Tag Archives: longer

Autumn 2015: where are the gaps in the UK market?

Regions of the UK

From the National Archives; contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Every six months or so, this site looks at a snapshot of the UK market for exit games and analyses where the gaps are at that time. (See the older versions from March 2015, September 2014 and March 2014.) Six months is practically the duration of a geological era considering how quickly the exit game market moves. This site says “six months or so” because the regular schedule had gone out of this site’s mind and a stray check reveals that it’s slightly more than six months since the last installment. Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

It’s possible that some of the first exit game room proprietors might have started business in the closest big city to where they happened to already live. However, if you had a choice as to where to set up business, where are the most obvious gaps in the market? Alternatively, where might people expect to see exit rooms coming soon? In late 2015, now that some of the most successful operations have started two or more locations in different towns, where remains up for grabs?

The Brookings Institution analysed 300 of the largest metropolitan economies in late 2012 and identified 15 of them as being in the UK. At time of writing, here are the 15 largest metropolitan economies in the UK, alongside the number of exit rooms featured in each one. If there’s a large metropolitan economy without an exit room, there’s arguably a gap in the market there. You can find details of which sites are in which locations on the Exit Game details page.

Metropolitan economy Sites operating Also consider
1. London 15 3 sites under construction, 2 sites recently closed
2. Birmingham 2 1 site nearby (Nuneaton), 1 site under construction, 1 site recently closed
3. Manchester 5 2 sites nearby (Macclesfield and Warrington), 1 site under construction
4. Leeds-Bradford 3 1 site nearby (York), 1 site recently closed
5. Liverpool 5 1 site nearby (Warrington)
6. Glasgow 3 2 sites under construction
7. Nottingham-Derby 3 1 site nearby (Mansfield), 1 site nearby under construction
8. Portsmouth-Southampton 0 2 sites nearby (Bournemouth and Salisbury)
9. Bristol 3 1 site under construction
10. Newcastle 3 1 site nearby under construction
11. Sheffield 3  
12. Cardiff-Newport 0 1 site under construction
13. Edinburgh 5 1 site under construction
14. Leicester 0 1 site temporarily closed for 17 months
15. Brighton 1 2 sites under construction

For comparison, the Dublin metro area with three sites open and one site temporarily closed would come just below number three in the above list.

Six months ago, this pointed to South Hampshire and Wales as being the biggest gaps in the market. Today… you’d probably conclude the same thing. In the last six months, it’s probably reasonable to characterise the majority of growth as having taken place in known, successful markets, with a limited extent of growth in smaller markets. It’s surprising that Portsmouth and Southampton lie fallow, though Bournemouth and Salisbury both have their own rooms and are convenient from Southampton, at least. The sites under construction in Cardiff and Swansea would also seem to have large chunks of territory to themselves; this site occasionally checks the TripAdvisor charts for North Wales and South Wales and finds nothing.

Let’s pick some other names out of the hat. Perhaps it’s surprising that Birmingham only has two sites; noting a site in Nuneaton, there might be scope for games in Wolverhampton and Coventry too. This site also tends to wonder about other home counties towns; there are so many tech companies and smart people in Reading that that must surely have a chance. This site also hinted at Watford and Southend, to which it would seem reasonable to add Milton Keynes. Hull might have a shot. This site is bullish about the potential of seaside resorts: Blackpool may well yet have untapped potential and surely it’s not alone. (Could a Dracula-themed game in Whitby kill all year round, or would it only draw during the Goth weekends?) Bradford must surely be worth another go rather than being the next site in Leeds. It’s arguably a slight surprise to see so many sites in Nottingham and so few in Derby and Leicester, as well.

Now the obvious rejoinder to that is that Nottingham is known as a tourist destination whereas Derby and Leicester aren’t, and that does suggest another reasonable approach; don’t think in terms of where the economies are, think in terms of where the tourists go. After all, exit games are firmly part of the leisure economy. Happily, the Office of National Statistics will furnish us with Travel Trends statistics that can inform our views, though it tends to focus on overseas tourists to the UK rather than tourists travelling within the UK. If you have access to reliable statistics about tourism in the UK from UK tourists, please let this site know.

The chart in figure 14 at the bottom of the overseas residents’ visits page is particularly interesting. Oxford and Cambridge get hundreds of thousands of visitors per year; perhaps they have scope to feature exit games more prominently as part of their tourist operation. Northern Scotland tourist visits are definitely popular – and if you’re going to the Highlands, you’re very probably going to visit Inverness. To its shame, this site was a little leery that a town with population of under 80,000 might support two exit games; however, with so many tourists, it makes a lot more sense.

All that said, this site is definitely considerably more cautious about the market than it was six months ago. There’s been a track record of the number of UK (specifically) exit games roughly doubling (or slightly-more-than-doubling) every six months. That is finally slowing down in the second half of 2015, though not by much. A notable trend is that a substantial proportion (say, perhaps, half?) of new sites are deliberately concentrating on opening outside the traditional Monday-to-Friday office hours. That’s sensible enough; a popular site can always expand if the tourist market shows that it has the demand to fill slots for games during afternoons or even mornings as well. That said, there are still very many (probably millions, certainly many hundreds of thousands) people who might only ever play an exit game once who are yet to play their one game, as well as those who might enjoy their first game enough to come back to play more, and those – who this site salutes! – who know the genre’s capability to thrill and devote themselves to seeing all there is to see.

A year in the life of Agent November, puzzle detective

Agent November playersA (slightly belated!) guest post by Agent November‘s Nathan Glover, looking back on the highs and lows of the first year of running an escape game business.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to run my own business. Growing up, I was never very creative musically, theatrically, or artistically. But I had a burning passion for creating a business, and I was always on the lookout for a way to start a successful enterprise.

About 18 months ago I was tentatively trying to start up a tour guiding business in London. To bring in some cash, I started working for an escape room, running some of their games and their e-mail system. So although I encountered the idea of escape games accidentally, I quickly realised that if I made my own version then I could use my passion for entertainment to create something amazing.

