It’s time to discuss something that’s dumb, but necessary.
It has come to our attention that there’s a tiny minority of games that are making their players buy hints.
I’m not really sure who’s doing it, but someone asked a question about this behavior to the panel that I moderated at the Escape Summit in Canada in May.
So, let’s get this out of the way once and for all.
Selling Hints is Bullshit
There is an assumption of fairness in escape room design. While some companies pull this off better than others, at the core of escape room play is the idea that these games will be fair even if they are difficult.
Selling hints undermines that fairness by introducing a financial feedback loop that encourages bullshit puzzle design. I’ll explain:
If a company sells hints, then they make more money from bullshit puzzle design because bullshit puzzles necessitate more hints.
This in turn encourages the company to include more bullshit puzzles, which drives more bullshit revenue.
This loop repeats recursively until the company strangles the life out of their business and closes because they suck. Along the way they will hurt the other local escape rooms by convincing the local player base that escape rooms are filled with bullshit puzzles, and thus depleting the potential customer base.
Digital Games
We’ve seen some this kind of nonsense from digital escape games like the point-and-click mobile escape room Spotlight: Room Escape (that’s not worthy of a link.) We’ve refused to review them.
We just assume that if the game is selling hints, the puzzles are probably bullshit.
We have better things to do with our time and so do you.
What Do We Do About This?
If an escape room company is selling hints, beat the hell out of them on Yelp for it.
Be fair. Don’t hit them with a 1 star review, drop something rational, but explain why this is a problem. Shame them into changing.
Also, alert the local player community. If you have a regional Facebook group, leave a note in there about the company.
The Exception
The one time that I can see “selling hints” to be a viable option is if, and only if, the money is going to a good cause, in the name of the players (not the business).
Having played my fair share of horror escape rooms, and having recently lurked as a team played one of my personal favorites, Dark Park’s Honeymoon Hotel, I’ve come to a few conclusions about how to build the right team for a horror escape room.
Green Screen + Green Shirt = Fun
It’s All About the Mix
You need the right mix of bravery and fear among the teammates to maximize the fun for the entire group.
If Everyone is Terrified
When everyone is paralyzed by fear, the team will seriously struggle to play because no one will be able or willing to search and solve puzzles.
If Everyone is Brave
When everyone is unflappable (or pretending to be), then the horror escape room quietly transforms into a regular escape room… just with low lighting, jump scares, and probably lots of gore.
This can still be a cool game, but something is missing.
Balanced Teams
Strive for a team with a good mix of players who are varying degrees of terrified and brave.
Terrified players need brave players to advance the game (and possibly to cling to).
Brave players need terrified players to protect, and through whom they can experience the fear vicariously… because empathetic fear is a great substitute for the real thing.
The right player mix keeps the game moving and maximizes the emotional experience for everyone.
If you’re on the fence about playing a horror game, find a brave player or 2 with whom you can create a symbiotic relationship for an hour or so.
The REA Duo
We’ve had some of our best escape room experiences in horror escape rooms.
While I’d attribute much of this to the games themselves – we’ve played some horrific masterpieces – some of that definitely had to due with our team composition. Lisa was terrified. I was … not so terrified. Our responses to horror complement each other. We strive to build out teams that are equally balanced.
Horror in Baton Rouge this July
As part of this summer’s Escape, Immerse, Explore tour to New Orleans and Baton Rouge, we will get to play The Asylum, the newest game by 13th Gate, and their first horror escape room.
You enter a publicly ticketed room and meet your new teammates. Setting aside questions of their puzzling skills, or how pleasant they are to play with (attitude, communication skills, odor)… there’s a bigger question to address.
Who’s the random in the room?
There are four conflicting schools of thought on this subject. I will explore the various theories of player randomness and evaluate each theory based on its own merits.
They Are Randoms Assumption
Hypothesis
“Anyone who isn’t me or a friend of mine is a random.”
Origins
The origins of the They Are Randoms Assumption are unknown and seem to have emerged around the same time that escape rooms emerged in the United States. Many different people came to the same egocentric conclusion.
