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July 2014 Dealwatch: coupons and discounts to play exit games for less

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"Sale" graphicSome exit games offer opening discounts, to help fill their rooms early before the word gets far and wide. Some offer opening discounts organically; others offer discounts through social buying schemes. Here’s a quick run-through of the deals that this site could find that are still valid. (Ground rules: terms and conditions doubtless apply and this site takes no responsibility for deals that fall through for whatever reason. These are not exclusive in any shape or form.) This month, there’s one new, one change and a couple of deletions.

  • Keyhunter of Birmingham have a Groupon deal active. £15 for two players, £19 for three, £24 for four or £29 for six. Codes are activated 48 hours after purchase and are valid for 90 days after purchase.
  • NEW! Escape of Edinburgh have a Groupon deal active. £24 for a team of up to five, restricted to new customers only. Codes are valid for 60 days after purchase.
  • Tick Tock Unlock of Leeds have a Groupon deal active. £22.50 for three players, £30 for four or £35 for five, restricted to new customers only. You must book by e-mail, including a contact phone number. Codes expire 90 days after purchase.
  • Cipher Entertainment of Leicester remain closed in preparation for their second season, but they have a Groupon deal active all the same. Deals are only available for the one-hour version of the game. £19 for four players, £24 for six or £29 for eight. You must book by phone and arrive 10 minutes early. Codes expire 90 days after purchase and exclude public holidays.
  • Ex(c)iting Game of Oxford have a Groupon deal active. £24 for five people or £47 for six to nine people, restricted to new customers only. You must book by phone. Coupons listed as valid until 8pm, so presumably are not valid for the 8pm-10pm game available daily, and expire 90 days after purchase.
  • Clue HQ of Warrington officially open a week today, but already have a Groupon deal active already. £29 for three or four people, £32.50 for five or £36 for six. You must book online. Coupons are valid from 28 June-28 September 2014. There’s also a similar deal at Wowcher, though this charges £29 for up to four, £39 for up to six, is valid until 15 October, and terms and conditions are presumably slightly different.

Those are all the active deals, discounts and coupons this site could find; if you know of others, please send them through – and if your site has a offer not listed above, please don’t take it as a deliberate attempt to disrespect and this site will happily spread the good news. (Alternatively, if you would prefer that this site does not list your coupon, that’s fine too and please get in touch.)

In other news, thanks to everyone who filled in our survey a fortnight ago. There weren’t loads of responses, but the ones supplied were appreciated, especially when people left comments as well. Posts on exit games were most popular, then posts on puzzle hunts, then general-interest articles, then ones on puzzle competitions least popular. Good to know!

Remember that there are some good ways to follow articles posted to the blog: subscribing to the syndicated feed in the reader of your choice is probably easiest, but we also post links to new articles to our Twitter account and our Facebook account.

Dealwatch: coupons and discounts to play exit games for less

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"Sale" stickerOne frequently-used technique to help brand new exit games to fill their rooms early before the word has got out too far is to offer discounts for a while after the site opens. It’s probably no bad thing for advertising purposes that the coupons are still easy to find online even after the validity deadline has expired, and you can see how many sites that are now booked up almost completely weeks in advance started off by offering social buying deals. Here’s a quick run-through of the deals that this site could find that are still valid. (Ground rules: terms and conditions doubtless apply and this site takes no responsibility for deals that fall through for whatever reason. These are not exclusive in any shape or form.)

  • Keyhunter of Birmingham have a Groupon deal active. £15 for two players, £19 for three, £24 for four or £29 for six. Codes are activated 48 hours after purchase and are valid for 90 days after purchase.
  • Tick Tock Unlock of Leeds have a Groupon deal active. £22.50 for three players, £30 for four or £35 for five, restricted to new customers only. You must book by e-mail, including a contact phone number. Codes expire 90 days after purchase. There’s also a similar deal at Dealmonster where tickets are a flat £30 and expiry is a constant date of 9th January 2015 rather than 90 days after purchase; terms and conditions are presumably different to the Groupon ones.
  • Cipher Entertainment of Leicester are currently closed in preparation for their second season, but they have a Groupon deal active all the same. Deals are only available for the one-hour version of the game. £19 for four players, £24 for six or £29 for eight. You must book by phone and arrive 10 minutes early. Codes expire 90 days after purchase and exclude public holidays.
  • Ex(c)iting Game of Oxford have a Groupon deal active. £24 for five people or £47 for six to nine people, restricted to new customers only. You must book by phone. Coupons listed as valid until 8pm, so presumably are not valid for the 8pm-10pm game available daily, and expire 90 days after purchase.
  • Clue HQ of Warrington officially open a week today, but already have a Groupon deal active already. £29 for three or four people, £32.50 for five or £36 for six. You must book online. Coupons are valid from 28 June-28 September 2014. There’s also a similar deal at kgb deals, though this charges £39 for six and terms and conditions are presumably slightly different.
  • XIT of Dublin have a LivingSocial deal available on their BOXit room. €35 for four people. You must book online. Coupons are valid until 27 October.