The first problem I hit was a lack of funding; there was no way I could afford to rent or fit out a room. But what I’ve discovered in the last year and a half of this project is that my biggest problems can often lead to my greatest opportunities. Instead of using a room, I decided to set my first game up in a park. But how could this be an “escape” game if the players are already outside? My answer: use the narrative of having one hour to defuse a nuclear device! It’s something that players can instantly understand, and it really puts them in a situation which is both unusual, yet in some ways familiar; after all, who hasn’t watched James Bond or Jack Bauer doing something similar? Thankfully a wonderful organisation called Go Make It Happen funded the start up of the company, allowing me to get the materials needed to make my nuclear puzzle device. The outdoor nature of my “Major X Plow-Shun” challenge has become a major selling point, as many players love the idea of doing an outdoor escape game, especially in the summer.

But it certainly wasn’t easy to begin with; in the first 10 weeks, I ran just 15 games! I was stuck in a catch 22; with no reviews on Trip Advisor, no one would book my games – and with no games being run, there was no one to write reviews! This did give me some time to call up newspapers and bloggers and try to promote the business. Thankfully I was mentioned in the Metro and on Exit Games UK, and the bookings started to come in. I’ve also started doing deals with Stag and Hen companies, and I’ve found that my second game “The Rainbow Syndicate” is a great way of getting stag/hen weekends off to a fun start.

I’ve always wanted to add something to my experience that isn’t offered by the other games running in London, while keeping the core elements that make them so much fun. I see so many opportunities to bring in elements of entertainment from different fields, and right from the start I wanted a strong narrative thread running through my products. To add to the customer experience, I advertised for actors to run my games (or “missions” as I prefer to call them), and made sure I paid them well, in order to keep the best people on board, interacting with the players and creating a fictional world for them. Working with such creative individuals has been great, and they have added a lot to the final product.

As the summer approached I was asked to create a new game, and after several sleepless nights I had created my third mission, simply called “Murder Mystery”. I decided to make the murder investigation a major part of the game, and blur the line between “escape games” and murder mystery events. It’s been great watching people take on a puzzle game with a unique blend of flavours. The game itself is designed to be run in some fantastic rooms I found, where I could finally run an escape “room”, rather than purely outdoor games. The venue in Euston that provides these rooms for me also let me keep my game materials on site overnight. This might not sound like a big deal, but it means I no longer have to cycle to work every day with up to 35kg on my back!

Then the summer hit, and I was suddenly busy all the time, which was a huge relief, as the sacrifices and hard work of the previous 8 months finally paid off. Last week I finally got rid of my credit card, which was a great feeling! The next day my 51st Trip Advisor review came in at 5/5, but that’s just what I’ve come to expect; as in everything I’ve done, I’ve tried my hardest to do it right. I can now accommodate 35–40 players at a time, and I’ve put on several corporate events of this size, which is always hectic but loads of fun. As the summer winds down I’m looking forward to running even more of my fiendishly difficult Murder Mystery missions.

I’m a perfectionist at heart, so I’ll never be completely happy with how the business is doing, but overall, I’m proud of what’s been accomplished. And now a moment is fast approaching that I’ve been really looking forward to; August 19th will mark 365 days since the first customer came through my doors! (This isn’t technically true, as I didn’t have any doors. But they did come through my hypothetical doors, even if they didn’t realise it at the time.) The reason that I’m so excited is that most businesses don’t last a year. Therefore the fact that Agent November has been running for over a year puts it in the top 50% of businesses of all time!

The future looks bright, as I’m really happy with the missions I am running. My biggest weakness remains marketing, but I am hopeful that something big will come along soon – possibly a partnership with one of the larger escape game companies in London. I’m also looking to find a manager soon, to take care of the daily running of the business, so I can get back to what I do best – to quote my mission statement, creating “outstanding quality puzzle experiences, which immerse participants in an amazing fictional world”!

P.S. This popped up on my Facebook feed today: “I used to be embarrassed because I was just a comic-book writer while other people were building bridges or going on to medical careers. And then I began to realize: entertainment is one of the most important things in people’s lives. Without it they might go off the deep end. I feel that if you’re able to entertain people, you’re doing a good thing” – Stan Lee

Interview with the Cyberdrome Crystal Maze team

The Aztec Zone of a branch of the Cyberdrome Crystal Maze in JapanWhat’s your favourite game of all time? Any sort of game: board game, video game, card game, puzzle game, physical game, computer game, role-playing game, exit game, all sorts of other genres of game, whatever you like; compare your favourites from each medium against each other and pick a favourite. Too hard? You can narrow it down to four.

My four, in no order: puzzle hunts at large, the live action RPG campaign I played in at university, obscure mid-’80s hybrid board/computer game Brian Clough’s Football Fortunes and The Cyberdrome Crystal Maze. You can probably have a reasonable guess, among other things, that I was born in 1975.

This site has touched on the Cyberdrome Crystal Maze in the past without going into the detail it deserves. It was a physical attraction, based upon the The Crystal Maze TV game show, where teams raced from game to game about the centre, sending team members to play bespoke physical games or computer games where physical games would have been impossible. These were often as puzzling as the mental games on the TV show, or at least emulated the demands of one of the show’s physical games. It worked heart-breakingly well. The photo above is of the Aztec zone at the branch in Kuwana, near Nagoya in Japan.

I wrote a longer piece about the game roughly half my lifetime ago, and will probably still have reason to write about it in another twenty years’ time. It’s the one topic that I’ve always wanted to write about on this blog but always shied away from for fear that I could not do it proper justice.

