S6E7: The Analytics of Fun: Great Escape Room Design with Marie Huber & Nico Cesar of Red Fox Escapes

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You can learn more and purchase your Cogs starter set at Cogs.show. Use code RepodEdCheckout. That's RIPOD. Link and details in the show notes. Welcome to the Reality Escape Pod, your lifeline when you need to get away from the real world. I'm David Spira alongside my cohost PG Law. Together we're exploring immersive gaming from all angles and will be joined by guests who really know their stuff. Today's guests are the co-founders of Red Fox Escape Rooms in Boston, Massachusetts. Marie Huber and Nico Cesar. Since 2019 they have been entertaining guests with their brilliant and beautiful escape rooms, the Heist, the U-Boat, and the Body Shop. Welcome Marie and Nico. We're so happy to have you with us. You were one of the featured escape rooms at Recon Boston. We got to come play all of your wonderful games and I just loved all three of your games. It's not that often that Escape Room company I think has all hits and I think you guys just really nailed it and not only that they're all very different games too. They're very different theming but cohesive and beautiful. Yeah, I just love it. Thank you. Yeah, the Heist especially, I think it's a major hit even though it's been like four years now. Since it was a little napkin, a bunch of ideas with Marie that we put together and that one turned out like very successful. Yeah, it's interesting just on that topic. There's so many different things to say. It's interesting the contrast between designing for people who love escape rooms and who've done a bunch and designing for running a successful business and even though the Heist was our first design and probably the least appealing to people who've done a bunch of escape rooms because they've done a bunch of other Heists but it's still almost like profitable game because for a newbie and I would say at least 30 to 40% of our customers have still never done an escape room before, maybe 50% have done one or zero and to that audience, something that's nice and approachable, being a thief in your own little Heist movie is just so appealing and so it just gets booked by a big audience. It's a particularly good Heist game. For the area, for Cambridge, I think it's a good market set. If you go to other places like Europe, there's more like immersive theater, you will have a 25-minute conversation with the character going into the escape room and here is more like, all right, you're a bunch of thieves going to our gallery and then you put the customers in the room. Yeah, you don't have to explain the storyline to customers like they understand what a Heist is. I want to start with the Red Fox name which I think is just really brilliant wordplay on Red Sox. Where did that come from? I never even connected that. I am such an artist, it's person apparently. I am also not a sports person and it didn't really occur to me until we literally had somebody call and ask if we were the Boston Red Sox. Somebody wants him to buy tickets so you stumbled into this. I love it. So the business that was before ours in the basement was called Red Line Fight Sports. It was a boxing gym and we liked the red because we are on the red line in their Boston underground system and then Red Fox is a clever and sneaky and good at solding puzzles and killing chickens and yeah, you had to Fox proof things. I had to Fox proof my bunny rabbit house and yeah. Were you living in a children's book? I lived in the British countryside and yes, it was super door-to-door. You sit off a mother, she had a narrator that actually will tell you what it was going on in the garden. If you're going to Red Fox, you have a big red door. We wanted to make something memorable. Red Fox was like a natural. We did a brainstorm, probably that paper somewhere in the house right now with a lot of ideas. Bring storming our brand, takes a lot of time and we went through so many of them and as soon as we got Red Fox, we said this is the one, we like that. So let's go to the beginning. How did you both get into escape rooms? Sweetie, do you want to start? Sure. We are partners in crime, we are partners in everything, not only the business. We met each other probably six months before starting the company or something like that. There was not that much time. So we did escape rooms before our relationship. One, we had best done one escape room before we met. The same escape room, by the way. This was here in Boston, the dig from Escape the Room. And we kind of love that. So we said like, oh, I cannot believe that we've been all this life and people do this for fun and people will pay for this. And this is the kind of personality we both agree and we saw that that's something that we want to do. And then Marie has a much more analytical brain than me and we did a little spreadsheet and tried to figure out if it's a good business model, what are the kind of things that we could do. If you commission everything and if you have contractors, there's a lot of money, but we are very resourceful on what we can create. So complimentary skills, we gave it the thumbs up and we needed to find a location and that ended up being like overnight, basically a struck off luck of the locations that we ended up getting a basement, 4,400 square