'Escape Rooms' Challenge Players To Solve Puzzles To Get Out (npr.org)

I found a game like this in eastern Europe some years ago, and really loved it. Ended up going to everyone I found in the city with my family.

Now most cities in Europe has them. Great activity for team-building. One thing I find interesting is that everywhere these games show up, they top the TripAdvisor rankings.

I beta-tested one of these in my town. Was quite a lot of fun, but our group solved it too fast (I think we finished after 30 minutes while the room was planned to take about 50 minutes to solve). They fixed this afterwards.

The fast-paced group problem solving is quite enjoyable, although I still think it's not worth the 20 € / person they usually ask.

In Czech Republic, we have many puzzle hunts per year. The "escape room" fad also came here, it seems similar; I haven't tried it, but it seems really overpriced.

Typical price for 20-hour puzzle hunt is about $3-5 per person. Escape room costs 1 hour for about $30. The room is probably much better done, but I would bet you would have more fun puzzle solving in a more traditional puzzle hunt.

Escape rooms are great fun! I did a couple, in Den Bosch and Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Tip: don't go to a new one directly but only after a few months or so, so that the room can be tested and tuned in difficulty. Also, wear and tear can reveal some clues and correct solutions, so in those few months, everything gets tried and thus the overall wear and tear masks the correct solutions.

It's expensive though, 20€/person for an hour or less if you're fast is relatively steep.

Zero Escape in real life sounds awesome

I've tried a bunch of these in Vancouver, Seattle and Mumbai. Most of them have been incredible. If you're the kind of person who enjoys the rush of solving puzzles under a timer, you would love this. Also, one set of rooms in Vancouver hired set designers to build the rooms (making them very realistic), and hired actors to help run the business. The actors really add to the immersive experience since they pretend to be part of the puzzle. But yeah, I don't understand how scalable the financial model is, since the owners would have to keep recycling the rooms every few months.

HintHunt in Paris is awesome.

Cluequest is a great puzzle room in london. I wasn't that excited about doing it but once you're inside with some friends it gets super competitive and fun!! Really interesting business problem as well about how to maintain interest and grow customer lifetime value. Possibly a problem that could be solved by super fast iteration of rooms so that a customer is never going to need to do the same room twice.......? I guess it is much like any theme park. You need to continuously update and improve the attractions.

I've just been handed a flyer for escape room here in St.-Petersburg, Russia. Didn't know it's such a popular thing in the world right now.

Really enjoy these but the quality varies immensely. In some they fail to setup the equipment properly or have weird clues and it ruins the whole thing. They are reasonably expensive (here 80-140EUR for an hour between 4-8 people).

It's been a massive fad for a year or more in Europe, seems like they have to capitalise on as many TripAdvisor reviews as possible before it loses popularity.

i had a friend invite me along to enjoy one of these rooms in nyc

the puzzle layout was such that there were some 30-40 individual steps that needed to be taken that would culminate in a four digit combination

you then use the four digit combination on a lock securing the lid of a box that contained a button that opened the exit

the lock was a wheel lock where each wheel had 7 faces, 0 to 6

about halfway through the game the group had found the first 2 values of the combination

i explained to my friend that math could get us out

at 7 faces and four wheels your looking at:

  #!/usr/bin/env python3
  import itertools
  len(list(itertools.product("0123456",repeat=4))) #2401

but we were down to only two wheels left

  len(list(itertools.product("0123456",repeat=2))) #49

all we had to do was try the 49 different possibilities for the lock, essentially brute forcing

my friend was ecstatic and encouraged me to do it, but when i went over to the lock and started trying the different combinations a staffer came up to us and stopped us asking:

  'do you really want to win that way?'

my friend and i laughed at the indirect math shaming and returned to the group looking for clues

eventually the timer ran out before the group could solve all of the riddles to find the last two digits of the combination

edit: copypasta err

Cool/clever escape room company in Denver... https://www.puzzah.com/

One of the founders, Derek, is an interesting guy and built an impressive tech stack that drives the rooms with a very high degree of automation. I think most HN'ers would enjoy speaking with him about it.

