Star Trek: Away Mission Escape Box

Within my circle of friends, escape rooms and puzzles are things we enjoy doing together. One Christmas, I couldn’t think of a gift to get my brother, so I ended up getting him a gift card. But I didn’t want to simply hand it to him, as that would be kinda lame.

So my wife and I had the idea of putting together a simple puzzle box with the gift card inside. I built a box with four padlocks and just enough room to fit a single gift card. Then we created some puzzles with clues to reveal the code for each lock.

Ever since then, it has become somewhat of a tradition where we make each other puzzles and escape rooms that must be solved to get to our holiday gifts.

For a while, I’d been wanting to build my own escape-room box and eventually came up with this design. It is largely inspired by this “Spacecase - Escape Room in a Box”.

This past year, I made the time and built my own with a Star Trek theme!

I’d been wanting to build this for a long time, and I finally did it! It was even one of the 2022 Hackaday Sci-Fi Contest winners!

Planning and Design

I first started working on this in mid-October 2021, thinking I had plenty of time. While I was making steady progress, I still ended up scrambling to finish it in time for Christmas 2021.

If I had to estimate the number of hours my wife and I put into this, I’d say it was at least 300 hours in just over two months.

Much of that time was spent designing detailed, functional panels and developing the puzzles and away-mission scenario.

While I’m overall very pleased with how this project turned out, there are a few design changes and improvements I’d like to make.

Find more details, including the files needed to recreate it, at Hackaday: Star Trek Shuttle Console.