Tag Archives: breakout liverpool

Charitable Connections

Breakout Manchester Charity Day detailsBreakout Liverpool Charity Day detailsThis industry-wide call to arms has kindly been written by Del from Breakout Manchester and Liverpool, to whom questions should be directed (see below for details!) but everybody is welcome to join in. Exit Games UK finds the idea of a focused, cross-site, charity initiative extremely promising and exciting, even if it might take a good chunk of planning ahead to execute to its full potential.

The exit games industry is such an exciting place to be for all involved. Customers love doing something different with their day, they like being challenged, they like feeling accomplished. As the company bringing them that, it is genuinely heart warming to be part of that experience and get to share that buzz with them.

Because of all this excitement around what we do with our various companies, it gives us the opportunity to help people outside of providing them an hour (or hour and a half, as is the case with some of your games out there) of entertainment. I don’t know about other companies, but at Breakout Manchester and Liverpool we are always receiving emails from local charities and fundraisers asking if we can donate a game for a raffle or auction as it’s something different to offer people and drive the interest up. There are obvious parameters we have to set, but on the whole we can agree to these requests and help the people these charities are supporting with their time and often limited resources.

In 2015, Breakout decided that we could do more than provide free games and having donation pots in our reception area. We contacted some local charities and game them our rooms for a day. This altered nothing from our end of the arrangement as these would be running anyway, we just took them off the booking system, told the charities our prices and let them book the slots themselves and take the money we would have received as a direct donation. The sales from any games we sold ourselves got donated to the charities. It wasn’t without its problems, as no first time event ever is, so we addressed these and addressed these and created a charity evening 6 months later, working with only one charity this time in Manchester and several in Liverpool. We’ll continue this biannual charity event, because it’s great to give something back to the communities that support us in whatever way we can.

BUT, for this April, we’re proposing something different. We’ve decided to go NATIONAL.

We want to see if you other exit games in the country want to join us, on Thursday 21st April, in giving some or all of your games to charity with us… We’re working with The Christie (a cancer specialist hospital charity) and Joining Jack (Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy) in Manchester and Imagine If Trust (fighting poverty through education), Barnardo’s (helping vulnerable children and young people) and Parkinson’s UK (supporting and funding better treatments for Parkinson’s), but ultimately this event could benefit any charity of your choosing. The groups we’ve worked with have been so happy about being involved in the event and being able to offer a distinctive product in exchange for donations. They’ve sent us buckets, balloons, T-shirts, stickers for the day and they’ve even come along to be part of the greeting team for customers and give a big thank you to them. The customers are happy as well, as they get all the benefits of playing a game whilst also knowing their money is going somewhere worthwhile.

If you’d like to join us, give us a shout on hello@breakoutmanchester.com, let us know who you’re supporting and definitely let us know of any interesting plans you have and how you get on. Feel free to contact us with any questions as well!

Can’t wait to hear from you and build our community further.
Breakout Team

Good news from early November

another-adventureIt’s been a few days since the real world has permitted a chance to catch up with things here, so to get back into the swing of things, a few quick good news stories:

  • This site has covered proposals at exit games before. This site has even covered proposals at Breakout Manchester before… and more than one of them, from memory. (Can’t get enough of them, though!) However, this site hasn’t had one quite like this before. The groom, who popped the question, wrote about his day, and the moment itself has been caught and shared both as a still photo and as a video clip, in the very rare instance where sharing camera footage from the rooms is actually properly cool. Hooray! Many congratulations to the joyous couple!
  • Two and a half months ago, this site posted about Red House Mysteries and their involvement in the Chatroulette First-Person Shooter. If you happened to be on Chatroulette at the right time, perhaps you might have been lucky enough to be involved in the recently-released level two, much more spectacular still, being filmed in an abandoned power station. Congratulations all round, not least to Red House Mysteries for the timely opening of their site in Exeter.
  • Over in Leeds, Locked In Games celebrated their first anniversary not only with some rather spectacular cakes but by donating the day’s profits to a local charity. Many happy returns of the day!
  • In London, the granddaddy of them all, HintHunt are hiring an experienced site manager. Jobs are also going in New York, Vienna and Budapest, which sounds extremely exciting.
  • Having started at Breakout Manchester, a good place to end is at Breakout Liverpool, where one Daniel Sturridge and friends broke out of their Classified room. Fingers crossed that more injured footballers use exit games as part of their rehab routines.