Assessment
While the They Are Randoms Assumption was the prevailing belief throughout the early years of escape rooms, it relied on the presumption that randomness was bestowed upon one group of players by another, ignoring the possibility that randomness might have roots deeper than a player’s group identity.
Smaller Group Concession
Hypothesis
The smaller group of players are the randoms.
Origins
I first became aware of this hypothesis when escape room player Daniel Devoe Dilley proposed the idea over midnight pancakes on the night of January 19/20, 2019, in a small diner in Jersey City, New Jersey.
As a player who strives to almost exclusively play in a duo, Dilley came to the profound realization that sometimes he and his wife were the randoms.
Assessment
Dilley’s hypothesis was a watershed moment in Escape Room Random Player Theory. His notion that randomness is not assigned but is an inherent state of being completely shifted the nature of the debate.
Late Booker Inference
Hypothesis
The players that book into a partially reserved room are the randoms.
Origins
During the midnight pancakes of January 19/20, 2019, Lisa Spira, co-founder of Room Escape Artist, proposed an alternative notion of inherent player randomness to counter Dilley’s hypothesis.
Spira, one of the world’s most experienced and prolific bookers of escape rooms, argued that it’s not the smaller team, but rather the group of individuals who knowingly join another group are, in fact, the randoms.
Assessment
Spira’s argument is rooted in the assumption that the original group to book actively selected an empty escape room for their group. The original bookers would be surprised by the arrival of additional players whereas any players who booked into a semi-filled game took this action knowingly and thereby assumed the random mantle.
Theory of Random Relativity
Hypothesis
In any given random team escape game, all unaffiliated parties are in a perpetual state of randomness.
Origins
At the legendary midnight pancakes of January 19/20, 2019, the most important event in the rich history of Escape Room Random Player Theory, co-founder of Room Escape Artist David Spira proposed the Theory of Random Relativity in a predictable act of one-upmanship.
Assessment
His argument was rooted in the notion that for every story that he has about “some random person in an escape room,” there’s another player who has a story about this time that they were in an escape room with “a pair of random, obsessive escape room bloggers.”
A Modest Proposal
We here at Room Escape Artist like to grapple with the big questions that the escape room world faces.
Escape Room Random Player Theory may be a problem that is limited to the United States, but endless and constant forum discussions about “public vs private” ticketing are an international issue.
The next time you see a public vs private debate, I ask that you shift the discussion to something more important like, “who’s really the random in a public game?”
Escape Immerse Explore
Now… what you should be doing is coming out to our escape room tours in San Francisco or New Orleans. We’ve got an amazing lineup of games and you’ll have a chance to meet tons of fellow escape room players.
… They may be sort of randoms, but they’re the best kind of randoms.
You exit an escape room and walk down the street… and everything that you look at feels like it has hidden meaning. You’re hyperaware. It’s an oddly pleasurable feeling.
I suspect that any engaged escape room player knows what I’m talking about. Call it what you want; we call it post-escape room hyperawareness.
After playing more than 700 escape games, we often get asked if we’re bored with escape rooms… and the answer’s still the same as the last time we wrote about it: The highs are higher, the lows are lower, and we really love novelty and thoughtful design.
One thing has changed: we don’t get that hyperaware feeling anymore… and we really miss it.
Where did it go?
I’m not really sure. I’d venture to guess that becoming really practiced at escape rooms, and having learned to parse the signal from the noise in any given room, has focused our awareness. I think in our earlier days of playing, escape rooms would kick our awareness into overdrive.
I also suspect that it might be adrenaline-related. After playing so many, an escape room has to do something really special (and frequently frightening) for us to trigger that particular neurological reward.
What about you?
What’s your escape room play count? Do escape rooms send you on your way in a state of hyperawareness?
The longer a player or a group of players works within a space in isolation, the harder it becomes for teams to fully reintegrate… and it’s often better for players to stick to the space that they intimately know.