However, failing that, here’s something rather special instead. Some detective work led me to the e-mail address of one Carl Nicholson, one of the founders of the Cyberdrome Crystal Maze – indeed, the technical side of the outfit. Mr. Nicholson extremely kindly agreed to answer some questions by e-mail; even better still, his partner in Cyberdrome, David Owers, whose focus was the business side, contributed some answers as well, and Carl has even got in touch with other members of staff. Huge thanks to all of them for their time, effort and responses, as well as for being the people behind a sensational game; it’s fascinating to hear more of the story behind the scenes. Continue reading Interview with the Cyberdrome Crystal Maze team

10 open questions about The Crystal Maze Live

The Crystal Maze liveThe crowdfunding campaign for the forthcoming The Crystal Maze live attraction has barely 36 hours left to run. Already it has proved extremely successful, raising its original £500,000 goal and then smashing through four stretch goals up to £850,000. Many congratulations to everyone involved! It’s still possible to buy individual tickets through the crowdfunding campaign at £45 each, compared to the announced general admission price of £50 each plus a booking fee. There are still some open questions, though, worth thinking about before you decide if it’s right for you.

1) How many games will you get to play? Each team will get two more per zone than if the campaign hadn’t reached £600,000, apparently, though the facility isn’t putting numbers on it. Exit Games UK – without the benefit of any inside information – looks at the announced playtime of 1 hour 45 and chooses to interpret the graphic as a reasonably literal map. The original show played up to four games per zone; Exit Games UK guesses that there will be six cells per zone and all six will be played by each team, pointing to 24 games per team, or three per player in a full team of eight.

That said, Iain had a rather exciting theory. Suppose some of the games are designed to let two team members play at once. If there are four one-player games and two two-player games per zone, then it would mean every player in a team of eight would get to play in every zone, which would be delightful. This site suspects that the attraction will err on the side of authenticity and stick with one-player games, but would be delighted to be wrong.

If you feel that this isn’t as many games as you’d like to play, it’s always possible to buy all eight tickets and have fewer than eight participants use them, spreading the games less thinly among the team. Theoretically there could even be a single-player team where the player plays every single game, but a lock-in would cause a considerable problem – and a single player may not get so far in The Crystal Dome.

2) Will there be watery games? Exit Games UK would consider it unlikely, taking an initial clue from the decision (which it loves!) to go with the original Industrial Zone rather than the Ocean Zone. On top of everything, it would be a health and safety nightmare; there’s always a drowning risk, and large tanks of standing water have an entirely serious legionella risk as well. The original show appealed to people for many different reasons, including to those who liked to watch people fall into water tanks. Does this mean that people would actually want to play those games, though? If you don’t see a “bring a change of clothing” announcement, expect a dry experience – and when there are so many other strong things that could be done, Exit Games UK would expect the attraction not to try to weakly emulate the genre.

3) How will lock-ins work? With the second stretch goal having been reached, those who get locked in will be taken to a special prison where they might have the chance to earn their escape, without costing the team a crystal, by completing a special challenge. This seems like a decision of practicality over authenticity, which Exit Games UK welcomes. Getting locked in and not being bought out would lead to poor value for money; much as “everybody likes solving puzzles, nobody likes not solving puzzles”, it’s a reasonable approximation that “everybody likes playing games, nobody likes not playing games”. Additionally, splitting teams between zones would be very difficult logistically, not least when there will be different teams circulating around the zones.

4) How soon will you get to play? This site estimates that the crowdfunding campaign has sold tickets to around 2,700 teams: start with the 1,600 “full team at the Maze” tickets that have gone, add 500 for the 125 “four teams head to head” tickets, and so on. Given that the “all day maze access” ticket suggests that there will be 16 teams per day (four sessions, each taking four teams) then this would imply that the facility has been pre-sold out for over 160 days – assuming the location opens seven days a week, that’s a good five months. It seems reasonably plausible that there will be higher demand for Friday-to-Sunday tickets and evening tickets so if your heart is set on one of those then you may have to wait, but midweek afternoon tickets may be more readily available. Exit Games UK wildly (and, again, uninformedly) guesses that games might start at 1:30pm, 4pm, 6:30pm and 9pm… and that the facility might well consider offering 11am games as well.

5) Will there be prizes? This one might not be such an open question, as Exit Games UK recalls (though quite possibly incorrectly!) reading a suggestion that when the four teams meet up against each other at The Crystal Dome, whichever team performs best earns a set of eight crystals. It would not be a surprise to see a monthly leaderboard with the chance for top teams to win activity days in the style of the original show.

6) How will The Crystal Dome work? There’s no reason to believe anything other than authentically – though the actual show used “the magic of television” and got its close-up shots from filming the players on a second attempt where the performance did not matter. In Buzzfeed’s brilliant oral history of the show, the captain of the first episode claims that even then “we realised that if we all lay down we’d stop the airflow and it would be easy” – expect blocking the fans to authentically be prohibited as well.

7) Celebrities? This site decided against getting a ticket to the first night party in the end. Don’t expect Richard O’Brien to show; Richard’s 73 years old, lives on the other side of the world and may not be in the very best of health. (On the other hand, a personal appearance would be a delightful surprise.) On the other hand, there would be a very welcome dash of authenticity if they could get an appearance by the captain of the team from the first Christmas children’s special, one Michael Underwood, who has gone on to have a strong hosting career. He’d be an excellent celebrity guest host if they could book him, not least from his time hosting Jungle Run, a children’s show with more than a little inspiration from The Crystal Maze. Also, just for the crossover kicks: is Hugo (“Treguard”) Myatt still in good health? Other heroes of television of those who grew up with the show, but who may now only be tangentially in the business known as show, spring to mind…

8) How will the spectator experience be? Courtesy of hitting the third and fourth stretch goals, there should apparently be a rather interesting bar area overlooking the field of play, with cameras in the cells to show the progress of the games as they are played. Exit Games UK tends to hold the view that a large part of the appeal of The Crystal Maze is rapidly working out what is demanded of you in the games within the time limit, as well as executing what is required, and that seeing the games in advance (either as a spectator, or because the site has revealed the game’s details) will rather spoil the effect. However, another (probably very much more practical) route to take would be to concentrate on games where knowing what has to be done is easy and actually performing the tasks required is difficult, as spoilers will surely get out by word of mouth if nothing else. Either way, Exit Games UK hopes that the games are really, really good, and that the project gets the very best people in to design them, including those who designed games for the original show.

