The Art of Escape With Conundroom
Redmond Moments sat down with Conundroom owners and designers Aleksei and TK Kniazev, to learn more about the art of escape room design.
By Jason Miller
Originally published in the Spring 2026 issue of the Redmond Moments Newspaper
10 years ago, Aleksei was looking for a change of pace. He had grown tired of working in digital advertising and wanted to start a brick and mortar business, something personal. Enlisting help from his programming brother TK, and their artist mother, the family opened up their first escape room in Redmond: “The Northwest Express”.
It was a room with a simple theme: You’re on a runaway train, and it’s up to you to stop it. The room was a runaway hit.
“After three months we already knew we had to make the next one,” said Aleksei.
Owners Aleksei and TK with the Conundroom team.
Nearly 10 years later, Conundroom has expanded to 3 locations with 8 escape rooms. From the surrealist wonderland style of the room “Alice”, to the mystic charm of “School of Magic”, each room is filled from floor to ceiling with elaborate details that invite you to take a closer look.
Every new room pushes the brothers and their team to explore new ideas, but the process of designing a new one is hardly straightforward. As the brothers explain it, a good place to start is at the end, then work backwards. For an escape room, that means the final door.
TK, the lead engineer at Conundroom, says design and testing for the door mechanisms can take up to 2 months alone to perfect.
Interactive props at Conundroom Escape Rooms.
From there, more puzzles and obstacles are added and refined. The brothers are careful to expand on past ideas and not to repeat themselves. But of course, designing the puzzle is only one part of the process. Next comes building it.
Conundroom has grown to include a team of professional artists and fabricators (and the brothers assure me their mother still helps with the occasional painting). An aesthetic is chosen early on, but TK explains that nothing is too concrete at this stage. Some complications don’t become apparent until after construction begins.
“It’s a very collaborative process” said TK, reflecting on the communication involved in building setpieces and props.
Set piece of an escape room at Conundroom.
A quick preview of an upcoming attraction offered a glimpse into the engineering behind the rooms. Bundles of wires snaked throughout the space, twisting inside and in between props. They connect lights, sensors, power, and microcontrollers called Arduinos. This nervous system of electronics is where the logic system for the rooms come in, and where much of the “magic” of the puzzles is created.
An electronic panel in a themed escape room.
Throughout the testing phase, various tweaks and adjustments are made. Every mechanism will have to function reliably, and reset quickly between groups of guests. Even after a room has successfully launched, Aleksei and TK are always looking for ways to improve the experiences.
The escape rooms at Conundroom are all marvels of design, and for the Kniazev brothers, they’re also spaces where the community can build experiences together, in person.
