All the news from the world’s exit games

Newspaper iconThe previous post contained a collection of links with exit game news from Europe; today’s news collection looks a little further afield.

Yesterday, this site linked to this German live escape games blog, with a map linking to known sites around Europe. With a tip of the hat to Scott, a site about online escape games is attempting to collate a global live escape game map. Ambitious, but brilliant! There’s only one post to the site’s blog so far, but this site looks forward to others. A rising tide lifts all boats. (Spoiler: something very cool in this regard very soon.)

One of the most interesting exit game developments in the US is Trapped In A Room With A Zombie, remarkable for already having a dozen locations across the country, East to West, North to South. The creator, Marty Parker, is prominent and fascinating in mainstream publication interviews; his take on his own segment of the industry in Art Attack Philly is well worth a read to give you a sense of his perspective on his own cottage industry, which you can put into context by reading other interviews from newspapers in Columbus from February and Boston from July.

Lastly, across the border to Canada – specifically, the province of Ontario. Scott, to whom we referred above, curates an amazing Ontario exit games catalogue, and the wide availability of games also attracts local press interest. (Why has Toronto evidently become a hub in the same way as Budapest and Beijing? Professional enigmatologist Stacy Costa, a SCS Instructor at the University of Toronto, had this to say.) It’s the location for the Canadian operation of the original Real Escape Game, as discussed at Motherboard, with The Star taking a wider look at the popularity of the genre across their area.

With so much interest in exit games, it would appear logical that there could be the demand for other sorts of puzzle events in the Greater Toronto area. Perhaps this might be another conurbation in which the likes of DASH and/or Puzzled Pint might take root. There aren’t yet puzzle hunts in quite the way they are known elsewhere, as far as this site can tell, but a spy-themed game seemed to have quite a few similarities (though, sadly, the domain discussing the event appears to be no more) and the FISH Scavenger Hunts annually held in Toronto, and Vancouver, also sound spectacular and relevant.

Toronto does have its own sort of hunt that may be all its own. Tip of the hat to the German Live Escape Games blog for this one, and it’s the sort of story that makes you check that you’re not reading a satire site by mistake. The Simcoe Reformer suggests that there have been scavenger hunts in Toronto where the prizes to be found are, well, cannabis. A larger event planned for September promises to put the “pot” into “jackpot”, or perhaps the other way round.

This might sound like a plot from a Cheech and Chong movie, and it might be the plot of one. The Canadian stereotype of politeness, legality and good order holds firm, though. Participants are not invited to dig up random leaves and take a chance at smoking whatever they find; instead, the prizes are vouchers. In order to claim your prize, you have to be one of the 11,000 locals with a medical marijuana licence already.

Rob Ford would surely approve!

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