May 2015 – Page 2 – Exit Games UK

Now open in London: iLocked

iLocked logo Another tip of the hat to Ken, the undisputed champion of finding new exit games in London, for this one.

It’s of at least vaguely academic interest to observe that there are a number of – at the risk of an inaccurate term – national traditions in exit games. This site welcomes that so many people have come from countries which have greater traditions of exit games to the UK and brought established exit game practice with them. It’s definitely possible to identify (and these names may be inaccurately specific where something more vague would be more appropriate) a Hungarian tradition and a Chinese tradition.

Now many exit games have been started by people who are neither of these, but the distinction is more about where the games you learnt from originate – so if you’ve played games in Budapest and then started your own here, you’re perpetuating the Hungarian tradition at one remove. If you’ve played games in the UK that come from the Hungarian tradition at one remove and then started your own, you’re still perpetuating the Hungarian tradition, quite possibly blending it with experiences from games from other traditions as well.

It’s not as if these traditions are all that different, but if you follow a few different exit game blogs from different countries, you can start to draw very rough patterns in where different hinting mechanisms, room contents, room sizes and even difficulty levels are most common, and how some early and successful games in one country can set players’ expectations for other games in the same country. There are a few instances where it might be more appropriate to suggest a tradition comes from one multinational brand and thus is spread about the world, rather than a particular country.

All that said, iLocked is a new exit game in London which does something different; an early impression was that it seemed to follow the Russian tradition of exit games. This claim was based on some early Cyrillic-alphabet tweets that the site has made, observed commonality between the site’s early social media followees and at least the implication that the site may have different one-room games in different parts of the city. Would this make it a single location with many games, or potentially multiple one-room branches? Er, not sure yet.

((Edited to add, May 25th: See the comments below; the site draws its inspirations from games in many countries, including Russia but also including many others, and has a style all its own, hence some slight editing above.))

So what makes this tradition Russian? Visit the Claustrophobia brand’s web site and observe how so many different of the games there have different addresses within the city; to see this more visually, click on the “карта квестов” – map of quests – link, and see all the different locations indicated. Furthermore, see how far the model has been replicated in other cities. Perhaps this is an artefact of a single brand, because there certainly are locations in Russia in other brands which do have many games at a single central location, but “Russian” is as good a starting-point as any for an identifier – at least, until a proper researcher gets their hands on it!

Humanities lesson aside, so what about this new site? It has one game in its first location, “Drunken office morning“. This is a sixty-minute game for teams of two to five, with the charge including VAT ranging from £60 to £105 per team depending on the size. The story runs as follows: “Saturday morning you woke up in a locked office after the birthday party. Do not despair! Turn your logical thinking on and together, as a team, get out of this room full of secrets. Guess who is missing colleague and why he left you locked? Solve the puzzles and communicate with each other. Have lots of fun!”

Further games are promised to be coming soon!

((Edited to add, May 21st:)) Maybe not the first from the Russian tradition after all! An article in Russia Beyond The Headlines suggests that Lock’d brought the Russian tradition to London first; the …founders of Lock’d ((are)) both Moscow State University graduates, one a cryptographer, the other a physicist. На здоровье!

Coming soon to Clonakilty: Escape

Clonakilty: Richard Webb [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Clonakilty by Richard Webb, released under Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The next escape game to launch – to this site’s knowledge – will be situated in an Irish town with under 5,000 residents. OK then.

However, it’s not just any small town; it’s a resort on a bay that punches well and truly above its weight. The tradition of seaside holidays at small resorts is decades old; for instance, someone might have fond memories of a childhood trip to Tenby in south Wales, of comparable size, or any of dozens of similar locations on most coasts. Could there be enough travelling business to sustain an exit game, though? At the risk of making this more of an article about the town than the game, Clonakilty has as good a shot as any of making it work. It hosts festivals of various sorts most months, and perhaps the exit game in the town will get business from tourists as they come to the town for other reasons.

