Charitable Connections

Breakout Manchester Charity Day detailsBreakout Liverpool Charity Day detailsThis industry-wide call to arms has kindly been written by Del from Breakout Manchester and Liverpool, to whom questions should be directed (see below for details!) but everybody is welcome to join in. Exit Games UK finds the idea of a focused, cross-site, charity initiative extremely promising and exciting, even if it might take a good chunk of planning ahead to execute to its full potential.

The exit games industry is such an exciting place to be for all involved. Customers love doing something different with their day, they like being challenged, they like feeling accomplished. As the company bringing them that, it is genuinely heart warming to be part of that experience and get to share that buzz with them.

Because of all this excitement around what we do with our various companies, it gives us the opportunity to help people outside of providing them an hour (or hour and a half, as is the case with some of your games out there) of entertainment. I don’t know about other companies, but at Breakout Manchester and Liverpool we are always receiving emails from local charities and fundraisers asking if we can donate a game for a raffle or auction as it’s something different to offer people and drive the interest up. There are obvious parameters we have to set, but on the whole we can agree to these requests and help the people these charities are supporting with their time and often limited resources.

In 2015, Breakout decided that we could do more than provide free games and having donation pots in our reception area. We contacted some local charities and game them our rooms for a day. This altered nothing from our end of the arrangement as these would be running anyway, we just took them off the booking system, told the charities our prices and let them book the slots themselves and take the money we would have received as a direct donation. The sales from any games we sold ourselves got donated to the charities. It wasn’t without its problems, as no first time event ever is, so we addressed these and addressed these and created a charity evening 6 months later, working with only one charity this time in Manchester and several in Liverpool. We’ll continue this biannual charity event, because it’s great to give something back to the communities that support us in whatever way we can.

BUT, for this April, we’re proposing something different. We’ve decided to go NATIONAL.

We want to see if you other exit games in the country want to join us, on Thursday 21st April, in giving some or all of your games to charity with us… We’re working with The Christie (a cancer specialist hospital charity) and Joining Jack (Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy) in Manchester and Imagine If Trust (fighting poverty through education), Barnardo’s (helping vulnerable children and young people) and Parkinson’s UK (supporting and funding better treatments for Parkinson’s), but ultimately this event could benefit any charity of your choosing. The groups we’ve worked with have been so happy about being involved in the event and being able to offer a distinctive product in exchange for donations. They’ve sent us buckets, balloons, T-shirts, stickers for the day and they’ve even come along to be part of the greeting team for customers and give a big thank you to them. The customers are happy as well, as they get all the benefits of playing a game whilst also knowing their money is going somewhere worthwhile.

If you’d like to join us, give us a shout on hello@breakoutmanchester.com, let us know who you’re supporting and definitely let us know of any interesting plans you have and how you get on. Feel free to contact us with any questions as well!

Can’t wait to hear from you and build our community further.
Breakout Team

New rooms from the newsroom

The NewsroomSeveral sites have refreshed their line-ups recently; others have just plan expanded. Here are details of the new rooms at existing sites that Exit Games UK has found recently. If your new room is missing, please let Exit Games UK know and the list shall grow longer.

  • Let’s go very roughly north to south, so that this way the list can start with a site with two new rooms. Breakout Games Aberdeen of the Granite City have overhauled their offering to introduce a pair of new treats for 2016. The Amazon has opened with a bang to become the most challenging game on site and is not recommended for beginners. “Plunged into the depths of the Amazon your team are charged with finding a priceless ancient artifact in an escape room filled with twists, turns and surprises. Will you be lost in the jungle for all eternity?” The two Lock and Key rooms have been replaced with two Deadlock rooms, enabling teams to race against each other: “DEADLOCK is the perfect escape game to introduce new groups to escape games in a race against the clock! With two identical escape rooms of DEADLOCK teams of 12 can race to escape completing exactly the same puzzles. With riddles, codes to crack and some twists and turns along this way this new puzzle is fantastic fun with a three star difficulty rating!” The site is also installing two identical copies of Black and White in March, which will make it one of the biggest sites in the land.
     
  • Down to Newcastle where Lost and Escape were feeling excited on Facebook about their new room, The Dungeon. Follow that link for the pictures; the story for the room suggests that “You accidentally went into an ancient house. The door of the house is a time machine, which brought you back to the 1900s. You found strange symbols everywhere. The only way to go back is to get the key in 60 minutes. The person who runs out of time will be locked in the past. Can you travel back successfully?
     
