Two new escape games are taking shape at anydoors right now, not at a desk but in the workshop: with a laser cutter, breadboards and a lot of cables, with a 3D printer joining soon. This time every box has electronics inside. One game is called CHRONICAL – Escape the Future, the other Das Werk des Uhrmachers, “The Clockmaker’s Work”. Here is what they are about, what goes into the boxes and why we build them ourselves.
Why we build our games ourselves
Puzzle boxes have been part of our formats for years. What we have learned along the way often has little to do with puzzles. A box for an escape room has to work once a day, for four people, in the same room every time. Our boxes have to work in a hotel ballroom, a canteen or a warehouse, for ten teams or a hundred at once, and be ready again a few minutes after the event.
There is nothing off the shelf for that. So we build it. The gears in the photo above came out of our laser cutter, and that is where the new boxes are being made too. By the way, I am not a trained electronics engineer. Everything is first built and tested on a breadboard, and we only solder once it runs reliably.
CHRONICAL – Escape the Future
The story begins with interference on the projector. A chronicler gets in touch from the future, more precisely from the future of your own company, around the year 2051. She has bad news: today, something that makes your company what it is will get lost. In her time nobody talks to each other any more, the only things still working together are the coffee machines. To stop that from happening, she has sent you time capsules.
Each team gets one of these capsules. It travels through time in stages: from the year the company was founded, through a past era, to today and on into the future. The heart of every capsule is a time dial, a rotary knob that makes the years rattle by. Press it and you jump through time, with light and sound. In the finale every capsule releases one piece of a shared code. The future is only saved if all teams work together.
The tone mattered to us: plenty of humour, never a real threat. Nobody has to worry about their job, it is about what holds a team together day to day. On request, the game is tailored to your company with your logo, founding year and a few facts from your history. It works just as well without. CHRONICAL is designed for 2 or 2.5 hours and for groups of up to 500 people.
Das Werk des Uhrmachers
The second game looks completely different. No display look, but a box full of wooden gears, a workshop and steampunk style, warm amber light and quiet ticking. A clockmaker has disappeared. What remains is his mysterious work, and the teams try to find out what happened to him. To do so, they bring his work back to life piece by piece.
Each gear first has to be freed and then aligned correctly. Input works through whatever a clockmaker’s workshop has to offer: hands, levers, a winding key, objects and the clockmaker’s notes. I will not reveal more, because the game has a twist you should not know before sitting in front of the box. Only this much: in the end it is not one team that decides, but everyone together.
Four to six people play at one box. With 50 participants that makes ten to twelve boxes, and the game can be played in 1.5, 2 or 2.5 hours.
What goes into the boxes
For those who want the details: every box contains a small microcontroller that controls light, sound, switches, rotary knobs and small motors. CHRONICAL adds a touch display, the clockmaker small latches on the gears. Game control runs on a Raspberry Pi with its own wireless network. It starts the game for everyone at the same time, shows the countdown on the projector and sees how far each team has got. No internet is needed at the venue.
We set ourselves two rules from the start. First, every box must remain playable without the wireless connection, in case the technology acts up on site. Second, the game length is set, not rebuilt: all puzzles are always in every box, and for a shorter event some are simply skipped. That way nothing can go missing, and no box is equipped differently from the next.
So that everyone reaches the finale together
Anyone who has played a puzzle event with many teams knows the biggest problem: one team is done after half the time, another is still stuck on the second puzzle. The electronics help us here. Teams that get stuck automatically receive hints, fast teams get bonus tasks. The aim is for everyone to reach the finale at roughly the same time, because the shared ending is the moment both games build up to.
When it starts
To be honest, we do not know exactly yet. For CHRONICAL the first components are on the workbench and the first tests are coming up, while the clockmaker game is still largely on paper. We are taking the time games like these need. As soon as the two formats can be booked, you will read it here on the blog and on our website. If you are interested already, just get in touch. We will note you down and let you know.
Until then, our proven escape formats can of course still be booked, from Escape the City and Escape the Forest to Beat the Box. Which of them suits your team is explained in our comparison of our escape games.
– René
Curious about the new escape games?
Tell us briefly which group size and time frame you are planning for. We will get back to you as soon as the formats can be booked.
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