One relevant example is that in 2014 and 2015, it hosted a games festival with tournaments in classic games of all sorts, plenty of involvement from local games clubs, and students from the games society at the local university bringing chances to play the most modern board and card games as well. The last three years have also seen a Random Acts of Kindness festival, with the 2015 edition set to happen on Saturday 18th July. Even if there’s not a festival on as such, Clonakilty is a red hot music venue, and even notable for its black pudding.

As for the exit game? It’ll be the fifth location overall, and the second Irish location, of the expanding Escape chain. (No longer can it be considered a purely northern business; Clonakilty is further south than Oxford.) Escape Clonakilty will feature two games, both with sixty-minute time limits and capable of holding teams of two to six. The Classic Live Escape and Da Vinci Room games are familiar from other branches in the chain, though they’re always very slightly different in each new location. The charge will be between €48 for teams of two and €72 for teams of six.

The location and business model are clearly a little different from that which the world of exit games is used to. This site wishes the new location well and wonders whether it might set an example for small resort towns everywhere to follow.

New games at existing sites

Wanted: Chris Exit That rough, tough hombre (who is unexpectedly as thin as a pin and nearly ugly enough to be realistic) is one of the characters you might see referenced in Breakout Liverpool‘s new Wanted room. It’s a single room, but you must specify in advance whether you want to play as the Cowboys or the Indians in this Wild West-themed room. Depending on which one you pick, you’ll face different tasks and puzzles. Whichever you pick – and why not play it twice, once as either side? – your team of 2-5 will have one hour to escape.

Agent November of London have added a third game. In contrast to their outdoor Major X-Plowshun and Rainbow Syndicate games, this is a murder mystery game: “You think you have come to solve a murder, only to realise too late that you are the victim! You have only 60 minutes before the poison takes hold, and you must identify the murderer and find the antidote before it’s too late!” Distinctively, this game is bundled with a meal – so as well as paying for the game, the tickets include a £13/head surcharge for the meal. That’s far from a bad price for London, though it’s tempting to wonder what the menu is.

Breakout Games Aberdeen are retooling their Lock and Key game; previously they had two V75 rooms and one Lock and Key, they are now transitioning to one enhanced V75 (and there must be good reason why it hasn’t been renamed V76), two new Lock and Key games – and there’s the exciting prospect of the addition of a fourth game, Black Gold, relevant to Aberdeen’s oil and gas heritage. This will be a game for 4-8 players rather than the usual 2-6 and will have an 80-minute time limit rather than the usual sixty. Pricing has not yet been revealed, but it sounds like a monster of a game!

Coming soon to Inverness: Lockdown Inverness

Lockdown Inverness logo Where do you suppose, at the time of writing, the two closest unrelated fixed-location exit games in the UK are?

London? Logical guess – and considering there are a couple of games that are mobile, that’s why the “fixed-location” clarification has to be in there. However, you could scarcely be more wrong.

Manchester? No, you might have to walk nearly half a mile to get from one game to another. Liverpool? Closer; there are a couple within a furlong or so of each other. Perhaps it would be necessary to get the surveyor’s wheel out because this might be a matter of a few yards determining the recipient, but it looks like Inverness might win the title as it looks like there’ll be two completely unconnected exit games on the same block.

There’s been a red dot on Inverness for some time and this site has been looking forward to news from Lockdown Inverness for months. Happily the site now has an opening date, Wednesday 27th May, and the world has enough details about the location to share. The location will launch with two games, both with a sixty-minute time limit and designed to be played by teams of two to six.

In The Heisenberg Murder (and it’s suggested that there may be an allusion to the alias of Walter White from Breaking Bad, but inevitably there’s some uncertainty about it) the titular Heisenberg “has been murdered in his dark secret hideout, by his rival gang after his ‘stash’. The Crime Scene Detectives have gone for lunch and you only have one hour to escape before you’re framed, or murdered too!”