  • Next to Manchester where Breakout Manchester have added their ninth room, this one in their High Street offshoot. In Most Wanted, Ray Cokes chats with production and viewers while introducing… oh, not that Most Wanted. “It’s another race to escape although this time the bigger reward you collect, the higher up on the leaderboard you will go! ((…)) Think of yourselves as Bounty Hunters of the Wild West breaking in to a Saloon in search of loot! Make sure you’re out by the time the Sheriff returns, even if it means leaving some of your riches behind, or you’ll end up spending the night in a cell as Breakout Manchester’s Most Wanted!” There have been rooms which award scores in the past; sometimes scores can be analogues for solving time, as the longer you spend cracking the pre-scoring puzzles, the less time you have to work on the additional challenges which determine your score. Here, it’s clear; “Time is important to your game… but the reward means more to your team!
     
  • At the south end of Greater Manchester, Code to Exit of Altrincham have now opened their second room full-time. In The Test, which they describe on Facebook as being without keys, padlocks or furniture, “An alien life force has been experimenting with the human DNA. They tempered with few of us and mixed their genes with ours. You are being abducted to complete the tests and find out if it was successful. Are you intelligent enough to represent our species? If you pass you will be set free.” The site have also suggested that their third game is only two or three months away and will feature quite an unusual theme that this site is looking forward to. Code to Exit now offer discounts to people booking off-peak, to students and to birthday parties; they also offer team-building days during office hours as well.
     
  • Bristol is apparently further north than Gravesend by scant seconds of latitude, so Puzzlair have announced that they are taking bookings for their fifth room, The Poltergeist Room, which opens next week in their Puzzlair 2 location. “A widow lived in this room with her daughter, and suddenly they disappeared. Every once in a while people seen the silhouette of a woman walking around in the rooms. The players have to find out the reason behind the disappearance and also produce a successful ghost exorcism in order to escape the room in 60 minutes.
     
  • The Panic Room of Gravesend are running their current room for another week and a half, then will be taking a few days off to change it over to The Witch House, running in March and April. “Our next mystery begins with a student who rents a room inside an old house with a long and dark history. His dreams are haunted by those of a Witch from the town’s legend. During the witch trials of 1692 she disappeared never to be seen again. It’s 11pm and your team has been sent to help the poor student uncover the mystery that lies within the room. What happened to the witch? Can you break the curse before the clock strikes midnight?” Eek!
     
  • Salisbury Escape Rooms write to say “Since initially opening at Easter 2015 with the Magna Carta challenge, in October 2015 we changed the theme to Murder in the Museum. Players are met and briefed by a detective then led to the reception of the Salisbury Smithsonian Museum. A body has been found and a suspect is in custody. Police have one hour left to either charge him or release him. The team are required to find the missing evidence and get out within the hour. The new game, again designed, built and run by retired detectives is proving to be very popular. Tripadvisor reviews have been excellent and several teams who have completed many escape rooms have said that this is the best they have done!
     
  • Lastly to Exeter where Mission Escape have added a third room, with more promised to launch this year. This one is deliberately designed to cater for teams of no more than four players. In the Pharaoh’s Anger room, you must “Make your way through the tomb of the Kings… be careful not to disturb the dead. Align the Celestial bodies to release you from the Pharaoh’s wrath or be entombed forever“. Nobody wants that!

Good news for mid-December 2015

Cartoon of people reading newspapers and a bookToday feels like a day where three cheerful news stories would not go amiss.

The Room of Glasgow are distinctive for reasons including the sizes of the largest games that they offer; their Mansion Room game is designed for teams of 8 to 16 (though there may be some wiggle room) and their Party Room for teams of 10 to 16. Throughout December, there are a number of promotions being launched “by the resident elves”, notably a discount code available for those playing up to December 20th. The most delightful initiative is this one; as discussed on Facebook: “On the 16th of December, we will be hosting a Charity Day. We are offering 3 Party Room games for free for groups of disadvantaged children (from an orphanage, care home, or from poor families). We would like to give the gift of fun to these kids for Christmas, the way we can. We want to give back to the community, and thought it would be great to surprise kids with some caring and fun.” How kind! Exit Games UK commends the site on this thoughtful – and original! – gesture.