The problem becomes more pronounced over time. It’s barely noticeable if the teams are only split up for a few minutes. When teams spend half of the game split, it becomes an annoyance. When teams spend more than 3 quarters of the game split, it can be downright irritating, even if no one has the language to vocalize it.
The Situation
When a player enters a space that has already been thoroughly searched and solved, that player has three options:
Start playing normally and “find” a ton of stuff that’s already been found or solved. This usually leads to exchanges along the lines of, “hey… did y’all see this little trap door?” A teammate who has been in space from the beginning will have to stop and explain that it’s been found and used.
Stop the entire game while teammates catch one another up on what’s been found, solved, and what still requires the team’s attention.
Stay put. Nobody crosses the boundaries and everyone sticks with the content that they already know intimately.
We had been feeling this problem for years, and only started to put our finger on what was going on last year after playing The Orderat I Survived The Room. Prior to identifying it, under circumstances like this, we would just say something like, “Hey… I think it’s easier for me to just solve this.” Which is a polite way of saying, “You don’t know what’s going on and you’re in the way.”
Our Dominant Strategy
When faced with a challenge like this, if we’re choosing to play efficiently, we usually stick to the spaces that we have mastery over, even when free to roam.
The pro is that we maintain efficiency. The con is that everyone kind of misses out. Another potential con is that we could really use person A’s skill set in space B and we’re avoiding that situation.
Regardless of what we choose to do, it usually feels like a bit of a wash because getting up to speed on someone else’s mostly solved section of a game is tedious.
Unevenness
It can be challenging to follow this strategy when the spaces are really different from one another. If the other space looks really inviting, as players, we have to go against our instincts to follow this efficiency strategy.
If we instead take the time to fully explore another teammate’s space, some players invariably feel like they drew the short straw, and they would have preferred to spend the majority of their time in the other space, the one the group deems more fun or more exciting.
Mitigating the Regrouping Problem
There are a few ways that we’ve thought of to prevent this problem from emerging:
Limit the amount of time that teams spend split up. This is a problem that becomes increasingly pronounced with time.
Once the teams regroup, push them forward into a new space. If the previous spaces aren’t really relevant, then it’s a nonissue.
Make all of the puzzles within the split-team portion joint solves, so that seeing the other space feels more like seeing what you’ve already participated in, rather than something new that demands exploration.
Don’t bring the team together. If you want split-team gameplay, keep it split the entire time.
The regrouping problem isn’t a gamebreaker, but it can be a late-game momentum killer… which is less than ideal for both players and game designers. Teams should be excited to regroup. That momentum plays a crucial part in building the right vibe for any given moment of a game.
Earlier this winter, we were thrilled to learn that Audrey Pendleton-Chow, owner of Curious Escape Rooms in Fitchburg, MA and an escape room enthusiast herself, had launched escape room passports.
We loved the idea of collecting stamps at the end of each game in these beautiful passports. We recently caught up with Audrey to learn more about what these passports offer players and how owners can get involved!
Tell us about your passport!
The We The Enthusiasts Global Escape Room Passport is a collectable to preserve your escape room escapades!
I’ve been archiving my escape room history in an Excel sheet. I know I’m not the only escape room enthusiast who does this. I thought it would be more fun to have something collectable! Why not stamps for every game from a participating event or escape room? That’s why we made a universal escape room passport.
I designed this small, durable booklet with a leatherette and gold foil cover, a profile page, and a unique ID. It provides 56 boxes for stamps and small spacing for notes and completion times. Stamp filler pages are available as well because, you know, 56 games could go by pretty quickly!
What makes for a great stamp?
It’s been amazing to see the different designs that escape room companies have created.
A great stamp is like an icon. It should be clear, one color, unique, and have thick lines.
The design should symbolize the theme of the game so when enthusiasts look back at it they remember their experience!
It’s nice to have the name of the game on the stamp too.
How do players buy a passport?