Those are all the active deals, discounts and coupons this site could find; if you know of others, please send them through – and if your site has a offer not listed above, please don’t take it as a deliberate attempt to disrespect and this site will happily spread the good news.

Approaches to difficulty in exit games

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GameCamp logoYesterday, at GameCamp in London, there was a talk on the exit game phenomenon given by Adrian Hon. It’s not clear what GameCamp etiquette is, whether what gets said at GameCamp stays at GameCamp, whether things can be reported under the Chatham House Rule, or whether there can be wider reports, but it would be great to hear more from the event. Failing that, Adrian discussed the genre towards the end of episode 41 of “The Cultures” podcast.

Some exit games take the approach that they will be very generous with the distribution of hints to their players, even making it clear that this is the policy right at the outset, in the discussion before players enter the room. As this was the approach taken by the first exit room site to open in the UK, this may well be the dominant approach nationally.

By contrast, there are other sites which offer some games where few or no clues are offered. The pitfall there is either that you set the difficulty level relatively high and have no or very few people crack the room, or you set the difficulty level relatively low and risk having people finish the game in less than half the permitted time, which can be something of a flat ending. There are plenty of other solutions, especially if players are prepared to enjoy the possibility of partial credit for solving some, but not all, of the game, but these appear to be less frequent.

Incidentally, the “deliberately very few winners” approach is the one taken by many of the games offered by SCRAP, considered the originators of the genre, among other operators. Befitting the Japanese origins of the “Nintendo hard” stereotype, as an example, their “What is the Real Escape Game?” page talks of a 2% success rate, and their Flickr photostream has a couple of photos of ongoing scoreboards suggesting victory rates not much higher than that. (Anecdotally, more recent games suggest an easing of standards to around 10%.) This site is not yet aware of any UK exit games that take quite such an extreme approach.

The issue of difficulty of exit games is an open one; there appears not to be a consensus on a single correct approach. As different players want to face different challenges, this variety of approaches may well be a good thing for the world. The difficulty is to match potential players up to the right game for them. This web site will do whatever it can to help in this regard.

The Keyhunter site in Birmingham takes a particularly interesting approach in this regard; it advertises its three games as having different levels of difficulty, and advertises its teams successes on social media not only in terms of the time they took but also by how many clues were needed. If you want the added challenge of completing an exit room and having “with 0 hints used” decorating your performance, perhaps Keyhunter might be the right site for you. There may well be other games that offer the same option and this site will make it clear when it’s available.

Coming up this weekend

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weekly calendarA quick round-up of matters arising:

  • The World Puzzle Federation’s ongoing Puzzle Grand Prix contest has its third round this weekend, with our friends from Japan supplying the puzzles. Choose your own starting time between 11am on Friday and 9:30pm on Monday, UK times, then you have 90 minutes to score as many points as possible by solving puzzles, with the (at least nominally) harder puzzles worth more. Take a look at the latest instruction booklet to see precisely which types of culture-free language-neutral logic puzzles are coming up this time. This round of the contest has more, relatively low-valued, puzzles than the previous rounds; you may well find things to your taste even if this is your first online puzzle contest.
     
  • If that isn’t enough for you, and you live in the UK, you can get a whole weekend of puzzles at the UK Puzzle Association’s in-person UK Open Puzzle and Sudoku Championships taking place in Croydon this Saturday and Sunday. Further details are available in my preview a couple of weeks ago. The day rate of £25 is very reasonable for what you get, and adding a night’s B&B for another £60 is a good rate for a prestigious venue. The UKPA’s contest page has the instruction books, which are discussed on the UKPA forum. The hardest of the hardcore solvers will likely treat the WPF Grand Prix as just a Friday leg-stretcher for the contests on Saturday and Sunday.
     
  • If you live in the UK, but rather closer to the West Midlands than to Croydon, you may well be interested in Keyhunter‘s “pop-up discounts” on their Facebook page. A 50% discount code popped up, but tantalisingly, it was only good for bookings made within a few hours. Teases! Keep following their Facebook page to look out for possible further such discounts in the future. Keyhunter have three different games, so perhaps you could use this to play another of their games if you’ve played one already, or perhaps you could try two games for the price of one – if you can find a booking slot in their timetable!