9) Is there replay value? Will people want to play more than once, or is this something that can only be a one-time experience? This ties in with the extent to which working out what’s required is a part of the challenge. Part of the fun of the experience will be supporting your team-mates, but if you see your friend play a game and go “oh, that looks really fun to play!” then you might well want to come back and do so. It’s possible to go too far, though; it would be inauthentic if an eight played the maze first time, learnt the games, practiced them at home, came back and smashed them all second time around and set an immense high score. You didn’t get second chances on the show, so it would seem awry to get them at the attraction. It may be hard to avoid; it’s practically inevitable that someone will come as a spectator and see the games played through the cameras before they come back as a player themselves. A good – but expensive and probably impractical! – way to do this would be to rotate the games very frequently; a reasonable way to do this would be to replace all the games every year, much as one series of the show had different games to the next.

10) Will it be a long-term hit? Ah, that’s the 64,000-gold-token question. Tickets have already been sold to perhaps twenty thousand or so players, and the show had audience figures in the millions. With the repeats on Challenge? over the years, the show must be familiar to tens of millions of viewers, many of whom will surely want to play. Whether it’s a compelling enough product to convert many potential players into actual players at a regular price of £50 plus booking fee remains to be seen, as well as whether or not £50 per player is actually a price point that makes sense for the organisers in practice as well as in theory. The people behind the enterprise have very convincing track records, though, so they must surely have as good a chance of making it work as any.

Exit Games UK has purchased a “four teams head to head” ticket and will be selling all 32 spaces on to members of the exit games community, both players and staff. A handful of tickets remain; you’ll get the chance to play alongside representatives of Agent November, Archimedes Inspiration, Breakout Manchester, Breakout Liverpool, Enigma Quests, Escape Hour, Escape Live, Escape Quest, The Escape Room and (subject to confirmation) the Escape sites in Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle.

The date is unknown, to be confirmed once the facility has an opening date and permits people to start booking their prepaid tickets – but the plan is an afternoon on a Monday, for Monday seems to be about as close to a weekend as the industry has. Purely indicatively, the first choice of date would be Monday 30th November, second choice would be Monday 23rd November and third choice would be Monday 7th December. (Anything later gets too close to Christmas and risks disrupting business.)

The remaining spaces are being sold at the cost price of £32.50 (that’s the £1,000 ticket split 32 ways!) so you might well be interested in them simply on the grounds that it’s more cost-effective than any of the other options, but the company should be spectacular as well. If this interests you, please get in touch by e-mail for the payment options. If you’ve got in touch in the past and received payment instructions but not acted on them then you don’t yet have a guaranteed place and need to move quickly. There may well be a waiting list started, in case people who have paid have to drop out and resell their tickets.

To-o-o-o-o-o-o… the Crystal Dome!

DASH 7: “There’s never plenty of time”

Cartoon of a permanently stopped watchDo not take the graphic as a dig or a suggestion that DASH 7 was in some way broken, that most absolute and damning term of game criticism…

A common theme in the commentary of DASH 7 was its quantity, as well as its undoubtedly very high quality. There was more than people were expecting, possibly to the point where it strained the logistic constraints of practicality that its players had to place on it, and that’s where some of the relatively negative feedback has come from. This post concerns the Experienced players’ track only; primarily this is from inevitable self-centredness, though it’s worth noting that (provisionally) the convincing majority of players were on the Experienced track.

A phrase frequently used when describing the hunt in advance ran, roughly, to the effect of “We expect that most teams will solve all puzzles in 6-8 hours“, though the precise wording varied from location to location. Some locations announced specific wrap-up times in advance, others used phrases like “All teams across the world will be working on the same 10 puzzles over the course of a max of 8-hours“; it’s not completely clear where the concept came from that there would be an overall time limit, including non-solving time, of eight hours this year, except possibly from expecting a repeat of last year’s hard limit in the absence of anything to set our expectations otherwise. That said, this site probably propagated this incorrect notion; if so – whoops, sorry, genuine mistake.

The combined par time of the nine scored puzzles for DASH 7 was 5:45, very similar to the combine par time of the nine scored puzzles for DASH 6 of 5:50. However, as previously discussed, a reasonably representative total solving time (based on early, probably incomplete data) for a globally mid-table team rose from 5:10 for DASH 6 to 6:55 for DASH 7. Another way of looking at it is that the median score for DASH 6 was 411 and for DASH 7 was 349. True, DASH 6 had five minutes more par time and thus scores might be expected to be five points higher, but the other way of looking at it is that people were scoring far fewer bonus points than in previous years.

In DASH 4, the par value was described as a “generous average solve time”; this year, that was rather less the case. Looking at the nine global-median-scoring teams (usual caveats: early, possibly incomplete, data subject to revision), in DASH 6, a typical team earned bonus points on seven (sometimes six) of the nine scored puzzles whereas in DASH 7, a typical team earned bonus points on two, maybe three, of the nine. This is rather an abrupt analysis; fuller analysis would consider practice from previous years still. Nevertheless, the DASH 7 par values broadly didn’t feel like generous average solve times.

The very dear Snoutcast used to mention the phrase “Everybody likes solving puzzles, nobody likes not solving puzzles” often. From there, it’s not much of an extension to “Everybody likes solving puzzles, everybody likes solving puzzles and earning bonus points from doing so even more”. Teams who were used to having sufficient time to solve puzzles and frequently earning bonus points in previous years may not have had their expectations set to the higher standard this year, which doesn’t just cause “we’re not doing as well as we did last year” ill feeling but also can cause “we might not have time to get all the fun from solving puzzles that we want before the hard time limit expires” worries, which may knock on to causing teams to take sub-optimal decisions over their self-care, worsening their experience further.

