Things · Games and communities
Escaping Things
My family’s escape room team log, with every room played since 2016, on a map with trips, players, and stats.
- Status
- Active Being built or operated.
- Dates
- Started Feb 23, 2026
- Where
- escape.thingelstad.com/
- Topics
- Play
- Page views
- 5,515 in the twelve months to Sep 30, 2026
- Latest evidence
- Latest commit, Oct 16, 2026
Escaping Things is the escape room team of Tammy, Mazie, Tyler, and me, and escape.thingelstad.com is its log: every room we have played, with results, photos, ratings, a map, trips, players, and stats. By August 2026 it recorded 113 rooms in 11 countries.
The record began as a list on my blog, built from posts about rooms. In March 2025 I reconciled it against blog posts, photos, YNAB transactions, and calendars, and the count went from 43 rooms to 65. With a spring 2026 trip to Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona planned around TERPECA-ranked rooms, I wanted a dedicated site with a map. As I told it in Weekly Thing 342, I turned my spreadsheet into a CSV, wrote a CLAUDE.md with Claude, and had Claude Code build the site. I then moved the data into an Airtable base of companies, locations, and rooms, and announced the site on 2026-02-23. I never looked at its code; Codex and Claude Code wrote it.
Tammy found the trip’s rooms (“Tammy found us twelve amazing escape rooms”), and the whole family writes up the rooms we play (Escape in Europe, Day 13). After the twelve rooms of that trip, I added trip pages, starting with Escape in Europe, with commentary from the whole family (WT344). The site is a static Eleventy build from Airtable snapshots, with Leaflet maps, Chart.js stats, Pagefind search, and an Atom feed of new rooms.
Activity
166 commits (93 with Claude, 23 with another agent, 50 by me), the first on Feb 11, 2026.
25 publications collected from its feeds, the oldest from Feb 21, 2026.
The latest weeks with activity
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Week of Oct 12, 2026 1 commit with Claude
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Week of Sep 21, 2026 4 commits, all with Claude
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Week of Sep 7, 2026 1 commit with an agent
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Week of Aug 31, 2026 1 commit with Claude
All activity, week by week. Who made each commit is from its author and co-author lines.
Sources and evidence
Observed daily from GitHub, sitemaps, feeds, the Internet Archive, and Tinylytics. Evidence never sets a status.
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jthingelstad/escape.thingelstad.com implementation
The Escaping Things escape-room team site — an Eleventy static site built from a normalized Airtable dataset (rooms played, countries, stats).
- Repository created Feb 11, 2026 (a development record, not a launch date)
- JavaScript, Nunjucks, CSS
- Latest commit Oct 16, 2026; 29 commits on main between Jul 1, 2026 and Oct 23, 2026
- Observed Oct 23, 2026
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escape.thingelstad.com/ website
- First archived Mar 4, 2026 by the Internet Archive (existence evidence, not a launch date)
- Feed “Escaping Things — Recent Rooms”: 25 items, newest Aug 18, 2026
- Sitemap: 136 pages
- 5,515 page views from Oct 1, 2025 to Sep 30, 2026, counted by Tinylytics
- Observed Oct 18, 2026
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weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/342/ reference
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www.thingelstad.com/lists/escape-rooms/ reference
Commits and publications per month, last twelve months.
History
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launch
Escaping Things site announced
The family escape room log gets its own site. Source
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development
Escaping Things: recorded development begins
The earliest commit in this repository is a development record; the project or idea may predate it. Source