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Are you clever enough for Dallas' Escape Expert? Grab some friends and puzzle your way out

The second the door was closed, we scattered. There were puzzles and clues hidden all over the room -- inside the suitcase, on the floor mat, in the photos that were on the wall -- and my friends and I had only an hour to solve a mystery and escape.

Well, "escape." We weren't actually locked inside the room, because as Escape Expert's co-founder Andrew McJannett-Smith told us before we got started, the city of Dallas would consider that kidnapping. And despite "escape from a locked room using only your wits" being the selling point of the establishment, he would rather not get in trouble with the police.

McJannett-Smith and his wife, Traci, started building Escape Expert in October of 2014, combining her love of brain teasers and his skill with technology and handiwork. "She's the brains behind all the puzzles," he tells me, "and I'm the brains behind all the electronics and computers and everything you see built in the room."

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Together, they create rooms in which groups of people (eight to 12 people per group at most right now) work together to solve a series of puzzles and escape before time expires. A puzzle might involve adding together numbers you find throughout the room, or you might be required to go on a scavenger hunt for several necessary items. One puzzle my group had to figure out involved Hokey Pokey-esque dance instructions on a numbered floor mat, the act of which revealed the code to a padlock.

Generally, the solution to one puzzle will lead to another challenge, often giving you codes to padlocks that will lead to yet more brain teasers. If you get stuck you can use your provided walkie-talkie to ask for a hint, but be careful. You only get three hints per game.

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Escape rooms aren't a new phenomenon, and they're not going away anytime soon. Xcape Adventures, which boasts sci-fi and steampunk-themed rooms, opened in Mequite earlier this year. Another business, Room Escape Adventures, has been around for longer and sports a zombie antagonist that will try to prevent you from escaping.

An escape room was even featured in the latest season of the hit CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, though, predictably, the show's genius characters solved the puzzles in a disappointingly short amount of time.

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I ran through two Escape Expert rooms with two different groups. First with my family (six of us in total), during which we got very close to escaping but failed to solve the final puzzle in time. I went back with a group of GuideLive.com co-workers, and we not only escaped in well under the allotted time, but we didn't use any of our three clues. During both trips, both myself and the people I was with had mostly positive things to say about the experience.

During both trips my teams practically tore the rooms apart looking for clues, but it doesn't take too long to clean it all up. Mr. McJannett-Smith told me it only takes 10 to 15 minutes to reset the puzzles in a room, especially if the one who created the puzzles is the one putting them back in place. "My wife, if you ever see her resetting a room, she's like Superwoman. It's almost like you put the video on fast-forward."

Escape Expert started as a part-time business for them, and they were only open on weekends at first. But when word spread and they started getting busier, and due to popular demand they started opening on weekends.

Andrew and Traci McJannett-Smith, husband and wife and co-owners of Escape Expert, pose for...
Andrew and Traci McJannett-Smith, husband and wife and co-owners of Escape Expert, pose for a portrait in Dallas on Thursday, May 21, 2015.(Michael Reaves / Staff Photographer)

Before long they had companies making reservations for team-building exercises. Managers would send their team into a room and buy the camera footage from Escape Expert so they could see how well the team worked together. To accommodate these corporate bookings, the McJannett-Smiths started taking vacation days from their full-time job to run their part-time business.

Their growth isn't limited to additional business hours. They're building more rooms for groups to run through, and they hope to keep customers coming back by continuously retiring old rooms and replacing them with new ones. Their hope is that eventually you could come back every month and escape from a new room of puzzles every time.

For the immediate future, they're redoing the popular "Attic" room, but Mr. McJannett-Smith says they're also planning Dallas-themed room that will incorporate iconic D-FW landmarks, like Big Tex.

On a personal level, I don't think I would have enjoyed myself as much if I had been group up with half a dozen strangers (which is likely to happen if you don't go out of your way to book a room all to yourself), with a group of friends who are wannabe Sherlocks, there's fun to be had in this escape game.

13663 Floyd Circle. 469-249-8588. $28 per person. escapeexpert.com