Category: Player Tips

I remember learning tally marks in elementary school. It never crossed my mind that there might be different ways to tally.

About a year ago this image showed up in one of my feeds and I saved it:

Since saving this, I’ve tried the other two methods of tallying (mostly while puzzling) and I have some opinions and conclusions to share.

I love the “box” method

After trying all of these out, I’ve found what I’ll call the “box” method is considerably better for me.

Drawing

Drawing the box feels better because I can do it without looking, and without picking up my pen.

With the other two methods, I have to at least be aware of what my pen is doing and where it’s placed.

Viewing

At a quick glance, the box method has a visual distinctiveness that I find easier to process than the other two.

With the vertical tallies that I grew up with, sometimes I have a hard time visually processing whether there are 3 or 4 lines.

Intricacy

According to Dig Mandarin, “Chinese tally marks add up to make the shape of the Chinese character 正 (pronounced zhèng), which means “correct” or ‘true/right.'”

I think it’s really cool that there is a tally method that has meaning in addition to function, but I couldn’t comfortably make this work for me. However, I imagine it would feel a lot more natural if I grew up drawing Chinese characters.

There’s No Right Or Wrong Way

There’s no right or wrong way to tally. Speaking for myself, I’m glad that I found a new way to accomplish this task.

I would have been fine using the method that I grew up on for the rest of my life, but I am happier with this new one. I always find it cool when I learn a better or different way to do a thing that I had assumed was only done one way.

REA Hivemind Reviewer Joel Smileypeacefun created this video, ESCAPE ROOMS: 10 Common Mistakes And Misconceptions. In it he explores and acts out 10 different ways that newbies tend to misunderstand the escape room medium.

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:30 No. 1: Mr. Know-it-all
• 03:25 No. 2: Kids in Escape Rooms
• 06:06 No. 3: Not listening to the gamemaster…
• 08:32 No. 4: Being way too intense!
• 10:25 No. 5: Communication is key
• 11:52 No. 6: Giving up without actually trying
• 13:23 No. 7: Cheating?
• 15:04 No. 8: Know how to operate the most common locks
• 17:37 No. 9: Chaotic people
• 18:54 No. 10: Playing the same Escape Room twice in a row
• 20:40 Outro

Give it a watch. He did a great job:

Yes those are Joel’s Guinness World Records. They are for domino chain reactions… something that I’d never have the patience for.

Update 7/6/21: If you’re interested in competitive escape gaming, we hope you’ll check out season 2, episode 4 of The Reality Escape Pod where we dig into this more with Ken Hoang, The King of Smash.

We recently participated in the International Online Escape Game Tournament (EGOlympics), hosted by Escape Roomers DE, a review website for live escape games in Germany and Europe, and for remote escape games worldwide.

What are the EGOlympics?

It is a friendly competition with teams from all over the world.

Each week, every team plays the same remote escape game, ideally at the same time (usually on Sunday at 8pm CET / 2pm Eastern).

Given that this time is not convenient in some time zones (especially Australia and New Zealand), players can complete any time during the 24 hours before the actual start of the tournament.

Industry Support

We love that the EGOlympics brings business to escape room operators worldwide in a challenging time. Every team books and purchases the game themselves. That’s a lot of extra revenue for the company of the week.

Community Building

The EGOlympics creates a sense of camaraderie for the global community of escape room enthusiasts. It’s amazing to be doing something together with like-minded people from all over the world.

You can share thoughts or questions about the game too, after you play, and find a whole bunch of people happy to converse. If you’ve been feeling isolated playing remote escape games, here’s an international community to share them with, practically in real time.

That said, Facebook comment threads don’t really capture that post-game debrief in the same way as getting together in a bar or cafe.

Decision Fatigue

Even if you’re not a competitor, you might like the EGOlympics simply because through it, Escape Roomers DE is essentially choosing a game for you to play each week. You don’t have to do the research yourself. Just sign up, book the game, and play!

Our Experience

We participated in our first EGOlympics on April 25, 2021 with REA Hivemind writers Theresa W and Matthew Stein. This was the 37th EGOlympics event and the game of the week was The Warp Core – Part 3: The Witches of Salem.

We joined for this one mainly because it worked with everyone’s schedule (and our schedule can be a challenge!), but also because we were interested in the game.

Warp Core – Part 3 was a truly impressive Telescape implementation with collaborative puzzle solving and video cutscenes.

We had a ton of fun challenging ourselves (and my computer/ internet connection!) to solve as quickly as possible. This isn’t how we usually play games, and the added intensity was exciting!

That said, speeding through a game isn’t really our style. We prefer to take in every aspect of the experience, enjoy the interface design, and see how our teammates solved things we missed. We prefer to relax and enjoy escape games for the time spent with friends, as much as for the puzzles solves.

We finished the game in a respectable 44:02 minutes without hints, which was just 2 minutes shy of the podium, I believe.

Advice For Better Competition

A bit of unsolicited advice for EGOlympics. When looking at the podium, second place finished at 41:56, while Team Squared finished in first with a time of 26:30.

We know Team Squared well. They are experienced, talented, and speedy puzzlers. We also suspect that to achieve that time they had to be skipping videos… because there were a lot of them in The Warp Core 3 and they consumed a lot of game-clock time. We only just learned that you can skip videos in Telescape when we were trying to figure out how a time of 26:30 was even possible.

Since the games being played aren’t truly designed for competition, the community itself needs to decide what the norms are. While we wouldn’t skip videos, because we are interested in taking in the whole experience, there’s nothing wrong with that being a tool in the players’ toolbox. Still, it should be explicitly allowed, and the methods of doing so explained.

Different competitive communities handle the creation of norms in different ways. Super Smash Bros. was never designed as a competitive game, but it was made competitive with specific rules and norms. Road Rallies and other precision driving competitions set minimum times based on the course’s speed limits, so no one is breaking the law.

All is fair when the norms are established, and the players can go in knowing what is and isn’t in the spirit of the game.

We offer this knowing full well that we are not going to top a podium in an escape room competition, and it isn’t our goal. Our goal is community.

To form community, the specifics of the norms matter less than the fact that they are there.

How to Join the EGOlympics

Join the Facebook Group Escape Roomers DE and look at the upcoming events. Click on the event you’re interested in, and you can read all about that week’s game, how to book it, and which teams have already signed up to participate.

To sign up, post on the Facebook page with your country’s flag, your team name, and the names of the players. You can include a photo or logo.

You’ll need to book/ purchase the game yourself, and organize your team to play at the start time (or earlier in the 24 hour window).

When you finish, post a photo with your time and see how your time compares to all the others!