters down through the pegs while everybody yells at a piece of plastic. It is worth enough points to flip the entire game, which is exactly what it is designed to do.

Our night

We ate first at Pines Bar and Grill around the corner, then walked in about fifteen minutes before the eight o'clock roll. Six against five, red versus blue.

We started hot and then fell apart in the middle in a very specific way. Friendly Feud is where it happened: we got a pile of answers on the board, took three strikes, and handed the other team a steal on a question we should have had. Name That Price was worse. They went four for six. We went two for six. On the retry they dropped back to two and we stayed at two, which felt less like a comeback than like everybody agreeing to be bad at it together.

Then the wheel landed on DUEL, which pulls one person from each team out onto the floor to settle it by rolling a giant foam die. I drew that one. I rolled a four. The guy across from me rolled a six. That handed them a stack of points and put them ahead with one game left.

The one game left was Plinko. We won it on the last drop.

That is the design working. Sixty minutes, four games, and the thing is genuinely still live at minute fifty-eight. Nobody in our group checked their phone.

The people running it are most of why it works

There are two of them working a show. Joanna Walters, who owns the place with her husband Chris, sits at a control desk in the back running the board, the screens and the timer, and comes over the mic to announce prizes. Out front there is a host in a suit who runs the floor, works the crowd, and keeps the pace up for the full hour.

He was good. Genuinely funny, a real voice, and he had eleven adults who did not all know each other loosened up inside about four minutes. He also does close-up magic, and after the show ended he did a set for us that finished with somebody reading the serial number off a dollar bill out of their own wallet and it matching a number he had written down before we started. That got a bigger reaction than anything in the actual game.

I want to be careful there: I do not know whether the magic is part of what you are buying or whether we just got lucky with who was working. Worth asking when you book.

Who this is for

The 8-player minimum is the whole story. Below eight, book an escape room. At eight or more, this is the better night out, and there is not much else in Douglas County that does this.

It reads as a team-building booking, a birthday, a bachelorette party, a sports team, a big family that has run out of things to do together. It does not read as a quiet date night. If your group will not yell, this is not your thing.

There is also a fundraising program that they barely advertise: $5 per player donated back to a school, church, sports team, PTO, scout troop or nonprofit, with no selling, no order forms and no inventory. They will build a group a custom code and run it as a fundraiser weekend or a whole month. Group rates start at eight players.

The escape rooms, since that is what they are known for

Four of them: Denver Bank Heist, 10 Days In A Mad House (you can start blindfolded and in a straitjacket, optional), Blood Money, and Alien Escape. Sixty minutes, $39 a player and $35 for Alien Escape, two-player minimum, up to seven (six in Alien). Every room is private, which is their whole pitch, and all four are wheelchair accessible.

We did not do a room, so I am not going to tell you what they are like. What I will pass along is their camera rule, because people get caught by it: selfies are fine as long as no solvable puzzle is in the shot and you post and tag them, but video inside the rooms is not allowed. They take a group photo for you at the end.

If you go

ClueClock, 7437 Village Square Dr, Suite A115, Castle Pines, CO 80108, next to the Castle Pines library. (720) 645-2927.
Game show: 8 to 30 players, 60 minutes, $35 a player, private room. Book at clueclockgameshow.com.
Escape rooms: 2 to 7 players, 60 minutes, $39 a player ($35 for Alien Escape). Book at clueclock.com. Arrive 15 minutes early.
Full details, hours, photos and map: ClueClock Escape on the DougCo Directory.

Make it a two-stop night while you are over there. Village Square puts Pines Bar and Grill, Castello Italiano and Duke's Steakhouse all within a couple of minutes of the door.