Mid-August news round-up

News round-up

Who’s a lucky bug? Someone who has just met the brilliant and charming brain behind escaping.sg and its sibling blogs, all full of excellent writing and even better thought behind them, on a trip to London from (as the domain suggests) Singapore. The same lucky bug is off to see friends in Wales this weekend, hurrah!

Here are some quick stories to keep you going for now:

  • Exit Games UK loves stories about proposals at exit games, of which there have been at least… ooh, three that spring to mind. However, a recent one at Dr. Knox’s Enigma of Edinburgh attracted media attention. Game principal Jonathan Dowie, according to STV, “is so confident of the game’s ability to test the compatibility of life partners, he has promised the couple free entry on every anniversary date to come“, which is extremely cute. Congratulations, and many, many games in the years to come, to the happy couple!
  • Following up on a recent story, Code to Exit of Altrincham recently made a post to Facebook featuring this rather handsome trophy, awarded to the team with the quickest escape each month. There are pitfalls in encouraging competition too much, but that is done very tastefully, and this site can imagine some of the usual suspects getting very excited about the prospect.
  • Breakout Liverpool are rather excited about their new fifth room and sixth game. In The Facility, the story goes that “You arrive at an unknown location for a once in a lifetime opportunity; a conference held by the critically acclaimed, Dr. Andrews. His work is widely known throughout the research circles, but he has remained hidden in the shadows for years. What you don’t know, is that Dr. Andrews has gone mad, creating a string of tests that have gone disastrously wrong. He has brought you here for his final experiment. You have one hour to escape his maze of tricks and games, before a deadly virus kills you all.” This room has a horror theme and is not suitable for players under 16. Considering what the Breakout gang have been known to get up to in order to spice Hallowe’en games up, they’re not kidding.
  • The Metro free newspaper and the Jeep Renegade are organising a free draw where the prize is to take part in an Art Heist experience in Manchester on Saturday 5th September. (You have to make your own way there.) The most relevant part is that the experience itself is being organised by CoLab Theatre, responsible for Fifth Column, as discussed last year.
  • Lastly, the Enigma Quests crowdfunding campaign has caught the attention of Time Out London and others, and the game’s first Quest is now practically 70% funded with seven days to go. The beta-tester and Super Early Bird slots have all gone, but the Early Bird prices still look attractive, and the game looks like one of a kind!

End of July news round-up

Newspaper with spectacles and pencilDouble news round-up? Aargh, so many longer pieces to write, so little time to write them. Here’s an assortment of quick stories.

1) Time Run of London have extended their run into 2016 – specifically, until the end of January. Last time this site looked at their bookings after an extension, it looked like they were going to put the price up; now it doesn’t. Hurrah! Interestingly, it looks like you can book tickets for Christmas Day – if this is deliberate, that could well make it a Christmas Day to remember (though getting there might be tricky as public transport shuts down). Take a look at the extremely positive review from The Logic Escapes Me, who did remarkably well recently.

2) The Logic Escapes Me largely keeps itself to London and does so very successfully, but feeds a few interesting stories here as well. St. Helens, in eastern Merseyside (a place whose name can only be pronounced in the dulcet tones of rugbeh leeeg’s Eddie Waring) has a library system that is running a two-week pop-up escape room this August. (Love the retro Teletext graphics.) Much of the content has been generated at a school already and there are drop-in sessions for the local youth to add further ideas. The finished game will admit either four or five teams daily, each of up to four players; free tickets are available between Saturday 15th August and Saturday 29th August. A really exciting initiative; other library systems, take note!

3) However, something else exciting is coming to Merseyside even before then; Breakout Liverpool are launching their fifth room on Saturday 8th August. The game is entitled The Facility, a title picked in a public poll. In it, “You arrive at an unknown location for a once in a lifetime opportunity; a conference held by the critically acclaimed, Dr. Andrews. His work is widely known throughout the research circles, but he has remained hidden in the shadows for years. What you don’t know, is that Dr. Andrews has gone mad, creating a string of tests that have gone disastrously wrong. He has brought you here for his final experiment. You have one hour to escape his maze of tricks and games, before a deadly virus kills you all.