Players can buy our passports online at WeTheEnthusiasts.com. They are also available at many participating escape room businesses. Pricing and promotions may vary if you purchase from an individual participating business.
Who are the participating companies?
We’ve got 187 games, 63 companies with stamps, and 25 locations selling passports. 🙂 So far we’re in USA and Australia.
The full list of companies and their games is available here. It’s growing every week!
How can a new company get involved?
See Become a Participating Business for more information. There, interested companies can read the FAQ, purchase passports wholesale to sell at their own business, and register.
It’s free to be listed on our website as long as the business agrees to stamp passport-holders with your special stamp for your participating game or event.
You get to choose and purchase your own stamp. You can even design the image that will represent each of your games!
If we wanted to make a stamp for our Escape, Immerse, Explore tours, could we do that?
Absolutely! This would be perfect for an escape room tour! We welcome any experiences related to puzzles or mystery solving. We’ve reached out to puzzle/ scavenger hunts, mobile escape rooms, and immersive plays, such as the annual immersive theater and puzzling eventClub Drosselmeyer.
When and how did you come up with this passport idea?
In 2015 my partner (now husband) Jeremy Pendleton-Chow and I visited Portland, Oregon. We went to a McMenamins, which revitalizes unexpected spaces to become different themed bars.
As we entered the 1960s elementary school building, passing the cigar bar “Detention,” a small bar “Honor’s Hall,” and the movie theater that used to be the school auditorium, we found that part of it had been turned into a hotel. The check-in desk had one sheet of novelty McMenamins passports, encouraging customers to visit all their locations and collect different stamps. I thought it was a great idea!
I was in the process of opening Curious Escape Rooms in Fitchburg, MA. I began talking to other escape room owners about the idea of a global passport.
After a failed attempt of making less-than-quality samples of passports last year (which lasted merely a month in my bag), I put the idea on the back burner until I discovered a way to create the durable and beautiful passports I had imagined. They had to be fully brag-worthy and long-lasting to be worth it.
In November 2018 we began selling We The Enthusiasts passports and rallying escape rooms to join us in creating stamps for each of their games. Every week, new businesses join us and we add them to our website.
We discussed my top 5 escape room travel tips… accumulated by booking almost every one of our 700 escape rooms played to date and all the corresponding travel arrangements.
We’re looking forward to reading your conversations with Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp of Hatch Escapes in Los Angeles, Yolanda Chiu of Asia Escape Game, and Nick Moran of Time Run and Sherlock: The Game is Now.
Thank you, Room Escape Problems. I’m honored to be part of your interview series.
I pretty much grew up with video games. I mean that in both senses of the phrase:
I grew up playing video games
Video games grew up as I did
Obvious Controls
When I first started playing first person shooters (and suffering through them while they made me motion sick because they were choppy as hell), the arrow keys on the keyboard were the movement standard.
The arrow keys made sense. They were the obvious input mechanism for controlling motion. That was, until “WASD” came along.
“Thresh” Hold
From Half Life and Counterstrike, to Portal and Fortnite, the movement control standard for first person games has been the “WASD” keys on the left side of the keyboard. This button mapping wasn’t obvious… and it didn’t come from a video game designer. It came from a player.
Dennis “Thresh” Fong was the top Quake player back in game’s heyday of the mid 1990s. WASD was his button mapping; he went undefeated with it. Thersh was basically a folk hero among gamers back then. This layout caught on, partially because of his notoriety, but mostly because it worked.
I remember being super skeptical of WASD as a button mapping, but it made everything more fluid and easier. Those keys were laid-out perfectly and the hand position gave access to plenty of other buttons, enabling complex actions that simply weren’t possible when your fingers were isolated over by the arrow keys.
This story is beautifully told in this video:
Why is this relevant to escape rooms?
Good escape rooms are built on top of decades of knowledge from other industries. Video games are certainly one of the biggest influences.
I’ve encountered plenty of companies that learn from watching their players. Some learn from aggregate player behavior, using their games as large experiments and iterating on them based on player trends.
