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

But here's the trick

passive learning doesn't work nearly as well as active learning so they teach a principle and then they follow up with engaging puzzles or an

Interactive demo, so you actually retain the information you can access brunet org from your computer or use the app

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