The Enigma Room Blog

All players welcome. Always.

Here at the Enigma Room our rooms and puzzles are designed to require a diverse range of skills and perspectives to solve. It means that the more diverse your team, the more likely you are to succeed. With us, diversity is an advantage.

In light of the current postal survey about same-sex marriage, it’s clear that for some diversity hasn’t been an advantage. It’s sometimes used as a put-down. Or a way to divide. And as a place that loves to see teams come together to unite as one, we can’t stand idly by as this is happening.

So what we want say to you all, our amazing players, is that you are appreciated. You are valued. And you are always welcome here at the Enigma Room.

Because diversity should be an advantage.

What's in the case?

The Enigma Room gets a tonne of inquiries every month from people looking to organise a fun team building event for groups of 20 or more. There aren't any escape rooms in Sydney that can handle this many people at once whilst all playing the same game.

So what can we do?

If your group is too big for The Enigma Room, we'll bring The Enigma Room to you.

Matt spent time with an early prototype of the game and ran a few groups of 30 people through it in Canberra and Melbourne which were successful, but needed to bring more of the escape room experience with them. We brought on a new member of the team, Paul to work on a new design and to handle groups of up to 36.

We then got our first client. For a group of 100. So we made it work for up to 108 people! And built and designed it in two months.

What a way to begin!

Barry, Matt and Piyush grabbed a van, The Enigma Room crew and headed up to the central coast where our participants were unaware of the of the fact that the fate of the world was about to rest in their hands. The event was a great success and even though we were tired, hungry and needing to drive back home we were so happy with what we were able to achieve.

Road trip. Big Game. Before Photo. #ebigma #escaperoom

A post shared by Greta Lee Jackson (@gretaleejackson) on Jan 10, 2017 at 4:16pm PST

This game is based on Dr Disasterand is now open to the general public. So if you have a large group looking for an activity where everyone can get involved (or know someone that does), have a look at the description of what we can do for you.

Thanks for reading!

Escape with a Smile

Smiles and laughter keep us healthy, but many of us don’t get enough of them in our day-to-day lives. That’s why it’s important to find a way to escape every once in a while. At The Enigma Room, you can do exactly that, escaping not just from reality, but also literally escaping from the room itself.

We at The Enigma Room were thrilled recently when we were featured as one of Australia’s best venues to make you smile and laugh, on a Bupa Dental Insurance’s blog?. The article, 'Put a Smile on your Dial: Fun Places to Go!', is full of great ideas and inspiration for having fun with the people you love. No one understands better than a dentist, the importance of flashing a good, healthy smile, and so Bupa asked us to share some of the ways we like to put a smile on the faces of our customers:

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Smiles Solve Everything

We're blessed to get smiles and laughter from our customers for all kinds of reasons, but the main joy we see is when people solve each puzzle that gets them closer to escaping the room. It’s a great way of bonding with friends or colleagues, as you each have a unique contribution to make that will strengthen the team as a whole.

The puzzles involved in each game require a variety of different skills to solve them. Some are physical, some require observational skills, and some need a little more specialist knowledge. Once you all put your heads together, you’ll find the game brings out attributes you never knew you had, and create camaraderie between you all. People of all ages will benefit from working as a team – you’ll find yourselves reacting, smiling and laughing together as a natural part of the experience.

Lose Yourself in Laughter

It’s amazing how quickly people lose their inhibitions once they get involved in the game. The back story automatically makes people get into the roles of being a spy, psychologist, or whatever the game requires, and we love to see our players fully embrace the games and these roles.

We've had teams that break out regular chest bumps and victory poses when puzzles get solved, and other teams that whoop and holler with delight when progressing through the room. Other times people have found themselves doubting the rest of your team only for the team to turn out to have the right solution, resulting in friendly teasing for the rest of the session, but the atmosphere is so good humoured that nobody gets offended. The excitement of the game takes over, with everyone working toward the same objective and getting fully immersed in our scenarios.

The Enigma Room is a great way to escape every day cares and you’re guaranteed to leave with a closer connection to your friends or colleagues, not to mention a great big smile on your face.

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Thank you to Bupa for chatting to us, and we hope to see you at the Enigma Room!

GX Wrap Up

What an eventful last few weeks we’ve had. The Enigma Room team has been busily running around making preparations for our first mini escape room and it was a great experience!

But let’s take a few steps back and tell you all how it came to be. In December last year we heard murmurs of a new gaming convention trying to make its way to Sydney, we did a little digging and found that this convention was GX Australia (previously (GaymerX). The convention looked fun and its message of diversity and inclusiveness really appealed to us. So on a whim one night, while Matt, Piyush and I were chatting over Skype we backed them on Kickstarter and got ourselves a booth.

The only problem was, there was nothing to put in that booth!

So we workshopped a few theme ideas with our GEMs where we got some great ideas and some… not so great ones. The theme that we settled on was a robot apocalypse taking place at Christmas (more on this later), a theme that sounds like something out of a Shane Black movie generator, but it worked for us, so on with the puzzle design!

We had a few cool mechanics sitting around that we really wanted to use, but there were several issues that needed to be taken in to account that heavily influenced what kind of puzzles that we put in

- Time: How long should a mini escape room be? Five minutes is too short, typically people spend about two minutes getting their bearings in a room, searching all the hiding spots, etc. That leaves only three minutes to solve a puzzle, which is only enough for one puzzle, which isn’t much fun. Twenty minutes would be good, but we wouldn’t really get many people through the room and since the game is only going to be around for the weekend, we want as many people to experience it as possible. So we settled on a ten minute room.

