Tag Archives: questroom

December 2015 Dealwatch: coupons and discounts to play exit games for less

Price tag suggesting deal, sale or bargainDealwatch is an occasional feature which, as the name suggests, looks out for special offers that exit games are promoting. (Very occasional; the last time it happened was January.) Some ground rules apply:

  • Do check voucher companies’ terms, conditions and guarantees and this site takes no responsibility for deals that fall through for whatever reason, which sadly has happened at least once and probably twice;
  • Many of these deals only permit a limited number of vouchers to be purchased and then the deal will expire. It’s quite possible that deals may have expired between being published below and your attempt to use them;
  • This non-commercial site does not attract any commission for promoting these deals, or for you using them;
  • These deals are not exclusive in any manner.
  • Ken found almost all of these; many thanks to him, as ever, for sharing them.

Eyes down for a full house with the details:

  • Escap3d of Belfast have a Groupon deal where a team of up to eight players can take part in “Paulina’s Revenge” for just £36.
  • Clue HQ‘s Sunderland branch are sharing a Groupon deal where six players can play for just £39, though a £10 surcharge is applied for those who want to play on Saturday.
  • Miles away from the Wear to the Tyne, Pirate Escape of Whitley Bay let you buy this Groupon deal where up to six can play their exit game for £45 – or a LivingSocial deal at just £35.
  • At almost the other end of England, Red House Mysteries of Exeter have posted their Groupon deal where a team of up to six can play for a flat fee of £39.
  • On the same coast, Cyantist of Bournemouth have a LivingSocial deal, just for a change, where two can play for £29, three for £36 or four for £45.
  • In the north-west, gamEscape of Liverpool let you buy a Groupon deal (or a LivingSocial deal if you prefer their terms and conditions) where their Golden Cage game, only, can be played by four players for £30 or by two players for just £15.
  • In London, Hidden Rooms have several Groupon deals depending on the number of players. See the deal and choose from a single ticket for £21, two for £27 or three for £31; their LivingSocial deal is a pound or two cheaper still.
  • Staying in London, QuestRoom have a Groupon deal where you can buy a three-player game for £34 or a five-player game for £52.
  • The new Sherlock Unlock also of London’s Groupon deal where up to six players can take part for a flat rate of £49.

((Edited to add:)) Exit Games Scotland also point to an offer by Escape Games Scotland of Glasgow: 20% off not only bookings but also gift vouchers until tomorrow. Thank you! Second post in a row with a similar sort of addition… 🙂

(UPDATED!) Black Friday 2015 Dealwatch: coupons and discounts to play escape games for less

All-black discount starEven the discount starburst has blacked out completely to celebrate the day! As you might be able to tell, the time at which the articles are published reflects the time at which writing started; this article is being started on Thanksgiving Thursday and completed very early on Black Friday, with the benefit of some new information that became available at midnight. Whether you approve of limited timescale deals or not, or the Black Friday phenomenon in particular, today is an unusually good day to purchase play – and it’s worth checking the social media of wherever you’re buying before you do so. All deals may expire quickly, maybe not even lasting the whole of the day.

Escapism of Nuneaton have posted an offer on weekday bookings at 10am or noon in December or January; any number of players, up to eight, can play for just £50, or alternatively you can get 20% off gift coupons to play outside these specific times.

Clue HQ have four locations from Sunderland to Brentwood, but it’s not immediately clear whether or not all of them are participating in today’s special offer. The posted deal suggests that they’ll sell a hundred games at £49 each for up to six players, to be played between the 1st and 2nd of December if you use the code BLACKFRIDAY when you book.

The same BLACKFRIDAY promo code also works at Escape Rooms Scotland of Glasgow. This deal runs from Friday 27th November to Monday 30th November and there’s no time restriction on when your booked game must be played; the code will give you a £10 discount, reducing the 2-6 player Jail Break and Zombie Quarantine rooms to £50 each and the brand new 4-10 player Bank Heist room to £90, from its opening on 9th December.

