Escape the ordinary, while giving your brain a workout

Rich Palzewic

Staff

March 3, 2025

ANTIGO – For those looking to blow off some stress, while also using a bit of brain power, Jennifer Fonfara said “escape” into another world at Tactical Escape 101 in Antigo.

“The Antigo location (500 Superior St.) is the company’s fifth escape room (in the Upper Midwest),” she said. “We also have locations in Rice Lake, Eau Claire, Maplewood (Minnesota) and Stevens Point. At one point, we also had locations in La Crosse and Hayward, but those are no longer open.”

An escape room, Fonfara said, is a game in which participants are confined to a room or other enclosed settings and are given a set amount of time to find a way to escape by discovering hidden clues and solving a series of riddles or puzzles.

“All games are booked privately (at our locations), so this means your group plays each adventure without strangers in the room,” she said. “Reserving ahead of time is a great idea. To keep your cost as low as possible, we only staff as many rooms as we sell, and we only sell as many rooms as we have guests.”

Fonfara said games are 60 minutes long, and if patrons have already played a certain theme with Tactical Escape 101, then you’ve played that theme – the content doesn’t change.

“We do, on occasion, move rooms between locations, but many rooms are custom to their space and only ‘live’ once,” she said. “If you’ve played a similar theme with a different escape brand company, the puzzle will not be the same. Every once in a while, there may be some slight similarities, but it’s rare.”

Fonfara said Tactical Escape 101 is the “only show in town in most of its locations.”

“Eau Claire had another (escape room), but it’s closed,” she said. “In Stevens Point, we have a co-competitor – not really a competitor. I actually designed a game for her. Our most saturated market is, of course, the Twin Cities in Minnesota. I’ve always got one eye open on possible other locations.”

Fonfara said the next full-build theme Tactical Escape 101 completes, will be the 100th since starting the business 10 years ago.

“To be in this 10 years and have 100 builds is reason to celebrate,” she said. “Every time we build (a room), we say, ‘Oh, this is the most beautiful thing we’ve ever done.’ Then when we get to the next one, and I’m like, ‘This is the coolest thing we’ve ever done.’ As time has gone on, we’ve gotten better and better at what we do.”

In her years of doing escape rooms, Fonfara said she’s played more than 350 games.

“It seems like a nice bragging point, but there are the true enthusiasts who have played 1,000 or even 1,500 games,” she said.

Fonfara said at this point, Tactical Escape 101 has had about 75,000 reservations across all its locations.

“I know the Rice Lake numbers specifically – because I do a lot of work there with tourism –  and in the last 10 years, we’ve brought well more than 100,000 visitors to Rice Lake,” she said.

Antigo location meant to be

Fonfara said last year, she saw a Facebook post about the Escape & Smash It! escape room in Antigo closing, so she reached out to the owner to inquire.

“I took a ride to check things out – I play a lot of escape rooms that aren’t mine,” she said. “We agreed I would buy it rather than have her close it and lose absolutely everything. We took some fun photos of the two of us together. Antigo is our little tiny baby – the smallest location in our smallest town.”

Fonfara said she “truly believes if they do things right,” the Antigo location will do “just fine.”

“It’s been a slow start,” she said. “We signed in April, but I was in the middle of some really big projects in Maplewood, Minnesota, and Eau Claire, so I just took the chance on writing the check and closing it down until August. We opened in August, had our grand opening in November and we’re slowly gaining traction.”

Fonfara said the former Escape & Smash It! had a smash room – a space where people can safely release stress and frustration by destroying designated objects like old electronics, glassware or other breakables using tools like baseball bats or sledgehammers, essentially providing a controlled environment to vent without harming others.

“I had no interest in maintaining the smash room,” she said. “I didn’t buy that concept from her, so the first thing we did was close that portion of the business. My insurance company said, ‘Heck no.’”

From there, Fonfara said the name was changed to Tactical Escape 101.

“We only kept one of the puzzles she had,” she said. “We’ve put one of our own originals in there, and soon to be our second one. That’s my next remodel – after we get our new room open in Stevens Point in the next month or so, then I’ll move up to Antigo and get them a third new room.”

Needing an ‘escape’

Fonfara said the idea behind opening her own escape room was born in February 2015.

She said she and her husband, Justin, were returning home from visiting their Navy sailors in Norfolk, Virginia, when Justin suggested they try an escape room.

“Ten years ago, I had just graduated from college with my master’s degree, and it was that year of conversion when our last kid left the house,” she said. “I was interviewing for fancy jobs in big cities, but I’m a northern Wisconsin girl.”

It was at that escape room in Charlotte, North Carolina, that Fonfara said she fell in love with the process.

“It’s the team building aspect of it, the fun and waking up the brain,” she said. “We all get in such a digital fog. On our way home from Charlotte to Eau Claire, we put our business plan on a napkin. After we got home, we figured we’d kind of set things up for our friends and whoever wanted to show up for a month or so – then maybe give the idea to somebody else. Ten years later, here we are. We opened our first location in Rice Lake March 6, 2015.”

From there, Fonfara said they slowly added more locations.

How it works

At Tactical Escape 101, Fonfara said they build their own unique puzzles.

She said that’s what separates the company from other big-name escape rooms.

“We have five locations, but I think it’s safe to say the biggest player in America – and maybe the world – is ‘The Escape Game,’” she said. “Their budget is extreme. I just played their brand-new game in the Mall of America, which I got to see in production when I toured their facility in Nashville. They’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their rooms – they’re super high-tech and beautiful.”

Fonfara said that’s the beauty of the industry – “everything is so different from company to company.”

“The Escape Game has dozens of locations across the U.S., but you’ll find the same 12 games – maybe with a slightly different mix – in all of their locations,” she said. “With the low odds of replayability – we do have some players who come back and play the same games – I really can’t do that in our locations.”

Fonfara said to keep Tactical Escape 101’s smaller markets moving, she makes sure every location gets one new room per year.

“Plus, we try to rotate through our holiday games every year,” she said. “So, each location gets a new holiday game and one new build every year – that’s the goal.”

Fonfara said another goal is to keep each new build as unique as possible.

“We have a running joke right now where we try to put at least one thing from the old build back into another build,” she said. “We sometimes bring some props over, but we try really hard to keep things as unique as possible.”

Fonfara said the best example of using features from previous builds is their upside-down game in Rice Lake.

“We were trying to hit that ‘Stranger Things’ feel,” she said. “We got to put furniture on ceilings and do all kinds of fun things. We painted the floor to look like the ceiling and the ceiling to look like the floor, and everything is upside down, except for the emergency signs, of course. We counted, and there was a piece of 11 different games in that room.”

Fonfara said the time each build takes depends on each specific game.

“Last year, we moved into a workshop space facility of our own, so all the tools and everything got a nice facelift,” she said. “We build what we can in the workshop and then install it, which has helped my artistic team bring some really cool things to life. Sometimes, if the build warrants it, I can use extra, normal things from my house or garage – tables, chairs, etc. Other builds need more than that.”

For more information on Tactical Escape 101 or to make reservations, visit tacticalescape101.com.