- Tech: This is a tricky one, we’ve got a list of cool ideas that we have the ability to implement, but since this was our first convention we weren’t sure what to expect about the space and the venue. Even things as simple as, “Where’s the power plug going to be? How many power outlets are there? How noisy will the convention be?” etc. We won’t say how much tech we put in there, but we made a compromise that made the room fun and impressive, whilst making the puzzles reliable and easy to set up.

- People: This sort of relates to the point about time, what kind of people will be playing the game? Will they be hard core escape room fanatics, meaning that we have to make the game hard enough to challenge them? Or will they be like my mum and have to be explained constantly what an escape room is? We took the approach that the players would big enough gamers that they all would have played some form of puzzle game before, be it a point and click adventure game, an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) or an actual escape game. So we made the game lean towards the more challenging side.

With these factors in mind, we started to develop a few puzzles that we could put into the room. The initial theme was a robot apocalypse inspired by the recent warnings by multiple tech luminaries on the dangers of AI. So the puzzles eventually took shape around the concept of “What can’t a robot do?”. Of course with some specific limitations around the space we had to let go of a few ideas, but the puzzles that eventually made the cut tried to generally revolve around this idea.

So why Christmas? Well one of the puzzles that we conceived involved the use of jokes – terrible dad-esque groan-and-slap-your-forehead-once-you-hear-it jokes. Where could they be situated in a robot apocalypse setting? After scratching our heads the answer that we came up with was that the jokes were inside a Christmas cracker. After debating the merits of creating a LOT of single use Christmas crackers, we decided to proceed with this implementation, and a huge shoutout has to goto one of our GEMs Derek who handcrafted each of the crackers by himself. So now we were committed to Christmas crackers, it meant that it was time to also commit to not just any robot apocalypse story, but a Christmas robot apocalypse story. Of course.

The rest of the build took us around two weeks as we gathered all the materials together and began cutting, drilling, soldering and clicking in Illustrator. The week before the convention was our test week and we had a few groups join us in our top secret puzzle development facility (the staff break room at the back of The Enigma Room). The reaction to our design was good, people enjoyed the story and the challenge provided by the puzzles. The puzzles were tweaked slightly to make them perfect, but it was still running a little too long so we made the decision to increase the length of the game to fifteen minutes rather than alter the game as we were pretty happy with how it all flowed.

All that was left was to set the mood. Cue a montage of me spending hours in front of the computer trawling Gumtree. At least the Christmas theming made things a little easier!

Come Friday we were psyched and ready to deploy our mini masterpiece entitled, “Y0u B3tt3r W4tch 0ut!”. We knew that bumping in an escape room in approximately four hours would be difficult, but we didn’t know just how difficult it would be, especially considering that we weren’t the most organised bunch. We exhausted all of our available time on the Friday and ended up having to come in extra early (I’m talking, “it’s still dark outside” early) on the Saturday morning. But we made it.

Piyush knocked up some awesome decorations, flyers and swag (MAZE PENS!) and Derek set up his patented “Ghettobooth” to take photos of the curious convention attendees and our booth was looking pretty great.

What's in the box??? #enigmaroom #gxaustralia

A photo posted by @marcchee on Feb 26, 2016 at 1:32pm PST

Reaction to the booth and the game was excellent, people had fun playing and the success rate was around 65%, which is pretty much where we wanted it. The best thing was that we introduced a significant number of people to escape rooms who had either never heard of them before or had never played one before. The mini room gave them a taste of what was out there and hopefully bred a new bunch of escape room fanatics.

Our GEMs had a great time as well, making new friends, checking out the exhibitors and buying precision machined dice. Overall it was a fantastic experience and we have to thank GX Australia for putting on such a cool event.

The question now is, where to next? We have this new mini escape room that has only been played by a handful of people. We could set it up at other conventions or events, but we’re not sure where. If you have suggestions of where we should go next let us know in the comments!

Escape Rooms For Team Building

So if you’re following us on social media or you’re a regular reader of Lifehacker, you may have noticed that one of our Game Experience Managers, Jeremy (aka Junglist), has posted a great write-up of tips for surviving an escape room. He’s addressed a fair few topics that come up as either lessons learned from games or frequent questions that we get from players, so if you haven’t read it yet, you should definitely check it out.

However, there are some other questions that we do get fairly often that haven’t really been addressed elsewhere. These revolve around using escape rooms as part of team building exercises in a corporate environment. Let’s try and answer some of those questions now...

Is this a good team building exercise?

Yes! Escape rooms are great for team building. The main reason is that escape rooms take you out of your normal work environment, but still require you to work as a team to achieve a common goal. In particular with our rooms, there are elements of physical cooperation as well as collaborative thinking.

There are many social events that people use for team building, like going to a team lunch, or to the pub. The problem with those is that they are primarily social events done with the intention of getting everyone in an environment where they talk about things other than work. But if you’ve ever attended a work social event like that you probably already know that the conversation quickly turns to ‘shop talk’ and soon enough it’s just like you’re at the office, but with beers. The other thing is that not everyone is a socialite, if you have team members that will normally be quiet, there’s no reason that having dinner together will suddenly get them to open up.

