 We played a game with Chris Anthony and Tracy at PAX that is a good review because it was a it's not a legacy game like write stuff on the board and then like it changes the story Nope, it's a game that you can play once because you destroy it physically in the course of playing Yes, it is a one-time use disposable board game you buy it how much does it cost 15 20 bucks? Yeah, not much you open it you play it with your friends it takes about an hour and then it's done which actually you might think oh what a waste of money that is it's like hey asshole you probably spent $15 just for one movie to get for one person down here for about the same amount of time and this is giving you four friends or five friends or more how many players is it uh uh many one to six yeah up to six people can have an hour of fun with the one but so it's only meant the disposable part right um right here I have an ogre box that I have played point five times I'll pay the amount of money it costs or one person to go to sit in one seat at one hockey game you could buy this game how many times could you buy this game so this game so there's nothing wrong with the disposable factor of this game yep I had the fun per dollar was well within reason right we played exit the game secret lab and it's important to say the whole title because there's an entire series of exit games including such titles as the polar station the pharaoh's tomb the forbidden castle the forgotten island and the abandoned cave so what the deal is something something so what the deal with this is it's basically an escape room in a box right it's made of paper and bits but it's an escape room yep and it's the in fact it is I would say it is functionally indistinguishable from a real physical high money escape room I for every escape room that I have seen I agree so I had now done a full disclosure I have done because Emily's company the previous one we did like an outing where we all went to uh one of those like fancy escape rooms in Manhattan it was real good like the production value was way higher than you would expect but not high enough for Scott how much did it cost I don't know I nothing because I just went to it okay but I bet it cost more than $15 for six people uh yeah definitely definitely but the only benefit the only difference between the physical big money escape room and this is that some of the puzzles involved crazy complicated physical shit like there's a bust in a room and if you move it somewhere else a door opens like pick it up it's a silver monkey yeah yeah but it's all triggered with like switches and stuff it's not like it's actually like built to work for real sure this basically only has paper and cardboard yeah there's a card mechanism where you can tell if you've solved the riddle or not and then it will take you you open up the next thing and now you're in the next room and you get more stuff so you can solve more riddles to get more stuff to solve more riddles and eventually you saw the final riddle and it's like congratulations and you read the end of the story so this instance exit the game the secret lab won the 2017 Kenner's field is YAR which is the kids field is YAR which makes perfect sense because I thought Kenner I thought wasn't that the kinders feel the Kenner is like the puzzle one I thought I don't know I don't figure it out it's it's not the regular spiel desire but it's still great enough to be worthy of winning an award right so here's the thing I'm really not a fan personally of escape rooms it's just like I don't like them and the number one reason I don't like them is because I feel like yeah Scott kinders feel is the connoisseur slash expert game this is not a connoisseur expert game well it's niche though it is this is you know you talk about gaming and how there's like niche market core market extent like all those different markets this is definitely at bad you could probably sell these extended market but this is definitely like aimed at niche slash core yes but anyway the thing I don't like about escape rooms is I think that they're basically it's a misnomer right it's like when I think of an escape room if I'm going to go to a physical place you think of saw all right I want like if I'm going to pay to go to escape room I'm thinking not this kind of random puzzle numerology bullshit it's like I want some Houdini shit right tie me the fuck up with chains and locks it's like good luck motherfucker we're closing the safe on you that's an escape you want to like break a window and now you're in basically American Ninja Warrior you gotta like I had this idea it's similar to my feelings on haunted houses right it's like you go to a haunted house and you know that it's some guy jumping out going boo and it's like whatever so what you want a haunted house where a guy comes out and actually cuts you a little like that would be okay but what I really want is a haunted house you go in the haunted house and then they're like they turn on the lights on and the fire alarm goes off and they're like and the guy takes off his ghost sheet and he's like oh sorry guys I guess we got to evacuate oh and then three years later and you're still in the game you go like home with your wife you open the emergency exit the emergency exit opens up you go out down some stairs you're obviously behind the scenes you know you're actually you know you're you feel like you're you're not in the haunted