The Prison Break scenario is a little different from others using similar names, for this time you haven’t been imprisoned for a crime that you didn’t commit. “You wake up one morning and find one of your colleagues is missing. You hear on your local news he has been imprisoned in a rat infested hell-hole, in a faraway country. Your task is to get there as quick as possible to free him from his unjust cause. Remember, this will be dangerous, so you must look out for each other and work as a team cracking codes, finding clues and ultimately escape the prison within the hour.”

The site has a video which will give you a real flavour for what’s in store – though the video doesn’t look like it would fit either story, so perhaps there may be more surprises to come. With two locations containing four games to play, exit game fans had better start planning for a trip to the far north!

Mid-May Newsroom

The Newsroom has the news from the rooms, hot off the presses.

This site has been following the progress of Dr. Knox’s Enigma of Edinburgh. It’s uncertain when the location opened and its proprietor has not replied to a couple of enquiries to this regard. Nevertheless, the TripAdvisor reviews started on 26th April, so opening can have been no later than that and the map has been updated to show them open. Early reviews are impressive – and, even more telling still, two other location owners in Edinburgh have tweeted about how much they enjoyed their game there. What more could you ask for?

The Escape Room of Manchester have announced something hugely exciting on their Facebook: “We are very proud to announce that we will be opening 6 new stores in the UK, 6 Locations in Europe and 8 Locations in the Middle East! Watch this space for the locations to be revealed!” The location has made a very fast start in Manchester; fingers crossed that other branches can do just as well. There are no updates as to potential UK whereabouts on the Escape Room International site that have not been there for some time, though second-hand information points to the potential for escape rooms to come to new towns in the UK. That’s sufficiently vague.

Puzzle Break of Seattle have launched an exit game on the Anthem of the Seas cruise liner that sails from Southampton during the summer, as previously discussed, and early indications are that it’s being very well received. Cruise Critic were wowed and the fan Royal Caribbean Blog have pictures.

As for passengers on the ship: the boat, still on its first few voyages, has got generally very good but somewhat mixed reviews. Perhaps this is due to teething troubles while things are so new, perhaps this is because the variety of offerings on board are so different to seasoned cruisers’ expectations; in one case, perhaps it’s because the passenger had his suitcase dropped overboard. (The crew rescued the case and washed the clothes, but the iPad and hair straighteners therein were a matter for the insurers.) However, Puzzle Break on the ship has received nothing but standout positive comments in reviews at CruiseCritic and at cruise.co.uk as well.

Any word from Make A Break of Manchester recently? Their booking page leads to a dead end and their Facebook page seems to have gone as well. If you can’t book to play at a site then is it really still in business? Perhaps they’re upgrading their game, perhaps not. One to keep an eye on.

And finally: perhaps it’s not just exit games that have hidden items to find!

Puzzle news in brief

News in Brief Not convinced about that graphic, but it took so much more work than it probably should have done… :-/

Puzzled Pint in London’s “Bubble” location was a smashing success; 79 players took part on 19 teams (not counting 3 GC members and two spectators), of whom 17 finished in full. The puzzles attracted plenty of compliments, with at least one that will last in the memory as probably better suited to being attempted after a couple of pints. As ever, the puzzles will be uploaded within, probably, a few days so that if you couldn’t make it then you can print them out and enjoy them in the comfort of your own home. Feel free to move from “Bubble” to “Squeak” from month to month according to which location suits you better, but this month there was plenty of room at “Squeak” and a bit of a squash at “Bubble”; when booking two rooms requires a certain amount to be spent at both, a more even split would suit rather better.

A new puzzle show – the category being a puzzle-focused subset of game shows – started on BBC 2 at 6:30pm on Monday. Cuddly Uncle John Craven oversees a team of four contestants attempting to solve three examples of two styles of puzzles in each of four “zones”, themed around different sorts of puzzle style. The more puzzles that are answered correctly, the more time the team have to try to win the prize at the end of the show. It’s a bit like a low-budget all-mental-game The Crystal Maze except much less kinetic – practically stationary. The puzzles include some very familiar styles, but the puzzle material is habitually very good and extremely well-suited for playing along at home. The endgame is great fun and rattles through at a good pace. Some videos of the first episodes have been uploaded to YouTube, possibly officially, possibly illicitly, so you may be able to take a look even if you’re outside the UK.