These problems are avoided with escape rooms. Even if you wanted to talk shop, you couldn’t! You’ve got an hour to escape and you and your team have to concentrate on the task at hand. People who are normally quiet in the meeting room will be encouraged to speak up during the game when everyone’s throwing out ideas. Afterwards, people will be livened up by post-game analysis of your tactics where you will ask each other questions like, “How did we miss X, it’s so obvious now!” and “Remember when they told us not to use our sense of taste, but you licked the wall anyway?”.

Our team is spread across a load of age groups... Is this just a game for ‘young people’?

This is definitely not a game just for ‘young people’. Our escape games are designed to test all of your skills and we find that everyone has something to bring to the table. A little extra, ‘life experience’, is not a hinderance, in fact, it can sometimes be an advantage.

What can escape rooms teach us about our team and how we can work better?

Escape rooms are designed to get you thinking under a little bit of stress caused by the time running out. This tends to make people’s natural personalities come out. This is great for identifying people’s strengths and weaknesses.

What we do find occasionally with a corporate group, is that people will settle into their normal role in the work team. The boss will be the one barking out orders while everyone else does smaller jobs and not questioning leadership. This is the tactic that you should avoid. During the workweek, they may be the expert in their field and their judgment is not normally questioned. But this isn’t work, this is an escape room, with a scenario that none of you have seen before. Everyone should be pitching in with ideas, and listening to only one person often leads to failure.

With that in mind, if everyone is pitching in ideas, you may find a certain quality in one of your team members that you hadn’t noticed before. Maybe they are really good at communicating their thought process, maybe they’re great at finding a way of describing a difficult concept to others. Perhaps you’ll find that some people are natural leaders in this unusual environment, or that there are others with excellent ideas that otherwise aren’t noticed by the rest of the team. Lessons learned here can easily be taken in to your next work meeting.

Is there anything we can do to prepare for this?

Physically, there’s nothing strenuous that you need to do so you can skip the extra push ups and pre-game stretching. There’s also no prior knowledge required, so the late night cram session to memorise the capital of Burkina Faso will be wasted (it’s Ouagadougou by the way).

What would be useful is a talk about the importance of teamwork and how it can be used to your benefit (given the answer to the previous question), not only to escape from the room but in your everyday work environment. Emphasis should be placed on communication and the fact that the escape room should be considered a safe space for collaboration.

That last bit is really important, remember, your boss might not be the expert here. Everyone is at the same level and has something to contribute, just because someone is higher up the chain of command doesn’t mean their ideas are better than yours. Feel free to shout out suggestions or even try something crazy (just don’t lick the wall).

So there you go, hopefully that’s answered some of your questions about the benefit of escape rooms to the workplace, or perhaps it’s given you some talking points to help persuade your boss.

Do you have any more questions? Or perhaps you have some personal experience of playing our games with your work team that you would like to share? Leave us a comment below.

10 out of 10 mothers love gifts from The Enigma Room!

Hey there enigmaniacs,

All of us here at The Enigma Room have been flat out running games over the past few months since our grand opening, so much so that we’ve had to add several new members to the team. We call them Game Experience Managers, or GEMs for short :)

We’ll get you acquainted with everyone in a later post.

In the meantime though, I’m here to tell you about an exciting new development in gift giving technology… GIFT VOUCHERS!

You asked for it, we delivered!

You can now purchase gift vouchers from The Enigma Room website by clicking here, or if you prefer, you can contact us to arrange a time to come in to our “escape facility” to pick one up in person.

These vouchers have come just in time for Mother's Day. So how about showing mum just how much you love her by locking yourself in a room with her. Or locking her in, and staying outside, whatever, maybe that’s how your family expresses love?

In any case, since opening we’ve run over 500 games and everyone loves what we’ve come up and we’re sure that your mum will too! So let the GEMs at The Enigma Room make gift shopping easier for you this Mother's Day.

What are you waiting for? Get your voucher now (before one of your siblings take credit for the idea!)

The Challenges of Starting an Escape Room

Hello there Enigma Roomies,

It’s been a while since we’ve let you know how things have been going on this blog and it’s simply because we’ve been busy making sure things have gone smoothly.

As we’re entering our fourth week, I thought I’d bring you up to date on how things have been running at The Enigma Room.

In the first three weeks of operation we:

Watched 109 games

Introduced three new members to the team - Jeremy, Olivia and Sylvia

Helped one guy propose to his girlfriend, successfully I might add!

Drank at least 40 cups of coffee

Needless to say, things have been a bit busy, but thankfully all the time we spent waiting to open allowed us to test our games and systems to make sure that we were confident with what we have to offer you guys. Although that hasn’t stopped us from constantly improving what we do and adding new features. We’ve worked out the bugs in our hint system and there are further improvements that are on the way!

However, it’s not just us enjoying our work, we’ve had a range of escape room aficionados come to try us out and they all agree that we are definitely one of the best escape rooms in Sydney.

Things haven’t been all rosy though. Every new small business has some kind of hiccup, some source of friction, a catalyst that threatens to tear the place apart.

I am of course referring to our use of cucumber water.

Matt and I are staunchly divided on this issue: I feel as though cucumber water is a refreshing drink that utilises cucumber’s nutritious and cooling properties.

Matt on the other hand feels like he’s drinking salad. And as the saying goes, you don’t make friends with (drinking) salad.

There’s only one way to settle such a vigorous debate… Thunderdome.

No? Too much? Ok, how about a vote? Leave a comment here, vote using the poll on Facebook or just tweet at us using the hashtags #cucumberWaterYes or #cucumberWaterNo.

