Escape captain’s quarters
By Ben Grover, October 28, 2025
With two rooms designed entirely from scratch, and with over half a year of planning fueled by donations and grit, students from the Themed Entertainment Association Club hosted a free escape room from Oct. 14 to Oct. 24.
Every hour, groups of four would enter two bedroom-sized devised rooms with the goal of escaping in under 20 minutes. Students would have to solve three puzzles engineered by students of the TEA at Cal Poly Pomona club to receive three keys and unlock a pirate chest to escape.
The escape room was a Bronco Fright Fest Halloween-themed event Associated Student Incorporated CPP hosts for students.
“We just had so much industry knowledge in terms of designing a themed space,” said TEACPP project manager William Dinkins. “We were just looking for a way to apply that.”
According to Dinkins, the team landed on an escape room concept after exploring many different avenues including haunted houses and other pop-up events.
TEACPP students engineered custom magnetic maps, drawers and an alphabetically coded lock box that stored the keys students needed to escape.
Hospitality student and TEACPP member Genevieve Benn also served as an actor in the room, aiding students by giving them clues when trying to solve puzzles.
However, to complete the room, Dinkins and the team needed a storyline to help give life to the clues and puzzles used in the room. That is when applied math student Adrian Alcaraz took on the role of lore-master to develop an original pirate codex: an ancient booklet manuscript.
“Back in spring, Will (Dinkins) came to me with this idea of a codex for legendary pirates,” Alcaraz said. “He gave me free range to do whatever I wanted to do, and I just went with that.”
Alcaraz opted not to watch “Pirates of the Caribbean” and other pirate related movies as he wanted his characters to be different from the typical pirate media.
Alcaraz sculpted multiple different pirates, focusing on building the characters as people rather than just pirates. Alcaraz even intertwined many of the pirate characters together, leading to a more structured storyline that could be used as clues when trying to escape the room.
“I’m very happy with how it turned out,” Alcaraz said. “I have a few favorites pirates too, one of those being the Wizna sisters.”
The Wizna pirate sisters are based off the town Wizna, Poland, which is most significantly known for the Battle of Wizna that took place in 1939.
Along with the custom codex, the escape room featured a life-sized parrot animatronic, the first ever used by the club. The parrot, who was named Pudge, was voiced by theater student Gaven Samano-Tovar.
Samano-Tovar said Pudge’s voice was inspired by Robert Morse, a former Broadway, television and movie star. Morse stared in multiple ‘60s films including “The Loved One” and “A Guide for the Married Man.”
Computer science student Milosz Kryzia attended the escape room and said he was a big fan of the puzzles and how the room as a whole was really well done.
“It’s definitely a good way to meet people, too,” Kryzia said. “This was my first time going to an ASI event, and I really enjoyed it.”
The team hopes the foot traffic and good reviews will help give the club the attention it needs to build bigger and better attractions in the future. TEACPP member Joshua Banuelos said one of the team’s goals next year is to build a larger escape room, seeing the success the pirate one had.
“It helps us practice our skills and helps others relax and enjoy a nice place,” Banuelos said. “The more people that come to these, the better we can do. Keep coming, keep hyping this up and the hype will grow.”
The team plans to bring back the escape room with a different theme in fall 2026 after nearly every session was booked this semester.