I’ve heard of other designers taking inspiration for new puzzles or puzzle iterations by listening to the wrong ideas that players cook up while attempting to solve a challenge.
As a player, I’ve adopted plenty of tactics from other players… and I’ve invented a few of my own.
Two Questions
Players: What tactics have you learned from other players?
Owners: What have you seen your players do that you think would make for great standards?
I think that there is a lot to learn from great players, both in terms of improving one’s abilities to play, and as in the case with WASD, improving the way that games are designed.
For our 1,000th Room Escape Artist post, we present the ERban Dictionary: Escape Room Glossary.
We consider this a living document. We welcome suggested edits, submissions, examples, and other enhancements through our contact form or in the comments below.
Escape Room Glossary
Actor – (noun, singular) a person with a character, commitment, and costume, designed to enhance immersion. They may or may not double as your gamemaster.
Anagram – (noun, singular) a word, phrase, or name formed by rearranging the letters of another.
Backseat Solve – (verb) to stand behind someone and tell them what to do because you’re frustrated your hands aren’t on the puzzle. This is generally discouraged.
Backsolve – (verb) to reverse engineer a puzzle solution.
Blacklight – (noun, singular) a handheld or stationary light that emits ultraviolet radiation that is invisible to the human eye. This is a common prop in escape rooms.
Blind Choice – (noun, singular) an interaction where players have to make a decision (frequently an ethical decision) without enough information or context to make an informed decision.
Bottleneck – (noun, singular) a point at which only one puzzle is available to the entire team that usually results in the entire team crowding around that puzzle.
Braille – (noun, singular) a form of written language for blind people, in which letters and numbers are represented by different configurations of a 2 by 3 grid of raised dots.
Bypass / Circumvent – (verb) to skip over a game element. This can be intentional or unintentional. It can result from hints, guesswork, lock exploitation, game design flaws, or faulty game resets.
Caesar Cipher / Caesarian Shift – (noun, singular) an encryption technique made famous by Julius Caesar, using a substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet.
Cipher / Cryptogram – (noun, singular) a text written in code.
Clue – (noun, singular) a detail or component within the game that the players should interpret, combine, and solve in order to escape. This term can be confusing as it is sometimes also used to refer to a hint (see below).
Combination Lock – (noun, singular) a lock that opens when the correct numeric, alphabetic, or symbolic password is input.
Communication Puzzle – (noun, singular) a type of escape room challenge that requires at least two parties to exchange information.
Difficulty by Darkness – (noun, singular) a type of escape room made intentionally more challenging (and frustrating) by dim lighting. This is not to be confused with a dark room (see above.)
Do Not Touch Sticker – (noun, singular) a sticker or piece of tape affixed to props and set pieces that are “out of play.” The definition of “out of play” varies by escape room.
Drag – (verb) to feed a team so many hints as a gamemaster that the team no longer feels they were responsible for the win. This tends to be the result of an incompetent team and/or an incompetent game.
Easter Egg – (noun, singular) an unexpected or undocumented feature in an escape room included as a joke or a bonus.
Escake – (noun, singular) a celebratory delicacy used to mark the completion of a milestone escape room, traditionally cake. The concept of escake originates with the prolific UK-based “S2” escape room duo of Sera Dodd and Sharan Gill.
Escape Rate – (noun, singular)
For players: the win/loss percentage of an individual escape room player or team out of their total games played.
For rooms: the percentage of teams that escape the room in the time allotted. This is often ballparked or blatantly misreported.
Escape Room Logic – (noun, singular) a puzzle solution that makes sense in the context of solving puzzles within the game, but not within a game’s narrative. E.g. You’re a fugitive on the run from the police hunting for the information that will clear your name. Why are you counting the cups in a cabinet to get a lock combination?
Filler/ Junk / Noise / Fluff – (noun, plural) subpar escape room content (puzzles, interactions, props, or story content) that is included for the purpose of lengthening the experience.
Frontsolve / Forward Solve– (verb) to solve a puzzle as the designer intended.
