To escape ordinary, sometimes bland team building exercises, many companies are looking for ideas to create a more exciting way to raise morale in the office.

A growing trend for corporate team building is an escape room. Escape games are adventures where players have an hour to break out of a room by cracking codes, solving riddles, piecing together puzzles and finding clues.

According to a study by Scott Nicholson, director of Brantford Games Network, escape rooms involve teamwork, communication, delegation, critical thinking, attention to detail and lateral thinking.

Escape Rooms can be played by a range of players and thriving teams have players with a variety of experiences, skills, background knowledge and physical abilities. Escape rooms also create ways for players to directly connect with each other.

According to the study, 19 percent of customers are corporate clients and about 37 percent of groups have players over 21 years of age.

One local escape room is Buckeye Escape Room in Westerville, where they allow corporate teams to sign up for an event together.

“We provide an immersive experience that will mentally challenge your team in a race against time,” its website states. “You will have the opportunity to solve the room in 60 minutes, which involves uncovering clues, flexing your brain and working with your coworkers to celebrate and achieve success.”

Buckeye can accommodate groups of any size and at the time and day that works for you and your company.

Another local company is The Chamber, also in Westerville. With their escape room, corporate team building events can be arranged outside of normal scheduled hours to suit the company.

“Spending time in The Chamber Escape Room will allow you to learn more about your coworkers and how you fit together as a team,” the website states. “Your experience inside the escape room will allow you 45 minutes worth of hands-on interaction with each other and you will leave with takeaways that you can start applying in your office daily.”

The Lockdown, located in west Columbus, offers several escape rooms with different themes and levels of difficulty. Themes range from haunted prison, mardi gras, crime scene and soon to come mayan temple.

The Lockdown will also offer a mobile escape room option this year, enabling them to set up at your office to create a perfect team building scenario.

Another local room is Room Escape Adventures located in the heart of downtown. This specific company focuses on the zombie experience.

“Escaping a room within a certain time limit when faced with the fate of being eaten by a hungry zombie yields the precise circumstances that produce one of the greatest team building exercises ever created,” according to the website.

The website states its team building sessions create a unique experience to give companies the opportunity to practice and analyze their skills in communication, organization, critical thinking, logic and creative genius in a high pressure scenario.

At the end of the session, corporate teams participate in the Curtain Call, where staff will analyze moves, decisions and how participants communicated and what could have been done to escape or possibly the reasons why they escaped so quickly.

After enduring the escape room at Room Escape, many corporate team building groups set up a dinner, drinks or a meeting following the session to discuss an analyze their adventure together according to the site.