In the early 1940’s a group of ‘roughneck yankee’ oil miners secretly made their way to England setting up camp at Kelham Hall, Newark on Trent.
They were tasked with drilling for oil in the surrounding area and producing the highly sought after ‘high octane’ fuel for allied planes and war ships. These gallant men were single handedly helping us dominate the skies of Britain and keeping enemy forces at bay.
Over 100 wells were drilled in less than 12 months with over 3000 barrels of oil being produced daily to help the war effort. Churchill called it “one of the wars best kept secrets”.
Our US friends left as quickly as they came, closing down sites where necessary or handing them over to English engineers when their contract ended.
Initial investigations show our american miners actually found oil right in the heart of Kelham Hall! It appears though, this was their last drill rig spudded and for some reason they closed it up in a hurry?!
Over 70 years later recent refurbishment at Kelham Hall by the new owners, have uncovered one such drill site right in the heart of the historic house! They are now dealing with a highly volatile RIG having been left to decay for decades and are calling in engineers to deal with the situation.
They need your help, early monitoring suggests a massive explosion is imminent, larger enough to demolish the stately home entirely and likely to occur in just over 60 minutes.
They are looking for groups of would be engineers, highly skilled in communications, team work and with physical and mental prowess under pressure. Your team must enter the facility, workout how to shut the RIG down and get out before the time is up.
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We had an obvious tech fail. These things happen, it's understandable. But rather than owning the fail and apologising, the GM went round the houses trying to explain how it was tough to activate the prop as it has to be super accurate and maybe our 20+ attempts at activating the prop were not exactly on the correct spot. This was infuriating.
Without this fail, we would have left with a better overall feeling towards the game.
We really enjoyed this room. Well themed and immersive room with lots of physical puzzles and thinking required, a must vist room in Nottinghamshire. Great host
Not your typical escape room setting, a business centre in a former stately home, but how little did we know. Our GM was the owner, Nigel, who we could have chatted to for far too long. The Rig uses some of the back story of the location to produce the narrative but this is one of the very best rooms I've done, the puzzles flow well and are well designed. Clues are delivered by a walkie talkie and we only needed one clue for a search fail. Highly recommended..
Reviews by escape room review sites
After so many escape rooms hidden away in dubious industrial estates, it’s a bit of a shock to reach LetsXcape, driving through acres of landscaped gardens up to the very grand country house that is Kelham Hall. This building has recently become a hotel and conference centre - and now also hosts LetsXcape’s escape rooms. Both of the games we played there draw on the Hall’s history.
As you might not guess from the name, The Rig is based on the real-life fact that American oil miners were station...
The Rig draws history from the surrounding area, has a beautiful, industrial set and delivers challenges that capture the physicality that a story about oil drilling needed. No single thing is amazing but there is more than enough here to impress and very little where it goes wrong.
You'll be hard pushed to find a room with a better story, and you definitely won't find a better setting for a room. This room lived up to it's impressive venue and is well worth a visit/detour
Letsxcape has two real gems on their site. The quality of the rooms really shines through and for the design, decor and game play puts them up there with more commonly heard names in the Nottinghamshire area. If you are planning an escape holiday, this needs to be a stop along the way. We highly recommend a trip to play The Rig
Lists
This game is part of the following user-created game lists:
These are the 100 highest rated escape rooms (out of 1600) in the UK, as of 31st Dec 2021, based on combined ratings from enthusiasts, bloggers and experts - every game here comes highly recommended.
