Not All Escape Rooms Are Created Equal

The first escape room opened in the UK in 2012, and since then, their popularity has grown rapidly. There are now close to 1500 escape rooms operating in the UK, with a wide selection of stories and themes. There are around 500 venues, which are a mixture of corporate chains, franchises, and small independent businesses. With so much variety, how do you choose the right ones for you?
You will undoubtedly get the most out of the experience if you do a little research before you book, especially if you are playing for the first time.

Six Things To Consider When Choosing An Escape Room.

Location:

Location is an important factor to consider. Although it’s common to have multiple escape rooms to choose from in bigger cities, you may have a more limited choice in smaller towns and rural areas. Where a venue has multiple rooms, you can usually arrange to play more than one game in a single visit, which may be better for you if you have to travel a distance to the venue. Some escape rooms also provide online escape room games that can be played by a remote team via Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc. Escape The Review has a great interactive map and an A-Z listing that are pretty comprehensive.

Difficulty level:

Escape rooms will generally contain a wide variety of puzzles, games, and tasks to challenge your team. Difficulty levels vary from room to room and are largely dependent on your level of experience playing escape rooms. If you are playing for the first time, it may be worthwhile checking which rooms are easier or have a higher success rate before booking.
You may have enough confidence in your team to consider throwing them in at the deep end and trying the most difficult room first, but you may not have the best experience if you are feeling stuck and clueless for the whole game. Escaping is definitely a skill that improves with practise! Escape rooms are generally designed to suit a wide age group and should be suitably challenging and, most importantly, fun for older children and adults alike.

Reviews:

It can be difficult to explain an escape room to someone who’s never played without giving too much of the game away. Selling the concept means convincing someone to pay me to lock them in a mystery room for an hour because they’ll have fun. Reviews are really important for escape rooms, and they are a really easy way for new players to gauge the quality of the escape room and the overall player experience. Check Google Maps, Tripadvisor, and the usual review sites. Look for team photos on social media too; after all, pictures can say a thousand words!

Brand:

Where you are fortunate enough to have a selection of rooms in your local area, you might see a mixture of businesses, from escape room chains and franchises to small, independent, owner-operated escape rooms. Chains and franchises tend to have lots of different themed rooms on offer across various locations, but their escape rooms can lack the creativity and originality you would see from smaller companies. And in my own experience, props can often look worn or be broken to the point where they interfere with gameplay. Small, independent escape rooms also provide a more personal service than larger chains. Their rooms are typically designed to a high standard with lots of attention to detail, and their games are maintained with care.

Cost:

With the rising cost of living, cost may be a consideration. In the UK, escape rooms generally offer a tiered pricing structure, meaning the price per person reduces as the player count rises, and most escape rooms will offer additional discounts from time to time. Escape rooms can be quite addictive, so if you find yourself playing often, you may want to invest in an escape game card. The card offers up to 30% off selected games and is accepted at 97 escape room venues throughout the UK and in more than 50 countries worldwide.

Theme:

The theme is often the deciding factor when choosing an escape room. Games will usually have a story attached to them and will be set in a real or imaginary time and place. Rooms are decorated to resemble scenes from the story, much like a movie or theatre set. Props and puzzles are designed to help you explore the set and lead your team towards a successful escape.
Just like the movies, there is a huge variety of themes or genres to choose from. Some rooms are family-friendly, while others are not. Details of any restrictions can usually be found on a company’s website. If you are in any doubt about the suitability of a room, it’s best to check with the venue before booking.

Calling All Early Birds!

The Benefits of Booking Your Next Escape Room Early.

When you’re looking for your next adventure, booking early can be a great way to get the best deals and make savings on the most popular, highly rated, and best-loved experiences. Whether you’re looking for a fun activity for the whole family, a day out with your friends or a night out with your work collegues, whatever the occasion, Divergent Games Escape Rooms in Falkirk has something for everyone.

Our 5 star Escape Rooms are a fun and challenging experience for players aged 8 – 80, and are guaranteed to entertain. Weekend games are popular, and the most sought after slots can be booked months in advance, but walk-ins and last minute games are also welcome, subject to availability.
When you book early, you can avoid disappointment by securing your desired date and time, and you can take advantage of our early bird discount to get a great deal on your next escape.

Our early bird discount offers 10% off escape room games, booked online at least 4 weeks in advance.
The discount is available from February 1st 2023 and cannot be used with any other offer.