Game Clock – (noun, singular) the official countdown timer. This is frequently displayed within the game.
Game Flow – (noun, singular) the connective tissue between puzzles or game elements. Game flow describes the whole experience, how one puzzle branches out into others or funnels into a meta-puzzle. Game flow be mapped as a visual representation of the escape room.
Gamemaster / Host / Guide / Game Guide / Cluemaster – (noun, singular) the person responsible for overseeing the in-game experience, providing hints, and delivering and enforcing rules.
Gamespace/ Set – (noun, singular) the gaming environment.
Glyph – (noun, singular) a symbol that (should) mean something.
Head to Head / Competitive Games – (adjective) describes two identical escape rooms that can be played simultaneously as a race. Teams competing in head to head escape rooms to can sometimes interact during the game.
Hint – (noun, singular) an additional piece of information from outside of regular gameplay delivered by the gamemaster to assist a team in forward progress. This concept can sometimes be referred to as a clue (see above).
Hint Penalty / Clue Penalty – (noun, singular) The punishment for needing an additional piece of information from outside of regular gameplay. It is commonly extra “time” added to the escape time whereby if a team escapes in 55 minutes but used a hint, it’s counted as if they escaped in 58 minutes. It can also be an in-game action, such as dancing, that the team must do to receive the necessary outside information.
Human Circuit – (adjective) describes a puzzle that requires players to form a human chain between metal props to complete a circuit to trigger an event.
Immersive – (adjectives) describes an escape room that creates such a compelling fiction that as a player, you feel that you are a part of it and forget the world outside the escape room.
Individual Role / Individual Goal – (noun, singular) a type of escape room where players are each assigned characters and/or objectives outside of the team objective. This can put the players in competition with one another, but it doesn’t have to.
Informed Choice – (noun, singular) an interaction where players have to make a decision (frequently an ethical decision) based on enough information that they can understand the context of their choice
Interaction – (noun, singular) a designed action within the game.
Jump Scare – (noun, singular) a technique often used in horror escape rooms (and horror films) intended to scare the players by surprising them with an abrupt change to their environment.
Key – (noun, singular) a small piece of shaped metal with incisions cut to fit the wards of a particular lock that can be inserted into the lock and turned to open or close the lock.
Key for Key – (noun, singular) a key locked up behind a key lock.
Kimmy Schmidt Crank – (noun, singular) a crank that must be regularly turned to keep the power on.
Linear – (adjective) describes a game that follows a rigid puzzle structure wherein each puzzle leads to the next. All escape rooms have some degree of linearity.
Live – (adjective) describes an element that you know will move or open in the future.
Lock Guy / Lock Girl / Locksmith – (noun, singular) the one teammate who always wants to input the combination or open the lock. This is sometimes a player who doesn’t feel they can contribute to actually solving the puzzles and opening things makes them feel like the hero.
Lock Whisperer – (noun, singular) the teammate who can always get the locks to open. They just have the special touch.
Lockout Safe – (noun, singular) a box or cabinet with a combination locking mechanism that will shut down for a period of time if multiple incorrect combinations are input. Lockout safes are generally frowned upon by escape room players.
Logic Leap – (noun, singular) a tenuous connection between a clue and a puzzle solution.
Mag Lock/ Magnetic Lock / Sensor-driven Lock – (noun, singular) an electromagnet used to secure a door or compartment. These locks are opened when they receive a signal from a button, sensor, or other controlling electronics.
Magnet Maze – (noun, singular) a common escape room prop where a small object (frequently a key) is behind a barrier and must be navigated out with a magnet.
Meta Puzzle – (noun, singular) a puzzle that unites several puzzles that feed into it. A meta puzzle is usually set late in the game and players must complete a series of other puzzles before they can tackle the meta puzzle.
Morse Code – (noun, singular) a code in which letters are represented by combinations of long and short signals of light or sound. Morse Code was originally designed for long-distance communication rather than obscuring messages.
