I bet there's cash
This is it 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 ten 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
I've never even done an escape room before we shattered the long-standing 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 ten tips together and then they went back to a new room with an equal level of difficulty and this
Time that 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 tracked down the architect and designer of the red bull escaping the wind 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
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 met games. Our focus here is actually making games to change the world
So a lot of the games we make here of 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 ten tips
I came away with after hanging out with him
the first step 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
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
at 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 in your to room is for everyone to split up and to start looking for clues and items
Professor Nicholson actually put me through my own searching boot camp 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 should 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 and 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 1 the clues and key items should be fairly obvious in a well
Signed room and the more scape rooms you do the more you'll get a sense for what is and isn't a real clue tip 3
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 that inputs it needs for example in this room
You see there is 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 today
You can focus on clues that will yield three numbers and two letters 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 got to be really important clearly or if 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 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 roof by working backwards on the immediate inputs that are needed
You'll avoid wasting time on red herring clips tip 5 is about team rolls according to dr
Nicholson poor
Communication is the number one reason why teams fail his list of eight different roles that team members can be assigned which I will link
below
But the one that semen was critical in our experience was project manager
Because it helps alleviate the 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 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?
who's working on what and
Keep the game flow going, but try to keep themselves out of getting buried in puzzles
So they can keep a scan of what's happening
So the first five tips focused on it general team strategies, but the last half will be about puzzle solving strategies
you should be familiar with 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 they can have anywhere from two to thirty 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 ten 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 of 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 have this tip save us on three separate occasions
and finally
you can skip trying to figure out the last digit if you know all the rest of them just by trial and error because there
Were only be ten 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 how we're looking for an encoding scheme
So in 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 sure
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 to the coder key is if there are a set of numbers ranging from 1 to 26 in
That case you match them up with a corresponding letter in the alphabet. So this becomes
H-e-l-l-o
Debate 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 6 7 3 4 and finally if you look at the first word of each new line on the left side
The secret phrase is goodnight sweet prince
Makini TVs 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 meit's indicates
You need to enter things in the order of a 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 3 codes on the board here. The top is 4 3 6
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 3 6 4 1 and finally in the middle, you see this digital numerical notation used a lot in escape rooms
So here the code is 5 for 7 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 some high-level questions
like if they have a 1 lock
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
Nichols'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
All that's left is to get your brain in shape and to do that
You got to use the logic courses at brilliant org on the off chance that you've never heard of them
Brilliant is an interactive website that focuses on just teaching science courses through intuition instead of memorizing formulas
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Which is super popular with 4.7 stars from over 40,000 ratings
and so no matter your current level of understanding if you want to quickly get smarter about a bunch of different science topics while
Basically playing games and doing puzzles you go to brilliant org slash mark Rover or use the link in the video description
And as a fist bump from brilliant for using a link and supporting my channel
The first 200 people will get 20% off their subscription. Thanks for watching