Walking into the room, you see wooden floors and wooden walls. A telescope on a tripod stands in the corner. Beside it, a desk supporting a computer and a black and white photo. Posters of celestial bodies and framed photographs adorn the walls. An astronaut's boot (which is really a ski boot) sits on a table. A door is covered in caution tape and held with a padlock.
You have one hour to escape Chapel Thrill Escape’s new room: The Morehead Odyssey.
On Monday, March 24, Chapel Thrill Escapes opened its new escape room, The Morehead Odyssey, to the public. The space-themed room was created in collaboration with the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, and the project has been in the works since at least Sept. 2024.
According to the organization’s website, Chapel Thrill Escapes is, “the first escape room built by students, for students.” Chapel Thrill Escapes is a registered student organization at UNC-Chapel Hill as well as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
As a student organization, members of Chapel Thrill Escapes designed and created The Morehead Odyssey. They’ll also be the ones keeping the room in working order, smoothing out any issues that arise and fixing anything that breaks. As a business, Chapel Thrill Escapes hires students as gamemasters to run their escape rooms. Hidden from view, gamemasters prepare the room and control the players’ experience.
Rohan Kashby, a senior computer science major and business minor, is Chapel Thrill Escapes’ Chief Executive Officer. As a sophomore, he joined the business team, which handles finances, collaboration, marketing, and more. David Foss, a senior studying computer science, is a Chief Operating Officer at Chapel Thrill Escapes. He joined the build team when he was a sophomore, which designs and builds the room’s puzzles and decorations.
They say that creating the new escape room was a long process. It started off with members spitballing possible themes and puzzles at the beginning of the 2024 fall semester. Eventually, they landed on a UNC-CH version of Night of the Museum inspired by the Morehead Planetarium. After throwing around a few puzzle ideas and getting the go-ahead from Morehead Planetarium, the team decided they could make it happen.
Chapel Thrill Escapes members visited the planetarium, where they found ideas for the room’s puzzles and aesthetics. The next step was creating a “room flow diagram,” which displays how players will make their way through the room. This allows the team to determine “how the puzzles can fit together, how we can kind of lock portions of a given puzzle behind the reward of another puzzle,” Foss says.
In November, Chapel Thrill Escapes closed their previous room, Ramses in Wonderland, to make room for The Morehead Odyssey. In March, the team opened the room for beta testing. During the testing phase, students played the room for free, giving feedback about what worked and what could be improved.
“The difference in quality from, like, just two weeks ago (the beginning of beta testing) to now is honestly crazy,” Kashby says. “Like, I remember furniture being scattered, parts and pieces everywhere. I remember things just kind of not being done, so many puzzles needing work. And compare that to two weeks later, the end of beta testing, literally this past Sunday? I mean, the room is clean, the room is set up, all the puzzles are, you know, firing at full capacity. I mean, it's truly mind boggling the amount of work that our build team was able to get done in just a fraction of a month.”
Now, the room is fully operational. Foss says that they will continue refining the puzzles, but overall, it’s ready for players to escape.
As the CEO, Kashby is responsible for seeing things through to the end. This means he has to hold members accountable, but that’s easier said than done. Since the members of the organization are full-time students who choose to volunteer for Chapel Thrill Escapes, he hesitates to call them out or boss them around. He tried to reach a middle ground in which members were not overburdened with tasks while making sure they remained productive.
Now that The Morehead Odyssey has opened, Kashby sees that he may not have enforced accountability as he should have. He says that some members leave the organization every year, but this year was worse than others. This left many roles empty, meaning Chapel Thrill Escape’s executive board had to step in.
Lessons like that have taught Kashby a lot about a real business environment. Kashby’s experience as the CEO has made him more comfortable handling finances and accounting. His marketing efforts have made him a better salesman and communicator. And his leadership role has made him a better leader.
That’s what Chapel Thrill has always been about, he says. The escape room provides not only entertainment for players, but a place to learn and practice skills for members.
David Foss, a programmer with years of coding experience, developed much of the software that The Morehead Odyssey runs on, allowing the gamemasters to interact with the room and the players within it. “Pretty much anything with a computer in (the escape room), I likely had some kind of hand in it,” Foss says.
A big part of building an escape room is running into problems and finding solutions to them, Foss says. That’s especially true with programming. When gamemasters run into technical difficulties, they go straight to Foss. He then remotely communicates with the gamemaster and figures out a solution to the problem. Meanwhile, players are inside the escape room waiting on him. This need for rapid support has trained Foss in communicating tech information to people who may not know much about tech.
Foss says that things will never go exactly as expected, but he’s ready for the unexpected. One of Foss’s puzzles (which he keeps secret to avoid spoiling the experience) wasn’t working during beta testing. He worked on it over and over, but he could not get it operational. Then one day, he got a text from a gamemaster. The puzzle had worked, and the players had really enjoyed it. That’s all Foss needs in order to know that his puzzle was worth the time spent.
“I think that's really, really cool to see, like, people enjoying stuff that I've built,” he says.
As a part of the build team, Foss helped bring the room to life. What he appreciates most about the escape room, though, is how his work combines with everyone else’s. “It's really cool, like, just seeing everybody's work come together into one cohesive experience,” he says.