Beat Any Escape Room- 10 proven tricks and tips

- I bet there's cash. - Oh! - Oh dude,, we crushed the record. This is an escape room. It's basically where you and some friends are placed in a room and you have to solve a. series of puzzles and locks to get out in exactly one hour. And today I'm gonna. give you 10 proven tips to dominate any type of escape room. And I say proven because me and six of my buddies utilize these tips. And even though about half of us had never even done an escape room before, we shattered the longstanding, record for this room by finishing in 38 minutes with no clues. Next, we tried an even harder room to prove that it wasn't just luck, and there again, we finished in 46 minutes and so the evidence seemed compelling. But for further proof, I had my niece and nephew and a bunch of their friends first try a room without me telling them the tips. They only made it about halfway through at the end of the full hour. Then we walked through the 10 tips together and then they went back to a new room with an equal level of difficulty. And this time they finished in 55 minutes with no clues. Now you're probably thinking what qualifies me to be giving tips about escape rooms when I've only ever done three myself? And the answer is absolutely nothing. They're actually not my tips. I track down the architect and designer of the Red Bull Escape. Room World Championships. He's a college professor. His name is Scott Nicholson. The problem is I live here in California and he's way over here in, Brantford, Ontario, in Canada. And while that's typically a 12 hour trip through the magic of YouTube, I knew I could make it there in just a six second travel montage. (upbeat music plays) - Okay, so, I am here now in Canada at the Begin Lab at Laurier University with Scott Nicholson. Scott, what the heck do you do? What is this place? - Well, this place is where I make games. Our focus here is actually. making games to change the world. So a lot of the games we make here have some sort of learning outcome. Our goal is to help get people to learn stuff in a playful way. - So. Professor Nicholson and I hung out together for a day as he generously spilled out the information in, his very large brain. He even put me through a few challenges and puzzles of my own. And so here are the 10 tips I came away with after hanging out with him. The first tip is to think simple. Think generally. Keep reminding yourself. that the average person should be able to complete, this room in one hour. In a well-designed room, you won't need any extra knowledge besides what you can, just find in the room. People tend to overanalyze and just go down a rabbit hole. So for example in one room, we found the travel log of a robber, and he went from Washington down to Mexico City up to Toronto. Now first we were trying to look at the interstates he would travel on and maybe that was a code, and then we're like maybe we should unscramble the names of the countries. And then we realized his path forms a V which happened to be the first letter in a combination lock we were trying to open. If you can't find a simple answer to a puzzle, chances are it's because all, the necessary information hasn't been revealed to you yet. So move on and then come back to it later. The second tip deals with searching. The first thing you should do when you enter a room is for everyone to split up and to start looking for clues and items. Professor Nicholson actually put me through my own searching bootcamp to point out the typical places that things are hidden. - There you go. Always look under tables, always look under rugs. They write codes on the back of rugs. - Other spots might be in hollowed out books or in pockets of clothing or behind a door in the room. A super common first time mistake is to look in places you shouldn't, for example, you won't find a clue by disassembling a ceiling. light or a power outlet. Another common searching. mistake is to see clues in things that aren't. For example, the bottom of this chair has letters and numbers from the factory, but they're obviously not. part of the room design because they don't fit with the theme. Going back to tip one,, the clues and key items should be fairly obvious, in a well-designed room. And the more escape rooms you do, the more you'll get a sense for what is and isn't a real clue. Tip three, organize your stuff. As you search the room, put all the clues and, items in one location. So if you found three similar cups like this with numbers on the. bottom, group them together. As you do this, the bigger, picture begins to emerge and it's easier to tell. what you're missing. Don't let people just. walk around with an item randomly in their hand that others don't know about. You can ask before you start, but almost all rooms have a policy where you use one clue or one lock only one time. So once you've used a clue or item, put it in a discard pile and be sure to leave any key in the lock that it opened. This helps avoid. unnecessary wasting of time. When a team member is working on a puzzle they don't realize has, already been solved and used. For tip four, now that your team is starting. to make sense of the room laser focus on what is stopping. you from moving forward. You are going to feel. overwhelmed at the beginning. Even with our record breaking times, about halfway through I thought there is no way we're gonna even come close to finishing. But then you solve one thing and then everything else starts falling into place. To help with this, work backwards from the.