Escape Live of Birmingham posted their offer on Twitter. That BLACKFRIDAY code will give you 15% off any games for four or five players that you book today. At this point, it might be worth trying the code BLACKFRIDAY pretty much everywhere, just to see what happens!

No codes required in Belfast, where The Gr8 Escape now offer four rooms and are offering gift vouchers valid for the first half of 2016; any room, up to six players for £45. Buy ’em today via PayPal.

((UPDATED, 2:30pm!)) Over to Bristol where Puzzlair (including their new second location, a short walk away from the original) used Twitter to post their Black Friday deal, which offers a handsome 30% discount on weekday bookings.

In north-west London, QuestRoom also tweeted their offer; there’s 20% off the two spaces available this evening but also 20% off games played this weekend.

Ken kindly pointed in the comments to an offer by Trapped In of Bury in Greater Manchester. It was posted on Facebook, which is as ever charmingly intermittent about which stories it shows to people, unless you pay it cold hard cash. The BLACKFRIDAY code used today will get you 20% off your booking. If you know any other deals posted to Facebook that haven’t made it to Exit Games UK, please speak up.

From the north of Greater Manchester to the south; down to Altrincham for Code to Exit. The Tweeted offer is for a discount of 30% on bookings using promo code BLACK. That said, there has been a suggestion that the code is no longer available – maybe a temporary glitch, maybe a limited offer. It applies to the Blueprint game only, not their new game, “The Test”.

This site knows of at least one other place offering a Black Friday discount for hunt participation, but it’s restricted to members of a mailing list, so the details won’t be shared here. Nevertheless, it’s not impossible that other sites might mail one-day discounts out to their own lists so check your mailboxes carefully.

As ever, if you know of other coupons, deals, vouchers or competitions, please send them through. If your site has a offer not listed above, please don’t assume the worst; get in touch and this site will happily spread the good news. (Alternatively, if you would prefer that this site does not list your coupon, or if the details of the offer are mangled, that’s fine too; again, please get in touch.)

Now open in London: QuestRoom

Quest Room logoGood things come to those who wait. This site has had reason to mention QuestRoom of London a couple of times, most notably in this piece discussing their crowdfunding campaign. That Indiegogo campaign didn’t get so far, but that hasn’t stopped the site from coming to fruition… even if months later than might have been expected. For comparison, this site can think of one other business that had a crowdfunding campaign through Indiegogo which didn’t get too far and yet seems to be doing just fine.

Having opened on 5th October on the Willesden High Road in north-west London, the facility currently features a single 60-minute game for teams of two to five. “You will be locked into a jail where many arrested people spent their times before. They all have left clues about their escape for the next inmates. But if you aren’t familiar in those circles you may haven’t heard about the ((route)), You have to find it for yourself to get out in time. The rules are simple: once you’re inside you have 60 minutes to get out. But to do that you’ll need to thoroughly examine every inch of the chambers of the vault and – most importantly – you’ll have to work as a team! During the escape, different skills are needed to be put into play at the same time; you cannot be successful alone!

The site will open on weekday evenings and at weekends. Teams of two and three play for £70, teams of four for £75 and teams of five for £80. Go to it, and see if the many months of work on the site have paid dividends!

Looking a long way ahead to more exit games

Enigma Escape bannerNormally this site can announce concrete details of an exit game reasonably shortly before, or reasonably soon after, it opens. This time, this site doesn’t have so much to go on, or knows that this is a longer-range preview. Nevertheless, these titbits are far too interesting not to share.

As previously hinted at, this site recently learned of another exit game planned for London, but whose operators have made it clear that they’re not in a rush to hit a deadline and will work long and hard rather than push out something before it’s ready. Nevertheless, with early social media campaigns under way and some gorgeous graphic design, here’s the story behind the team behind Enigma Escape.

We are two young cousins with a passion for video games, and in particular room escape games.
After playing some live room escape games in Hong Kong, Budapest and London, we felt that we could do a better job in creating the ultimate live room escape experiences.
It didn’t take too long to decide that we would quit our jobs and set up Enigma Escape.
Our mission statement is to be the best in room escape entertainment, by introducing well designed and innovative escape rooms, backed up with our outstanding attentive customer service values.
The perfect room escape experience is a blend of an intriguing storyline, innovative theme, challenging team-building oriented puzzles, and attentive customer service.
We have analysed many room escape businesses and far too many lack in at least one of these areas.
Our first location will be in London. We are in negotiations in securing a lease on a premises and hope to open by the end of the year.

