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  • I bet there's cash

  • 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

  • And as a fist bump from brilliant for using a link and supporting my channel

  • The first 200 people will get 20% off their subscription. Thanks for watching

I bet there's cash

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