feet in the middle of the red line. Yeah, again, a lot of luck. And we live like four minutes away, walking distance, not like a lay that you have to drive everywhere. So that helped a lot in the logistics and creating the room and running the business too. Even right now we get less minute bookings and we just go there and we run a game instead of having a full structure of employees. We wouldn't be doing that if we had enough staff, we don't mind paying the staff to sit around doing their homework. But I think Nico also skipped over like a little bit of the answer to your question, which was that when I met Nico, I had quit my previous job, which was analyzing biotic companies for a Hitchfund. And that's a very long story in and of itself. And I was looking to do something which for many reasons didn't involve me selling myself to some new prospective employer. And so that's why I was like, oh, I wonder how this business model works. And so way back in my career, I had been a business analyst in a management consulting firm. And so I made my little spreadsheet with their variables for the number of customers and, you know, what are we going to pay staff? What's our rank going to be? All this stuff. And then of course, you have the biggest something of how many customers are you going to get? And fortunately for us at the time, there were two other escapers in Boston and both of them had three games. And what they have done is they had uploaded photos of all of their customers to their Facebook pages. We paid this gentleman in Bangladesh five bucks an hour to go and count the faces in all the Facebook photos. And we had an exact customer number count since inception for these two other escapers. Are you for real? Yeah, what? And it was based on that where we were like, okay, so we needed to get not that much more than 5% of their customer numbers to break even. And that was really the trigger. So Nico had a full time job at the time, but we had nice complimentary skill sets. He can do all the electronic stuff. And that's when I was like, oh, I wonder if I can design any puzzles. So I toyed around with designing some puzzles. And it is quite a cute story actually. Nico went away on a trip to Scotland for like a week or nine days, ten days. And while he was gone, I made a little miniature sequence of puzzles, which ended up with a lot box with the key to my apartment so that he could move in with me. And one of the things that I made for that was like these mosaic tiles out of scalpy to make these little mosaic space aliens, which are actually today part of a puzzle in the heist. They didn't really play a great role in the puzzle, but it's just because they were like the inception of the whole idea that they have this pride of placing one of the games. Oh my god, that is so adorable. That is a fantastic story. And I really, I can see you guys have very complimentary backgrounds. Also, that is some crazy market research. No wonder the hedge funds were paying you the big bucks. Yeah, this is also my fourth company. And most of my previous companies were like business to business. And this one says the first one that is consumer facing. And it's very different. Everything, it's how you approach to business, how you make it successful, how you keep the marketing people in enthusiastic over time. And worth of mouth is the only thing that we do. in terms of marketing compared to the other ones that I have. This is like the front line, the zero line of actually creating a business. Everything else is just support for that. So we did that. It was doing the spreadsheet and getting some level of confidence because otherwise, you can build a spreadsheet for any business idea you have, but the critical variable is always going to be like, how many am I going to sell? And if you go to one of these McKinsey interview and they're like, so how many, whatever, paper clips are there in New York, and you have to make all these assumptions. Okay, there's going to be like this many offices and this many paper clips per office and all this kind of things. And I think very often, when you go down that path, especially for a business like this, it's like, what are you going to do? Like, okay, what's the population of the greater Boston area? And then we make what? 0.01% of those people will be my customers or 1% or like, it's all completely random. So you need to find some kind of data that will give you a little bit of confidence in the numbers you're going to stick into your business model because we finance the whole thing with our own savings. So this was not something where we wanted to be all like, yes, this will work. I will spend my VC money and then I only upside. Absolutely. So Red Fox is surrounded by a notoriously intelligent community from Harvard to MIT, tech, biotech companies. Do you design your rooms with this community in mind? Yes, very much so. But we are also aware that we have the full spectrum of customers like anywhere else. So maybe our top end is maybe a little bit skewed towards some very brainy people and on neighborhood, but we get plenty of tourists and families who've never done escape rooms before. I think different people, different audiences also get different things out of the scaper's and some people are very much in it for their escapism and the immersion in the set and other people