This is the ninth instalment of an occasional feature to act as a status report on the exit games in the UK and Ireland. 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 | 33 | 2 |
| Exit game sites known to be open | 30 | 2 |
| Exit game sites where the lights are on but nobody’s home | 2 | 0 |
| Exit game sites known to have closed permanently | 1 | 0 |
| Exit game sites showing convincing evidence of being under construction | 4 | 0 |
| Exit game sites showing unconvincing evidence of being under construction | 4 | 0 |
| Exit game projects abandoned before opening | 2 | 0 |
The term opened should be understood to include “sold tickets”, even when it is unclear whether any of those tickets may have been redeemed for played games; the definition of site should be understood to include outdoor sites and component parts of larger attractions that are played in the same way as conventional exit games.
The Report Card
| Site name | Number of exit rooms | Number of different games | Number of TripAdvisor reviews | Number of 5/5 TripAdvisor reviews | TripAdvisor’s “thumbs up” percentage | Local TripAdvisor ranking |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agent November | 2 | 2 | 20 | 19 | 100% | 120 |
| Bath Escape | 2 | 2 | 49 | 41 | 97% | 10 |
| Breakout Manchester | 4 | 4 | 180 | 161 | 97% | 3 |
| Can You Escape | 1 | 1 | 21 | 21 | 100% | 25 |
| Cipher | 1 | 1 | – | – | – | – |
| Clue HQ | 2 | 2 | 233 | 218 | 99% | 1 |
| clueQuest | 5 | 2 | 874 | 820 | 99% | 14 |
| Cryptopia | 1 | 1 | 26 | 23 | 100% | 12 |
| Cyantist | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | – | 21 |
| Escape Edinburgh | 3 | 2 | 255 | 233 | 99% | 4 |
| Escape Glasgow | 3 | 2 | 68 | 66 | 100% | 1 |
| Escape Hour | 2 | 1 | 36 | 35 | 100% | 11 |
| Escape Hunt | 10 | 3 | 61 | 48 | 91% | 148 |
| Escape Land | 1 | 1 | 81 | 69 | 100% | 72 |
| Escape Live | 2 | 2 | – | – | – | – |
| Escape Newcastle | 2 | 1 | 8 | 7 | – | 10 |
| Escape Quest | 1 | 1 | 14 | 14 | – | 1 |
| Escape Rooms | 2 | 2 | 92 | 70 | 97% | 117 |
| ESCAP3D Belfast | 1 | 1 | 109 | 84 | 89% | 32 |
| ESCAP3D Dublin | 2 | 1 | 13 | 6 | 76% | 162 |
| Ex(c)iting Game | 2 | 2 | 53 | 36 | 94% | 12 |
| GR8escape York | 1 | 1 | 16 | 16 | 100% | 8 |
| HintHunt | 5 | 2 | 1138 | 1053 | 98% | 21 |
| Jailbreak! | 1 | 1 | – | – | – | – |
| Keyhunter | 3 | 3 | 55 | 30 | 86% | 22 |
| Locked In Games | 2 | 2 | 66 | 63 | 98% | 2 |
| Logiclock | 1 | 1 | 4 | 4 | – | 18 |
| Make A Break | 1 | 1 | 50 | 32 | 86% | 21 |
| Puzzlair | 2 | 2 | 98 | 94 | 98% | 1 |
| Room Escape Adventures | 1 | 1 | – | – | – | – |
| The Great Escape Game | 1 | 1 | – | – | – | – |
| The Gr8 Escape | 2 | 2 | 28 | 24 | 96% | 21 |
| Tick Tock Unlock | 1 | 1 | 246 | 235 | 99% | 1 |
| XIT | 4 | 4 | 8 | 5 | 100% | 115 |
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. Remember that TripAdvisor have reclassified exit games from being attractions to being activities so positions cannot be directly compared to those from before November 2014.
Things are starting to settle down in the activity era. Some sites are making good progress; a salute to Escape Glasgow for getting to number one on a second chart. This site is especially delighted to see the developments in Leeds, where the activities chart has exit games at both number one and number two. The highest of fives to both Tick Tock Unlock and the fast-rising Locked In Games, and it’ll be interesting to see whether exit games in West Yorkshire continue to grow further still. (There’s a spa in Huddersfield stopping the West Yorkshire one-two, which perhaps should watch out!)
This site makes an estimate that the number of people who have played at least one exit game in the UK or Ireland, at any point in time up to the end of December 2014, is 120,000. (This estimate is quoted to the nearest 5,000, but the site would not like to claim more confidence than “…to within an order of three either way”.) As ever, if someone plays more than one game at the same site, this figure still only counts them once, and this number is only really meaningful in the context of this site’s previous estimates. The other usual caveat is that this figure may exclude data from locations about which this site is ignorant; for instance, last month’s figures should have covered Escape Hour which opened in November, but didn’t.
Another way of looking at it is that this site believes that exit games in the UK and Ireland were, perhaps, a two-million-pound industry in 2014. This might represent an increase on 2013 by a factor of somewhere in the reason of 5-8. Another similar increase again in 2015 would seem ambitious, but you never know!
