The League Table: end of September 2014

People celebrating a line graph posted on a wallThis is the sixth instalment of an occasional feature to act as a status report on the exit games in the UK. On its own it means little, but repeated sufficiently many times it could be the basis of a survey of growth over time.

The Census

Category Number in the UK Number in Ireland
Exit game sites known to have opened 21 2
Exit game sites known to be open 19 2
Exit game sites known to have closed temporarily
(but “temporary” has been five months now)
1 0
Exit game sites strongly suspected to have closed, at least temporarily, in the UK/Ireland 1 0
Exit game sites known to have closed permanently 0 0
Exit game sites known to be under construction 9 0
Exit game sites less confidently known to be under construction 3 0
Exit game sites that once talked about being under construction but… 2 0

The definition of site has got a little fuzzier than last month; Agent November is played outdoors, so the world could be its oyster, and this site will shortly discuss an exit game that it recently discovered within another attraction. Nevertheless, they both have the exit game nature sufficiently strongly to be well worthy of inclusion.

The Report Card

Site name Number of exit rooms Number of different games Number of TripAdvisor reviews Number of 5/5 TripAdvisor reviews Local TripAdvisor ranking
Agent November 1 1 3 3 522
Bath Escape 2 2
Breakout Manchester 3 3 107 96 2
Cipher 1 1
Clue HQ 1 1 135 128 1
clueQuest 4 2 707 666 1
Cryptopia 1 1 26 23 9
Cyantist 1 1
Escape Edinburgh 3 2 144 133 2
Escape Glasgow 2 1 8 8 33
Escape Land 1 1 49 41 21
Escape Rooms 2 2 35 31 30
ESCAP3D Belfast 1 1 105 83 12
ESCAP3D Dublin 2 1 4 3 133
Ex(c)iting Game 2 2 34 23 14
HintHunt 5 2 986 909 3
Jailbreak! 1 1
Keyhunter 3 3 47 29 8
Make A Break 1 1 38 25 22
Puzzlair 2 2 68 65 3
The Gr8 Escape 2 2 19 17 5
Tick Tock Unlock 1 1 126 120 1
XIT 3 3 6 4 96

This needs to be taken with a heavy pinch of salt. This site supports all the exit games that exist and will not make claims that any particular one is superior to any other particular one. Please note that the TripAdvisor rankings represent a wide variety of locations and cannot be directly compared against each other. In fact, it’s probably pushing it even to compare the TripAdvisor rankings of two exit game sites in the same city.

In general, look at how many different exit games have got roughly 90% of their reviews being 5/5, which is perhaps a benchmark for being hugely impressive and allows for some reviewers casting grudge votes, or just being people having a bad day. (However, if your site has a long-term record of receiving 90% 5/5 marks and then only receives 50% 5/5 marks over the course of a particular month, it might be worth checking to see if something has changed for the worse.) There hasn’t been much movement in most sites’ rankings over the month, except for new sites climbing the charts quickly within their first few months of opening.

This month, this site makes an estimate with its usual level of confidence that the number of people who have played an exit game in the UK or Ireland by the end of September is now 76,000. This cannot be super-accurate, but it’s this site’s best guess; it would be prepared to bet good money at short odds that the true figure is above 25,000 and below 250,000. Do note that all of this can only be based on sites this site knows about; Jailbreak! had been running for three months, Agent November for five weeks and Cyantist for nearly three weeks before this site found they existed. If there are other sites missing, please get in touch.

October 2014 should be a crazy month for openings; this site would be very surprised not to see three new sites open – and, if everything aligned, conceivably twice that many. There’s an argument that indoor activities such as (most!) exit games should do best in the winter months as the nights draw in.

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