There was a hint at Puzzled Pint of an extremely exciting-sounding event possibly taking place; no specifics, but more news will follow if the event is confirmed and if this site gets permission to share. Fingers crossed, because the suggestion caused literal bouncing with excitement!

Tuesday night is Puzzled Pint night

Puzzled Pint London logo The second Tuesday of every month is Puzzled Pint night… which means that tomorrow night is the puzzliest night of the month!

Puzzled Pint is a monthly, casual puzzling event as previously discussed on this site. The simplest way to think of it is to imagine a pub quiz that you solve with a team of your friends, but replace the quiz questions with puzzles: all sorts of puzzles – word puzzles, picture puzzles, maybe codes, perhaps maths or logic puzzles – and usually very good ones. The atmosphere is deliberately accessible and hints are freely available, so everyone can have the fun of surprising themselves by solving puzzles that they thought they would never be able to solve.

Puzzled Pint keeps growing and growing; it is now played in eighteen locations in three countries. Two of those locations are in London, referred to as Bubble and Squeak, because having two locations each with a few dozen people involved is so much more practical than a single location; a single month with almost a hundred solvers proved to be impractical, and last month the attendance at the two London locations totalled over a hundred. Finding suitable pubs is a large part of the challenge.

Take a look at the location puzzle; it shouldn’t detain you long, and the logo may give you a sense of the theme for the month. As ever, hints are available; once you’ve got the answer, the two London locations are revealed. Pick whichever one suits you better, please submit your RSVP and turn up. The nominal timing of the event is 7pm to 10pm but there’s some flexibility. The conclusion to this month’s final puzzle is particularly surprising and satisfying, so maybe better not to leave it too late. One request: this month, please bring a pair of scissors if you can.

My wife has been co-running the whole event this year, more recently specifically the Bubble location. I’ll be one of her team, helping run the event tomorrow. You’ll recognise us by our Game Control T-shirts. Hope to see you there!

Coming soon to Inverness: Breakout Games Inverness

Breakout Games Inverness header This site was impressed to be able to say that exit games are available in the UK as far north as Aberdeen and as far south as Plymouth; their spread has got even further north with the exciting news that the successful Breakout Games Aberdeen are spreading even further north with the imminent opening of Breakout Games Inverness.

The site is launching with two games, both of which are designed to be played by teams of two to six and feature 60-minute time limits. They’re both different designs to anything that they had in Aberdeen, even noting the launch of their new Black Gold game in Aberdeen. Additionally, they’re also carrying across the property of having two copies of one of their games to enable head-to-head competition.

In the Black and White game, which can be played head-to-head between black and white units, “Set in the everyday with an extra ordinary twist, your team of wannabe escape artists will work together as you race against the clock in a bid to escape in time“. That’s very generic, but the black and white images on the web site might give some clues.

This site also loves the local flavour of the Nessie game, intended to be slightly the more difficult of the two: “Professor R. has long been on the trail to uncovering the riddle of the fabled monster and your task is to decipher the clues, crack the codes and solve the puzzle before the office is raided and the evidence is lost forever. Does Nessie really exist or is this just another myth and legend?”

The site notes on Facebook that “We’ve had over 60 groups of ‘guinea pigs’ at the venue taking on each of the rooms we have to offer and are EXTREMELY excited to bring some bespoke, challenging escape games to Inverness…” so the games are well and truly tried and tested. There’s also an opening offer on the itison social buying site; you have just over three days to buy vouchers permitting teams to play games in either the new Inverness site or the original Aberdeen site at just £26. That’s a spectacular discount!