UPDATE - 25th March 2015

Well folks, we've compiled the votes and cucumber water is victorious on this day! I am raising my hands in triumph while Matt begrudgingly sips from his ice cold extra refreshing beverage. He says he's not happy with the result, but I can see in his eyes that he loves it.

Thanks to everyone who voted, and for those who didn't know which side to stand on, the only way to truly be sure is to come in to The Enigma Room and try it out for yourself!

Theme a Little Theme

With our imminent launch, I thought it’d be a good time to have a closer look at our two games, “Dr Disaster” and “In Memoriam”. As lead game designer, I’ll be providing a few insights into some of the design decisions we made along the way. In this first part I’ll discuss the themes for our games, and in part two I’ll delve into the way we designed our puzzles.

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We aren’t the first people to open up an escape venue; in fact we’re not even close. But after playing in a lot of escape rooms around the world, we’ve identified a lot of recurring themes. Office environments are super popular (probably because they’re so easy to set up!), as are horror themes (it’s also easy to throw around red paint/tomato sauce!). Crime scenes of varying descriptions also feature prominently with a lot of murders and thefts happening all over the place.

So we’ve tried to do something a little bit different. Not to say that office/horror/crime rooms are lacklustre – we enjoy playing them, and there are some very very good ones out there. But we’re trying to shake things up a bit, and theming is one area that we wanted to focus on.

With so many other venues taking a serious and hardline approach to storytelling, we thought it’d be refreshing to take a tried and tested trope and inject our own brand of laughs. The 3 of us met doing university comedy shows together, so this was a bit of a no brainer. “Dr Disaster” takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the spy/supervillain theme, with less “Bond” and more “Austin Powers.” We’ve added comedic elements into the way we’ve decorated and dressed the room, and the puzzles have also been designed with this attitude to bring an element of surprise and maybe even encourage players to poke fun at each other. If you want to try a room which doesn’t take itself too seriously then this is the one I’d recommend.

On the other end of the spectrum, “In Memoriam” has a much more serious theme. Without giving away too many spoilers, the idea behind this room is that you are being thrust into the life of an unknown woman with the view to saving her. The puzzles and aesthetics are designed to let you explore her memories and walk through the key events in her life that you must interact with to discover the clues. My sincere hope is that rather than having a narrative handed to you, you as a player will discover the narrative on your own as it’s interwoven into the game. The further you progress the more you’ll discover about this woman and how she’s lived. And for those squeamish types, don’t worry, there’s no horror themes involved at all.

I've put up a few stills from our video briefings for both games above. Big thanks to Jeeves Verma, Mel Saxton and Janice Tan for appearing in front of camera; and amazing cinematographer Dan Christie and his crew for helping to shoot it all.

The last point that I’ll make about theming is that we’re all big fans of nerd and pop culture (well at least I am, I’ll let the others confess themselves). We’ve referenced a few influential movies and video games under each of our game descriptions, and I’ve tried to sneak in as many pop culture references and Easter eggs into our games as possible. So far I’ve got Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Batman, Zelda, Mario, a few Bond references, and even Breaking Bad to name a few. When you can come and play see if you can find them all :)

That’s all on themes for now. Stay tuned for a post on puzzle design sometime in the not too distant future!

A little bit of construction, mixed with a bit of spice

Firstly, The Enigma Room wishes all our escapees a happy New Year! We hope you had some fun over the break while we were getting things ready for our launch.

After my last blog and the reveal of our second theme there were two people in the comments who recommended a movie that explored some similar themes to “In Memoriam”. The movie is called Paprika, a Japanese anime movie, and you can check out the English dub here.

My wife and I were looking for something to do on New Year's Day that involved sitting on the couch and this movie filled that role just fine.

Paprika was generally entertaining, although the narrative was a bit strange at times, especially because you're never sure whether the scene you are currently watching is in the dream world or real world. By the end of the movie, that delineation between the two is almost non-existent, so these moments can be a bit confusing. This movie was actually one of the main inspirations for the Christopher Nolan movie “Inception” so I can see where people drew the link between our game and the movie, especially since we cited Inception as one of our references.

That said though, the themes in the game differ to those in the movie slightly. The movies focus in on entering someone’s dreams, and because they are dreams, reality can become distorted leading to many different plot mechanisms (Paprika featured several scenes of a parade led by a walking refrigerator… you see, reality, distorted). In Memoriam focuses on a group of doctors entering a patient’s subconscious to explore their memories. I guess I'm trying to say that In Memoriam is a little less, "trippy".

Remember, escape games are all about finding objects, determining their purpose and finding ways to put them together to solve the puzzle. If you were to come across any bi-pedal white goods, I don't think we could all agree on their purpose, let alone how you could use them to solve a puzzle.

If you get some time and you are a fan of anime, you should really check it out if you haven't already.

Now the title of this post mentioned something about construction. Here’s the scoop.

WE’VE STARTED BUILDING!!!!!!111

Finally we have jumped over some of many many hurdles placed in front of us by the relevant authorities and have begun our construction work (you can check out some photos in the carousel above). We are not completely there yet, as we have yet to jump over all the hurdles, but we’re getting closer. Soon we should be able to begin beta testing Dr Disaster and from there, it’s over to you!

We will keep you up to date on the build as it progresses, but in the meantime, if you end up watching Paprika let us know what you thought in the comments!

Barry

One more step towards completion

Hello Escapees!

Work has been completed on the poster for our second launch game, "In Memoriam". Matt, Piyush and I are really happy with how this second game is coming together. We’ve incorporated some clever uses of technology in the game to fit with the theme and to get players to think outside the box a little bit, and we’ve been looking at fine tuning the flow of this game extensively as part of our alpha testing.