Non-Binary Win Condition – (noun, singular) a type of escape room that doesn’t result in simply win or lose; it has different degrees or types of winning.
Non-Linear – (adjective) describes a game that does not follow a rigid puzzle structure wherein each puzzle leads to the next. Multiple puzzles can be completed at one time. Different teams can tackle puzzles in different orders.
Number Soup – (noun, singular) an escape room with so many numbers and combination locks and lack of correlation between the numbers and the locks… that your brain feels like a soup.
One-time Use – (adjective) describes props that will only contribute to one puzzle solution.
On-ramp – (noun, singular) the first puzzle in the escape room. It should stand out and be easily approachable.
Over-locked / Lock Orgy – (adjective / noun) describes a single item that is shut with many (too many!) locks.
Padlock – (noun, singular) a portable key- or combination-activated lock.
Paper Puzzle / Homework Puzzle – (noun, singular) a puzzle that does not require the gamespace and could be solved anywhere.
Parallel Puzzle – (verb) to complete multiple puzzles at once with different teammates working on each concurrently. Some escape room design allows this. This can refer to teammates working in parallel in the same gamespace or in different gamespaces as part of the same escape room.
Physical Force – (noun, singular) physical strength used to open things. This is usually in violation of game rules and may result in breakage. Note that some escape rooms require physical force.
Pigpen / Masonic Cypher – (noun, singular) an 18th-century substitution cipher created by the freemasons that exchanges letters for geometric symbols that are fragments of a grid.
Pipeline / High Throughput Model – (noun, singular) a type of escape room where multiple teams are in the experience at the same time, but in separate rooms, always moving forward through the experience, never backtracking, and never running into other teams. This is the 5 Wits style.
Plaintext – (noun, singular) any text that is not encoded.
Play the Blame Game – (verb) to blame a failed escape on puzzles that make sense to 99% of players just because one is salty about not escaping.
Private (Ticketing) – (adjective) refers to a ticketing model where an entire group experience is purchased at once. This eliminates the possibility of strangers sharing the same experience. It is the most common ticketing model outside of the United States.
Prop – (noun, singular) an in-game item. It can be part of a puzzle or a red herring.
“Psychic” – (noun, singular) a player who stands or crouches in front of one lock for the entire game trying to guess the combination instead of playing the game. The psychic never actually guesses the combination.
Public (Ticketing) – (adjective) refers to a ticketing model where admission is purchased by each individual player, thus allowing for the possibility of strangers sharing the same experience. This is a common ticketing model in the United States.
Puzzle – (noun, singular) anything that the team solves to advance through the escape room.
Puzzle Snatching / Puzzle Yanking – (verb) To take or steal a puzzle or component of a puzzle from another player, generally considered poor form.
Randoms – (noun, plural) strangers with whom you are teamed up in an escape room due to a public ticketing booking system (see above).
Recap/ Thought Journey – (noun, singular) a mid-game or late-game explanation to teammates of how a puzzle or series of puzzles has resolved in order to get the entire team in sync again.
Red Herring – (noun, singular) an in-game item or piece of information that does not contribute to a puzzle solution, but could potentially lead players to waste time thinking it would be involved in the puzzle solving process. It may be intentional or unintentional. It may also be the result of wear, breakage, or vandalism. See Ghost Puzzle and Decor for additional information.
Reset –
(verb) to revert an escape room to its starting position whereby a new team can begin. e.g. “I need to reset the room for the next team.”
(noun, singular) – the act of reverting the escape room to its starting position. e.g. “We experienced a faulty reset.”
Reset Fail – (noun, singular) an improper reset where not every aspect of the escape room is reverted back to the correct starting position thereby adversely affecting the room play.
Resting Puzzle Face – (noun, singular) a look of concentration while solving puzzles that is easily mistaken for discontent.
RFID – (noun, singular) an automatic identification technology that uses radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to identify objects carrying tags when they come close to a reader. RFID is frequently used in escape rooms to release mag locks or trigger other events, often feeling magical.