There’s a very interesting discussion on the GAST scoring system on the Puzzle Hunters Facebook group at the moment. When the par times are sufficiently generous, then the ordering by (highest) scores and (fastest) solve times are identical; when they are not, some teams are arguably over-rewarded, or insufficiently punished, for relatively slow solves on some puzzles. This was an arguable issue as high as the top ten this year.

DASH has one of the hardest calibration issues of all puzzle hunts because it aims to cater to teams of so many different abilities, even among those who self-select for one level of difficulty or another. Previous DASHes perhaps might not have got the degree of credit that they have deserved for making the balancing act work quite so well. So this all points to a question of where DASH should seek to target its activities.

Is the number of puzzles correct? Should the puzzles be shorter… or the same length, with longer par values? Would DASH be better served by having the sort of quantity of content (i.e. total solve time 4½-5½ hours for median teams) that is had in previous years, or a similar quantity of content to that of this year spread over a longer day? The considerable downsides of a longer day could include that it might well put potential players off, potential GC and volunteers off and that it might make finding appropriate locations even more difficult still. On the other hand, challenges as meaty as those of this year were an awful lot of fun!

This is a very INTP-ish “throwing things out there” sort of post, so perhaps time to be a bit more concrete. It’s inevitable that calibration suggestions will turn out to be self-interested, though the self-interest will be subconscious as efforts have been made to try to eliminate conscious bias. For an eight-hour-overall-time-limit day, perhaps the calibration target should be that 75% of teams solve all the puzzles, in their division of choice, within 5½ hours solving time, and that 80% of teams beat the par value for each puzzle.

That said, it’s not as if tuning puzzle difficulty up or down is at all an exact science, or that playtest results are necessarily reflective of how puzzles will turn out in real life. The whole process is the endeavour of fallible humans after all; the puzzle community at large is truly grateful to those who submit puzzles, those who edit them, those who make the selections and turn raw puzzles into complete hunts. The quality has once again been extremely high, even if the quantity was not what people had been led to expect.

It could be possible for a DASH to offer so little challenge to the fastest teams as to hurt their experience, so here’s an out-there suggestion to finish. While adding multiple levels of difficulty by writing more sets of puzzles adds very considerably to the workload – and while the BAPHL series of hunts offers two levels of difficulty, this site isn’t aware of any other hunt that offers three, what with the brilliantly thoughtful junior track as another labour of love – here’s a possibility.

Consider the addition of a hardcore mode that shares the same material with the experienced track, but is different in the proactivity with which it offers hints, and also limits team sizes to three. This could slow the best solvers down while hurting their experience in only the “it’s fun to solve in large teams” fashion – but, if you’re that hardcore, you’re likely to have access to other events which will let you solve in larger teams as well. It’s also been proven to be the case that the best three-player teams can match the best larger teams as well!

Mischief managed! – DASH 7 described

DASH-cardThis site makes no apology for a great deal of content about DASH as it’s one of the highlights of the year. If you couldn’t attend this year, here’s what you missed… and perhaps, just perhaps, it might make you interested in taking part in a future year.

Fair warning: now that DASH has finished, we’re into potential spoiler territory. Every previous DASH has had its puzzles posted online reasonably soon afterwards. If you didn’t play DASH, it would still be a lot of fun to get a group of your friends together and try the puzzles for yourself once they’re made available. This post is going to be fairly generic, avoiding the Aha! moments for each puzzle, but the comments may be more specific. Nevertheless, if you want to avoid spoilers altogether, best skip this post and definitely best skip the comments. However, if you played and want to relive the experience, if you played elsewhere and want to compare stories or if you know you’ll never play this year’s puzzles and just want to find out what you missed, then to get to the detail, click on the Portkey that is the “Continue Reading” button below. Continue reading Mischief managed! – DASH 7 described

The Exit Game purity test

Are you an angel or a devil?This site doesn’t believe in taking April 1st as an excuse to try to make fools of its readers, but it’s a good day for whimsy. For instance, see last year’s satire on freemium gaming; happily everybody has had sufficient good taste for this not to come to pass, and fingers crossed that this remains so for many more years to come.

Instead, probably less tastefully, this site proposes an exit game purity test. Your purity score starts at 100% and drops by 1% for each of the following questions to which you can truthfully answer “Yes”. Technicalities count.