The plot of In Memoriam centers on a team of doctors (played by you and your friends) who participate in an experimental medical procedure to enter a woman’s consciousness in order to help her find her most precious memory.

You can read a little more in the Our Games section where we mention a few pop culture references that explore similar themes to this game. Are there any other movies, books or games that you can think of where the plot involves poking around someone’s subconscious? Let us know in the comments!

Barry

Progress Update!

Hi Enigma Roomies. Mind if I call you that? No? Cool. I had a feeling about you and I :-)

Progress towards our Grand Opening has been going great:

We’ve secured a great location in the city centre and have been burning through that company credit to buy props, decoration, set pieces, locks, electronics, sensors, gizmos, gadgets, doodads and whizbangs. They’re being glued, painted, taped, nailed, wired and smooth-talked together, into working puzzles for you to eventually solve
Construction will get into full speed as soon as the approvals come in. For some reason, officials give us puzzled looks when we tell them we want to build a secret missile test facility in the middle of Sydney CBD
Our cast and crew were in full operation last week, filming videos for our rooms. It’s been a while since I’ve been on a film set, but we have a fantastic team and I can safely say that after editing and post production, the videos look as slick as Dr. Disaster himself (almost)
We’ve been alpha testing the rooms and puzzles, which involves taking test players through the game rooms to ensure the puzzles work and most importantly... are Fun. Puzzles can be quite complex and without the right level of hints and foreshadowing, they can change from being a fun and intelligent game of skill to a difficult to understand challenge that can only be opened by brute force or chance. This polish phase is critical and is happening righ-

BREAKING NEWS

Evil dictator Dr. Disaster discovered our plans to bring down his (not-so) secret (anymore) missile launch facility in the heart of Sydney. In retaliation, he deployed the (very specifically named) torrential-rain-storm-causing-room-flooding machine to halt our progress! Rain water has flooded into the launch facility preventing anyone but us from entering the premises. It looks like our plans to stop Dr. Disaster will have to be temporarily halted while we dry the premises up.

Fear not team! Progress has not stopped. We’re on the job and as long as our pedal powered fans, absorbent paper towels and dry sense of humor are still operational, we’ll have this place up and running in no time. Stay tuned.

News, News and more News

So things have been moving forward for The Enigma Room, albeit not as quickly as we would like, but we are making progress towards an opening date.

Matt’s trip to PAX was a success with a great turn out for his panel and it was there that he piqued the interest of writers for Gizmodo. In fact, they were so interested in what he had to say, he was recently featured in an article!

That article led to us being featured in Geek In Sydney. As the article says we're going to be aiming to have a focus on Science and Technology based puzzles, but we are also looking to add more of a theatrical element as well to make sure that players get have a unique and fun experience when visiting us. Remember, our goal is to take the genre in a new direction.

If you have been checking the website regularly, you may have also noticed some other changes as well. First off, we have an address! When we do open, you will be able to find us at 262 Pitt St Sydney. As for the opening date, if things go well with our installation and testing phase, we will be opening in December (somewhere around the middle).

The next big reveal was the first of our two themes… “Dr Disaster” will be a Bond-esque comedy escape room featuring a bunch of science based puzzles mixed in with loads of references to supervillains, real life rogue-states and maybe a few other pop-culture surprises. We hope this room will be thrilling and hilarious at the same time.

Our second theme is still yet to be released (we have to keep some things mysterious!) but should be announced within the next week. Keep an eye on the blog to be the first to find out when this happens.

What do you think of Dr Disaster? Does he have the potential to be the greatest villain of all time? Who is your favourite movie / video game villain? Let us know in the comments?

PAX Competition Time! (Updated)

Ok, fess up, you're here to score yourself a sweet sweet discount with us right? Or perhaps you've stumbled across this by sheer accident? Well either way, you're in luck! If you're attending this year's PAX Australia and you'd like to score yourself a massive 50% off voucher, find Matt wearing an Enigma Room shirt on the showroom floor on any of the three days of PAX and say the appropriate codeword:

Day 1: MEMORIAM
Day 2: DISASTER (Why? Because our imperious and glorious leader said so)
Day 3: ESCAPADE

And that's it! Find Matt, say the word, get a voucher! So what are you waiting for? Come and get 'em!

(Hint: For up to date sightings of Matt, follow our Facebook page!)

The SUMS Puzzle Hunt is afoot!

Each year the Sydney University School of Mathematics and Statistics puts on a puzzle hunt, and the 2014 edition has just started today. The puzzles have varying levels of difficulty (although most are fiendishly difficult!), but one striking characteristic is that they're always presented without specific instructions - a lot of the time you'll simply be presented with a graphic, a collection of words, or sometimes even a sound file and that's all you've got to go on to start the puzzle. The designer provides enough of a pathway for players to solve the puzzle without breaking the minimalistic feel. It's an interesting approach to puzzle design, and I love it. I've been competing with a group of workmates for the last few years, and although you'll need a good dedicated team with a lot of spare time to do well, it's still a fun event to try out even if you're running solo. Don't despair if you get stuck, as hints are released on subsequent days for each puzzle.

So check out the first batch of puzzles, as well as the puzzle solving tips that they provide if you're attempting these for the first time. I'd also highly recommend the other major puzzle hunts in Australia, which are the MUMS puzzle hunt and the CISRA puzzle hunt. If you're a seasoned puzzle hunter, or an enthusiastic novice, drop a comment below!