Breakout Manchester have launched a second site within the city centre, on the High Street near the Arndale shopping complex. (It’s about eight minutes’ walk from their first location, which remains open.) The new location will feature another John Monroe’s Detective Office, with a new room entitled Vacancy opening tomorrow – “Exhausted after a long journey, you place your bag down on the freshly made bed, ready to relax. Suddenly, an ominous sixty minute countdown begins. No matter what you try, the door will not open. Welcome to Crimson Lake Motel. You check in, but you NEVER check out…” – and a horror-themed Facility X room for players aged 16+ opening soon. “You arrive at an unknown location for a once in a lifetime opportunity; a conference held by the critically acclaimed, Dr. Andrews. His work is widely known throughout the research circles, but he has remained hidden in the shadows for years. What you don’t know, is that Dr. Andrews has gone mad, creating a string of tests that have gone disastrously wrong. He has brought you here for his final experiment.” A fourth room on the site is promised for January, and that’s not all; this new location is a big old space and there may very well be more to come.

Jackie from Locked In Edinburgh got in touch to enthuse about their second room. “Our theme has stemmed from having Pickering’s Gin Distillery sited directly below our escape rooms.” Exit Games UK loves games with local flavour, no pun intended, so the localism here is hard to beat. “The distillery reported a breakin which is thought to be an inside job. Which employee is plotting the distillery downfall and to where are Pickerings planning to move their gin stock for safe keeping? ((…)) A tour of the distillery can be incorporated, although probably best after players escape as the tour includes gin samples which may cloud people’s thinking heads!

Here’s a bonus cheerful news item, not related to exit games: while the shortest day of the year doesn’t happen for nearly another week, we’ve already reached the point in the year where the sun is starting to set later and later. Indeed, the UK is at a point in the year where both sunrise and sunset are getting later in the day, and which one is moving more quickly determines whether the day is lengthening or shortening. Take it as a sign that we’re already making it through the winter!

Good news from early November

another-adventureIt’s been a few days since the real world has permitted a chance to catch up with things here, so to get back into the swing of things, a few quick good news stories:

  • This site has covered proposals at exit games before. This site has even covered proposals at Breakout Manchester before… and more than one of them, from memory. (Can’t get enough of them, though!) However, this site hasn’t had one quite like this before. The groom, who popped the question, wrote about his day, and the moment itself has been caught and shared both as a still photo and as a video clip, in the very rare instance where sharing camera footage from the rooms is actually properly cool. Hooray! Many congratulations to the joyous couple!
  • Two and a half months ago, this site posted about Red House Mysteries and their involvement in the Chatroulette First-Person Shooter. If you happened to be on Chatroulette at the right time, perhaps you might have been lucky enough to be involved in the recently-released level two, much more spectacular still, being filmed in an abandoned power station. Congratulations all round, not least to Red House Mysteries for the timely opening of their site in Exeter.
  • Over in Leeds, Locked In Games celebrated their first anniversary not only with some rather spectacular cakes but by donating the day’s profits to a local charity. Many happy returns of the day!
  • In London, the granddaddy of them all, HintHunt are hiring an experienced site manager. Jobs are also going in New York, Vienna and Budapest, which sounds extremely exciting.
  • Having started at Breakout Manchester, a good place to end is at Breakout Liverpool, where one Daniel Sturridge and friends broke out of their Classified room. Fingers crossed that more injured footballers use exit games as part of their rehab routines.

Late October news round-up: the Home Office

News round-upAfter the recent round-up of sites adding new games, there are plenty of other stories that couldn’t fit in there but are far too interesting not to print. There are so many stories, in fact, that there’s got to be a home-and-away basis, so here’s the domestic news.

