Red Herring

Red herring is an English idiom that refers to a clue that is misleading or distracting. The phrase is often used within the context of a mystery story where the detective collects many clues, some of which turn out to be irrelevant. Red herrings help prevent the solution of a mystery from being obvious before the reveal.

Red herrings are much less important in an escape room than in a mystery story. Most escape rooms do not have red herrings, and you should not feel obligated to add them. However, I enjoy throwing in a red herring or two to throw players off guard.

I typically make the red herrings simple clues and puzzles. As an example, a clue might be a typed letter with the following return address at top.

My family has done enough escape rooms to pay attention to numbers placed within written material. So, I expect them to try these numbers in locks around the room. But they won’t work (snicker).

All that said, you don’t want players to get too wrapped around trying to make red herrings work. To this end, it is best to provide a cue that something is a red herring. I’ve established with my family that when I use the phrase “red herring,” it signals that it will not help investigating further. In the previous example, note that the street name is “Red Herring.” In another example, in one room I had a decoy QR code (distracting from the real QR code players needed to construct).

The page has a hidden message text at the bottom:

The message uses both capital letters and highlight letters, making it easy to see and decode. The message is “red herring,” which is a signal for players to stop looking.

Of course, you could use a different signal for a red herring. You could instead say “just kidding,” place a 😜, or Rickroll the players. Whatever you choose, place it on red herring but never on legitimate clues.