Happy hunting!

Progress

Progress, what does that mean? Well, on the International Space Station (ISS), one of the commonly used resupply vessels is named “Progress”. Of course, being Russian vessels we should really refer to them as “Wessels”.

*pause for laughter from Star Trek fans*

I wonder, would there be any puzzles on board for the crew? The ISS would be an amazing place to create an escape room. You can actually watch the live feed of astronauts right now, I mean the screen is completely dark right now (they’re sleeping as I’m writing this).

What was I supposed to write about again? Oh yeah, what have we been doing.

So the beginning of August may have been when you first heard about us; however, we have been actively working on this project since May. During this time we have been working hard on getting this business up and running. Some of the highlights are:

- Our puzzle design is complete - We will be opening with two escape room themes. Although completing the puzzle design was something we had accomplished months ago, we have continually have been tweaking the story, the puzzles and the experience to make sure that all of our participants have the best possible experience. The themes of the rooms should be released within the next few days so keep checking in on us to get a sneak peak.

(Are the astronauts still sleeping? Yes…)

- Our website and booking system is almost complete. We’re aiming to provide the best possible user experience in terms of navigating the site and making bookings. If there’s something you would like to see implemented or improved, please don’t be shy, leave a comment or contact us.

- We’ve been burning up the company credit card buying props, locks and secret items. We’re going to make these rooms look great and you’ll get a kick out of the gadgets we’ve been building.

- We’ve almost found a place to put everything into!

So I’ll go in to a little more detail on that last point. Since day one, we have been searching for the perfect place to situate The Enigma Room. Obviously, we will be based in Sydney, but where exactly was the more important question. At the moment we are very close to signing the lease on a property in the Sydney CBD, close to nightlife, public transportation and a restaurant that takes particular pride in the quality of their laksa (I’ll be the judge of that).

I have to say that finding a property has probably been the most challenging and frustrating aspect of our business development so far. Commercial property is something none of us had experience in to begin with and it was a telling factor that resulted in several delays.

However, this has not disheartened us, we are more determined than ever to get our Escape Room open and bring the puzzles to the people! Every set back we’ve had is just a learning experience that will make us better at running our business when we do eventually open.

When are we going to open? It’s hard to say, as I mentioned previously we are close to signing the lease, but we aren’t there yet. After that we’ll commence our build and testing phase, during which we will be able to release an official launch date. If you can’t wait any longer and want a rough guide, we could say that we’re tentatively looking to launch mid November.

Don’t think that we’ve been sitting around doing nothing waiting to sign a document. Definitely not! Our preparation work load has ramped up so much that we’ve taken on a fourth member, Vica, to help us with design feedback and the purchasing and construction of props.

So, in summary.

1. We’ve been working really hard to get open and show you all the cool stuff we’ve made.

2. The time is almost here, but not quite yet.

3. Astronauts are like lions at the zoo. They’re always sleeping when you’re looking.

4. I like numbered lists.

Thanks for reading!

We're coming to PAX Aus 2014!

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at PAX Australia this year as part of a panel entitled “Live Action Gaming: The very real world of real world gaming”. If you don’t know what PAX Australia is, it’s a massive gaming expo held in Melbourne each year allowing gamers of all types to mingle with their favourite game developers, check out new games on the horizon, grab bags of #swag and basically have a great gaming time with like minded people.

Our panel be focusing about all different types of live action gaming, ways that technology is hindering or helping gaming in real life, and the trials and tribulations of live-action gaming design. Joining me will be peeps from Tech Assault, BoxWars, IRL Shooter, Swordcraft and Zero Latency - all really great groups with vibrant communities and followings. I had the chance to meet the other panellists in Melbourne last month, and they’re an awesome bunch of people - expect some interesting discussions and topics to be thrown around!

I’ll be sure to post up more details once we get the exact time and location of our panel, so keep your eyes peeled for further info. Are you coming to PAX Australia this year? What topics would you like to see us talk about? Drop some comments below, and hopefully see you there!

UPDATE: The schedule for PAX has been released - the panel will be at 5pm on the Saturday in the Fruitbat theatre. You can find the full schedule here and a map of the venue here. Getting excited!

A Short History of Escape Games – Part 2

Last time in part 1 of this series we looked at the origins of escape games as they started appearing around the world. But to truly explore the origins of these games, we should look at the influence other forms of media, such as movies, video games and TV shows, have had on the escape game genre.

Movies

The first thing that people often say to me when I describe escape games to them is, “Oh, you mean like Saw? Or Cube?” If you haven’t seen either, you can find good summaries of them online, or better yet, hunt down a copy to watch. Both are horror movies involving people being trapped in situations where they have to try and escape fatal obstacles or contraptions. Besides the obvious difference between our escape games and these movies (violence bad!), the other is that the traps in these movies were often more arbitrary in the way that they were ‘solved’. In many situations there wasn’t anything the unlucky participants could have even done to avoid their fate.

A slightly better movie comparison would be Die Hard: with a Vengeance (i.e. Die Hard 3), where the antagonist sets Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson a series of puzzles and riddles to distract them from his gold heist. However, the best example is the foreign film Fermat’s Room. Here a group of mathematicians are suddenly brought together and are stuck in a room. Given a series of mathematics based puzzles, the group needs to solve each problem to find a way out of the room which shrinks upon every incorrect answer. The pic above is taken from the movie.

