Now open in Cambridge: Cambridge Escape Rooms

Cambridge Escape Rooms graphicExit Games UK has been looking forward to this one for a while. Cambridge is one of the bigger tourist destinations in the country and has long been an obvious venue to host an exit game; work on one has been long under way, with its proprietor long responsible for Play Exit Games (which is much better-programmed than this first-generation old site!) and, more recently, Escape Game Card, among other ventures.

The first game at Cambridge Escape Rooms has a 60-minute time limit and is for teams of 2-6 players. Games start every 90 minutes between 11am and 9:30pm daily, with advance bookings being very strong, particularly at weekends. Full price starts at £44 for a team of two and goes up to £84 for a team of six, but weekday games before 5pm have a £2/player discount.

That first game is Secret of the Tomb, and is the first game in the UK from TRAP (“Team Race Against Puzzles”) of Budapest. TRAP have installed games in 13 other countries around the world; their original Budapest site is, at time of writing, TripAdvisor’s top-rated site in Budapest beating 48 (forty-eight) others to that title. (And that’s just the ones rated on TripAdvisor; dear old daddy exitgames.hu suggests there are 79 in total, though that total may well count two physically distinct halves of a site separately when TripAdvisor does not.)

Brent Chadwick had a rough childhood. He grew up in the shadow of his mother, Lucille, who was the founder of the ‘Church of the Untemptables’ (COTU). The COTU was a Christian-fundamentalist church in the eighties that preached: ‘Resist all temptations, but if you aren’t able to resist, you still have the chance of salvation if you punish yourselves equal to the sin you have committed.’ So no wonder Brent went crazy and, after his mother died, moved to a hidden room – the very room you are about to enter. This strange place is full of traps. The only way to escape is to find the urn of Lucille’s ashes. If you fail and are still here after an hour, Brent will arrive home and I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when he does.

Neither would this site. The pedigree is tremendous and the price is attractive, especially if you can play before 5pm on Monday where the discount for holders of an Escape Game Card is so large that it will more than pay for the card in a single visit. What a lucky place Cambridge is!

The fourth CUCaTS puzzle hunt: Cambridge, 12th-13th June

CuCATS fourth puzzle hunt logoThat handsome chap – a stylised cycloptic CuCATS cat at the centre of a Koch snowflake with a cheeky pangram about hir – is the logo of the Cambridge University Computing and Technology Society’s upcoming fourth annual puzzle hunt, set to run in Cambridge (our Cambridge, not the one with MIT and Harvard!) over a period 24 hours or so from 4pm on Friday 12th June. It’s going to be gloriously, unashamedly hardcore. It’s one of the most exciting things that this site has seen this year.

As a FAQ-like page explains, the puzzle hunt is “a team puzzle-solving and treasure-hunting competition. Your team will navigate its way through a mental and sometimes physical obstacle course of challenging and fun computational, mathematical and linguistic puzzles, seeking to cut its way through to the goal before everyone else. No preparation is necessary, just come along on the day!

One crucial thing to note is that “Teams may be made of up to three members. It is envisaged that most participants will be @cam.ac.uk (affectionately known as Camacuks) and it is encouraged that each team should have at least one Camacuk. However, teams not meeting this criterion may be allowed to compete by prior agreement (drop us an email). If you’re looking for more team members, hit us up and we’ll try to match you up!” It seems very likely that there would be ways for counterpart Oxacuks, Icacuks, Manacuks or even Lifeacuks to play as well, though the hunt will surely have just enough local flavour to keep things interesting.

To get a feel for the flavour of past form, the puzzles from the 2012 edition are online, along with worked solutions. It’s clear that the puzzles are set to challenge their intended audience, with no hesitation about setting the bar quite high. The puzzles from 2013 are also available. It’s striking how both years’ structures point to puzzles that nobody got around to trying, as well as got around to solving.

This site emphasises how accessible Puzzled Pint, DASH and Order of the Octothorpe are; by contrast, this site would only recommend this hunt to the most persistent, capable and (particularly technologically) resourceful – the calibre of which can be found at places including the country’s most celebrated universities. This site does not subscribe to an elitist viewpoint that harder is necessarily better or more interesting; instead, it celebrates a wide puzzle hobby where everybody can find the level of their choice.