just like to do something with that group of friends and it gives you a certain environment within which to observe how your friends are. And then other people like they like that kind of brain-ish and the kind of the way that a well-designed puzzle can make you feel clever. Right? And some people I think view it like a challenge between the designer and then the player to see if they can figure out what the designer was thinking of. I definitely fall into the category like I like the puzzles in escapism above all else and I will forgive a lot of crapiness. In fact, I've enjoyed the worst escapism I've ever done just because I like puzzles even if they're rubbish puzzles. And that certainly can't be said truth everyone, but I think that what your original question about that our audience I think a lot of them fall into that category. They want the puzzles that are going to make them feel challenged and it creates a very big design hurdle to figure out how to make the same game fun for that audience and for people who haven't done so many escapism before or who aren't. There's puzzle orientated. In a family of four never-done escape room and 10 MIT puzzle geeks there's a big gap and also just between the number of people you have to give enough content to be everybody should be entertained. And I think our philosophy is to have a lot of puzzles in parallel rather than going with a sequential one and give it the possibility to change the difficulty of the puzzle if needed so we adapt the game to the players to the size of the party and to the experience of the party. So that gives a lot of range of things that we could do but you have to assign the puzzles that could be changed one way or the other to make it more difficult more easy and also to have this kind of like blueprint of a very parallel game and on top of that we start usually the design and when I say we with Marie she's 95% of the brain doing the sign part. So this 50/50 work that we do it's all about the wow moment of being able to actually deliver something that people will remember that is beyond the puzzles. The UBOT has a big one that people usually you will see in their reviews and then we try to ask please don't tell that in the review you're growing everybody else at party but the idea is like from the wow moment you construct the rest of the story. In terms of team building activity from a tech company maybe you know everybody's engaged but sometimes we have team building activity from HR and they just wander around three of them are into the puzzles the other seven are looking around and having a wow moment that actually people will remember that is like we try to create and know the science. There are a few hallmarks of Red Fox games that I want to explore one of them is the way that you have approached puzzles which you just talked about the next that I wanted to explore with you is the abundance of detail in your games. In most escape rooms that are heists the art gallery is packed with all sorts of public domain art that is very recognizable you made a number of different pieces that I personally classifies art which I love I love the amount of originality in not just the puzzles in the game design but actually the things that you put into the space what went into making some of the more iconic pieces in that space. Cully so one of the pieces that I like the most which I've actually made a couple of others of as well we have a Marilyn Monroe made out of pennies so of different copper U.S. sense different amounts of aging in them and that whole thing came about actually before we decided to make an escape room yet another story about that you just have my relationship with Nico and I should also mention I saw a little shock on PG's face when Nico said that we met six months before we started the escape room there is something to be said when meeting somebody later in life because you've kissed a lot of frogs by that point so then when you meet a keeper you're like okay done this is a keeper and so after six months we felt perfectly comfortable moving in. After Nico had successfully solved the puzzles and got the key to my apartment I helped him pack up his stuff from the place where he was living and he had this massive jar of pennies and he really wanted to leave it behind and I was like no this is amazing there's this huge jar of pennies you can't leave a jar it's like a jar of money it's like a pot of gold from the end of the rainbow and apparently Nico's sister had the same fight with him she had insisted that he take it to that apartment when he moved into the apartment anyway so needless to say I won that argument and we kept the pennies and so we had this very heavy glass jar of pennies but then having fought so hard to keep these pennies I thought like I had to justify all of that all of that fighting and so then I was like what can I do with a bunch of pennies and then I thought oh I can make penny art using Photoshop but if wizardry and pixelation I made a grayscale Marilyn and then you sort the pennies very tediously into different shades of copper tarnish and then you stick them all together and then you have a Marilyn made out of pennies and I made a second one that was actually a multi-nuthir king that we have in our waiting room also made out of pennies and yeah they ended up much nicer than I even expected it