  • Breakout Manchester had a charity night on October 13th in association with The Big Do for The Christie cancer centre. It looks like there were two or three rounds of play, each with multiple teams taking on the rooms, and all the proceeds going to charity; in the end, the @ideasbymusic team were declared the night’s winners. Congratulations all round!
  • Exit Games UK really loved this Facebook update by Clue HQ‘s original Warrington branch. By way of backstory, in The Vault, their third game, “Your heist appears to be going smoothly until the security system comes back on! You’ve got 60 minutes to grab as much cash (in casino chips) as you can and escape!” Teams were scored by how many chips they were able to grab. Several teams were able to grab all the chips in the game except for one particular high-value jackpot; it appears that one team was so enchanted by the challenge fo trying to find all the chips that they came back again and again and were the first team to perfectly clear the room… on their fourth attempt. Kudos to them – and to the site for a game that perfectionists want to come back and play again and again.
  • Geeks in Wales have a fine article that addresses the long-standing anomaly of the principality being an exit game-free zone; Escape Rooms Cardiff have their web site up and suggest they’ll be opening in December, with early-bird discounts available by booking through their crowdfunding campaign; Breakout Live Swansea haven’t announced an opening date but may not be far off either. The Escape Rooms Cardiff has a really sensible and appropriate question that was new to this site: “What language is used? It’s kind of an international game really, as most of the puzzles and codes work without using any language.” No reason why English has to prevail, after all.
  • Also on fire is the stunning The Logic Escapes Me blog, having all sorts of fun. (Find your previews here and your reviews there… works for both of us!) Drawing attention to just two articles, you’d have had to have a heart of stone not to fall for the story about creating a tiny little game so that some kids might break open their pocket money (though, admittedly, if my folks had done that when I was six, there would probably have been tears) and the puzzle hunt created for work also sounds like a beautiful pieve of craftsmanship. Super cool!

Hunting for news

"Puzzle Hunt" and a basket of plastic eggsTime for a round-up of puzzle hunts and related events, both in-person and online:

  • Which to start with, in-person or online? How about both! Breakout Manchester recently posted on their Twitter account that they will be giving away free games at some point in the next day or two to locals who can follow the clues that they post and, presumably, hot-foot it to the clued location. The hashtag #BreakoutBounty may also tell more. Exciting times, especially if you’re in town!
  • Firmly in person, London sees An Appetite for Murder by A Door In A Wall run through October and its shoulders. Several of the sessions are sold out already, particularly at weekends, and many of the others cannot have far to go. This site had the good fortune to get to meet the company’s founder Tom Williams at Now Play This recently and talk hunts and now is even more excited about ADIAW‘s work. If you get the chance to get to play their The Long and the Short of it trading game, it’s highly recommended.
  • Elsewhere in London, Treasure Hunts in London have games coming up as usual, with the next game on the roster being a Trick or Treat hunt around the British Museum. This happens on Hallowe’en weekend, as the name suggests; there are two runs of a version suitable for teenagers on Friday 30th October and the main event on the afternoon of Saturday 31st.
  • Over in France, escapegame.paris points to a “giant live escape” in Paris, a free event being run eight times between Wednesday 23rd October and Saturday 26th October. It’s being run by Team Break, which has rooms in Paris, Lille and Lyon where your team is sent by an agency to combat supervillains. Cool!
  • Online, thanks to escaping.sg for pointing out that while the CiSRA puzzle hunt is sadly no more, some of the people behind will be continuing to run online hunts in the first half of the year, starting from 2016, associated with the mezzacotta web comics. Looking forward to it in the fullness of time.
  • If you can’t wait that long for an online puzzle hunt, online quiz site Sporcle have just started running the Sporcle Intelligence Agency puzzle hunt, running over the next fortnight or so. This isn’t the first they’ve run; their first one was a couple of years ago.

Phew… and those are just the ones that the site can definitely talk about, too!

Early September news round-up

News round-upLet’s dive right in to the latest assortment of links:

