Competition compendium

Competition rosettesA 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.))

Around the World: a US hunt playable around the world?

South Carolina state map(South Carolina image courtesy of mapsof.net, published under a Creative Commons licence.)

Life gets in the way for a few days and all of a sudden there’s a little backlog of exciting news to post…

The happiest news of the day is good reason to turn two more dots on the map from red to yellow as Breakout Games Aberdeen have announced that they’re taking their first customers today and Crack the Code Sheffield previously suggested that today would be the day on which they will be taking their first customers. (There are TripAdvisor reports for the site already, so perhaps they have had a soft launch already?)

Last year, this site briefly covered the University of South Carolina puzzle hunt, which has been an annual fixture since 2012. Registration is now open; the hunt’s informational page suggests that “Remote teams and members are still welcomed in this Hunt. On the registration form, please indicate that you are playing remotely, and more information will be provided to you“, and an article on last year’s event reported that “Twenty of this year’s teams were composed of USC students, but the remaining teams were remote, and came from as far as China and the United Kingdom.” Fair game, in that case! On each of the five days of the first week of the hunt, a set of puzzles will be released, along with a metapuzzle derived from those puzzles’ answers, with the overall hunt solution derived in turn. You can get a better idea of the hunt’s form from the 2014 puzzles and the 2013 puzzles as well. (Ooh, they had an Only Connect event as part of the 2013 hunt as well! Excellent.)

Lastly, Iain points out that 25 cities across the United States will be having one-day revivals of the old Lobby Lud gimmick this week! To celebrate the start of the second series of NBC’s The Blacklist, lookalikes of the show’s lead character will be deploying themselves across the US between Monday 2nd February and Thursday 5th February then posting clues to their whereabouts to social media. The first three to find each lookalike and whisper the phrase that pays stand to win hundreds of dollars. Sadly South Carolinians will have to travel north and cross the state border to either Charlotte or Raleigh in order to play!

If you’re not in the US but still feel like making some money, don’t forget Quiz The Nation on Sunday evening; download the free app and get tokens letting you play your first few quizzes at no charge. The competition was bigger in week two than week one, but not wildly so, though the standard of top competitors is getting higher. First place pays £1,000, second to tenth and spot prize winners all claim £50 or more, and eleventh to fiftieth win tokens to play further games for free.

Coming soon to Sheffield: Crack The Code Sheffield

Crack the Code SheffieldSheffield is set to get its first 60-minute exit game very soon! Crack The Code Sheffield is set to open in the centre of the city, near the City Hall and barely a hundred metres from the Supertram stop of the same name. The site is set to cater for teams of up to five; prices are £51 for a team of three (or, unusually, two), £64 for a team of four and £70 for a team of five. The first game has the theme of The Cold War Room.

The year is 1973, over a decade on from the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis that followed… but the cold war rages on. Espionage and counter espionage between the east and western intelligence agencies continues to dominate political power and any opportunity to seize the upper hand is pounced upon.

General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Leonid Brezhnev has informed all agents that the balance of power needs to swing back towards the Eastern Bloc. K.G.B. officer Yaakov Malenkov has managed to intercept a file naming all the senior C.I.A. double agents currently operating within the Politbureau. It is his intention to meet his handler within the Kremlin and pass this file on later today. If this file is passed on it will result in the death of hundreds of agents currently operating behind the Iron Curtain and the resulting power shift may never be fully recovered.

Further games are promised soon. This period piece is all the more distinctive for not taking a jokey approach to its source material, which makes it a valuable addition to the variety of games available. It sounds intriguing and this site looks forward to first-hand reports of how well it lives up to its very considerable promise. Bookings are open now; correspondence suggests that you will be made extremely welcome if you book to play from the 31st of January onwards.