house anymore but you are so it's actually scary if you ever see the movie the game no is that what that is that's what that is it's actually a pretty good movie how come I can't go to the game in real life there are places to do that in New York actually but I would know that is that kind of place when I'm going there well that's the plot of this movie the game which I remember liking as a kid because I was in like high school I do not know if it holds up we have to set up what looks like a perfectly innocent haunted house at a terrorist attraction that's not innocent well Scott so the game was made by the same person who made seven so good movie that seven anyway so the point is the escape rooms what they really are what they should be called is solve stupid number and letter riddles with friends they're way more specific than that escape rooms almost always follow a very specific pattern there are a number of gates and again the gate can be anything could be a lock it could be a pot doesn't matter it's a gate and the gates require between one and five alphanumeric inputs so you the puzzle is the puzzle all like every puzzle all bakes down to what combination of things that I have access to can I convert somehow into the correct number of inputs of the correct type it's really like open these five combination locks but we're not going to just give you the numbers we're going to give you the numbers heavily heavily obfuscated so I tend to solve them by looking for all right we need five inputs in this puzzle is there five of anything anywhere yep well there's five balls on the ground so let's see if there's a way to translate balls into numbers right so it is but there's one other mechanic the other thing that these all have in common is you'll have at almost every moment multiple gates some of which can be solved with the data you already have and some of which can be solved either with the data you already have coupled with external knowledge or the data you already have coupled with data you get when you get through further loss the also parallel they don't give you split up the puzzles they also give you data in advance that you don't need yet because the gate is not available yet and they'll give you gates you don't have the data for yet and so on and so forth so now you have to figure out not only how to you know come use the information to create the codes you need but also which information is relevant to which thing yep so what they also do not do is they never they don't have fatal consequences like well you fucked it up they don't have just time it's like how fast can you get out or do you get out in time yep that's it they don't have triggers like oh you didn't diffuse the bomb right now the bomb is going to go off sooner or like one of your teammates is out of the game or anything like that that would be better I think but no they don't so no that'd be awesome you like open the wrong door that's what I said it would be better if they did that yeah yeah it'd be better than what escape rooms are right if they had bombs that go off it's like oh sorry you paid for this escape room but you didn't solve the bomb and it blew up everyone out but basically other than the the physical you don't get to see the rest of the escape room pay and try again other than the physical aesthetic of being in an actual physical room exit the game is basically identical to the experience of an actual escape room so while it is fun to solve riddles I guess if you like solving you know cryptogram type you know things it's fun to an extent you know you can get tired of it after a while but it's okay it's more fun to do it with friends because they can help each other out you know especially if you know if you have a person who's smart enough they can just figure the whole thing out by themselves but it's more fun to sort of collaborate because also because there's multiple things to work on simultaneously you know it's like you can get through more efficiently with more people like me and Tracy were like puzzling over those flags while you guys working on a puzzle I didn't even really interact with yeah but then the stuff comes together and you put your pieces together right it's like yeah it's fun to solve riddles with friends and this will give you about an hour of fun riddles solving with friends which is perfectly fine but I'm still not really into escape rooms it's like I wouldn't go out and like obsessively go get the whole set of these but if someone these are a great convention game and I feel like convention if anyone brings one of these I haven't played to a convention I'm at I'll probably just play it it's the kind of thing where I'd be in the mood to do it once in a while right like I like if you brought one out of these like hey Scott let's do one now I'd like no all right if you if you even brought one on the weekend with a bunch of people I'd be like no I just did that I'm not feeling that stupid thing again but like last next year a pad wax next year you got another one and it like if it's the pharaohs tomb one I'd probably do it yeah but if it's what were the other lame ones the polar one yeah I'd be like yeah I don't want to do the polar one I don't know you're right did you you're the terror right I could do some polar I didn't read the terror but I don't care I'm gonna I might make that next book club book even though I've read it before because that's cheating oh