1. Have you ever been in a room with a door with a lock?
2. Have you ever unlocked a door?
3. Have you ever unlocked a door by grabbing the key with your teeth and turning it because both your hands were full with shopping bags that you didn’t want to put down on the ground?
4. Have you ever picked a lock?
5. Have you ever snapped a key clean in two in a lock then had to physically unscrew the lock from the door in order to sort it out?
6. Have you ever mocked a lock after cleaning its clock?
7. Have you mutilated more keys than Uri Geller?
8. Have you ever been outside a building with an exit game?
9. Have you ever got out of the rain by standing in the doorway to an exit game without actually going in?
10. Have you ever been inside a building with an exit game?
11. Have you ever been thrown out of a building with an exit game?
12. Have you ever played an exit game?
13. Have you ever played an exit game and won?
14. Have you ever played an exit game and lost?
15. Have you ever played an exit game and come up with a weird indeterminate sort of half-victory which the staff were not expecting?
16. Have you ever taken the consequences of losing an exit game wayyy too seriously?
17. Have you ever broken a record at an exit game?
18. Have you ever smuggled a vinyl disc into an exit game for the purpose of demonstrating your commitment to convoluted prop comedy?
19. Have you got a regular exit game team?
20. Have you got more than one exit game team?
21. Have you founded more than one exit game team just so your two teams can somehow feud with each other?
22. Have you travelled a hundred miles to play another exit game?
23. Have you travelled to another country to play an exit game?
24. Have you travelled to another country to play at least eight exit games in a single day?
25. Have you ever played an exit game while not knowing more than the barest essentials of the language of the country in which you were playing?
26. Have you ever cracked a code?
27. Have you ever been cracked by a code?
28. Have you ever asked a precocious child to set you a code to break and then been blown away by the complexity of what they have set?
29. Have you ever cheated at an exit game?
30. No, really. Have you ever cheated at an exit game, just a teeny weeny bit?
31. TECHNICALITIES COUNT. In your heart of hearts, you’ve got to admit that that one time, you did that thing that wasn’t completely kosher, didn’t you?
32. Have you ever cheated on an exit game, by playing it but thinking about playing another one while you were doing so?
33. Have you ever played two exit games at once?
34. “Yo, dawg. I heard you like exit games, so I put an exit game in your exit game so you can exit a game while you exit a game.” Have you ever played a digital exit game while playing a physical exit game?
35. Have you ever played an exit game with your significant other?
36. Have you ever played an exit game with your significant other and argued about it with them for hours afterwards?
37. Have you ever brought your cat, dog or other household pet with you to play an exit game because you want them to share the fun?
38. Have you ever dreamt of an exit game?
39. Have you ever dreamt of an exit game, then woken up in the morning, written the details down and worked out if they were at all practicable?
40. Have you ever been blindfolded in an exit game?
41. Have you ever been blindfolded in an exit game and enjoyed it a bit too much?
42. Have you ever been handcuffed in an exit game?
43. Have you ever been handcuffed in an exit game and chose not to remove the handcuffs when you probably should have done?
44. Have you ever taken advantage of an exit game which doesn’t have a camera to do something you probably shouldn’t have done in an exit game?
45. Have you ever taken advantage of an exit game which does have a camera to do something you really really probably shouldn’t have done in an exit game and the fact that there was a camera only made it better?
46. Have you ever been a gamesmaster for an exit game?
47. Have you ever designed your own exit game?
48. Have you ever run an exit game inside your own house for your friends?
49. Have you ever set yourself a one-hour time limit for a domestic chore and pretended you were playing an exit game in order to make it more interesting?
50. Have you ever bought something because you thought it would be a cool addition to the exit game that you’re planning to make some day?
51. Have you ever made an exit from an exit game through an exit that was not intended?
52. Have you ever left an exit game before the end because the fire alarm had gone off?
53. Have you ever realio, trulio, not-part-of-the-game-honest been locked into a building with an exit game?
54. Have you got an exit game costume?
55. Have you got an exit game costume that you like so much that you wear it when you’re not playing exit games to help you pretend that you are?
56. Have you ever gone commando when playing an exit game?
57. Have you ever played an exit game naked?
58. Have you ever been injured in an exit game?
59. Have you ever been properly physically injured in an exit game, not just suffering a bruised ego?
60. Have you ever learnt a famous code off by heart?
61. Have you ever held a conversation in Morse just to annoy those who don’t understand it?
62. Have you ever used a blacklight in an exit game?
63. Have you ever staged a miniature blacklight rave in an exit game?
64. Have you ever made it through a laser maze in an exit game?
65. Have you ever practiced capoiera, parkour or tai chi in the expectation of having to face a laser maze in an exit game?
66. Have you ever watched a movie and thought “mmm, this would make a great exit game”?
67. Have you ever spent money on an exit game that you really shouldn’t have done?
68. Have you ever playtested an exit game?
69. Have you ever picked up people you didn’t previously know for the express purpose of playing an exit game with them?
70. Have you ever seen a ghost while playing an exit game?
71. Have you ever pranked a teammate while playing an exit game?
72. Have you ever bitten a teammate while playing an exit game?
73. Have you ever had something in an exit game named after you?
74. Have you ever named a child making a deliberate reference to an exit game?
75. Have you ever had a first date at an exit game?
76. Have you ever gained a significant other through playing an exit game?
77. Have you ever opened a lock, a lock with someone, ever opened a lock, a lock with someone you shouldn’t have opened a lock with?
78. Have you ever traded sexual favours for information about an exit game?
79. Have you ever proposed marriage, been proposed to, got married or started your honeymoon at an exit game?
80. Have you ever broken up a relationship over an exit game?
81. Have you ever spoken about exit games in public?
82. Have you ever made academic study of exit games?
83. Have you made a career out of exit games?
84. Have you made a living out of exit games?
85. Have you made a living for other people out of exit games?
86. Have you got rich from exit games?
86. TRICK QUESTION! Nobody has got rich from exit games… yet. Have you ever gone broke from an exit game?
87. Have you ever badly mistimed your need for the bathroom due to being locked in an exit game?
88. Have you ever played the same exit game more than once?
89. Have you played so many exit games that the precise details of what was in each one blur into each other?
90. Have you ever pretended you were in an exit game when really you had just lost your keys?
91. Have you ever used being locked in an exit game as an excuse for not doing something, to someone who didn’t know you would still have been able to get out?
92. Have you ever used the phrase “exit game” as innuendo while fooling around?
93. Have you ever played an exit game on your own?
94. Have you ever fantasised a bit too hard about an exit game?
95. Have you ever used “whatever happens in an exit game stays in the exit game” as an excuse?
96. Have you ever had a game exit you?
97. Have you ever escaped from an exit game with a different team than the one you went in with?
98. Have you ever lied while taking this purity test to improve your score?
99. Have you ever used this purity test as a check-list of sources of inspiration, then done something with the intent to “improve” your score on this Purity Test?
100. Are you taking this test from within an exit game right now?

No names, no pack drill, and definitely no scores, but this site has specific reason to believe that in aggregate, the industry has a purity of between 6% and 14%.

The Crystal Maze at 25

the-crystal-mazeThe first episode of The Crystal Maze was broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on Thursday 15th February 1990, twenty-five years ago to the day. Happy silver anniversary!