However, this site is delighted that there is readier access than once there was to the highest of ceilings, and that those with sufficient skills can get a chance to play at as high a level as this hunt offers; it may be about as challenging as the decades-long tradition of hunts in the US and elsewhere. Those with experience of such games, who have missed having the opportunity to play in them, or those who aspire to reach the highest of global heights, will likely have the time of their lives. Many thanks to everyone at CUCaTS for putting it on and making it available; it’s surely likely to be spectacular!

(Now, does that logo contain some sort of pre-clue around the hexagonal face…?)

One night in Cambridge

Cambridge's Polar Museum(Image of the Polar Museum at the University of Cambridge, derived from one to which they retain the copyright.)

Back last October, this site reported upon, among other things, Cambridge University’s Polar and Sedgwick Museums hosting one-night exit games as part of the Curating Cambridge festival. It was a delight to read of their existence, though the limited extent (a handful of places only available on each one) meant that very few got to enjoy what they had to offer. Nevertheless, a report details the story of the game and has a charming pic of one of the museums’ winning teams in the remarkable surroundings.

The report also hinted that “If you didn’t get the chance during Curating Cambridge, The Polar Museum will be repeating Museum Escape: The Polar Domes during the Cambridge Science Festival in March 2015.” Sure enough, that has come to pass, and the event has its own page within the Cambridge Science Festival site, suggesting that the game will have a glorious single-night stand on Tuesday 17th March.

Back due to popular demand – Your mission should you choose to accept it, is to escape the museum… The Polar Museum brings you ‘Museum Escape’, an interactive live escape game designed for groups of 3 to 8 people. Find hints and clues, solve puzzles, and crack codes as you race against time in order to escape from a room you are ‘locked in’. The Polar Museum will be open to the public to browse from 5pm – 8.30pm and a bar will be available.

Each slot is 45 minutes starting at 4.30pm, 5.30pm, 6.30pm 7.30pm & 8.30pm. With only five slots available, book fast for your group. Bookings will only be reserved once payment is made. Each slot costs £30 no matter how many people are in the group.” The page also quotes an e-mail address to check for booking enquiries. Elsewhere on the site, it is suggested that “Bookings open Monday 9 February 2015 at 10.30am” – i.e., tomorrow – so follow the advice about booking fast to the letter.

Perhaps continued popular demand might inspire the museum to host the game again, further down the line! Cambridge sounds like the sort of place where exit games should flourish.

Introducing a great UK university puzzle hunt: the CUCaTS hunt

CUCaTS logoAfter discussion of puzzle hunts around the world, it’s long been tempting to wonder whether there might be one in the UK that somehow has gone under the radar. Many different countries have their own puzzling traditions, and perhaps the UK is most relatively strong in the armchair treasure hunt tradition. One of the most interesting US puzzling traditions is that of the in-person puzzle hunt, more specifically epic 24-48-hour non-stop team hunts sometimes referred to as The Game. (It’s very inconvenient that a useful generic title can get overloaded with so many different, incompatible meanings… and you may have just lost The Game.)

That particular puzzle hunt tradition began at some of the most prestigious universities in the US; over time, many of the participants went to work for, or found, technology companies. Well-placed rumours suggest that such puzzle hunts were also played by members of technology companies in the UK, though activity came to a halt in 2005, possibly to some extent as a result of the 7th July bombings. This site seeks to research this claim.

It was a total delight to recently discover that a group within the UK has been running an in-person treasure hunt, very much in the style of those in the US, for at least three years. True to the backgrounds of technologically focused prestigious academia, the group responsible is CUCaTS, the Cambridge University Computing and Technology Society. Their hunts have been 24-30 hours long, featuring heavily technical puzzles, befitting the playing constituency’s background, played between teams of just three.

The 2012 problems are an excellent starting-point, showing not just the structure of the event but the sort of background required to enjoy the puzzles. They tended to be very sparse on flavourtext, and light on clueing, though it’s impossible to know what sort of help the teams received in practice. The results show that in practice they each tended to take many person-hours to solve – and that the hunt may have had depths that no team actually managed to reach. While the event would be considered “conference room style”, several puzzles involved visiting locations around the city.

The 2013 event’s problems follow the form and take it further still, though it may well be that the clues and solution techniques are not yet written up in sufficient detail to judge properly. Certainly these are proper double-black-diamond difficulty puzzles, certainly comparably hard to those in the SUMS hunt in progress this and perhaps bearing comparison to those in the MIT Mystery Hunt.

