Mind Gaming
Are these the world’s best escape artists?
The smartest minds from 22 countries are about to battle it out at Red Bull Mind Gamers.
The Escape Room World Championship, Mission Unlock Enoch, lands in Budapest next month.
Over 10,000 people played online at Red Bull Mind Gamers for a shot at a local qualifier; they have been whittled down to just 22 national and two wild card teams.
Mission Unlock Enoch, the first event of its kind, will use quantum logic and the sharpest minds in the field to take escape rooms to a new level. Dr Scott Nicholson, Professor of Game Design and Development at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University and visiting professor at MIT, has configured a series of formidable challenges.
Teams will be using all their creativity, logic, visual processing and strategy to overcome the challenges ahead.
We have analysed the data from the qualifying rounds to see which characteristics might help a team win or see them drop out of the competition.
Asian teams from Singapore and Korea came out with the best average times of the 2,345 who entered. Just five teams (Switzerland, France, Korea, Singapore and the USA) came in under 10 minutes; the average team time among the top 10 teams in each local qualifying session was 15:27.475! However, it was the University of California’s team in Berkeley that trounced everyone in 7 minutes, 7 seconds and 616 milliseconds!
There were disparities between neighbouring nations too. Germany was over a minute and a half faster than Austria. The gap between the Norwegians and Estonians and their respective nemeses, the Swedes and Lithuanians, was half a minute longer still.
Escape rooms are a young person’s game. The Germans are one of the oldest teams, and they only have two members over the age of 30, while the French don’t have one older than 21. The question is whether their youth will give them an edge or their inexperience will fail them but whatever happens, this will surely give them hope for future championships.
Experience isn’t everything either. The Turkish national champions had to defeat more local qualifying teams than any other country, despite never having played an escape room game before. This is in stark contrast to the likes of Great Britain who have played 983 games between them. Just recently, the group managed 43 escape rooms in five days.
Some of the teams have exceptionally strong relationships. The Romanians, the only team to have an equal gender split, includes family members and the team from Ukraine even has its own branding!
On the other hand, the players who qualified in Oman are all from different backgrounds and nationalities. They are all engineers however, just like the Germans and the Swiss. Both the French and Romanians are composed entirely of IT specialists.
The first-ever Escape Room World Championship
© Red Bull Media House
The history of mind challenges
© Red Bull Media House
With such a variety of challenges ahead of them, will it be shared vocations (and even shared blood) that emerges victorious or could the Spanish team, made up of two chemists, an archaeologist and a geologist, show that variety is a winning formula.
Oh, and let’s not forget the two Wild Card teams, one of which happens to include four-time world puzzle solving champion, Wei-Hwa Huang.
Find out more about Red Bull Mind Gamers and who will earn the right to call themselves the world's best escape artists at RedBullMindGamers.com, plus watch the first-ever Escape Room World Championship on March 25 on Red Bull TV.