you want to do that all right once the future king here we go I've read it have you read it yeah I'll read it again I love that I'll have to find a book I've read that you haven't read careful son because condom on a crystal is the sword of damn no it's the book of Damocles hang over you because if it fell on you would kill you just the same as a sword I just wouldn't read it what you can do about it it can't make me you can't make me you know you're gonna ruin the book club the social contract I'll get the cliff note what you can do about kind of you know what I'll watch a movie what you can do about the movies are all the movies I bet I can fool you I don't think I read it the clip I watch the anime I've also watched the anime I would know specifically if you only watch the anime because of things I forget most of the anime the anime is great actually like I think the anime condom on a crystal is more in the spirit of the book despite taking gratuitous liberties than any other adaptation of the condom on a crystal anyone has ever made but the end to the anime is bullshit it is a terrible ending like it is so bad and so poorly done that it kind of ruined like that is an a minus b plus anime if you don't watch the last episode if you watch the last episode it's like b maybe a b probably just a b maybe b minus anyway so exit game thingy if you got enough friends who like solving number letter visual kind of puzzles right the kind of friends who would be excited if you told them you had tickets to an escape room and if you don't mind spending $15 for an hour of fun with five or six friends that you can only do one time then buy one of these things and go for it and maybe if your friends are the kind who are way into it you could buy a whole set of these things and go nuts otherwise you know maybe let someone else like I did spend the money and just tag along and play for free which is totally worth doing it at least one time you know hey yeah and it's you know it's pretty it's even if you don't like doing the thing the thing I think I enjoyed the most about it actually was not the solving of the puzzles because like I can get that just like solving puzzles in a puzzle book from the drug store yeah it was seeing how they put this thing together like whoa yeah the the double index look up right the double index with the cards and the paper you tear apart like how it was physically constructed was very clever and like it's like oh the people who made this I see what they did there that is cool yeah how they do that there's like a peat there's like a little clock and a compass we made and stuff yeah the only the only ride herring we ran into was for a minute we were all like is this star tropics do we need to make this wet so he's spent I licked my finger and then rubbed my spit on the paper because we didn't have any water available and I didn't want to make the whole paper soggy got there was water 12 feet away from I didn't want to make the I didn't want to like soggy the whole paper like destroy it right tiny bit of water but I thought hey maybe if I breathe on it like ink will magic ink will appear they should have done that missed opportunity the physicality of it fifteen dollars they should be doing that yeah like we had to tear some stuff apart and we're like oh we don't think we need to tear this no we needed to tear it apart the physicality of it was pretty good the only problem with these games is that the puzzle like the logic of the puzzle a couple of times barely made sense well I mean the fiction of these things never make sense it's like oh I locked you in my lab and made yourself puzzles before you go to escape the fiction of this one like if I you know it's like this one I'm the riddler of my riddles the fiction of this one is that we're mixing different chemicals together to make compounds yeah that was not it was nonsense but the problem is that the logic of like how did they expect you to solve the puzzle like what was the chain of logic that they expect you to solve it with we solved some of them not quite that way because you don't need to have a logical chain you just need to be able to convert the right number of inputs yes I lie basically as I was solving it I just looked past all the fiction and only looked at the numbers and letters yeah did the colors did did I did I do a transformation that made five alphanumeric characters come up that is almost definitely the answer yep and we were never wrong if we weren't able to make an output we were right the only times we were wrong is when we made an output from scratch just by so if you're looking to be immersed in the fiction yeah this is not going to help you neither is even the most high production quality escape room you're going to need the scott level escape room to be immersed in the fiction that's the only way it's gonna happen this has been geek nights with rim and scott special thanks to dj pretzel for the opening music cat lee for web design and brand okay for the logos be sure to visit our website at front row crew dot com for show notes discussion news and more remember geek nights is not one but four different shows sci-tech mondays gaming tuesdays anime comic wednesdays and indiscriminate thursdays geek nights is distributed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 license geek nights is recorded live with no studio and no 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