  • Episode six of Race to Escape was broadcast on Saturday night and has made its way to illicit video-sharing sites already. This was the final episode of the first series, which this site broadly considers to have been a triumph, with every episode bursting with new ideas – though, unfortunately, sometimes setting a bad example for real life play by literally bursting the rooms that they established. No idea what the ratings have been like and whether there’ll be a second series; there are plenty of things that could be done in later series, but even if it’s one-and-done, it’ll have been a glorious one-hit wonder rather than a flop out of sight. (It’s also the sort of timeless show that will surely be repeated, on and off, over the next twenty years at least.) If you don’t want to risk the illicit video-sharing sites, the episode is available at YouTube at about 110% speed, so it sounds a little bit funny but may not be caught automatically as a copyright violation. The same channel has all six episodes, similarly in Pinky-and-Perky-o-vision.
  • This site is looking out for content from the first Escape Games Convention last Friday. So far there is an overview video that is slickly produced, conveys the sense of excitement and hints at another event next year, if light on detail; you can also see Dr. Scott Nicholson’s talk, which is well worth quarter of an hour of your time.
  • Breakout Manchester are teaming up with the Christie charity, a local hospital charity that provides “enhanced services over and above what the NHS funds“, not least cancer research, between 6pm and 9pm on Tuesday 13th October. Teams of 2-5 can book a room for a special price of £75, regardless of team size, all of which goes to the charity. Great work!
  • Lost and Escape of Newcastle have a Groupon deal available at the moment, though availability is limited and it’s not clear when the deal might deal itself out. Up for grabs is a ticket for up to three players for £29, or for up to five players for £49. The tickets are only valid for games on Tuesday to Friday, starting at 11am, 1pm, 3pm, 5pm or 9pm (so not the 7pm prime time slot!) by 30th November. So there are a few caveats, but that’s a nice price.
  • Code to Exit of Altrincham near Manchester got in touch to say that “((…))we have a 50% sale on at the moment on The Blue Print Room. Also 10% Student Discount available on the top of that. ((…)) We are also opening our second room this month, I will keep you updated on the exact date.The Logic Escapes Me were well impressed by the site and they know their onions, so it’s well worth considering.
  • And finally, but what a finale: Handmade Mysteries, of Lady Chastity’s Reserve fame, point to a Mashable article about Midnight Madness 2015, the latest annual incarnation of the huge-budget all-night puzzle hunt sponsored by Goldman Sachs. 21 teams raised over US$3,000,000 for charity between them, so that gives you an indication of just how high you have to roll if you want to play!

All the news: Enigma Escape Kickstarter, Breakout Manchester charity day, new rooms and more

breaking-newsA quick round-up of news stories from the UK’s exit games:

  • Enigma Escape of London have a Kickstarter campaign in progress which offers a fascinating look behind the scenes of the budget for a high-end exit game in London. They’re planning to sink their life savings in to making their dream happen, but an extra £5,000 is necessary – ideally from the crowdfunding campaign, but they have other (slower!) plans in mind if it doesn’t happen. The site looks distinctive for, among other reasons, the potential for multiple conclusions to the game depending on the degree of success you had playing it. Extremely intriguing, and if you know you’re going to play the game then the best possible prices to play it are available by booking in advance through the campaign. Kickstarter campaigns for exit games have not had the best track record in the UK so far but this one looks so detailed that it’s clear how much thought has gone into it. Tell your friends! (Tip of the hat to Ken for the link.)
  • Breakout Manchester are holding a charity day today where all the proceeds – not just profits, but every single penny – are being split among four local charities. Heck of a gesture, and it’s such a popular site that it’ll raise a chunky sum.
  • Escape Quest of Macclesfield have opened booking for their second room, Amazon Escape, from April 1st. If it gets as good a reaction as this review of their first room, it sounds spectacular. Plans for Escape Quest‘s third room, a timed mini-game challenge, also seem exciting; its success or failure would seem to depend on the (quite possibly very considerable!) quality, quantity of variety of content on offer. The prospect of a room with replay value is also noteworthy.
  • Cyantist of Bournemouth have also opened booking for their second room, Clockwork Orange; you’ll only have to wait as long as Monday to play this. This hints of dystopia and the Nadsat argot, so get your droogs together. There’s currently a 25% discount for those who book and places are going quickly!

Coming soon to Liverpool: Exit Strategy and Breakout Liverpool

exitstrategybreakoutliverpool

This site would like to apologise for an innocent mistake that it made in a recent article. On Saturday, it claimed that scheduled openings would “…make Edinburgh the first city within the UK, outside London, to host four different sites“. Given that nine days ago, Liverpool had zero exit games open, this seemed like a credible claim. However, being such a strong candidate to be the UK’s most famous city not to have an exit game previously open, it looks like Liverpool will go from zero sites to four within about three and a half weeks. Wow! …and, perhaps, from the perspective of the sites’ proprietors… er, hmm.

An article in the Liverpool Echo points to Exit Strategy, which is set to open “in an underground studio on Victoria St in Liverpool city centre, opposite The Millenium Gym“. Bookings are not yet being taken, but the Liverpool Echo suggests it will open “by the end of the month“. Exit Strategy will open with a single room, The Illluminati, with two more promised this spring.