Now open in Waterford: Quests Factory

Quests Factory logo Exit games in Ireland are no longer restricted to Dublin – and are no longer restricted to Dublin and Cork! South-east Ireland has got its first exit game, as Quests Factory opened in Waterford on May 1st. The site has opened with two games, both of which cater for teams of two, three or four, and both of which are played with a 60-minute time limit.

The more unusual game of the two is the Hollywood Star’s Apartment game. “This morning you thought that you’re lucky since you’ve receive an invitation to the party hosted by one of the Hollywood’s Stars. You’ve arrived at the event, but looks like there is no party. Even worse, you’ve been trapped by one of your competitors. Now you’re locked in the celebrity’s apartment and alarm is on and you’ve to find the way out until the police will arrive.”

In the Prison Break game, the story runs as follows: “You have been sentenced for a crime you didn’t commit. You’ve been locked up in a maximum security prison. You and your neighbour next door have revealed that the prisoner, who has spent a several years in yours cells before you, have successfully escaped from jail. Are you ready to discover his secret and to repeat the escape?”

Not a poke at this particular site but at the trope in general: how come you’re never ever caught bang to rights and feel like breaking out just because you don’t like being behind bars? The regular price is €69 per team, regardless of size, but there is 50% off in May. Considering the strength of the pound against the euro, that means an entire team can play in May for the price of a single player at some London exit games. Waterford has a tiny little airport and you can fly there directly from Luton or Birmingham with VLM. Alternatively, there are some cracking rail and ferry deals available if you want to start the adventure early with part of the fun being the journey itself!

Competition compendium

Competition rosettes A comment on a recent post requested more coverage of deals that might be available. Entirely reasonable shout. Clue HQ have announced that the second game at their Blackpool location will be available from May 22nd and have announced that groups to booking it using code LAB38 can do so at a price of just £50, regardless of team size. (No clue how long this code will last.) Clue HQ are also taunting the world with this image, speculated to be – among other guesses – possible details of a fourth game at their Warrington home base.

The only other hint of a deal that springs to mind relates to potential players at a new site in the north of Scotland; more on that very soon, hopefully. Other than that, this site has news of competitions to win free games; not the same thing as deals, but not a million miles away. Every month, Crack The Code Sheffield hold a monthly giveaway which you can enter by sharing their Instagram image, appropriately tagged. Winners will be announced on May 15th so you haven’t got long to do so.

The Play Exit Games site, which does a quicker job of reporting on new openings than this site (and which has a clustered map of which this site is sorely jealous), has a competition offering tickets for Hidden Rooms London, due to launch on June 1st. (It’s a good route to gain publicity; this site hopes to be able to report on more competitions at Play Exit Games before long.)

Similarly, The Gr8 Escape of Belfast have announced a competition on their Facebook offering not just a free ticket but a VIP experience as a prize, with champagne and nibbles as well as a free game on offer. Exciting times and you have a real chance of winning.

Taking competition a little more loosely, here’s a competition that isn’t held between players where the reward is offered by the exit games, but is a competition between exit games where the players offer the reward… sort of. Specifically, Escape Game Paris are operating their Escape Game Awards 2015, looking to crown winners in six categories: best room overall, best room gameplay, best room decoration, best site overall, best site game masters and best online presence. Already, within a very short period of time, they have attracted over a hundred votes, so clearly the exit games have got well and truly behind it. Presumably the winners then go on to a tricky tie against the champions of Istanbul in the exit games Champions’ League that someone will inevitably launch some day.

Speaking of which, for no link is too tenuous, this site has a favourite footballer: Daley Blind of Manchester United. Daley has won this accolade by being pictured both here at Escape Newcastle and here at The Escape Room in Manchester. Perhaps there are other contenders to the throne; who’s to say that, say, Graeme Le Saux hasn’t used his retirement to marathon five sites in London? This is a title to be won on the weight of evidence!

((Edited to add: On the same day this article is posted, Daley Blind has gone back for at least his second game at The Escape Room, so there’s no way that he isn’t a fan, and pretty much all the Manchester City under-21s had a big booking at Breakout Manchester.))