There was another such event in 2014; the preview makes it clear that there would be an increased degree of focus on relatively accessible puzzles towards the start, working up towards the most difficult ones later. While the puzzles are not available (from context, they may well have been hosted on a private server that is no longer online) the review makes the flavour clear. “The full range of Cambridge inventiveness and ingenuity was exhibited by all the teams, with puzzle topics ranging from dial tones & guitar chords to binary trees & window managers; from discrete cosine transforms & famous engineers to prime numbers & run-length encoding; and from magic bytes & corrupted FAT partitions to postboxes & the Greek alphabet.”

What is known for sure:

  • The hunt has been run for each of the last three years.
  • The review of the 2014 hunt says “Stay tuned for next year!”, despite only four teams participating.
  • One would expect a 2015 event to happen in mid-June and to be announced on the CUCaTS Facebook site, among other locations.
  • The 2014 event suggested that at least one team member required an active cam e-mail address, implying that other team members did not.
  • There is a tradition of feeding the players throughout, which is excellent, sociable practice.

What is not known for sure:

  • It is not clear whether the hunt would welcome players from outside the society, or outside the cam.ac.uk community.
  • It is not clear whether the participants are interested in a closer tie-up with the puzzle community at large and the other hunts and contests that exist, noting other rumours of puzzle cells at Cambridge.
  • It is not clear whether a hunt requiring such effort can be sustained for the long-term.
  • The extremely technical nature of the puzzles mean that even some avowed puzzle hunt fans may consider this not to be the puzzle hunt for them.

Nevertheless, learning of the existence of this hunt is one of the most exciting developments since this site started way back towards the start of the year. Onwards and upwards, and who knows what other surprises there might be waiting to be discovered?

University challenges

SUMS puzzle hunt logoSeveral universities around the world have their own puzzle traditions. The most famous of them all is probably the MIT Mystery Hunt, with a history almost three dozen years old. This site has also previously discussed the Australian puzzle hunt tradition and reviewed this year’s MUMS Puzzle Hunt put on by Melbourne University’s Mathematics and Statistics Society.

Sydney University’s Mathematics Society have their own puzzle hunt, with a history about half as long as its Melbourne counterpart. The format is reasonably similar to that of the MUMS hunt, though as well as the history being only half as long, the maximum team size permitted is only half as large: 5 rather than 10. Does this mean that the puzzles are any lighter? Well, you’ll have to decide that for yourself. This year’s hunt has its first act of five revealed at noon Sydney time on Monday 27th October… which translates to 1am GMT on Monday 27th October and that the first act is already up and running. The next four acts will be revealed daily, again at 1am GMT, along with hints to previously-revealed acts. Find yourself a team (or start yourself one!) and get stuck in.

There are mathematics societies at UK universities, but none have quite the same sort of puzzle hunt tradition. Warwick’s one has had a local puzzle trail at their end-of-year barbecue, some years, and both Oxford’s and Cambridge’s have had at least one event that they have described as a puzzle hunt in the past. (As ever, if you know of any events that this site should be writing about, please get in touch about them.) Cambridge’s Archimedeans have a long-held tradition of an annual Problems Drive stretching back at least fifty years – and it’s fun to think that 1964’s problem one has at least 25 more answers known now than it did then, courtesy of GIMPS.

In this vein, Oxford’s Invariant Society has a free puzzle drive coming up this Tuesday, with a £200 first prize sponsored by Oxford Asset Management. The event starts at 8:15pm and presumably takes place in Oxford’s still-new Mathematical Institute, the Andrew Wiles building. The puzzles are quite likely to be relatively mathematical; it’s unclear whether or not the Invariants’ puzzles page can be considered representative of what might be asked on the night. It’s also unclear whether it’s a team event or not, but it would seem more likely than not.

Cambridge has other treats to offer, though. As part of the Curating Cambridge programme, the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences is offering a one-night pop-up exit game on Tuesday 18th November, with the Polar Museum Memorial Hall offering a similar one the week beforehand.

Adults only. £30 per group. Booking required.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to escape the museum…

The Polar Museum and the Sedgwick Museum bring you Museum Escape, an interactive live escape game. Find hints and clues, solve puzzles, and crack codes as you race against time to escape from a ‘locked room’.

Designed for groups of 3 to 8 people, this game lasts for 45mins, beginning at set times.

To make a booking for either location email:museumevents@spri.cam.ac.uk

With only a few games being played each night, perhaps the games might have sold out already. However, it’s worth getting in touch with the organisers to congratulate them for their imaginative event and showing them that there’s sufficient demand that they might want to run the event more frequently!