Room Escape Artist

The Top Escape Rooms Project is an attempt to find the best escape rooms in the world, by leveraging the experience of an international community of experienced players.

Last Saturday the project presented the Top Escape Rooms Project Enthusiasts’ Choice Award, or TERPECA, to the top 100 escape rooms rooms in the world based on 1,114 contributors who nominated 939 rooms, out of the combined 314,782 escape room played.

It’s a big deal to win a TERPECA; 100 winners is a shorter list than it sounds. For a winning company, it’s international recognition for their craft, and the award brings in more business.

For players, the TERPECA incentivizes international travel and helps players with itineraries.

Travel Destinations

The top 10 games are internationally diverse. They’ll take you to: The Netherlands, Greece, Canada, Belgium, Poland, and Spain. And the top 100 games will take you to 15 different countries.

However, a few countries dominate the top 100 winning games:

There are 22 winners from Spain. We’re very excited to be traveling to Spain in 2024! It’s almost overwhelming to plan this trip. The choices!

There are 20 winners from the United States. We’ll break this down below.

There are 18 winners from Greece. We traveled to Greece in February of 2020 and it’s invigorating to see how this market has transformed since we were there. We’ve only played 3 of these 18 winning games.

There are 9 winners from The Netherlands, including the #1 and #2 games. It’s impressive to see The Dome take the #2 spot again. It has stayed in the top 3 since ranking #1 in 2019. We very much look forward to playing this year’s winner Molly’s Game. Interestingly, the winners from The Netherlands include both long established winners like The Dome and newcomers like The Non Believers and The Alchemist, and some games in between. We’ll be playing most of the top 200 from The Netherlands (that we haven’t already played) (except where it was logistically impossible) on our upcoming trip!

The Rise of Escaparium

Escaparium repeated its 2022 feat of having 3 winning games under 1 roof… and in an even more impressive showing, this year two of those games finished in the top 10.

• Forgotten Cathedral placed #4
• Wardrobe For Sale placed #7
• The Lost Island of the Voodoo Queen placed #28
• And Rain Corp only just missed out on the award, placing #114. (It’s also under the same roof.)

Escaparium is only the second company to ever have 2 top 10 games. No company has achieved this since Skurrilum in 2018, and with a much larger project today, it’s an even more impressive accomplishment. We’re very proud of Escaparium, and continually impressed by how quickly they bring impressive new games to market.

Check out this REPOD interview with creators Jonathan and Sacha.

It was amazing to bring our tour Escape Immerse Explore Montreal to visit them earlier this year. We expect another tour to Montreal is in REA’s future.

The U.S. Winners

The Man From Beyond

At #16, The Man From Beyond at Strange Bird Immersive in Houston, TX, is the top game in the United States for the 5th year in a row. It is incredible that no game has unseated it. It’s a testament to its strong emotional resonance, that players remember years later, and that still lands for new players today.

Orlando

The Exit Games landed at #19 for Pins & Needles Tattoo Parlor (the second ranked game in the US) and #41 for Servants of Sleight. Doldrick’s Crazy Train: The Ballad of Skeemin’ Plotz came in at #50. This game only opened this fall!

We have interviews on REPOD with Tay and Josh of The Exit Games and with Mike and Rick of Doldrick’s!

Of note, 3 games from The Escape Ventures, another Orlando company, also placed (#160, #183, and #241). We firmly believe that The Escape Ventures will climb this list in the future as well. They are incredibly talented.

This is a market on the rise. We highlighted this market with our tour, Escape Immerse Explore Orlando, in November. We’re excited to share the data from our post-event survey, where players stack-ranked all the games they played in Orlando. Stay tuned to see if it matches TERPECA.

Doors of Divergence

By achieving replayability, Doors of Divergence broke some foundational assumptions TERPECA. Madness: 1917 placed #37.

Had TERPECA leaned more heavily on the opinions of voters who had played Madness: 1917 at least twice, it would have ranked #14… and their other game Heresy: 1898 would have made the top 100. We firmly believe that voters who had played at least twice were the only voters who had seen enough of the experience to properly judge it. Regardless of its ranking, these games are a triumph.

We also have a REPOD interview where we dig more into replayability with Doors of Divergence creators Christian and Zac.

San Francisco

We finally got back to San Francisco this year and had a chance to play all of the winning games in the region. They truly deserve it. This is a region on the rise that we’ll be keeping an eye on.

• Ghost Patrol at Trivium came in #43
• The Attraction at Palace Games came in #58
• Robotopia at Omescape came in #64
• The Edison Escape Room at Palace Games came in #72
• Undercooked at Omescape came in #83

While we haven’t yet interviewed the creators behind Palace Games and Trivium, we did have conversation with Sarah Zhang of Omescape on REPOD.

Escape Artist Greenville

It’s really time for David and I to figure out how to get to Greenville. It’s one of the few top companies in the country that we still haven’t visited. The Starlight Motel ranked #82 and Dark Lullaby ranked #91.

TERPECA Behind the Scenes

TERPECA is an incredible feat to produce.

It’s not just the insane math required to make sense of 1,114 people nominating and stack ranking escape rooms.

It’s not just the coordination of the awards show, complete with slides, intro videos, and detailed information about each game and company. If you haven’t watched yet, check it out! If for nothing else, you won’t want to miss the theme song.

It’s not just the website that presents the results, making all the data accessible to the whole community.

Rich Bragg does so much work behind the scenes, and with the help of the Advisory Board and Regional Ambassadors, to make sure the data is clean, fair, and as unbiased as possible.

We make sure the voters are who they say they are and they declare any affiliations that could bias their voting.

We make sure the companies offer what they say they offer, especially in terms of when a game was open and whether it was playable in English during that time.

We work to make the results accessible… by categorizing them for “how much horror” they include, for example, so that players can find the games that are right for them.

We figure out how to deal with outliers of all kinds. Escape rooms are creative and as our industry innovates, we continually push the boundary of what an escape room is. Then TERPECA has to somehow put it in a box to be voted on.

We tackle delicate questions in a cross-cultural forum, always with an eye for being fair to everyone involved, and producing a list of top games that our community can trust.

The amount of work that Rich and others put into this project grows as the community around it grows. It’s a huge undertaking. As board members, David and I do what we can to advise it and promote it. We’re excited about how it continues to grow.

And if you want to hear some of the behind the scenes, you can listen to Rich on REPOD.

REA’s Advice

At Room Escape Artist, we spend a lot of time digging into the nuances of each game. We think about why each one is special, or even what small thing it does differently. We think about who each game is for. An ordered list of winners can’t give you that nuance. This list of TERPECA winners includes incredible variety in type of experience. They are all magnificently impressive, but sometimes in very different ways. We encourage you to find the games that speak to you, and when you have the time in your travels, explore the games that didn’t win, but surfaced through this project. For those that have the time and the funds, there is a lot more to find here besides an ordinal list of 100 incredible games… although that in itself is an amazing thing to have.