For those who don’t know, in each hour-long episode, teams of six contestants went around the titular maze, visiting each of four zones in turn. In each zone, they would face three or four games, played by a team member of their choice. These games would last between two and three minutes in length, and would be chosen from categories entitled physical, mental, mystery and skill. Each game would see the player have to enter a cell, attempt to retrieve a crystal and exit the cell within the time limit, but (generally) winning the crystal would require successfully completing a test of strength, agility, dexterity, balance, problem-solving, ingenuity, lateral thinking or sometimes just plain following instructions. Failure to escape within the permitted time, or sometimes making sufficiently many errors within a game, would see the player locked into that cell and would require the team to, optionally, relinquish a crystal won from another game in order to rescue the player from the cell. One all four zones had been visited, remaining team members aimed to collect certain foil tokens blown into the air within the Crystal Dome, having a time limit proportionate to the number of crystals they had remaining.

The show was distinctive and gained sufficient cult following to last six series, with much to commend it:

  • The games were frequently brilliantly designed, mostly great fun to watch and their sheer variety of games (typically close to fifty per series) meant that there’s a good chance, unless you’re a dedicated fan, that you’ll frequently be pleasantly surprised by something new.
  • The pace was tremendous; if a game is not to your taste, something different will come along within the next three or four minutes. (There were no artificial pauses, or replays, or contestant asides to camera, or any of the other modern additions which might feel dramatic but really just waste time.)
  • The set and soundtrack were elaborate, atmospheric and gorgeous; it’s fun to watch people enjoying themselves by playing with elaborate toys, and the show had some of the most spectacular vicarious fun to be found on TV.
  • The hosting by Richard O’Brien (in the first four series) was irreverent, witty, fantastic and didn’t take itself seriously. (Ed Tudor-Pole in the last two series? …if you ain’t living it, it ain’t coming out of your horn.)
  • The show had vast play-along-at-home value when you were able to work out what to do more quickly than the contestants; if you’re the sort of person who needs to make yourself feel superior to the contestants on-screen struggling and occasionally slightly suffering as a consequence of their mishaps, there were usually opportunities to do so.

The show has a certain timeless quality to it, by virtue of its time-travelling motif, and the production values were so high that it stands up on its own merits decades later. The show is sufficiently well-loved that the game show-focused Challenge TV channel here in the UK still show repeats from time to time; indeed, they are celebrating the anniversary with eight episodes in a row today – a classy, commendable touch. It would not be at all a surprise if the show were to go on to be repeated for decades further.

The Guardian has a story (from a couple of days ago) about the anniversary. The content is excellent, though the tone of the piece is a little incongruous and strained in places. The show is so well-loved, particularly among the game show fandom, that from time to time people discuss whether it might be remade; remade game shows, no matter how lovingly or accurately recreated, often tend to struggle and be brushed off with “It’s not the same“. Perhaps what people really mean is “I want to feel young again, and the show reminds me of when I was young”; the solution to that is something exciting and new… though possibly evocative of the hits of the past, and drawing upon their strengths. (It’s rare for a second host to match up to the original, and you couldn’t expect an increasingly frail 72-year-old Richard O’Brien to be nearly as kinetic as he was in his late forties and early fifties.)

The piece in The Guardian does perceptively touch upon the link between The Crystal Maze and the explosive growth of exit games; this site completely concurs. The Crystal Maze has become a byword (or, perhaps, a byphrase – a byname?) for any sort of TV challenge where part of the puzzle is to work out exactly what to do, or where the instructions may not be completely obvious. The “collection of minigames” format is not original to the show – see, for instance, the format that the world knows as The Price is Right, dating back at least a couple of decades earlier – but that is another familiar niche that the show has carved out as its own.

This site is convinced that The Crystal Maze‘s popularity and familiarity have contributed to the rapid public acceptance of exit games in the UK and Ireland. (It’s far from essential, though, looking at the success of the genre in countries which have never been exposed to the show.) Every country has its own favourite sort of intellectual game, but the phrase “it’s a bit like The Crystal Maze” has so immediate and familiar as to convey the key message of “go into a room, work out what the puzzles therein want you to do, solve the puzzles and get out within the time limit” in concise shorthand. Some sites refer to it explicitly when describing how their game works; even when they don’t, those who have played it will often make the comparison when describing the game to their friends – and it’s a comparison that is often so well-received as to make people want to play.

If that weren’t sufficiently connected to exit games enough, the first five series of the show each had one game that drew upon the murder mystery party games that had come to popularity in the 1980s – and, indeed, which some exit games can still be compared to. Enter the cell, there’s a dead body on the floor, it’s probably clutching an instruction, the instruction determines where to look within the intricately decorated cell and how to interact with the scenery, follow the chain of clues and eventually you’ll reach the last one which is rewarded with success – and hopefully you’ll do it before the time limit expires.

The show was popular enough to develop its own fan following, with Marc Gerrish’s site an excellent, database-like repository of information about each episode and every game played therein. It has screen grabs and statistics of these murder mystery games as played on the show in series one, two, three, four and five. (There wasn’t one in the sixth series, possibly because by that point each zone had hosted a murder mystery once and a sixth would’ve retrod old ground.) You can find a great many illicit videos of episodes of the series on YouTube; if you don’t want to spend the time looking up particular episodes and then finding particular games within them, you can just look at this wobble-vision off-screen recording of a contestant playing the murder mystery from series four.

If you were sufficiently keen on The Crystal Maze to watch more than a couple of episodes of it, there’s a good chance that you wanted to play the game and feel it for yourself. For years in (mostly) the early- and mid-’90s, there were a number of The Cyberdrome Crystal Maze attractions at bowling alleys and other family entertainment centres in the UK. This site has long planned to try to compose the paean to them that they deserve; their fading suggests that they may have been ahead of their time, or perhaps that they used unreliable technology that proved too hard to maintain, or perhaps they did not have the degree of repeat play value in practice necessary to pay their considerable way, or perhaps – just perhaps – The Crystal Maze might, sadly, have been just a bit too niche an interest after all. Nevertheless, this site is really impressed by Boda Borg, which would seem to have independently developed many of the same essentials. It has several sites in Sweden, one in Ireland and at least one is coming to the US within a few months.