Here’s a puzzle from the movie, and the answer is at the bottom of this blog post:

You find three switches outside a room. One switch controls a lamp bulb inside the room while the other two switches are fakes. You can turn on or off the switches outside the room and then enter the room to see if the bulb is on. You are not able to see the light of the bulb from outside, and at the start all the switches are off. What is the minimum number of times you’ll need to enter the room to decide which switch controls the bulb, and why?

Video Games

Do a search for ‘escape games’, and chances are you’ll get hundreds of results for various flash escape games. The last few years have seen an explosion in the popularity of these simple hidden object games, and most of them involve clicking randomly around the room to see what you can interact with. It can be hard to sort the bad and the ugly from the good, but one of my personal favourites of recent times is called The Room. With a moody atmosphere and some tricky puzzles, it’s a great timewaster when you’re commuting or just wanting a good puzzler to get immersed in.

Before the latest slew of flash games and apps, there were loads of point and click adventure games like Myst, the Zork series, and other comedy adventure games like Monkey Island. Although not confined to a specific location, these games still had plenty of puzzles which required you to interact with objects and the environment in innovative ways.

The game that I think most closely resembles the escape game experience is a Japanese number called Virtue’s Last Reward. This has characters all stuck in a large complex where they have to solve puzzles to escape each section of rooms, whilst also vying off against each other Hunger Games style. There’s a lot of dialogue in the game but the puzzles themselves are pretty good. Another similar game that I’ve been told about but haven’t personally played is 999 or 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors.

TV Shows

In Australia we’ve had our share of TV game shows requiring players to run around and solve puzzles. I have fond memories of watching A*mazing after school, and in more recent times other shows like Lab Rats Challenge have come out too.

But we have absolutely nothing on the shows produced in the UK. The one that stands head and shoulders above all others is a show called The Crystal Maze. This show had a massive budget and an overly eccentric host, and players were led around a sprawling complex the size of two football fields to take on a variety of challenges for a chance at the prize. Each puzzle was in a self contained room, with players given 3 minutes to solve and retrieve a crystal ball, and the variety of puzzles over each series were astounding.

Some of the challenges (called ‘mystery games’ on the show) were extremely similar to the layout of escape games. The player was given a sequence of clues to follow to retrieve the crystal ball and escape the room. All of the puzzles were pretty ingenious, and even now the show is great fun to watch, bad fashion and all. Don’t believe me? See for yourself:

One other show worth mentioning called Knightmare had kids working as a team to be the eyes and ears of a blindfolded teammate to solve puzzles and avoid traps in a semi-virtual world. The concepts on the show were absolutely fantastic, and the game itself was often very challenging for the players involved (even though they were kids most adults would find it challenging too!).

Thanks for reading, and if you need it, here’s the answer to the puzzle from Fermat’s Room. To keep it spoiler free, I’ve put the answer in Rot13, so just copy and paste this text into http://www.rot13.com and click the button to convert it.

NAFJRE: Lbh bayl arrq gb ragre gur ebbz bapr. Gur xrl gb guvf fbyhgvba vf abg fb zhpu onfrq ba gur yvtug cebqhprq ol gur ohyo, ohg gur grzcrengher lbh pna srry nsgre n ohyo unf orra ghearq ba. Gur dhvpxrfg jnl gb fbyir gur chmmyr vf gb ghea gur svefg fjvgpu ba naq jnvg sbe n qrprag crevbq bs gvzr. Gura ghea vg bss naq ghea ba gur frpbaq fjvgpu, naq ragre gur ebbz vzzrqvngryl. Lbh’yy gura unir bar bs guerr fpranevbf: vs gur ohyo vf ba (gurer'f yvtug tvivat bhg sebz vg), vg’f pbagebyyrq ol gur frpbaq fjvgpu lbh yrsg ba; vs gur ohyo (yvtug) vf bhg, ohg ubg gb gur gbhpu, gura vg zhfg or gur svefg fjvgpu gung pbagebyf gur ohyo orpnhfr vg jbhyq unir orra trarengvat urng jura lbh yrsg vg ba cerivbhfyl; vs gur ohyo vf bhg naq srryf pbyq, gura lbh arire ghearq vg ba jvgu gur svefg naq frpbaq fjvgpurf, guhf vg zhfg or pbagebyyrq ol gur guveq fjvgpu.

A Short History of Escape Games – Part 1

All of us here at the Enigma Room are big fans of escape room games, also known as “real life escape games”, “live action escape games” or simply “escape rooms”. There is a huge appetite for these games around the world, with venues all over Asia and Europe, and a burgeoning scene in the US. Part of the reason why we decided to open up our own venue was that we had been to some of these places overseas and had really loved the experiences, but on coming back to Australia we found that the scene hadn’t really taken off here. Aussies are smart cookies and have always loved sports and physical activity, so surely they’d love something like this too? Hopefully with our escape room opening up (and a few other venues that have opened already around Australia) we’ll start to see our own Australian take on the genre.

But where did this craze start? There are a few different stories depending on who you ask or what you read on the internet. I’ve decided to dig around and find out what I can about the origins of live escape games below, and in part 2 I’ll discuss influences taken from other media.

The first live action escape game that I know of was held in Kyoto, Japan sometime in 2007. Run by the company SCRAP, they have a mix of escape rooms as well as large scale events around Asia and the US in venues like sports stadiums or the hull of a battleship. One highlight of their games is the extremely low success rates (of which the organisers are quite proud of).