The Illuminati poses this situation: “Reclusive conspiracy theorist Ziggy Roswell has gone missing! No one believed him when he claimed that The Earth is run by a cabal of shape-shifting intergalactic lizards. He claimed that they run the EU, NATO, the NSA, The Vatican, China, Russia. That they control every war, every uprising, all the intelligence services. That the moon is a hollow, reality-controlling super computer, and that they use wifi to enslave the human mind. No one believed him, everyone thought he was nuts… But maybe he was on to something. Enter his world, find out what he was working on. See what info he’s left lying around and eventually work out what’s become of him“. Intriguing! Get on your bi(c?)ke and try it out.

Distinctively, the Liverpool Echo also claims that “Exit Strategy will also be linked to an interactive app, Reptile Resistance, that explores the storyline in more detail, inviting users to complete brain-teasing challenges to help defeat the lizards running the globe.” The link between exit game and app is one that hasn’t been seen by this site before! According to the app’s site, “Reptile Resistance is an iOS and Android app which uses written text, game play and video to tell its satirical tale. Neither book, computer game, nor film, but something between all three, Reptile Resistance is an experiment in narrative art and an assault on both conspiracy theories and unearned privilege.” Crowdfunding for the app has not yet reached the target, but it has dozens of pledges so far.

So to Breakout Liverpool. It draws heavily upon the experience of the very popular Breakout Manchester, based not much over thirty miles away. With its recent launch of two Classified rooms at an overflow location, Breakout Manchester has grown to host six different games, the largest number in the country; Breakout Liverpool will open with three different games and is based in the basement of an old comedy club, possibly two hundred metres away or so from Exit Strategy.

Breakout Liverpool will open with three different games: Sabotage and Classified both having proved popular in Manchester, and Shipwrecked being a Liverpool original, intended to be at a slightly lower difficulty level than the two Manchester imports. “Can you escape the famous Soldado Pirate shipwreck with Captain Chiver’s most prized and valuable treasure before his ghost that endlessly haunts the ship finds you, and drags you down into his watery grave? You have 60 minutes to search the ship and find your way out with the riches.

Breakout Liverpool, by contrast, is already taking bookings, fixing opening dates of Saturday 7th March for the two imports and Saturday 14th March for the original Shipwrecked game. (The Liverpool pricing schedule matches the Manchester one, which offers particularly attractive rates on Mondays to Thursdays, as well as during the day on Fridays.) The Manchester mothership often sells out, particularly at weekends, so there are other options available if you want to play Breakout’s games. With all this expansion, it might not come as a surprise that Breakout are taking on staff; if you want to join a team with an enviable track record of success, send them your CV!

Going head-to-head

"Head to head" graphicA part of the exit game experience that some people particularly like is the ability for your team to compete against another team. This survey only considers sites where two teams can play (practically) identical copies of the same room at the same time; there are several other sites with two or more rooms where two teams can start different games at the same time, though the result must always be in doubt as the “our room was harder” excuse can always be in play. In alphabetical order:

  • Agent November of London: the FAQ suggests that two teams of up to seven can play the Rainbow Syndicate game against each other.
  • Breakout Games Aberdeen: this brand new site has two identical units of Lock and Key.
  • Breakout Manchester: two identical Classified rooms have very recently been opened.
  • clueQuest of London: there are currently two Operation Blacksheep rooms and three PLAN52 rooms. One exciting development is that this famous site is moving in early March to a new location near King’s Cross St. Pancras; the new location will open with two of each of the games, but who knows how this might change over time?
  • Escape of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle: each location has two copies of their classic Live Escape Game room. The booking page might suggest that games start with a 15-minute stagger, but the sites are happy to set both teams going at the same time.
  • Escape Hour of Edinburgh: there are two identical Major Plott’s Revenge rooms. The man evidently gets around.
  • The Escape Hunt Experience of London: this site takes this to another level, permitting head-to-head-to-head-to-head play for Kidnapping in the Living Room and Murder in the Artist’s Bedroom, and head-to-head play for Theft from the Lab.
  • ESCAP3D of Dublin: the Dublin location has two identical rooms, though the Belfast location has only a single room.
  • HintHunt of London: here there are John Monroe’s Office games (one of which has a slightly staggered start time) and two Zen Room games for you to compete on.

Errors and omissions excepted, as ever, and corrections and additions are most welcome. It’s tempting to wonder whether rooms might ever be able to customise head-to-head rooms’ contents to something brand new to try to create some sort of elimination tournament, though it’s difficult to be surprised by the contents of the same room more than once!