4) Play Exit Games have posted a competition in which you can win tickets to play Escape Plan in London. Very cool!

5) A quick couple of discounts: The Room of Glasgow have a Wowcher deal. You’ve got two days to buy a £39 voucher (down from £80) and until August 12th to use it to book a space on Sunday, August 16th, 23rd or 30th. Pretty specific, and terms and conditions apply, but if you can make it work then you can get a team of up to 10 players who have the chance to solve the mystery of Sarah Lynn. Back down in Liverpool, Exit Strategy posted a special deal to Facebook; for a limited time, buy a ticket for three players and you can play with up to five!

New games at existing sites

Wanted: Chris ExitThat rough, tough hombre (who is unexpectedly as thin as a pin and nearly ugly enough to be realistic) is one of the characters you might see referenced in Breakout Liverpool‘s new Wanted room. It’s a single room, but you must specify in advance whether you want to play as the Cowboys or the Indians in this Wild West-themed room. Depending on which one you pick, you’ll face different tasks and puzzles. Whichever you pick – and why not play it twice, once as either side? – your team of 2-5 will have one hour to escape.

Agent November of London have added a third game. In contrast to their outdoor Major X-Plowshun and Rainbow Syndicate games, this is a murder mystery game: “You think you have come to solve a murder, only to realise too late that you are the victim! You have only 60 minutes before the poison takes hold, and you must identify the murderer and find the antidote before it’s too late!” Distinctively, this game is bundled with a meal – so as well as paying for the game, the tickets include a £13/head surcharge for the meal. That’s far from a bad price for London, though it’s tempting to wonder what the menu is.

Breakout Games Aberdeen are retooling their Lock and Key game; previously they had two V75 rooms and one Lock and Key, they are now transitioning to one enhanced V75 (and there must be good reason why it hasn’t been renamed V76), two new Lock and Key games – and there’s the exciting prospect of the addition of a fourth game, Black Gold, relevant to Aberdeen’s oil and gas heritage. This will be a game for 4-8 players rather than the usual 2-6 and will have an 80-minute time limit rather than the usual sixty. Pricing has not yet been revealed, but it sounds like a monster of a game!

Late April news

"Daily News" newspaperSo April has 30 days, making the first ten “early”, the second ten “mid-” and the last ten “late”. Seem reasonable enough? Here are some more news stories that have cropped up over recent days.

Many congratulations to Can You Escape? of Edinburgh for winning the Scotland’s Favourite Family Day Out award at the fourth annual Scottish Entertainment & Hospitality Awards on Sunday. (The site’s founder writes about the day.) The masses may have voted them into the final shortlist of five, but it was a visit from the judging panel that propelled them into first place overall! The site has recently launched its second game, Operation Odyssey; looking forward to reading reviews.

Exciting developments at Breakout Liverpool, who have announced their new fourth room: Wanted. The site explains: Wanted is a wild west themed room. Your quest in the room is to escape but you have two choices and ways to escape. Which side will you take, will you save the day as a cowboy or an Indian? Depending on your choice you will face different tasks and puzzles to complete. Which path will you take? Their sister site, Breakout Manchester, already have experience of running a pair of Classified games against each other head-to-head; it’s not clear whether this will have similarities or not. It’s available to book from Friday 15th May.

ESCAP3D of Belfast have a LivingSocial deal available, permitting teams of three to eight players. The vouchers can be used until September 10, 2015, and are available to new ESCAP3D customers only. Terms and conditions, including usual LivingSocial terms and conditions, apply.

Clue HQ Blackpool have also announced an opening date of May 25th for their upcoming second game, Quarantined, with the first 20 groups to book using the special code getting to play for just £50 each, regardless of group size. “With the growing threat of a radiation leak due to the increase in nuclear power, the government seek a solution to radiation poisoning within humans. Deep within a high security facility, a group of scientists work to develop a vaccine to ensure immunity, but to run tests they need subjects. You regain consciousness to find yourself quarantined within the facility. You don’t know how you got here. You don’t know who got you here. Then the screams start. Just when you think your situation cannot get any worse – it does.” Teams of three to six can play; during this game, each team member will be handcuffed, blindfolded, in pitch black darkness and locked in one of three small rooms – so, quite possibly, alone. Not a game for the claustrophobic or those aged under 15.

