Did DASH 8 leave you wanting more?

whatsnext

This site has always declared its constituency to be Escape games, puzzle hunts and more and the escape games have had to take a back seat for some time. Perhaps you’re coming here for your first time, or one of your first times, as a result of DASH, or perhaps you couldn’t go but thought it sounded great; you don’t have to wait another year for DASH 9 to get your fill of puzzle fun. The idea to try to keep a calendar of such things has rather fallen by the wayside, but there are plenty of exciting-looking things coming up:

  • This site is perhaps more excited about the upcoming Raiders of the Lost Archive than anything else. It’s a version of Citydash by the esteemed Fire Hazard, but has a big twist. It takes place in the Victoria & Albert Museum; the V&A are excited about this, but it’s not an official event of theirs. The difference between this and any other Citydash is “(…)this time there’ll be nobody chasing you (and no running in the museum!). We’ll keep the pressure up with twists & turns, surprise clues and leaderboard updates, but you won’t need your running shoes for this one – and you’ll be inside throughout.
     
    If the running element of previous Citydash events has been a turn-off (*raises hand*) then this may well fit the bill and the theme is gorgeous. You can play solo, in a pair, or in a team of up to five. Tickets for Sunday afternoons in May are now listed for 15th May, 5th June and possibly 28th May. (Thanks to Ken for the heads-up!) 
     
  • The A Door In A Wall are, happily, continuing to put on their large-scale public events. The next one coming up very soon will be entitled Played to Death. “Each team will need a charged smartphone to hand and we advise you wear comfortable footwear as our story leads you out into the nearby streets in search of puzzles, clues and characters. (…) you’ll have about 45 mins to get settled and work out where to begin your investigation before the game’s opening scene. You’ll be tasked with gathering evidence to crack the case and you’ll then have two hours to explore the area outside: solving puzzles, interacting with characters and collecting clues. Once the time is up, return to the Square Pig ((pub)) where you’ll have some time to make sense of what you’ve found and identify the killer.
     
    The game will be offered on most evenings and some afternoons (particularly at weekends) between mid-May and mid-June; tickets are already available and have sold out on a number of days already. If you don’t get to play, the company are also offering the A Veiled Threat game on the third Tuesday of every month, which The Logic Escaped Me played and loved
     
  • This site’s friends at Treasure Hunts In London are also continuing to run their events; the best way to keep in touch with what’s on offer there is their calendar on Eventbrite. Three events are coming up soon: May sees the Art on the Streets Treasure Hunt at the Chocolate Museum on the 14th and the Trafalgar Square Experience at the National Gallery on the 28th; June sees the Naughty But Nice Afternoon Adventure starting at the Annenberg Courtyard of the Royal Academy on the 18th. Prices vary, depending on whether the event includes no food, a cream tea or a full dinner. 
     
  • The Cambridge University Computing and Technology Society have held a long, ambitious, advanced puzzle hunt annually for the last three or four years, normally in early June after most students have finished their exams. No word whether there’ll be another one this year, but fingers crossed. The logical place to look for more information would be the society’s Facebook page
     
  • The Manorcon board game convention (15th to 18th July at the University of Leicester) is set to feature a puzzle hunt, probably on the Sunday afternoon. This year’s hunt setters are past hunt setting veterans and multiple-time solving champions, as well as some of this site’s favourite people in the world; attend Manorcon because it’s a tremendous board game convention that started running ten or twenty years before the current breed of board games started to become popular again, rather than just for the puzzle hunt. 
     
  • Before all those, there’s dear old Puzzled Pint in London – and now also in Manchester! – on the second Tuesday of each month, so as soon as the Tuesday in half a week’s time. The puzzles here come from a rather more DASH-like background, but are deliberately accessible to all and designed to provide an hour or two’s fun for a team enjoying food, drink and good company. 
     
  • If Tuesday’s too long to wait, or if London and Manchester are both too far to go, there are online puzzle hunts which come to you. The annual Melbourne University Mathematics (and statistics) Society hunt starts at midday, local time, on 9th May. It’s designed for teams of up to ten; you’ll recognise some of the participating teams’ names from the top of the DASH leaderboard, but other teams come from the MIT Mystery Hunt tradition and more. Suffice to say that the MUMS hunt has gained an audience who like to spend hours on deep, research-y, Aha!-y puzzles, though they’re almost always brilliantly constructed. 
     
  • Staying online, if you like logic puzzle contests then the calendar also looks busy. The World Puzzle Federation’s Grand Prix season’s contests take place every four weeks, with the next starting on Friday 13th May. The next contest is set by the US authors and may be of particular interest; more soon. The move to featuring “casual” puzzles as well as the more high-powered traditional fare adds massively to the fun as well as the accessibility. That’s not all from US authors, though; the US Puzzle Championship will be on Sunday 18th June. Before that, HIQORA takes place on Saturday 28th May; more soon on that one, too. Look out (perhaps at @ukpuzzles on Twitter?) for news of the UK Puzzle Championship as well, which has rapidly become this site’s favourite of the year. Previous UKPCs have happened in May, June, July and August, so this year’s event could happen at any moment. Exciting times!