There are many flash games like this on the internet - but real life sounds way cooler :)

I wonder now which came first, the computer games or the real life escape rooms...

I saw another comment mentioning 4-digit codes. For some reason, every single such computer game I played also involved a 4-digit code, as if that's some kind of obligatory thing to have. So the 4-digit thing kind of lost its originality, I wonder why it keeps being present in such games?

Man, I don't think I'm clever enough to enjoy these.

How often do they resort to P&C adventure game logic?

Is this not a huge thing yet in america? I've done like six or seven of these here in London. Most of them are good fun. There seem to be new ones starting up every month as well.

Currently there are almost 250 escaperooms in the Netherlands. With 1.7 new escaperooms being added every month I can safely say it's going fast in the Netherlands. Lots of great ones as well! The scene is a lot further than in the rest of the world. US has +/- 500 rooms. NL 250 :). And I know 10 more rooms will open this year for sure.

I played my first room in 2013 and started working on our escaperoom platform Escape Rooms Nederland beginning of this year. Biggest platform about escaperooms with reviews, news and comparison. Played around 40 rooms myself. Really love this phenomenon. Hopefully it will stick around. If you ever visit the Netherlands and want to know the best one in your area. Let me know.

A new thing is growing popularity as well, Prison Island. You should check it out as well.

It does not have to be about escape. Why not find something in the room instead, hidden behind set of puzzles?

Another popular thing is location games. You receive a book of puzzles in the form of "find X on a street Y near house Z" (some unusual features). You then need to solve travelling salesman problem while solving puzzles and recording answers. Some puzzle sets are bike-oriented, some assume you travel by public transport, some car-oriented.

Here's the most popular company in SF that runs these: http://realescapegame.com/

They are an offshoot of the Japanese division. All of their games are really well done. There are several other places in the bay area doing this now too, this one in Richmond is also great: http://letsescapesf.com/

I just did the one in Nashville. It was a lot of fun, but it was very expensive (~$35), and they also made us solve the puzzle with a bunch of strangers (in order to fill up the room entirely).

The good part of this is that they're making $280 per hour (8 x $35) off of their escape room, and at those prices, there should be many, many more of them soon (which will bring down the price to its equilibrium, which I assume is far lower).

There was a Science Channel show that aired over the summer called "Race to Escape" that followed two teams as they try to escape themed rooms using clues- it was a lot of fun to watch, though the omnipotent cameras led to a lot of yelling at the TV as you saw the obvious clue that the contestants kept overlooking.

So this is like True Dungeon gone mainstream?

There are 2 or 3 escape rooms in Cleveland and 2 in Pittsburgh. I've done one in each city - they were decent, but in both cases many of the clues were for 3-digit combo locks which were easy to brute-force after getting some of the clues. Working with strangers is also interesting (most have a 8 or 10 person quota per room). Anyhow, they are pretty fun. It's like Myst in real life.

Seems a bit like Laser Tag for the 21st century. In general I think the space of "real life + tech juice" sort of things is a pretty under-exploited market segment. From pacman on the streets of NYC to Ingress to Puzzle Rooms to Geocaching. It seems like a lot of different ways to take this.

I've done one of these, and what I found myself was that the challenge wasn't just solving the problem, but also promoting a social dynamic that allowed everyone to participate in the problem solving.

That meant being intentionally ignorant to certain aspects of the puzzles to force participation from the quieter people in the group.

My girlfriend and I have gone to a bunch of these in LA. They range from little strip mall places with a bunch of janky puzzles with poorly translated instructions to fully decorated and themed rooms with actors moving the action along. Check reviews on Yelp first.

If you want to jump in, one of my favorites is "Trapped in a room with a zombie". They were featured on Big Bang Theory (don't hold this against them, and the room is nothing like portrayed in the show) and it's really well done--our zombie was hilarious. They have rooms in Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, LA, NY, Philly, and Seattle: http://roomescapeadventures.com/

In LA specifically, the Race/LA rooms are great: http://escaperoomla.com/ (Race/LA also puts on scavenger hunts which are also worth a shot.)

(Not associated in any way with these rooms, just a huge fan of the concept.)