Could the brand still have value in a participation experience in the UK these days? Perhaps, just perhaps. The particular challenges would include the need to establish dozens of different challenges, at a much greater physical location / rent cost than a typical exit game, the potential for much greater need to reset the games between plays (though the Cyberdrome games broadly handled that well) and either an intensive labour requirement for people leading the teams around the maze or an intensive tech requirement to direct people from game to game. There would certainly be some retro chic value to it, if ever it were to happen. We can but hope and dream… and improvise our own games until it happens, if ever it does. Tooooooooo the Crystal Dooooome!

Also happening this weekend: the second, Slovakian-authored, round of the WPF’s Puzzle Grand Prix series runs until the end of Monday, Central European Time. 90 minutes to earn points by solving puzzles of varying difficulty, with four puzzles of each of six different styles available. Take a look at the instruction booklet and see if any of the six types tickle your fancy. Also, if it’s Sunday night, it’s Quiz The Nation night, buuuuuut the official results from last week have not yet been posted and the official results from the week before have not had their prize payouts confirmed, so while these teething troubles are being sorted out, maybe play this one for fun (and, happily, it is fun) with the free credits supplied and more in hope than in expectation of the cash prizes.

Looking ahead to 2015: predictions for the year

Crystal ballThis site ran a predictions feature over the second half of 2014 then assessed the accuracy of its predictions. More strictly, the piece was a series of probability estimates, which is not quite the same thing. This year, to make things more explicit, this site will split its estimates into challenges, which represent interesting predictions that have an outside chance of happening but this site considers to be less likely than not to happen in 2015, and actual predictions, which this site considers to be more likely than not to happen in 2015.

CHALLENGES

There is a 5% chance that an exit game business sufficiently motivates and enthuses its staff to vote it into the top twenty of the next Sunday Times “Best Small Company to Work For” list.

There is a 10% chance that the newspapers will find a new style of puzzle that attracts half as much public attention as sudoku. There is a 80% chance that the newspapers will claim they have done, but only a 10% chance that it will actually stick in close to the way that sudoku has.

There is a 15% chance that the world will gain a second global monthly puzzle event. There’s a definite reason for one to exist: the wonderful Puzzled Pint is for the benefit of the community, which (generally) goes to visit a different venue each month in each city. Suppose there were a second event run for the benefit of the venues; individual bars (etc.) could adopt the event, pledging to host a puzzle night in their location each month. There are places that would find that a compelling attraction!

There is a 20% chance that some company brings larger-scale live escape events to the UK, with relatively many teams playing the same game at once. (For those who get the distinction, think Real Escape Game as opposed to Real Escape Room.)

There is a 25% chance that the 25th anniversary of The Crystal Maze, which will happen on 15th February this year, will see a reawakening of interest and the show will catch the public mood once more.

There is a 30% chance that one of the big players in the leisure industry starts a chain of exit games within its own facilities, or teams up with an existing exit game business which wants to expand rapidly by opening in a number of facilities. For instance, if you’re going to go to either of the branches of the real-snow indoor ski slope Xscape, you know you’re prepared to spend money, and the chance to play “Escape at Xscape” would surely be irresistible…

There is a 35% chance that the UK team produces its best performance in the next World Puzzle Championship, beating its previous best of sixth from the twenty national “A” teams in Beijing in 2013.

There is a 40% chance that another UK city develops a puzzle community like that of London, with at least one regular monthly event and at least one larger annual event – maybe as simply as hosting its own Puzzled Pint and DASH events, maybe something of its own. All it takes is someone willing to be the first onto the dancefloor.

There is a 45% chance that the UK mass media will catch on to just how cool exit games are. Maybe the “The One Show” team will go and play, or someone will take the idea to Dragon’s Den, or The Apprentice might consider them to be sufficiently zeitgeist-y to take an interest. At the top end, this site might dream of a revival of The Adventure Game, which effectively featured (among other things) room escape games a good thirty years ahead of the time.

PREDICTIONS

There is a 55% chance that at least one exit game will earn the Living Wage Employer mark. Perhaps there is at least one out there which pays the stipulated wage already. This site doesn’t believe that every exit game can afford to pay the stipulated level; indeed, many owners, especially of very new games, will be some way from covering costs, and consistent wage rises might force them out of business outright. However, perhaps there’s a business out there who would take pride from going down this route.

There is a 60% chance that the next World Puzzle Championship will be won by Ulrich Voigt of Germany, which would be his eleventh overall and the first time anyone has ever won four in a row.

There is a 65% chance that the exit game industry continues to grow sufficiently quickly that this site’s estimate for the number of unique players in the UK or Ireland by the end of December 2015 reaches or exceeds half a million… and this site will not attempt to fix the figures just for the sake of proving this relatively weakly-held prediction correct.

There is a 70% chance that at least one exit game will start to advertise itself using a formal endorsement from a reasonably well-known, mainstream national or international celebrity.

There is a 75% chance that the Puzzled Pint community of London will continue to grow, flourish, with teams getting to know each other ever more closely and look forward to meeting each other at the other puzzle events that exist through the course of the year.

There is a 80% chance that eleven or twelve of the calendar months of the year will see at least one new site open for business in the UK or Ireland.

There is a 85% chance that there will be a UK-based exit game review blog set up this year, to which this site will very happily link. There are many different sites out there who want the publicity from the reviews that they might get; be any good (goodness knows, this site doesn’t set the bar high) and proprietors will be climbing over themselves to invite you to play!

There is a 90% chance that the London leg of DASH 7 will expand from 8 teams in 2013 and 21 teams in 2014 to at least 25 teams for 2015. The London capacity for 2013 and 2014 was 25 teams, so it’s quite possible that London DASH might well sell out.

There is a 95% chance that at least two existing exit games covered by this site will officially call it a day. These don’t have to be unhappy endings; for instance, Oxford Castle are listing their Jailbreak event as happening until the end of January only, then presumably they will put the game cleanly back in its box. Fingers crossed that they choose to get it back out again at some point.