To redeem use the code: EARLY_BIRD10 at the checkout.

Unlocking Team Building: How Escape Rooms Can Bring Your Team Closer Together.

Unlocking Team-Building:

How Escape Rooms Can Bring Your Group Closer Together

Team-building activities can be an excellent way to bond with your colleagues in a fun and creative environment. But have you ever considered using an escape room for this purpose? In this article, we’ll explore the power of escape rooms and how they can help unlock team-building opportunities, allowing you to get closer to your peers and achieve great results in the process.

Introduction to Escape Rooms

Escape rooms are an increasingly popular activity for groups looking for a fun, unique, and challenging way to bond. For those who haven’t tried one, an escape room is a live adventure game in which players are set a challenge, and have to use elements of the room to solve puzzles and complete the challenge within a set time limit.

Escape rooms are a great way to get your team working together on problem-solving and communication skills. They’re also just plain fun! If you’re thinking of trying an escape room with your group, here’s what you need to know to get started.

Benefits of Escape Room Team Building

Escape rooms are a unique and exciting way to build teamwork skills and promote collaboration. By working together to solve puzzles, complete the challenge and escape the room, team members learn to communicate effectively, think creatively, and work together under pressure. The variety of different puzzles inside an escape room means that there is truly something for everyone.
Escape rooms are also a great way to break the ice and get to know your teammates better.

The benefits include:

Boosts Collaboration: In an escape room, everyone is working together towards a common goal and that encourages collaboration between team members.
Improves Communication: As the team works together to solve puzzles, they must communicate clearly and effectively in order to make progress. By improving communication skills, teams will be better equipped to tackle future challenges.
Enhances Creativity: Escape rooms require problem-solving skills together with creative thinking in order to find clues and escape the room. This helps to boost creativity and encourages everyone on the team to think outside of the box.
Strengthens Relationships: Escape rooms are a great way for teams to bond and get to know each other better, which can help build stronger relationships within the group.
Promotes Leadership Skills: By giving different people on the team different roles during the game, such as leader or puzzle solver, this can help foster leadership skills among team members that can be utilized in future projects or tasks within their organization.

How Escape Rooms Promote Communication

Escape rooms are a great way to promote communication within a group. By working together to solve puzzles and escape the room, team members are forced to communicate with each other in order to succeed. This can help break down barriers and encourage more open communication within the group.

Strategies for Maximizing Team Effectiveness

There are a few key strategies you can use to make sure your team-building experience is as effective as possible.

First, it’s important to set clear objectives for what you want to accomplish during the escape room experience. This will help ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goal.
Also, make sure that everyone is included. This can be achieved by creating roles for each person in the group and ensuring that everyone’s voice is heard. When people feel like their input matters, it will help foster a sense of collaboration and cohesion among the team.
It’s important to ensure that there is a balance between individual and group tasks. Giving everyone a chance to take the lead on something or solve a problem independently can help boost confidence and create opportunities for team members to learn from each other.
Finally, remember to debrief after the experience. Talk about what went well and what could be improved upon. This is a great opportunity to get feedback from everyone on the team so that you can continue to improve your team-building strategy.

With these strategies, you’ll be able to maximize team effectiveness during your escape room experience and use it as an opportunity to build relationships, solve problems, and have fun!

Tips for Dealing With Different Group Dynamics

If you’ve ever worked on a team, you know that different group dynamics can make or break the success of the project. The same is true for escape rooms – different group dynamics can either lead to a successful escape or an unsuccessful one. Here are some tips for dealing with different group dynamics in an escape room:

Don’t let one person take charge: This can lead to tension and resentment among other members of the group. Instead, try to work together as a team to come up with a plan.
Be patient with each other: Escape rooms are typically timed, so it’s important to be patient with each other and not get frustrated if someone isn’t moving as fast as you are.
Communicate: This is key in any situation, but especially in an escape room where there may be puzzles that need to be solved. Make sure everyone is on the same page and knows what needs to be done.
Have fun! Ultimately, the goal is to have fun and bond with your team. So even if you don’t escape the room, try to enjoy the experience and learn from it.

