Boxed escape room kits and printable party games are generic: the same envelopes and the same story in every home, with props you have to add. Venue escape rooms are built for one room by a designer. Home Escape looks at photos of your own rooms, finds the objects you actually own (the clock, the rug, the fridge magnets) and designs a puzzle chain where each answer is hidden in your furniture, so the house itself becomes the game.
The data it runs on
The user's own photos: two to five room photos taken in the app or uploaded. Nothing else is needed.
Access: photos go to a vision model only to list objects, their position and whether they can hide a card; the photo itself is not stored after the game is generated unless the host chooses to keep it.
Limits and gaps: vision models miss small or partly hidden things, misread digital clocks, and cannot know whether a drawer opens or a rug can be lifted.
Fallback: the host confirms each object with a tap ("yes, the rug lifts") before the chain is built, and can add missing objects by name. If a room has too few usable objects, the game uses fewer puzzles or printable props (a paper clock face, an envelope).
1. The mission
Turn any home into a one-night adventure. Families and friends get an escape room made from their own living room, kitchen and bedroom, ready to print in minutes.
2. Why people can't resist it
"It's our clock!" Seeing your own furniture as clues is a delightful shock, for kids and adults.
Host glory. The host looks like a genius puzzle designer for twenty minutes of setup.
Beat the clock, beat the family. Escape times go on a family leaderboard, and a new room pack keeps the next game night coming.
3. How it works for real
Detect: a vision model (Gemini Flash or Claude via OpenRouter) lists objects with boxes, plus properties: can hide paper, has numbers, has letters, can be locked.
Confirm: the host taps to keep or drop each object.
Design: a frontier LLM (Claude or GPT) picks a theme and builds a 6-step dependency chain where each puzzle's answer points to the next object. A checker pass (a second, cheaper model call plus simple code) verifies every step is solvable and no answer can be skipped.
Difficulty: the same chain is rewritten for kids (pictures, counting, colours) or adults (ciphers, logic).
Print: cards and the host guide are laid out as a PDF on the server; an image model (Flux or Gemini image) can add a themed illustration to each card.
Play: timer, hint ladder and progress run in the app; the end photo is taken on the phone.
4. Cost per use
About $0.20 per game: vision detection on 3 photos (about $0.02), the design and checker calls (about $0.10), card illustrations (about $0.08). Hints and timer cost nothing.
Free: one game a month, 4 puzzles, no illustrations. Game Night ($5 a game or $8 a month): 6 to 10 puzzles, all themes, illustrated cards, kid and adult versions, team mode.
5. Growth loop
Every game has 3 to 8 players who see it work in a real home and want to host their own. The end-of-game photo card with the escape time is made for the family chat, and "beat our time" invites can be sent to another household to play their own version of the same story.
6. Risks and guardrails
Safety: no clues in or near ovens, hobs, sockets, medicine cabinets, windows or high shelves; kid mode only uses objects at child height.
Privacy: room photos are processed for object lists and deleted by default; faces in photos are never analysed.
Property: no puzzle asks players to open locked personal drawers or move heavy furniture; the host approves every hiding place.
End photos: stay on the host's phone unless they share them.
7. MVP build order
Photo upload and a vision prompt that returns objects as JSON with boxes and properties.
A Claude prompt that builds a 6-puzzle chain from that list, plus a solvability checker.
Card and host guide layout as a printable page, then PDF.
The kid and adult rewrite toggle.
The game night timer with hints, then the end photo card.