The League Table: end of June 2014

Bar chart showing improving performance over timeThis is the third instalment of an occasional feature to act as a status report on the exit games in the UK. On its own it means little, but repeated sufficiently many times it could be the basis of a survey of growth over time.

Exit Game sites known to have opened in the UK/Ireland: 14/1
Exit Game sites known to be open in the UK/Ireland: 13/1
Exit Game sites known to have closed temporarily in the UK/Ireland: 1/0
Exit Game sites known to have closed permanently in the UK/Ireland: 0/0
Exit Game sites known to be under construction in the UK/Ireland: 3/1
Exit Game sites less confidently known to be under construction in the UK/Ireland: 3/0

Site name Number of exit rooms Number of different games Number of TripAdvisor reviews Number of 5/5 TripAdvisor reviews Local TripAdvisor ranking
Breakout Manchester 2 2 30 28 2
clueQuest 3 2 493 472 1
Cipher 1 1
Clue HQ 1 1 1 1
Cryptopia 1 1 25 22 8
Escape 2 2 29 29 1
ESCAP3D 1 1 81 68 5
Escape Land 1 1 1 1 633
Ex(c)iting Game 2 2 21 15 18
HintHunt 5 2 846 783 3
Keyhunter 3 3 39 25 6
Make A Break 1 1 25 16 13
Tick Tock Unlock 1 1 25 25 2
Puzzlair 2 2 45 44 4
XIT 4 4 4 3 89

This needs to be taken with a heavy pinch of salt. This site supports all the exit games that exist and will not make claims that any particular one is superior to any other particular one. Please note that the TripAdvisor rankings represent a wide variety of locations and cannot be directly compared against each other. In fact, it’s probably pushing it even to compare the tripAdvisor rankings of two exit game sites in the same city.

This site has a suspicion that there is such a thing as a summer season where indoor attractions like these are relatively likely to struggle temporarily. On the other hand, the sites that opened in May all appear to have got off to very strong starts and the London sites appear to be booked out well ahead of time. Accordingly, this site makes an estimate with its usual level of confidence (i.e., not especially high, though it should be correct to within a factor of three) that the number of people who have played an exit game in the UK or Ireland is now 45,000. By way of contrast, it’s fun to see on the SCRAP Entertainment “Real Escape Game” site that Over 3,000,000 participants have played this game in Japan,China, Taiwan, Singapore, and the United States. As generally accepted progenitors of the genre, if anybody should know, it’s probably them!