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chrisThere needs to be a UK puzzle hobby web site, for a broad definition of the puzzle hobby at large. I am as flaky as a cronut (*) and so am very unlikely ever to be the person to produce it, unless I get a sudden fit of enthusiasm and spoons over the coming Christmas period, but believe it when you see it, or when someone beats me to it.
Top priority list:
1) A list of UK live room escape games. At the moment this is easy: Hint Hunt in London, Clue Quest in London, Cryptopia in Bristol (as of last month), Keyhunter in Birmingham (as of last week), with at least Live Escape Game in Brighton and Puzzlescape in Manchester under construction, and I'm sure several others that I don't know about. I don't get the impression that they talk to each other, and I have only been able to construct this list through judicious engine searching. I think they should, and that people who like one might like playing others.
2) An aggregator of puzzle calendars. Excerpt parts of Puzzle Hunt Calendar that can be played from the UK, excerpt the janko.at puzzle event calendar ditto, add details of the UK Puzzle Association's events, Puzzled Pints and other UK events as and when they arrive. There was a big crossword shebang a day or two ago to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the cryptic, not that I heard about it in advance.
3) A list of puzzle hunts, contests, trails and other similar Thynges that you can do at home at your own convenience on your own schedule, even if you cannot make it to any of the above.
I also have a moderately long list of other things that a puzzle blog might include at some point but considering how badly I'm doing at keeping this one up to date, let's not run before we can walk! :-)
(*) This is an analogy that could not have been made a few months ago. Because I've never actually had a cronut, I don't know whether it works or not. Worth a go, though!
Top priority list:
1) A list of UK live room escape games. At the moment this is easy: Hint Hunt in London, Clue Quest in London, Cryptopia in Bristol (as of last month), Keyhunter in Birmingham (as of last week), with at least Live Escape Game in Brighton and Puzzlescape in Manchester under construction, and I'm sure several others that I don't know about. I don't get the impression that they talk to each other, and I have only been able to construct this list through judicious engine searching. I think they should, and that people who like one might like playing others.
2) An aggregator of puzzle calendars. Excerpt parts of Puzzle Hunt Calendar that can be played from the UK, excerpt the janko.at puzzle event calendar ditto, add details of the UK Puzzle Association's events, Puzzled Pints and other UK events as and when they arrive. There was a big crossword shebang a day or two ago to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the cryptic, not that I heard about it in advance.
3) A list of puzzle hunts, contests, trails and other similar Thynges that you can do at home at your own convenience on your own schedule, even if you cannot make it to any of the above.
I also have a moderately long list of other things that a puzzle blog might include at some point but considering how badly I'm doing at keeping this one up to date, let's not run before we can walk! :-)
(*) This is an analogy that could not have been made a few months ago. Because I've never actually had a cronut, I don't know whether it works or not. Worth a go, though!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-23 04:43 am (UTC)I haven't had the original (NYC) cronut, but the local (California) imitation isn't very flaky in the croissant sense. The croissant dough is fried, glazed and filled, and it's actually sopping with grease and glazing. So I guess it's there, in a way, but they're held together, so it's not like a regular croissant where you get a lapful of flakes every time you take a bite. I recommend trying one. They're really quite good, in an incredibly unhealthy sort of way.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-23 11:45 am (UTC)I appreciate the heads-up and visit most weeks! ...or when I try to visit the Puzzled Pint web site, type puzzle into my browser and find it autocompleting with PHC rather than PPint.
There do seem to be lots of different puzzle hobbies that don't really talk to each other, and I think there's far more scope for crossover than happens to be the case at the moment, for mutual benefit. Heck, you probably know this better than anyone, when you find out about a new event and go "huh, I didn't know they had puzzle hunts there". (Even though Larry has been telling us that Puzzle Hunts Are Everywhere for years now...)
While I remember, it's possible that my thinking is based upon a fallacy. It's the sort of thinking behind multiple-mind-sports events, and aside from relatively few cases, most people prefer to concentrate on one single mind sport to a great depth than to become a generalist. Perhaps people have their preferred style of puzzle and prefer not to look further afield? Not sure, but I could be prepared to reluctantly conclude it if that's what years of data supports.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-23 10:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-23 12:12 pm (UTC)I don't understand the economics of room escape games. They seem sufficiently expensive to play that they have to be planned for as a real treat. However, when you look at the revenue that can be attracted as an operator, the margins seem pretty slim even if you are successful enough to get very high occupancy rates. Perhaps it's possible that you can find somewhere with very low rent, but surely nobody would ever stumble across you that way. (Maybe that isn't a factor if you are banking on people finding out about you first before trying you out, but marketing is expensive.)