Another venue that’s also talked about as being one of the first in the world is Parapark in Budapest, Hungary. It’s not the world’s first escape room as it only opened in 2011. However, it’s highly regarded in the super competitive market in Hungary (at one stage I know there were over 30 escape room venues in Budapest alone, with some sources also now saying there are over 100! Either way that’s a lot for a city with one third the population of Sydney!)

One more rumour that I’ve heard is that rather than Japan, the escape room concept started in China, but I haven’t been able to find any information on that at all. Similarly, I’ve seen one mention of an escape room in Silicon Valley in 2006, but also haven’t been able to verify that. If you know more about any of these places, or if you’ve been to some of these escape rooms around the world, tell us in the comment section below!

Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll look at media such as movies, TV shows and video games which have influenced (and been part of) the development of the escape game genre.

Listen up, this is how I see it

National Science Week! Here's one of the coolest things that we've seen in a long long time - a way to extract audio from only video. The way it works is that the video captures an object as it vibrates when audio hits it. An algorithm is then run to then convert these tiny vibrations back into audio, and although not perfect, provides a pretty decent representation of the original audio which was hitting the object.

From a puzzle point of view, think of the possibilities! You could listen in on a conversation in another building by pointing a camera at a vibrating object in their room! Or maybe talk to someone else when all you have access to is a CCTV feed of each other! The possibilities are endless...

Check out the video below:

Meet the Team - Piyush

I had agreed before Matt and Barry had begun to talk. When a rocket scientist, a lawyer, two gamers, comedians and old friends tell you that they want to create something you want to as well, you don’t ask questions, you just start coming up with answers.

Growing up, I spent countless hours playing games, solving riddles and watching re-runs of The Crystal Maze, It’s a Knockout!, Takeshi’s Castle and Gladiators. Something about megalomanics, fantasy settings, spandex, cryptic puzzles, unnecessary deadlines and unrestrained violence appealed to my gentle and kind nature. Naturally, this led me to a career in consulting ;-)

Despite my failure of building a slide out of Lego, my love for building things and live drama endured. A few years into university I met Matt and Barry during CSE Revue. We spent many days and nights writing imaginary worlds, forcing actors into mildly uncomfortable scenarios and playing games at the pub. Somehow we had a team of completely different people with similar interests, working well together. If only there was a way to be paid to do this!

Cut forward a few years, I agreed to be locked into the basement of a pub in Budapest with a few friends. We had to find the key to unlock the door within an hour, or be stranded underground, hungry, in Hungary! If only Sydney had prepared me for such a scenario! So when Matt and Barry gave me a call to tell me they wanted to build a similar facility in Sydney, I knew I had agreed even before they began to talk.

Meet the Team - Barry

As I sat in my chair and thought, “how should I begin talking about myself?”, I struggled with what perspective I should use. Should I write in first person? Third person? What tense should I use?

This is all too difficult! I’m going to write as though a pirate was describing a mysterious sea creature…

Avast! Ye maties! I'll tell you a tale of the great Barry, as tall as an average shark, with teeth like... a ... person.

Ok, this isn't working either.

I guess I'll start about where I've come from and why I'm here. I was born and raised in Sydney and growing up, I had an insatiable appetite for video games. Even to this day, I can't walk in to a laundromat without the smell reminding me of Street Fighter 2.

As I grew older, I realised that a career in gaming wasn't realistic, so I went to the next item down the list, astronaut. This led me to enrolling in Aerospace Engineering at UNSW. It was at UNSW where I met Matt and Piyush as we all developed our theatrical tendencies doing CSE Revue.

My career as an aerospace engineer was fruitful as it allowed me to work on various high technology projects involving passenger aircraft, military aircraft, rockets and even trains!, both here and abroad. However, it didn't get me into space and thus was always a little unfulfilling.

Recently I have headed back to university to become a software developer and that's where my involvement in The Enigma Room begins. While Matt and Piyush tinker with the puzzle mechanics you will find me sitting behind a keyboard tinkering with the website, keeping the books balanced and making sure the whole operation runs smoothly. So I guess at the end of the day, a career in gaming was more realistic than the 15 year-old me thought.

Although every now and then, I'll chip in with the puzzle design. I mean, it couldn't hurt to get a "rocket scientist" involved, could it?

Meet the Team - Matt

I’m an avid fun seeker, and for as long as i can remember, games have been an integral part of my identity. Anything from computer games, boardgames to competitive sports, I am either heavily involved in or keenly follow. I met both Barry and Piyush at university, where I also tapped into my love of performance and sharing the discovery of fun with a large audience. My time as a presenter/researcher with Good Game on ABC2 was the lovechild of all these passions, and easily the most fun job I’ve ever had til now.

When I learned that I could pursue everything I love - both physical and mental challenges - in the creation of escape rooms, I jumped in with both feet. Luckily for me, my two good mates decided to jump in with me. The Enigma Room is our ode to fun, our way of pooling together all that we know about the joys of discovery, lateral thinking and puzzle solving, and of working with a core group of mates to find out what you’re capable of. And now when someone says games are antisocial, I can proudly say “Not true, look at all these interesting people I meet everyday!” Come around to the Enigma Room and play a game, and we hope that you’ll be able to share in the same fun too.

Welcome to the Enigma Room blog!

Follow our blog and you'll be able to go behind the scenes to see our progress as we get ready to open our doors, as well as learn a bit more about us, our design philosophy and the escape room genre. It's going to be an exciting journey for us, hop on and join us for the ride :)