thing that is stopping you, identify the inputs it needs. For example, in this room, you see there's a lock here and it looks like the key is right here but you need some kind. of hanger to fish it out. Now there's a cabinet on the wall that probably contains that hanger and it has a lock that needs. three letters and two numbers. So now you can focus on clues that will yield. three numbers and two letters and you won't be as. vulnerable to red herrings. - So red herring is something that's put into the room that has no bearing upon the game. It can be something simple, oh, this has gotta be really important. - Yeah. - Clearly. - Yeah., - Or some rooms even have red herring puzzles that lead to nothing. As a player, it's incredibly frustrating. And so we've done some studies. So most players hate red herrings because they're a waste of our time. About half designers hate red herrings and will not put them in their rooms. And about half are like, yeah they're okay to have in the room. - By working backwards on the immediate inputs that are needed, you'll avoid wasting time. on red herring clues. Tip five is about team roles. According to Dr. Nicholson, poor communication is the number one reason why teams fail. He has a list of eight different roles that team members can be assigned which I will link below, but the one that seemed the most critical in our experience was project manager. Because it helps alleviate this issue of poor communication. - The project manager. shouldn't get overly involved in puzzles. Instead, the project manager is the person people report to and say, Hey, there's a four digit. combination lock over there. - I see. - And the project manager will call that out. Okay, everyone we're. looking for four digits. Someone comes up and says, Hey, there's, there's a. five letter word lock there. Okay, we're looking for five letters. There's a poster over there that looks funny. Okay, so everyone take a look at that poster. If you're searching for something, you might find it in that poster. So the project manager should keep an idea of what are the active tasks, what needs to be done. - Yeah. - Who's working on what, and keep the game flow going., - I see. - But try to keep themselves out of getting buried in puzzles. - That makes sense.. - So they can keep a scan of what's happening. - So the first five tips focused on general team strategies, but the last half will be about. puzzle solving strategies. You should be familiar, with the most common locks and their inputs because again, if you're working back. from what's stopping you and you know a lock requires three letters, then everyone could just focus, on finding three letters. The standard key lock is the most obvious. Then a combination lock where you're just looking for four numbers in a specific order. Or here where it's a combination lock of letters and numbers, but five total. Then your classic dial. lock where you need three numbers total, and you start by spinning clockwise. Then open it like this. Then you've got this directional lock which is a little trickier because it can have anywhere from two to 30 inputs. Squeeze down here three times to wipe it clean if you need to try again. Finally, you have one of these lock boxes that are, again tricky because they've got, anywhere from two to 10 inputs, but it's good to know they. can only use each number once and the order doesn't matter. So one, six, zero, five works, but so does five, zero, six, one. A critical tip with locks is if you're pretty sure you have the right code,, but it's not opening have someone else try before you move on. Just given the pressure of the game. We had this tip save us on. three separate occasions. And finally, you can skip trying to figure out the last digit if you know, all of the rest of them just by trial and error, because there will only be 10 options. According to Professor. Nicholson's research, about half of all escape rooms will have some kind of code that you need to decipher. -,

There's a few basic codes I've seen again and again, and just knowing what they look like is useful. Now, you're not gonna be expected to memorize the encoding scheme, but it tells you, ah, we're looking for an encoding scheme. - So the upper left, anytime you see dots and dashes you should be thinking Morse code. Usually it's written, but sometimes it can be, lights that are flashing long and short or even long and short sounds. The upper right is called pigpen cipher and it's often disguised as hieroglyphics. The key will look something like this. So see if you could decode the message. Then anytime you see dots in a group of six like this, you know you're looking at a braille key. Each letter in braille is, some combination of six dots. And finally, Dr. Nicholson, said in his experience, the only time you might, not get a decoder key is if there are a set of, numbers ranging from one to 26. In that case, you match them up with a corresponding. letter in the alphabet. So this becomes H E L L O. Tip eight is about written clues. Dr. Nicholson created this challenge for me of the four most common styles of hiding clues in written text. Pause the video and see if you can find the four separate hidden messages here. The first is the most obvious. with the bold letters. Look at the watch face. The second are all the words missing a letter. So remove the telephone keypad, find the secret. Next, and this one stumped us for a little while in one of the rooms we did, is to just look at the capitalized words. The secret code is six,. seven, three, four. And finally, if you look at the first word of each new line on the left side, the secret phrase is. goodnight sweet prince. The key in each of these, is looking for something that stands out from the normal pattern you would expect to see. Which leads us to our second to last tip. Look for patterns. Dr. Nicholson gave me. one last challenge here. - Now the lock that you have might indicate you need to enter things in the order of red, green, blue. - This one. is pretty straightforward, but what do you think the code is here? In fact, pause the video if you want to decipher all three codes on the board here. The top is four, three, six, based on the number of sides. This one at the bottom, you just need to count the. different colored circles and then enter them in that order. So three, six, four, one. And finally in the middle you see this digital numerical notation used, a lot in escape rooms. So here the code is five, four, seven. Apologies to my colorblind peeps out there because you probably couldn't solve that last one, which is exactly the type of reason why you should cycle people through trying to solve the tough puzzles. A fresh perspective is all it takes in many cases. This helped us multiple times. And for the final tip,, your guide is your friend. Listen closely when they're giving their instructions at the beginning. A lot of times they will give subtle hints about issues that trip a lot of people up. You can also ask them high level questions like if they have a one lock, one use policy. And even if you don't want hints, you can ask them to. prompt you if you're way behind where most people would be at a certain point. At the end of the day, you're there to have fun. So it's better to take a hint and feel the excitement, of escaping the room, than being stuck on a frustrating clue for 40 minutes. And finally, fewer people is almost always better. Statistically, you'll, have a higher success rate because you don't have, to deal with the issues of poor communication amongst 10 people. But there's also a finite number of fun things to do in a room. So the fewer people you have, the more fun stuff that everyone gets to do. To quote from Dr. Nicholson's Twitter, my policy for the number, of people in an escape room is the same as the number, of people in a tent, no matter what the package says, you'll have a better. time at half capacity. So there you go. Now you know all the best strategies to dominate your next escape room. Thanks for watching. (bell dings) (upbeat music plays) (snowballs shoot),