When a team is looking for an escape room, the question often comes up of what difficulty level to take on. Obviously they can only judge that once they have a clear sense of the “strength” of the team that wants to are trying to escape. At that point they take into account:
1. How well the team knows each other
A group of strangers — say a team thrown together from new colleagues at a team building event — doesn’t know its members’ strengths: who is better at maths, who is the puzzle fanatic, which of them is the natural leader who handles the radio and holds them together, and so on. It is precisely because of this getting-to-know-you process, of course, that an escape room is recommended as an active team-building or ice-breaking event. But looking at the end result — and at the statistics — the initial communication difficulties (a well-established team, after all, understands each other from half a word) and the reasons above mean this isn’t the most efficient kind of team.
By contrast, a well-established group of friends, family or colleagues — even if this is their first escape experience — will probably, and in our experience does, handle a harder room more easily. That may be because they know each other, information doesn’t get lost between them, they communicate more easily, and generally exploring the room, solving the puzzles and dividing up the roles all go more smoothly.
2. The team’s escape room experience
It is worth noting that every escape room is different. There are new-generation and old-school rooms, games built more around dexterity or around logic, horror and child-friendly rooms… so the variations are practically endless, and rooms can differ enormously from one another: they engage different skills and follow a different line of thinking. Even so, statistics and experience suggest it is true that once a team has done 10, 20 or 30 rooms, they take the next challenge a little more easily — even when they are trying to escape from a type of room they haven’t encountered before.
It happens easily that two family teams of apparently similar make-up (for the sake of the example: two parents and two or three children aged 8–14) escape the same room with completely different results. With Magic World – The Burrow , for instance, the more experienced team may come out with a good 20–25 minutes to spare, saying “we thought there was more to come”, and then the similarly composed team playing right after them, for whom this is a first escape experience, gets out just in time after a few hints over the radio, their first question being: “Does anyone actually do this without help?”
So the same room — on a ten-point scale, let’s say a 7 — would be rated at most a 4 by the first team in the example above, and an 11 by the second. Averaged out you get a difficulty of 7, but every team will experience that room as a completely different level of difficulty, and in a different way.
