Tonight is World Championship night

Drinks canCompletely generic beverage container pictured there, yeah?

I’ve been trying to cover Red Bull Mind Gamers’ Mission Unlock ENOCH, the first really serious international competition between escape game solving teams. The official Facebook and Twitter are still keeping things fairly firmly locked down, and participants are respecting the privacy embargo impeccably, so this report of what there is to know about things so far is necessarily going to be pretty short. There’s no more inside information than one player having described the room as “really, really cool”.

That said, it has been suggested that the restriction on discussing the games on social media was lifted at dinnertime on Friday night, so here’s what has been mentioned. Teams played a series of seven challenges; solving each one opened a door to try the next. The challenges have been compared to things from The Crystal Maze or The Krypton Factor, except with very heavy focus on co-operation between team members; the challenges were primarily mental, but with heavy physical elements in the implementation of the puzzles, as opposed to testing athletic prowess. They involved unusual equipment rather higher-tech than you would see in most, but perhaps not quite all, escape rooms; it’ll be really fun to see (at least footage of) the teams playing with some very fancy toys on the broadcasts. If I can get permission to suggest what the challenges were before the broadcast then I’ll paste what I’ve heard in.

It is known that Thursday and Friday each saw twelve teams play the same game, with the fastest qualifier of the day qualifying for tonight’s final. The Thursday and Friday games were different from each other, presumably as a spoiler protection measure, so performances can’t be compared exactly from day to day. Thursday saw the UK play, along with eleven other teams who had arrived in Budapest relatively early. The UK faced off against Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Slovakia, Italy, France, Hungary, Norway, Spain, Lithuania and Estonia, so there will be some European interest in the finals.

We do know a little – and I mean little – about how Thursday went, courtesy of an official “surprises and stats” article. The juiciest quote runs like so: The early results are as top-secret as the details of the Escape Room itself. But organizers did reveal that, looking at the strengths showed by the teams in the various intelligences challenged – the dream Mind Gamer team for the day would have been a combination of Spain, Switzerland, Slovenia, Estonia and the United Kingdom. There’s a lovely photo of the UK team just before they go into the room, as well, even if it doesn’t show the team members’ best sides.

While the UK team were only the 17th fastest out of the 22 national champions in the qualifying competition, the actual escape room-based tests of the semi-finals should have played to their massive experience and their strengths. Second place and twelfth place are practically interchangeable so this may not be the most meaningful thing to say, but I have a feeling that the UK team will have acquitted themselves really pretty well. (If I’m going to pick a second tip, the Swiss team were mentioned above, plus had the fastest qualifying time among the European teams.)

Friday’s play featured teams from Singapore, Korea, Russia, Azerbaijan, Romania, USA, Oman, Turkey, Ukraine and Sweden, as well as the two wild card teams. Obviously I’m going to be cheering for UK to qualify from Thursday, but my loyalties on Friday are more heavily divided. I’ve met one person on each of the two wild card teams; both wild card teams and the US team are represented on the Slack, so I’d be happy if the Friday winner were any of those three.

It’ll be a lot of fun to find out. The teams are being kept in suspense as to how well they have done until the big reveal on the live show on Red Bull TV online from 7pm UK time tonight. I’m going to try to provide minute-by-minute liveblogging here at Ex Exit Games, as befits coverage of the world championship final of a mind sports event, and because it was fun when I tried something similar a dozen years ago. See you just before seven!

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