Can tags be used in an escape game?
Yes, and the properties that matter in a room are the boring ones: no battery, no network, nothing to charge between sessions. The limit is that a tag answers anybody who holds a phone near it, so a tag hidden in the room is a clue available from the first minute.
Why they suit a room
A room runs several sessions a day and gets reset in minutes between them. Anything with a battery becomes a chore on that schedule, and anything with a network connection becomes a fault report.
A tag has neither. It sits inside a prop for a year and behaves identically on the first session and the thousandth.
It also hides well, since it works through wood, card, fabric and plastic, and nothing about the prop has to look electronic.
What a tag cannot do
It cannot decide. A tag answers with what is written on it, to anybody, in any order, and it has no way of knowing whether the players have earned the answer.
So a tag cannot gate a puzzle. Gating has to live wherever the tag points, which means a page that knows what stage the group is at, and that page needs a network.
It also cannot be a lock. A tag reveals a code; it does not check one.
Design around this rather than against it. The tag is a hiding place for information, and information found early is a design decision, not a fault.
The phone problem
A room that requires players to use their own phones has excluded whoever brought the wrong one, and has put a screen in the middle of an experience usually sold as an escape from screens.
The workable arrangement is a single device provided with the room, which also means one known phone to test against instead of every phone in existence.
Take NFC Tools. On iOS it requires an iPhone 7 or later running iOS 15.6 or later, and the app must be launched manually. Background reading is available from the iPhone XS and XR onwards.
Running a room with them
Test every prop in place, not on a bench, since a tag behind a metal plate or inside a tin behaves differently once installed.
Keep a spare of each prop already written. A tag failing mid session is rare; a prop going missing is not.
Write down what each tag holds and where it is. The person who built the room will not be the person maintaining it in two years.
And leave the tags unlocked unless a player could plausibly rewrite one, which in a supervised room they cannot.
Frequently asked questions
Can a tag check a code players have found?
No. A tag reveals what is written on it and checks nothing. Any verification has to happen at the destination.
Can players read a tag before they are meant to?
Yes, if they find it. A tag answers anybody, so hiding is the only sequencing a tag provides.
Should players use their own phones?
A single device provided with the room is more reliable and gives you one phone to test against.
Do the tags need maintenance?
No power, no network, nothing to charge. Testing each prop in place at installation is the whole of it.