Coming soon to London: street game “Shadow over Shoreditch”

Shadow over Shoreditch graphicThis site has touched upon the work of the Fire Hazard street games company in the past. Their stock in trade is energetic outdoor gameplay, often evoking movies’ chase sequences. City Dash is their breakout hit, popular wherever it has been tried. However, the basic principle of a chase game is easy to replicate; customised software to keep people precisely in touch with the state of play during the race is a lot harder and there are other variations on an intuitive and simple theme that can be tried to keep people coming back for more.

October’s game will be Shadow over Shoreditch. “The ladies and gentlemen of the Lumos Society race to seal the portal as sinister shapes slither from the shadows. Can your team of heroes crack the clues, escape the shambling horrors, and still have time for tea?” This iteration of the general principle aims to be a lot more theatrical than its predecessors.

The briefing will be in character, players are invited to dress for atmosphere as well as for practicality (“Encouraged (but not mandatory). Think ‘vintage adventurer’, perhaps with a dash of Steampunk ((…)) perhaps a collared shirt and a waistcoat?“), teams will be chased by squiddling Tentacled Horrors From Beyond and the afterparty will take place at the very cool Ziferblat, featuring custom-designed cocktails for the event. If the inhabitants of Shoreditch can go all-in for the likes of Secret Cinema, there’s no reason why other games couldn’t affect some similar sense of occasion. (A tip of the hat to the likes of Time Run and Trapped in a Room with a Zombie, possibly the state of the art for theming in exit games.)

As for the game itself: 50 players meet at our HQ, and our crew help you get into teams, pick up your map, and get the game running on your phone. Then we’ll brief you and send you all off into Shoreditch at once. Now you’ve got an hour to score as many points as you can. Find checkpoints in any order by looking at your phone to see the latest cryptic clues, get there, and look for the hidden code. Type that into your phone to update the scoreboard. But at the same time, watch out for our patrolling monsters. They don’t need to catch you – they only need to see you, so you’d better hope that someone on your team is keeping a lookout!

That hints at the other major step forward for this game compared to its forebears. No longer are you being chased by agents who wish to take their own photo of you in order to penalise you, but by monsters who need no such obvious tools and will cause collateral damage through their mere proximity. How can that be made to happen in real life? Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law reads “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“; let’s leave it at that!

Shadow Over Shoreditch will take place at 8pm on each of the last four Thursdays and last four Saturdays of October. Tickets start at £8 per player for the preview event on Thursday 8th October, early bird tickets are £15 per player, with the Hallowe’en special wrap party being £25 per head. If you love craftsmanship at the cutting edge, don’t let this one fall into darkness past you.

One door closes, many more open

Closed blue doorimage credit: Closed Door via free images (license)

Today is not the worst day in the world to have woken up unexpectedly early, for live entertainment includes following the #egc15 hashtag on Twitter for discussion of the Escape Games Convention in progress. Apparently there are around a hundred attendees, which is impressive. Fingers firmly crossed for more to come!

Some sad news: a single-line announcement points to the closure of Guess-House of Bradford. It’s not immediately clear whether the shuttering will be temporary or permanent, but signs point to fearing the worst. The site’s Facebook posted nine team photos over its summer run; how many other teams there were who went unpictured cannot be known. This site will remember the location for offering players the ability to play solo, an innovation in this country that does crop up as a player request from time to time, though it’s not clear if that option was taken up in practice.

One piece of sad news, but many more pieces of happy news. The best palate-cleanser of all is that Breakout Games of north-east Scotland posted that this weekend they will be donating all the profits that their Aberdeen and Inverness locations generate to Medecins Sans Frontieres, whose Doctors Without Borders provide medical aid where it is needed most around the world. Kudos to them, and yet another good reason to go and play there. Breakout Games aren’t the first exit game to run such charity days and hopefully won’t be the last!

This site has long thought that Wales is one of the larger gaps in the market for exit games and is following the progress of the pre-launch Escape Rooms Cardiff with interest, even before it gets its web site going. However, it’s certainly not the only such project in Wales; Breakout Live Swansea has a venue in mind, a planning application under way and coverage from the local press (twice!) already. Very promising, especially with the news of the founder’s electronics background.

This site has also touched on the work of Fire Hazard, the energetic games company best known for City Dash, a running-sneaking-and-finding-checkpoints urban turbo-orienteering game. On balance this site considered City Dash to be a little too running-y to be quite its taste, though it was delighted to see that the game had been transported to Edinburgh for the Festival and praised by Can You Escape?. However, the latest flavour of City Dash is called Code Red, and there’s a clue in the title. Conversation in person at the Wellcome Collection’s recent Play Spectacular, followed up on Twitter (with thanks to Ken!) suggests that “We added a few extra hard checkpoints to the new series, so puzzlers have another way to get an edge on runners“. That’s the sort of thing to get this site interested!