Conclusion

Escape rooms are a perfect way to bring teams closer together and create an environment of trust and cooperation. From encouraging communication skills to helping people bond over shared experiences, escape rooms can be an incredibly valuable tool in building strong teams. By planning ahead and taking the time to understand the needs of your team, you can make sure that everyone has a great time while still achieving your goals. Escape rooms are an ideal way for teams to become closer and more cohesive without the need for long lectures or tedious exercises. With thoughtful planning, you can make sure your team has an engaging, fun-filled experience that will ultimately leave them closer than ever before! So go ahead—unlock your team’s potential through the power of escape rooms!

Moonshine, Mobsters and Blind Pigs

Moonshine, Mobsters and Blind Pigs:

A Visitor's Guide to the Capone Zone

Our two escape rooms are set in Chicago in 1931. The Volstead Act, which banned alcohol across the USA, was still in force. The (illegal) alcohol trade had been taken over by criminal gangs when the ban proved unpopular and difficult to enforce. Al Capone and Bugsy Malone are probably the most well known mobsters of this era.

People kept finding new and creative ways to avert the law. The term ‘Blind Pig’ was coined to describe one such method. A proprietor would charge customers to see an ‘attraction’ (an oddity or unusual animal) then serve a “complimentary” alcoholic drink. Many other names were used for illegal bars, saloons and clubs during prohibition, you may have heard of a few: Blind tiger; Speakeasy; Gin joint or Juice joint. These weren’t the only codewords and euphemisms the mobsters and revellers of the 1920s and 30s used. Many of the words and phrases fell out of fashion, but a few are still used across America and the rest of the world today. Here are some of my favourites:

Big Cheese – an important person
Bootlegger – an alcohol smuggler
Cake Eater – a ladies man
Can Opener – a safe cracker
Flat Tire – a boring, dull person
Giggle water – liquor
Hard-boiled – tough;without feeling or sentiment
Hooch – liquor (originally liquor from the Hoochinoo tribe of Alaska)
Moonshine – liquor
Torpedo – a killer for hire, a hit man
Typewriter – a machine gun

There is a map of Chicago in our Mystery and Moonshine room that was originally published in 1931. It’s a pictorial map featuring a ‘Ganglands Dictionary’ along with gruesome details of some of the events of the time. The map is described by the national library of congress as “A map of Chicago’s gangland: from authentic sources, designed to inculcate the most important principles of piety and virtue in young persons and graphically portray the evils and sin of large cities”. I could lose myself in it for hours just looking at all the little details. It was one of the first props we bought for the room and it really helped inform the overall style and design. We love having a genuine piece of history included in the game.

We had a lot of fun mixing fact and fiction to bring you the stories for these two themed escape rooms. You are tasked with finding and retrieving a shipment of Al Capone’s favourite Mississippi Moonshine. In Mystery and Moonshine, you are searching the office of Private Investigator Mick Macy, for clues and evidence of the where-abouts of the missing moonshine. In Piggy Blinders, you are breaking into a Blind Pig in search of the shipment.
The games are both family friendly, as they have a light take on the theme and are suitable for kids aged 8+, although, we have had much younger kids who have got quite involved when playing along with their parents! Kids from around age 14 will usually manage as well as (if not better than) adults.
Book in advance online or call if you are looking for last minute availability.

Great Days Out

Divergent Discounts this November

By Emma Malcomson

As the winter weather slowly creeps in on us, it’s easy for us to draw the curtains and hide away from the cold! Which is easier said than done, especially with the festivities and the Christmas holidays from school. While winter might feel like there’s never a more appropriate time to lock kids away in a difficult-to-escape room, jokes aside, we have the perfect solution for that!

Throughout the month of November, we’re collaborating with VisitScotland as part of their Great Days Out campaign to offer £20 off 4-6 player games.
The Great Days Out initiative sets out to encourage people from across the country to enjoy something a bit different with their days out this winter, and that includes Divergent Games! All you need to do is enter the code ‘WINTER_22’ at the checkout to redeem!

Our escape rooms are the perfect activity for the whole family to engage in, and we guarantee that our brain-challenging activities will be a topic of conversation for years to come, creating lasting memories shared time and time again.

There is no better way to combat the autumn-to-winter transitional boredom this month than partaking in one of our thrilling escape rooms. Round up the biggest (and the littlest) brainboxes you know and embark on an exhilarating brain-tricking challenge against the clock.

We offer a range of rooms with varying difficulties so all ages and abilities can participate. Our rooms include a series of clues, locks and puzzles, which must all be completed to escape. Do you have what it takes to beat the clock?

Go on, be Divergent, and book today for a (great) day out and find out if you have what it takes to escape…