For the fifth time, I, along with the wonderful David Spira and Theresa Wagner, created a game for the RECON audience. It’s a delightful and challenging proposition, crafting a game that will inspire the industry’s most brilliant minds and delight escape room enthusiasts, while not taking too much attention away from the many other amazing events: the talks, discussions, exhibit hall, and other types of sessions of RECON.

For those who were unable to play the RECON 26 Game, this article walks through the various puzzles and interactions. For those who did play, this article hopefully gives you a behind-the-scenes look at what and why we made it this way.

Goals

Each year the RECON Game serves more than just entertainment. For RECON Laval, we had three goals.

1. Help attendees discover the event space.

For our last in-person RECON event in 2024, RECON Los Angeles, the team received feedback that finding rooms and knowing where to go was challenging. And, for Laval, we had spaces throughout both floors of the convention space as well as the hotel lobby. We wanted to ensure players found these spaces early. We also wanted to make sure that the players who would gravitate towards a game would see other aspects of the event that they might be less inclined to explore, such as the exhibit hall.

2. Foster collaboration between players.

Large convention games are rare. They’re a lot of work, and it’s difficult to get this many players together to play a game. Each in-person RECON is a rare moment when we have access to this scale.

One of my favorite aspects of RECON is bringing this community together. It’s full of delightful, warm, fun, and inviting people. One of the goals of the convention is to encourage new relationships, foster new friendships, and cultivate new discussions. The RECON Game, at two points, split up puzzle content among its participants, forcing players to help one another in solving.

3. Require minimal operational energy.

Producing an event the size of RECON takes a whole team. Ten of us are on the production team, and RECON Laval was supported by 20 wonderful Guides. But, even with that many people making this event happen, we don’t have people to dedicate entirely to the RECON Game. We need to design a game that can run itself with as little personal involvement as possible in order to focus our attention on all other aspects of the event.

While we’d love to provide an even more immersive experience, scale becomes a major hurdle. With over one hundred people finishing the game this year, even a one-minute engagement takes a couple of hours for everyone to experience.

Impish Posters and Marketing

The RECON Game for 2026 revolved around a fake marketing company, named Impish Posters and Marketing. They were a sponsor of the convention, but failed to get everything together in time to attend. They had an unfinished booth in the exhibit hall, their website and social media accounts were incomplete, and their marketing flyer contained little information.

Some attendees initially believed this was an actual company. What a delight for us! But, Impish Posters and Marketing wasn’t real… they were actually IMP POSTERS the whole time!

We landed on a marketing-focused game, in part because there are a lot of design surfaces to play with: social media, signage, flyers, newsletters, and websites. But, we also wanted to show that even less-than-ideal marketing can be effective. Getting your name and brand out there can be tough, but doing something is far better than doing nothing.

Special thanks to Wade Piche, who illustrated our three imps in a trenchcoat, and brilliantly captured the chaos of the RECON Games Team!

Walkthrough

Part 1: The Flyer

The RECON Game started at the first speaker session, where flyers for the company were handed out to attendees. On the back of these flyers were ten questions, hinting at various animals. The answers to eight of these questions were the names of rooms throughout the convention.

RECON had rooms split across two floors. The venue’s official names for these spaces were French names unfamiliar to most of our audience. So we decided to rename the rooms, and add an easy taxonomy: rooms on the upper floor were named for birds (birds fly above the ground), while rooms on the lower floor were named for sea creatures (sea creatures swim below the surface).

When players visited these rooms, the sign outside listed the animal name along with an extra letter or number. When players put these letters in order, it spelled the message ASK 4 HELP. 

The final two questions gave information about land animals, which were not tied to room names. The flyers had questions like: “Can you find where the Aardvark sits to the left of the Iguana?” and “Where can you find a Jackal sitting to the left of an Elk?” By themselves, the questions aren’t solvable.

But, unbeknownst to players, there were four versions of this flyer, with these two questions differing between versions. Once players found all four versions of the flyers, they could discover the order of these animals. In order, the first letters of each animal spelled out the final message: EMAIL RILEY. Using the email addresses provided on the flyer, players can deduce what Riley’s email address is: impishriley@gmail.com.

Part 2: The Booth

Once emailed, Riley replied to players within a few minutes. They apologized for being too busy to respond right now, but directed players to their booth in the exhibit hall. There, they found a booth in shambles – cardboard boxes were strewn about, and there was a strange box of paper on the front table.

On that box was a keypad and hidden receipt printer. The email instructed players to enter their badge number into the device. When they did, a receipt was printed for them, giving them a QR code that linked to the Impish website, and a “lucky code” for use later. Four different QR codes and four “lucky codes” were randomly distributed to players.

That was the end of what players could accomplish on the first day of RECON. On the Impish website, they could sign up for their newsletter, which would be delivered every Monday morning.

Part 3: The Presentation

The next morning, players had an email from Riley in their inbox*. It wasn’t a full newsletter, but an apology that they were going to miss RECON. Included was a video (here’s an example) with the pitch they were planning to give at their booth. If players returned to the Impish booth, there were new banners on display which matched the graphics in the video.

Four versions of these videos were released, each corresponding to one of the four “lucky codes” dispensed by the receipt printer from part 2. The videos highlighted specific words on the banners, and the “lucky codes” put those words in order. Working together, players needed to collect all videos and all “lucky codes” to assemble the message: LOG ON TO OUR WEB SITE WITH THE PASS WORD IMP ACT.

*If you played the game and this wasn’t your experience, stay tuned for the next article where I talk about adaptive design!

Part 4: Social Media

Returning to the Impish website (using the QR code received earlier) allowed players to login to the backend of the website, using the password IMPACT. Once there, players found planned social media posts for earlier in the month.

Players needed to visit the Impish social media sites and find where these messages differed. Once they did, they uncovered another message: AT THE INFO BOOTH, USE A MAGNET ON THE RECON EYE.

At the info booth, a screen displaying the RECON schedule had been running the entire convention. And, right next to it, was a magnet display board for no apparent reason. If players used one of those magnets on the frame of the screen, it displayed a secret meeting time with the Impish CEO.

Special thanks to Kevin Currie from Escaparium, who created both physical props for the RECON Game, which brought a delightful level of whimsy and wonder to the game!

Conclusion: The Impish CEO

Players were directed to a room in the RECON event space that they hadn’t yet visited. Here they received the final message of the game, a short thank you from the RECON Games team and a sticker of the Impish logo. Here, they met me, rather than the CEO (who, like the rest of the company, had failed to attend RECON).

That was the game for RECON Laval! If you had a chance to play, I hope you had a blast. We love creating this every year, and seeing everyone excitedly dive into our silly shenanigans is always a highlight. We’re already hard at work on our next crazy idea; we can’t wait for you to hear what we have in store for RECON Remote 27!

To follow RECON and learn when tickets go on sale for our next event, please sign up for the RECON newsletter.

This is the first of two articles about the RECON Game at RECON Laval. The second article (coming soon) discusses the challenges of making a game of this scale, and how adaptive design choices are critical to its success.