If you play a lot of escape rooms, and you have opinions about them, consider participating in the Top Escape Rooms Project Enthusiasts’ Choice Award, or TERPECA.
About the Project
The Top Escape Rooms Project is an attempt to find the very best escape rooms in the world by leveraging the experience of the most experienced escape room enthusiasts in the world.
In 2018, the first year of the project, it awarded 25 escape rooms and 10 companies with this achievement.
For more background and commentary (and an incredible list of escape rooms!) read our announcement of the 2018 winners.
TERPECA is not a Room Escape Artist project; however David and I are on the advisory committee.
Year 2 Improvements
In 2019, the second year of the project, creator Rich Bragg had two major goals: expand the coverage to more parts of the world and improve the data collection process.
Last year’s participants are actively reaching out to their friends and global enthusiast communities to encourage broader participation.
There is a new voter portal where participants can sign in and make their nominations and rankings. There’s a new and improved UI too.
Should I Participate?
If you have played more than 50 escape rooms… yes!
50 is the minimum escape rooms played requirement to be a voter. You will get the chance to vote for your favorite rooms to win this award.
If you have played more than 200 escape rooms, you can also join as a nominator. You will be able to nominate your favorite rooms to be voted on, and you also get to vote.
How do I Join?
Visit the TERPECA voter portal to sign up.
Fill out the form to the best of your ability and the committee will try to get back to you as quickly as possible.
The nomination deadline is October 31, so if you’ve played more than 200 escape rooms and you’d like to nominate, sign up ASAP!
For detailed answers to all your questions about the project and how to join, read the TERPECA FAQ.
Best is Challenging
David and I submitted our nominations earlier this month. It was challenging to whittle down the many incredible escape rooms we’ve played into just 20 nominations.
There are so many different ways to define “top” or “best.” The Top Escape Rooms Project recommends that you consider which rooms you are most likely to recommend to someone else who also loves playing escape rooms.
We took this to heart in our nominations. After we generated our respective lists, we enjoyed an evening chatting about why we thought others would love a game we’d loved, or even why they might love one that we hadn’t loved quite as much.
To reiterate, this award is not produced by Room Escape Artist. It is not the same as our Golden Lock-In Award winners, our award for our favorite rooms we played in any given calendar year. (Stay tuned for our 2019 Golden Lock-In Award livestream and announcement on Saturday, January 4, 2020.)
While we have a longstanding and uncomfortable relationship with the word “best,” we think that the Top Escape Rooms Project Enthusiasts’ Choice Award offers a valuable tool for traveling escape room players. We’ve joined the advisory board to help it grow. We believe in its mission to synthesize a community’s worth of opinions into a list of top escape rooms that we can all enjoy. We can’t wait to see which rooms bubble to the top this December when the winners are announced.
If you enjoy playing escape rooms, we hope you’ll add your votes!