it would and we had them in our apartment for a while and they really made lovely wallot as well we've had many customers offering to buy Martin Luther King but he is not for sale you made almost all the art in there yourselves right yeah that's correct and where we didn't make it we credited the real creators so I think there's a bunch of fish which is just photos but I did search high and low to get these pretty beta fish my brother we have a puzzle with a giant painting of some superheroes my brother is actually the artist and our family and he lives in Germany he made that painting for me I you want to spoil the puzzle but basically I sent him a picture of one thing and I was like hey pick a few of these characters make me a painting and and he made this huge painting and rolled up and shipped it to me some of the other art there's something with the Murakami flowers these very iconic flowers with smiley faces on them and I just thought that was a nice way I had my original design was actually just going to be colored circles which was supposed to be a Nord to Damian Hurst he has his famous paintings with different colored circles because I was trying to like even though I didn't do verbatim copies of a real artist I did give a Nord to stuff that I found aesthetically pleasing out in the real art world and then yeah that kind of evolved from multicolored circles it's amazing when you're designing puzzles you and almost every puzzle in the art gallery fell into this category you start and you think it's going to be too easy and then you start later testing and you just have to refine it and refine it to make it easier and easier so the flower faces was partially to make that puzzle easier than the first version that was just colors and different colored rings so yeah we did I think we made everything that was in there just in different ways and it did occur to me when Nico was talking about we get these team building groups where some people are going to be into the puzzles I thought the least I could do was just make a pretty space for other people to wander around and look at the pretty art if they aren't that into the puzzles. That's a beautiful space. We're taking a moment to thank our sponsor Mordy. Mordy is a free app for discovering planning, tracking and reviewing, escape rooms, haunts and other immersive social outings and Mordy is now available for all to use on its fantastic website experience, iPhone app and its brand new Android app available now on the Google Play store. I believe in Mordy so much that I have a stake in it as an advisor. So David I know Mordy isn't just for enthusiasts they also have robust tools and a partner dashboard how does that work? Yeah, this is a feature that is available exclusively for escape room and haunt owners. They have to request access to their dashboard, but once they have it, they can do a lot of powerful things, including updating their listings. You can add new experiences in games. You can edit the ones that you already have up there, and you can update your photography. You should always update your photography. Good photos, sell games. They can also communicate back with the community. And this is the place that owners can go to respond to reviews. I strongly recommend that you learn how to do that before diving into responding to reviews. There's an art to it. You should practice it. And there are also a number of other features that can help you get more bookings, including listing your availability, adding promo codes, and getting sponsored placements. These features will help you stand out on Mordy. You can learn more at mordy.app/repod. That's our EpoD to sign up and get a special badge for our listeners. After I played your game, The U-Boat, I wrote a piece about your unique approach to modifying a directional lock, which may have caused some stress in your life. Can you explain what you were doing and why you don't do it anymore? I guess since I was the one who did it, I should yet again be the voice on your podcast, 30 to monopolize it. So, master who makes the master locks, they have always emblazoned their symbol in front of their locks. And so it was a directional lock, and I just felt it looked so modern. And one thing I went out of my way to do in designing The U-Boat was The U-Boat was supposed to be 1941, so we didn't want to have anything non-1941, the ridiculous degree of very similar to in that game, it just goes over everyone's head, including the fact that all of the books on the bookshelf were actually published before 1941, which is a whole other disaster story in and of itself. But when it came to the directional locks, I just thought, well, if I sand off the paint and you just do one experimental one, and it looks wonderfully brushed aluminium underneath once you sanded the paint off, no matter what the original color was. We'll put a photo in the show notes. Yes, oh, thank you. The problem with those master locks, and I think the reason that they got discontinued is that they are very fragile. And I would say probably only 50% of the ones we ever bought actually worked out of the package, because if you drop them, if you open them up, they've got very fragile plastic parts inside, and so if customers drop them, that already breaks them. And the problem was in the process of sanding off the paint, I think it just affected