Building extensions

Building extensionsOctober has been a very fruitful month for existing sites adding new rooms. Here’s a round-up of at least some of the sites that have added, or are about to add, new rooms to their line-up.

  • Cryptology of Nottingham opened their new room, The Crypt, on October 10th. “Pharaoh Rameses has sent you and your peers to The Crypt where you will starve. Some of his minions are sympathisers and have given you the means to escape. Can you and your team unshackle and free yourselves before the guard comes to make their first inspection?” This adds to their already popular Cypherdyne room, both of which take 2-5 players, and their Group Detective tour of the city.
  • Exit Newcastle, of -on-Tyne rather than -under-Lyme, were a day later with their new Volatile Laboratories game for two to six. “You find yourselves trapped and infected in a top secret laboratory that’s been sent into lockdown. Will you be able to find the antidote and release the Exit? (Please note that Volatile Labs begins in a confined space. It is also not suitable for those with epilepsy.)
  • A day later still, Salisbury Escape Room reopened with a brand new game, Murder at the Museum, replacing their prior Magna Carta Challenge. There’s no written description available, but have an online video instead, showing how it takes advantage of the founders’ legal backgrounds.
  • Not just a new game at Puzzlair of Bristol, but a whole new location. The original location, Puzzlair 1 remains open with its two games; the new location, Puzzlair 2, opens on Monday 26th with two new games and a third to follow soon, as discussed at 365bristol. The new games are The Warehouse of Jack Travis, in which you search through said storage facility for clues to a hidden rare diamond, found during African explorations and set to be donated to the Crown Jewels until Travis’ untimely disappearance, and the Secret Agent room, wherein a double agent has stolen the complete list of MI6 agents and you are required to identify the double-dealing counterspy and return the agent list to its proper owners. The Poltergeist Room will be the third game at the new location, set to open in November for players aged 18+.
  • Code to Exit of Altrincham are set to open their second room on 14th November. In The Test, the story goes that “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.” Maybe best not to find out what happens if you don’t pass.
  • Looking further ahead still, Lost and Escape of Newcastle have announced on Twitter that their Time Travel to the 1900s game must close at the end of Earth Year 2015 – but, in happier news, new games are under construction and will hopefully be available in Feburary 2016.
  • Ex(c)iting Game of Oxford have added not so much a new room as a whole new outdoor game on October 8th, The Time Machine. Apparently bus 8, regardless of whether it is being operated by Stagecoach or by the Oxford Bus Company, acts as a time machine when you take it towards the city centre. “You are members of a secret society who suspect the existence of the time machine and impending danger, but you cannot specify it. Now you will be engaged in a secret mission in which you need to get the information necessary to find out what will jeopardize Oxford and in what year! Your task is to detect the precise details, so you’ll have time to prepare for the impending danger and prevent it.” This game, for groups of 2-5 (but maybe up to a dozen or so such groups, each starting 15 minutes apart?) is only available before 2pm because it relies on the opening times of some of the other buildings that you may have to visit in the city, which do change from time to time. The short version costs £45 and takes 2-3 hours; the long version costs £55 and takes 4-5 hours, possibly split over two days.
  • While in an Oxford frame of mind, the Jailbreak! game at Oxford Castle has undergone a complete makeover. It’s now only available after 7pm and has been revamped so that it now caters for parties of 10-15; the price has likewise been revamped to £250 for the team, though this includes a glass of house wine. (Subject to confirmation: per player, not per team.)

And finally, in bigger news still, congratulations to Enigma Quests of London on their opening day today! Their first such Quest sees you “brew some potions and defeat dark arts” as you explore a magical academy.

Late September news updates

Newspaper graphicA few short news stories and they’re all good news, so without further ado:

  • Escape Plan Ltd. report that their lease has been extended until late January 2016, so there’s longer to enjoy their current game in its present location. Celebrate this good news by using the launch discount code, which will spiral into infinity for good when business closes on Friday night.
  • Excited to see Play-it-Real, an English language blog on exit games by the owner of one in Amsterdam. It’s only two posts old, but Exit Games UK really loved the Play-it-Real recap of attending the convention in Germany three weeks ago. Not much has been written about what happened there, making this article a must-read.
  • Only four days to go for the crowdfunding campaign for the Red House Mysteries exit game in Exeter. The campaign has come on in leaps and bounds over the last two or three days and is now well past 90% funded. While you can’t take anything for granted, you would be disappointed if your ticket pre-orders at extremely attractive-looking prices weren’t to come to fruition from this point.
  • Good news about new games coming at sites in Nottingham: Escapologic are opening their third room, E.P.I Centre on Saturday; it’s a game about compound interest, or at least about an interesting compound. Alma City has just been hit by an earthquake. There’s panic on the streets. Chaos and devastation. Buildings are collapsing. Fires are raging. People are screaming. Cars are crashing. Your team is the disaster cleanup crew. You have one hour to save billions of pounds of chemical research from the Edward Palamate Institute. Stabilise the systems. Save the priceless chemical sample. Get out before the contents of your cryogenic case disperse and it’s all over. Elsewhere in the city, the second room at Cryptology, which is set to put the crypt into Cryptology, “will be ready for an October launch”. Good times!
  • And finally, Agent November used Twitter to confirm the announcement that the intellectual property for the well-known large-scale zombie chase game 2.8 Hours Later has been bought from the sadly insolvent Slingshot. The zombies may yet run again; it will be rather exciting to see what a company that is used to smarter games might do to refresh the familiar concept!

Coming soon to Nottingham: Cryptology

cryptologyNottingham will shortly get its third exit game! Opening on the 8th of June, Cryptology will be situated in the city centre, between the Old Market and Lace Market tram stops. Locals will apparently know its location as “thirty seconds from the Left Lion” (oh, that explains it) – another way of putting it is “just down the road from the Five Guys“. The location will be opening with two exit games, both of which take teams of two to five players and have time limits of an hour.

One of the games is named Cypherdyne and concerns a fictional modern technology company of the same name. “You and your team are completing your first day at your new job at Cypherdyne. What seems like a normal induction takes an unexpected turn. Can you and your team pass the test to become an honorary employee?

If your heart races more for historical scenarios than modern-day ones, perhaps The Crypt is more for you. “Pharaoh Rameses has sent you and your peers to The Crypt where you will starve. Some of his minions are sympathisers and have given you the means to escape. Can you and your team unshackle and free yourselves before the guard comes to make their first inspection?” It is not yet clear how literally the word “unshackle” should be taken, but anything is possible!

As well as featuring two exit games, the site is also set to host Detective City Tours for groups. Here you can “Discover a different side of Nottingham with a Detective City Tour. Answer riddles, solve puzzles, track locations, map out the crime: discover Nottingham’s secrets. An interactive, clue-solving mystery based in and around Nottingham city centre. The tour will take between 2-3 hours to complete. Fancy yourself as Sherlock Holmes?” The link between exit games and detective tours has always seemed like an intuitive one to this site; Bath Escape have done something similar and it seems like a tie-up that would have a good crossover.

The exit games are charged at £40/team to £75/team depending on team size, the detective tours are a flat fee of £30/team. Lots more fun to be had in an increasingly busy city!