Safe – (noun, singular) a box or cabinet with a keyed or combination locking mechanism.
Sandbag – (verb) to hold back in an escape room as an experienced player to maximize the enjoyment of muggles or randoms.
Search / Hunt / Scavenge – (verb) to look for hidden clues within the gamespace.
Search Fail – (noun, singular) failure to find a hidden clue within the gamespace.
Seizure mode – (noun, singular) a handheld flashlight state where the light flashes incessantly. Some flashlight have this mode. This should not be confused with a weak and flickering flashlight.
Self-resetting / Automatically-resetting – (adjective) describes an escape room that is ready to play again immediately. Players do not have to wait for a gamemaster to reset the experience. This is usually associated with pipelines.
Semaphore – (noun, singular) – a system of sending messages by holding two arms or two flags in certain positions that correspond to an alphabetic code. Semaphore is used as a cipher in escape rooms.
Set Piece – (noun, singular) a self-contained segment of the gamespace.
Signpost – (verb) to direct players to what they’re meant to be working on through subtle in-game cluing
Spin – (verb) to stall in an escape rooms and take the clues in all sorts of ridiculous directions instead of taking a hint.
Split Team – (adjective) a style of escape room where the team is separated into different gamespaces for some or all of the experience. Split team design is most commonly used as the starting situation, with the team coming together later in the experience.
Strategic Hint – (noun, singular) a hint used because of gamesmanship in order to speed up the team’s performance.
Sudden Death – (adjective) describes an escape room where you can take an action that results in losing before the game clock runs out. e.g. cutting the wrong wire on the bomb.
Surprise Satanism – (noun, singular) a genre of escape room where the initial gamespace is comfortable and welcoming, but a later gamespace reveals blood, guts, and pentagrams… or anything unexpectedly sinister.
Tech – (noun, singular) something that runs on electricity that the player cannot control completely with an on/off switch.
Used Pile / Done Pile / Discard Pile – (noun, singular) a pile of single use props that have already been used. Used piles are created by players to keep organized.
Vouched-for Randoms – (noun, plural) randoms whom you haven’t actually met, but you are less wary about playing with due to their connections to the escape room community.
Walkthrough – (noun) a post-game overview of the puzzles and game flow delivered by the gamemaster after a team has completed the escape room (win or lose).
Wear – (noun, singular) marks or changes to a prop as a result of regular use or handling. Wear frequently exposes solutions. e.g. “There is wear on Boston on this map. It must be the answer.”
Here’s a simple yet advanced escape room player tip for remembering letters and numbers in games that don’t provide note-taking materials.
The Problem
You’re playing an escape room that requires you to derive letters or numbers one at a time and then recall them for a code. To make matters worse, you aren’t even sure what order these digits will go in.
You haven’t been provided with note-taking materials.
You’ve got digits and you know they are important, but for some reason the game designer believes that this puzzle should also be a memory test.
The Solution
Grab a discarded lock and input the digits that you need to remember. Now you have a portable external memory device. Tote it around with you until the problem is solved.
If you don’t have a used lock, save the digits on an active lock. However, keep these few things in mind if you’re using an active lock as external memory:
Communicate to your team what you’re doing. Active locks tend to get shuffled.
Remember that the active lock might get solved before the puzzle you’re attempting to save the digits for.
How Often is this Useful?
I can’t say that I have had to do this all that often in the three or so years that this trick has been in my back pocket. However, it’s been especially useful when playing escape rooms with fewer people than the recommended team size.
Earlier this year, Lisa and I played a game where we had to derive a series of 9 digits to input into a keypad. To get to these digits, Lisa solved a logic puzzle and correlated her answers to items spread across a large space. There might have been other steps. I put the first 5 digits in a lock and brought that over to the keypad. After I punched these in, she only had to recite the last 4 digits for me. We were in!
It may not be an every-game trick, but I’ve always been happy to have it when I’ve needed it.
Locks as External Memory is one escape room tactic. For more tips, check out our Player Tips section.