If you have a room that can hold five people at once, and they're paying £17/hour each to do so, which is very high as entertainment goes, then that limits your revenue to £85/hour - maybe a few hundred quid a day. That's really pretty slim pickings on which to run a business. There do seem to be a few ways around it: perhaps your venue can have multiple teams playing at once, which seems to be the case for Hint Hunt and may also be the case for Keyhunter. I note that Seattle's Puzzle Break game is set up for teams of 12, rather than teams of 5 which seems to be the European tradition. If you can take in money 12/5 times as quickly, great! If you run through your potential player population in 5/12 the time, less great.
In my mind I am already drawing conclusions with the laser game boom of the early '90s. (Perhaps it was more of a zap than a boom.) I don't know whether this is a sensible kind of conclusion to draw or not, but it's something I vaguely know a little bit about and so can't help but do so. After all, both of them really are based around birthday party / corporate / social group / other-organised-treat business. (Some laser game places got good walk-up business, but they have to be in affluent, leisure-y areas, well-situated within those areas, and walk-up business may well be based around novelty.) At least laser games had clear reason for repeat business and the chance to develop skill, which seems to be a much more difficult challenge for room escape games. (Can you change your room up frequently? Can you offer multiple rooms? Can you offer multiple difficulty levels?) On the other hand, the most successful laser game businesses have lasted for literally decades by now, so it is possible to do it right.
Perhaps it might be that room escape games become parallel options in Family Entertainment Centres, which is a model that seems to work for some. You go to a bowling alley, you have a game of bowling, you go and have a laser game, you have a round of crazy golf, you hire a private karaoke booth, you play a room escape game. This latter one would require a turnkey solution that can be operated by, with no offence intended, yer average entertainment customer service bob, which is rather a different audience to the puzzle afficionados that have been drawn to running these escape games so far. This might also limit the degree of quality of service in the materials and their resetting between games that might happen, I'm not sure.
I also really like the idea of a pop-up room escape game that travels from location to location, wherever a cheap month's rent can be found in a property that's having serious long-term difficulty renting out their space. (It's not as if there aren't a lot of those around right now.) I'm not claiming this is a great business model, but it's a cute idea.
Heck, there are literally dozens of these things in Hungary, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were established business conferences there for the genre. Learn Hungarian and go on the world's most fun business trip ever!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-23 12:45 pm (UTC)Ipswich rents are pretty cheap (we don't really count as part of the south-east for property purposes) but even so, as you spotted, the intensity of profit per hour was too small to make it worthwhile unless one could guarantee high occupancy. And we didn't feel we could, on the local market, even with considerable marketing. Getting people to come back more than once is a real issue (this is why tourists, who are most of ClueQuest's business afaics, are much preferable). You really don't want to be having to redo the room every few months to lure people back.
We did actually talk briefly to the borough council about a popup version that tours various of their empty properties around the town. But they wanted too much input into the story, content etc. And even without that, again it wouldn't really have made much money, although it would have been a fun thing to do for a while.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-16 06:47 pm (UTC)Yo Belfast! ...dating back to July 2013, apparently. Maybe not several yet but evidently at least one.
Am I really going to have to search for escape game <name of UK city> for every major UK city I can think of, once every month or two? There must be a better approach but I'm hosed if I can work out what it is.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-16 10:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-25 01:33 am (UTC)Three sites in London is not actually particularly many when Budapest apparently has 44 (and I dare say that next time I have reason to update this post, it might well be either 30 or 60) and the Wall Street Journal report that there are perhaps 120 locations in Beijing, as well as "nine million" bicycles.
One question: why do so many of the web sites look so similar? I suppose it's not necessarily a bad thing when it makes navigation easier and more intuitive, but, you know...
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-02 06:57 am (UTC)On the other hand, I can believe that I didn't search for one in Leicester and thus did not previously know about Cipher Entertainment, which dates back to probably about the same time. This one is particularly interesting as it calls for teams of 4-8, and offers both 1-hour and 2-hour games.
I wonder if it's possible to hit Leicester, Birmingham, Oxford and Bristol all in the same day? Three out of four must be reasonably easy with organisation but all four strikes me as ambitious.
Must have searched for them in every major UK town by now, but fingers crossed that there are more to find before long...
Capsa Online
Date: 2016-04-04 08:00 am (UTC)Capsa Online (http://jadibd.com/)
Cronuts to you, mate
Date: 2024-06-15 12:43 am (UTC)I also note with amusement that the Live Escape Game "coming soon" page has surely been unchanged for ten years.