Room Escape Artist

Leaderboards have been a regular part of many escape room companies dating back a decade, and here at Room Escape Artist we have long questioned their value.

We recently had an interesting conversation with owners and players about escape room leaderboards in our Patreon Discord, and that chat produced a number of ways to augment leaderboards.

Before we get to how leaderboards can be improved, let’s start with the case against them.

The Case Against Escape Room Leaderboards

This may come as a surprise, but the reason that we have been anti-leaderboard is because we top them so often. Players like us and many of the people in our community can easily set unreasonable times in escape rooms… and we frequently do this by accident. We are functionally professional escape room players and leaderboards are ranking us against newbies. We don’t love that the times we’re setting in games could discourage a newer player.

And we know that insanely fast times listed on leaderboards can discourage less experienced players because we eavesdrop on other teams in escape room lobbies.

For more competitive, but less skilled teams, leaderboards can create a sort of second, much more challenging win condition that is likely unachievable. They might emerge from the game feeling great that they won, but then go out into the lobby and see just how far away they were from making the leaderboard, let alone topping it. We’ve watched winning teams walk out of escape room companies talking as if they’d failed. It feels like an unnecessary feel bad… especially when you factor in that very few teams will ever get the high of making or topping the leaderboard.

All of this is compounded by the diminishing returns of landing on leaderboards. It turns out that savoring a game is frequently better than rushing through it. Over time it seems that many experienced players become disinterested in ranking on a leaderboard… so the players who are most likely to take up this space are the least interested in the reward.

We stand by this reasoning, but our Patrons pointed out that there are a number of ways to get more highs out of the leaderboards and limit the lows.

Rolling Leaderboards

The easiest fix for the problems of leaderboards is to clear them every quarter/ month/ week.

Clearing the leaderboard means that when a team puts up a time that is so fast that it’s silly, they get celebrated for a time, and then it goes away. The mortals have a chance.

Rolling leaderboards require a little bit of effort and maintenance, but it’s not a ton of work.

Eliminating Leaderboards

It should be stated: leaderboards are not an essential part of escape rooms. They don’t need to be there.

If a company doesn’t want players rushing through their games, then they shouldn’t have leaderboards. The very presence of a leaderboard in a lobby sends a clear signal to players: “This is competitive. Play fast.” If you want to send that message or you want to give players the chance at the joy of winning a place on the list, go for it… but if you don’t want to send that message, then you can take down the leaderboard and use that wall space for something else.

Playful Leaderboards

Some of our discussion wandered down an interesting path of playful leaderboards. Think of these as more subjective measures of success bestowed by your gamemasters:

• The group that had the most fun
• Best dressed group
• Silliest group
• Kindest group

The cool thing about playful leaderboards is that they can be used to encourage the kinds of behavior that you want players to embody in your games.

This category is certainly the most fuzzy, but it is an interesting thought experiment and it opens up some new design avenues that we hadn’t previously considered. If you’re already doing anything like this or start doing something like this, please leave a comment and let us know.

Spotlight Leaderboards

While I may not be a big fan of leaderboards, I still look at them for one specific reason: I love finding my friends on them. It always puts a smile on my face when I am in some random town where I know absolutely no one for hundreds of miles, but there is a photo of Amanda Harris and Drew Nelson, or Dan Egnor and Ana Ulin.

I have seen a couple of leaderboard-like displays that feature distinguished guests. I think that’s a pretty cool idea.

On the subject of distinguished people, the list of our Patreon backers is a pretty incredible list of folks. Not only are they amazing, but their support allows us to do all of the crazy things that we do here at Room Escape Artist.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Jeff Harper, Stacey Hopkins, Jared Butler, Nadina Espinosa, Jill Parisher, and Chris Eberle.

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.

The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.