This site applauds their lofty ambition and looks forward to the long haul of following their progress.

Three months ago, this site touched upon the crowdfunding campaign for QuestRoom, also planning to launch in London. While the crowdfunding was not a complete success, the campaign announced “Our goal is to reach £15,000 which would cover the start up the game and the first couple of months’ essential costs. The plan is flexible; we’ll find a bank loan for the missing amount if we need to.” The continued development of their web site suggests that they are making good on that part of the plan and this site also looks forward to seeing their plans come to fruition. More news as it becomes available.

The next story is from further afield. Very little to go on at the moment, but there’s a very early web site up for Logiclock, which intends to establish itself in Nottingham. Sounds wise; the East Midlands may well have a gap in the market, especially with the continued hiatus of Cipher Entertainment of Leicester. One noteworthy piece of cunning from Logiclock is that there also seems to be a realescapegame.co.uk web site pointing to their work, arguably an allusion to realescapegame.com, the web site of the US subsidiary of SCRAP Entertainment, who started things off.

In late-breaking news, the proprietor of the very successful Escape of Edinburgh has announced on Facebook that they plan to establish a second venue in Glasgow, with a target opening date of August 15th. This site has been looking for someone to open within Glasgow for a while; it’s surely fertile territory and the proprietor’s track record is well-established, so the prospects are about as strong as they come.

These have all been added to the “Announced but not yet open” list; when there are definite addresses and web presences, this site will very much enjoy adding more dots to the map!

All the news: from the exit games

news3To conclude our round-up of news, let’s check the ten known exit game sites in the UK and Ireland for their news:

The biggest news comes from Cipher Entertainment in Leicester, who will be temporarily closing their Chamber Escape game from 26th April in preparation for what they call season two. “We hope you adventurers are ready for the new game, with new tricks, new decorations, new ways of gaming and so on! So be ready, Champions! For we defy you all, you will not escape that easily again.” There are still a few spaces available for April, though none yet for May. Their new pricing structure reveals one-third off discounts for booking for weekdays, and one-eighth off discounts for booking for parties of 6+. More news about the reopening when it becomes available.

Make A Break of Manchester have extended their opening offers until 20th April; three-player teams earn £5 off per player, four- and five- player teams earn £3 off per player. Only a couple of TripAdvisor reviews so far, but they look very promising.

Similarly, Puzzlair of Bristol have an Easter Egg discount promotion offering 15% off for parties of three or more, if you book before Easter Monday, which I reckon is 21st April.

Over the Irish Sea, XIT of Dublin recently used their Facebook page to announce the opening of their fourth different game. “Imagine a world where every sin is an illusion of a virtue that guides you through logical steps to get hold of the Philosophers’ Stone. Is seeing really believing?” I like the theme – and while I know of another site where four teams can play at once, I believe XIT is unique in having four different games to play. An unusual and delightful theme and the two photos they have revealed look rather gorgeous.

Also news from Escap3d of Belfast: they are currently number one attraction out of 137 in Belfast; very intrigued to see a review mentioning the development of a second room at some point. The admission fee is now £45/team, with soft drinks included, but the site is open seven days a week and can accept teams of six as well as 2-5.

Lastly, very interesting to see this Indiegogo project to crowd-fund another exit game, QuestRoom, set to open in London. A couple of weeks in, it doesn’t appear to have got too far towards its goal, but the “flexible funding” option means that all the donations will go towards funding the site, with the campaign saying “Our goal is to reach £15,000 which would cover the start up the game and the first couple of months’ essential costs. The plan is flexible; we’ll find a bank loan for the missing amount if we need to.” The perks for donating include vouchers for play. There doesn’t seem to be much to go on, but there is a Facebook page and you could try asking questions there.

If you know something I don’t, please send the news through!