the mechanism a little bit, and they just don't have such a long half-life, so it's just a lot of love that goes into making this thing all the cool, pretty and brushed aluminium, and then the next thing that happens to customer drops it, and now all of your love is down the drain and you have to put a new one in. Just like we have a jar of pennies and I want to get rid of, we have a jar of broken locks in the lobby area, that is like all that one is in there, I'm pretty sure. But it is, we have, there's many master locks in there. And also from time to time we have the locks get jammed and the box is closed and then the players are inside the room, so we need to go and cut that lock, so they get an extra fun bit of sparks action because we actually come with an angle grinder and actually we cut the lock in front of them, we know that's for them to access the particular box that they need to. Lots of our customers have said that was the highlight of their game was watching us just make all of these indoor fireworks cutting off the lock. And note to any escape from owner out there, I wish I had done this sooner but I've now done it with almost every lock where it's possible, I have drilled a hole in the shaft and I have chained up the lock next to where it belongs, A, it makes resetting much easier because the locks don't go off wondering around the room and B, it massively extends the life of any directional locks, it stops getting dropped on the floor, so adding a little chain really has helped. So maybe I'll do some brushing of the locks again. That's fantastic. I just want you to know though that I appreciated the level of detail you put into the games, I think they're just beautiful. I do too. I also, we can talk about this in the Patreon bonus episode. I have some other thoughts about why the directional lock is being discontinued, we can explore that together later. Because they're actually fascinating if you ever look up the way that they work and the mechanism on the inside, people are amazed when you tell them it can actually take an infinite number of input directions. The mechanism in them is insane. I have opened one up as well. It is a nutty device and I can't believe that they pack as much into that thing as they do for as low a price point as those things sell for. I also wish that they would machine them with better parts, but that's a different story. We'll talk about it more in Patreon bonus episode. So we had you on the spoilers club to do a deep dive on the body shop, which is available for patrons at the $15 level and above. I'd love to hear the backstory on this particular game because it has such interesting origins. There was a time in human history that had a pandemic, a world pandemic in 2020. And some of our friends at the own scape rooms, they actually had to close down. Jeff was the owner of one scape room in a little town in Massachusetts, town of Webster out of the box. And the body shop was one of the games that we love the most from the area. It's a great game. It's a great game. The level of realism, we discussed with Jeff back in the day. There was a meetup of scape of owners. Before we were scape room owners ourselves, we sneak into a meetup of scape of owners and we spoke with a lot of them. And one of the things that we criticize in some places is they will have, for example, a plastic rock. You say, come on. Why didn't you just get a real rock? It's not a problem of price. So Jeff, he goes real all the way. You go to that body shop and it felt like a real body shop. That's the feeling that we had when we did it with Marie, he spends hundreds of hours to get in the little details and the real tools. And some of the tools actually are part of the shop. He used those tools for the body shop, escape room and for his building shop. So when he was closing down, it was a very sad story. We really wanted to say that game because we loved it. So we approach Jeff, he said, can we buy the game? And as I said, he was very happy that there was a new home for that game. So we started shipping everything from Webster to Cambridge, which is probably two hour trip, a couple of you holes. I'm not going to give anything away, but definitely there's a lot of stuff in there that when you are carrying it around on the streets, people look at you. We can send you a couple amusing photos if you want to add them to the bonus material, writing a motorcycle down the corridors in Bedfox. Oh, yes, please. We create everything. That space was like a blank space and we had to actually build the wall. And our footprint is a lot smaller. So we needed to actually change the game a lot, just to fit everything that was in Webster into the Cambridge location. But also Marie says, I want to change the story a little bit. In the original game, I felt like there were too many storylines. And I had played the game twice in its original location. And this speaks to how much I enjoy puzzles and set. And I have a tough time following storylines when I play games. That's like a part of my brain that is not well flushed out. I did not understand the storyline after playing this game twice in its original location. So I was like, OK, if we're going to redesign this game, I'm going to set people around the face with exactly what is happening in this story, but also remove some of the storylines. So this