Lastly, Time Run of London launches its three-and-a-bit-month run on Thursday 23rd April, and already most of the tickets for the first week are gone – and if you want to play in the evening, you’ll need to look rather further down the line. It’s disturbingly easy to develop a slightly untoward crush on the Luna Fox character and even more so on the actress depicting her in the video.

Coming soon to Liverpool: Exit Strategy and Breakout Liverpool

exitstrategybreakoutliverpool

This site would like to apologise for an innocent mistake that it made in a recent article. On Saturday, it claimed that scheduled openings would “…make Edinburgh the first city within the UK, outside London, to host four different sites“. Given that nine days ago, Liverpool had zero exit games open, this seemed like a credible claim. However, being such a strong candidate to be the UK’s most famous city not to have an exit game previously open, it looks like Liverpool will go from zero sites to four within about three and a half weeks. Wow! …and, perhaps, from the perspective of the sites’ proprietors… er, hmm.

An article in the Liverpool Echo points to Exit Strategy, which is set to open “in an underground studio on Victoria St in Liverpool city centre, opposite The Millenium Gym“. Bookings are not yet being taken, but the Liverpool Echo suggests it will open “by the end of the month“. Exit Strategy will open with a single room, The Illluminati, with two more promised this spring.

The Illuminati poses this situation: “Reclusive conspiracy theorist Ziggy Roswell has gone missing! No one believed him when he claimed that The Earth is run by a cabal of shape-shifting intergalactic lizards. He claimed that they run the EU, NATO, the NSA, The Vatican, China, Russia. That they control every war, every uprising, all the intelligence services. That the moon is a hollow, reality-controlling super computer, and that they use wifi to enslave the human mind. No one believed him, everyone thought he was nuts… But maybe he was on to something. Enter his world, find out what he was working on. See what info he’s left lying around and eventually work out what’s become of him“. Intriguing! Get on your bi(c?)ke and try it out.

Distinctively, the Liverpool Echo also claims that “Exit Strategy will also be linked to an interactive app, Reptile Resistance, that explores the storyline in more detail, inviting users to complete brain-teasing challenges to help defeat the lizards running the globe.” The link between exit game and app is one that hasn’t been seen by this site before! According to the app’s site, “Reptile Resistance is an iOS and Android app which uses written text, game play and video to tell its satirical tale. Neither book, computer game, nor film, but something between all three, Reptile Resistance is an experiment in narrative art and an assault on both conspiracy theories and unearned privilege.” Crowdfunding for the app has not yet reached the target, but it has dozens of pledges so far.

So to Breakout Liverpool. It draws heavily upon the experience of the very popular Breakout Manchester, based not much over thirty miles away. With its recent launch of two Classified rooms at an overflow location, Breakout Manchester has grown to host six different games, the largest number in the country; Breakout Liverpool will open with three different games and is based in the basement of an old comedy club, possibly two hundred metres away or so from Exit Strategy.

Breakout Liverpool will open with three different games: Sabotage and Classified both having proved popular in Manchester, and Shipwrecked being a Liverpool original, intended to be at a slightly lower difficulty level than the two Manchester imports. “Can you escape the famous Soldado Pirate shipwreck with Captain Chiver’s most prized and valuable treasure before his ghost that endlessly haunts the ship finds you, and drags you down into his watery grave? You have 60 minutes to search the ship and find your way out with the riches.

Breakout Liverpool, by contrast, is already taking bookings, fixing opening dates of Saturday 7th March for the two imports and Saturday 14th March for the original Shipwrecked game. (The Liverpool pricing schedule matches the Manchester one, which offers particularly attractive rates on Mondays to Thursdays, as well as during the day on Fridays.) The Manchester mothership often sells out, particularly at weekends, so there are other options available if you want to play Breakout’s games. With all this expansion, it might not come as a surprise that Breakout are taking on staff; if you want to join a team with an enviable track record of success, send them your CV!