The League Table: end of August 2014

3-dimensional bar chartThis is the fifth 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.

The Census

Category Number in the UK Number in Ireland
Exit game sites known to have opened 18 2
Exit game sites known to be open 16 2
Exit game sites known to have closed temporarily 1 0
Exit game sites strongly suspected to have closed, at least temporarily, in the UK/Ireland 1 0
Exit game sites known to have closed permanently 0 0
Exit game sites known to be under construction 5 0
Exit game sites less confidently known to be under construction 4 0
Exit game sites that once talked about being under construction but… 2 0

The Report Card

Site name Number of exit rooms Number of different games Number of TripAdvisor reviews Number of 5/5 TripAdvisor reviews Local TripAdvisor ranking
Bath Escape 2 2
Breakout Manchester 3 3 92 86 1
Cipher 1 1
Clue HQ 1 1 86 80 1
clueQuest 4 2 654 618 1
Cryptopia 1 1 25 22 9
Escape Edinburgh 3 2 111 102 2
Escape Glasgow 1 1
Escape Land 1 1 39 34 27
Escape Rooms 1 1 11 11 100
ESCAP3D Belfast 1 1 104 82 11
ESCAP3D Dublin 2 1
Ex(c)iting Game 2 2 30 20 17
HintHunt 5 2 953 879 3
Keyhunter 3 3 45 27 9
Make A Break 1 1 33 22 20
Puzzlair 2 2 63 60 5
The Gr8 Escape 2 2 7 7 22
Tick Tock Unlock 1 1 95 89 1
XIT 4 4 4 3 103

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. In general: look at how many different exit games have got roughly 90% of their reviews being 5/5, which is perhaps a benchmark for being hugely impressive and allows for some reviewers casting grudge votes, or just being people having a bad day.

This month, 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 by the end of July was 55,000, rather than the previous estimate of 54,000, and by the end of August is now 64,000. Do note that all of this can only be based on sites this site knows about; Bath Escape went under the radar for six weeks before Intervirals made this site aware of it, and it would be a delight to learn of others in the UK still.

Looking further afield, a couple of months ago this site referenced the SCRAP Entertainment “Real Escape Game” site‘s estimate that Over 3,000,000 participants have played this game in Japan, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and the United States. Looking further, “Real Escape Game” Canada now quote: Today, over 10,000,000 participants have played this game in Japan, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and the United States. Only 3% of participants have made their way out. The estimates are growing!

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