whole storyline of having a package delivered from an Amazon rival, it was like one too many storylines that was going on there because there was also a Girl Scout part and the plot twist part. And then I really felt as I was looking into the Girl Scouts because I wasn't one myself. I just felt like there was such a rich source of material there with Girl Scout badges that it was just such a pity not to really emphasize that. So that's when I decided, OK, I'm going to make my customers into the Girl Scouts. I'm going to make adult sized Girl Scout Sashes for everybody to wear because who doesn't love a grown man wearing a Girl Scout sash. I came up with a reason why the Girl Scouts are doing this thing that they are doing in the game, which was there was no reason for it in the original game. And I never ever intended to make an even vaguely horror themed game, but then when we inherited this one, there was no way to avoid the gory part of this story. If I had it to do over, I almost feel like it's a pity not to have emphasized the Girl Scout badges even more because there's just so many fun things you can do in an escape room with Girl Scout badges. And then the other part of redesigning it was definitely the evolution. I had learned so much more about our customers and about designing games by the time you got to that third one. You know, the first two games are for 10 people because it was pre-pandemic. We had mixed public groups and we also do get a lot of team building. So it's good to have those big games. But then now that we've gone to all private games, much of the escape from world, having a smaller room, but with enough content to at least keep these six people, the game works fine for seven people too. I had evolved and really wanted to make the difficulty adaptive in the games, but there are whole extra puzzles that pop open for larger groups or groups who are doing better. And I think That's what took longest in designing this game, is figuring out a way to incorporate those things without having bits of ghost puzzle left behind for those groups where the extra puzzles weren't then going to be incorporated. And also, there's puzzles you can skip when people are doing worse, but yeah, the badges helped. It was nice. Jeff finally got to play his own game, which is something he'd always wanted to do. What were the pros and cons of buying a game? Yeah, so buying somebody else's game, we really thought it was going to be a delightful shortcut to our next game, and it absolutely was not. One of the major difficulties was, Jeff had a much bigger space in which he had the original game. And it was a real basement, so he had, I don't know what you call them in America, Breeze blocks, he's big concrete blocks. Were the walls of the space in which he built it, so that was all just incredibly immersive. So finding a way to shrink his game into the size of the space that we had without shrinking the content, I wanted to make the space feel a bit bigger, so I managed to make our smaller space into sort of two and a half runs. The lighting and the room changes in such a way that I hope it feels a little bit like an extra room. But yeah, the amount of brain effort that it took to turn his game into something that I thought was going to work for us, work for our customers, our style, making it adaptive in the way that I just discussed. That took just as long, if not longer, then starting a game from scratch. But it's hard also to disentangle that from the mental malaise of being in the middle of the pandemic because there's just nothing more so fucking than peeing the rent and having no customers. And not being allowed to have customers, even though we had occasional phone calls of people who wanted to come, yeah, and then just wondering when we're going to be open and all that kind of stuff. It's very different when you buy a game like a franchise. Like you go, be company, has a package. This is the kid you go install it. We bought it from a friend, a game that we love, a friend that really wanted to help us. So having Jeff on board to actually do the moving, the installation, the creation of the new space, helped a lot. We of course paid for the game, we hire him to do it. But definitely he was like a team player with us doing 80 hours a day just to get the stuff done. And in that sense, it's very different experience from just saying buying a game, right? Here it quotes. At the same time, Jeff used a lot of electronics. I call it Jeff Tronics, that are a little bit more 12 volt relays with motors. So he was very good on much more basic logic trucks made with a bunch of relays. And our technology is completely different. I come from a software world. The brain of our games is actually running on server outside the game. And all the sensors they report to that brain. So I have to retrofit the game that he had to the technology that we had. It was a lot of moving parts at the same time. We had to move to a new location. We have to kind of change the game. And it's funny because at the beginning, Marie says, I want to change this two or three things, four things. But as soon as you change four, you need to change the fifth one just to make it cohesive. And then you-- this two other things. And at the end of the day, you change 90% of the game, one way or another. Between the technology, the restrictions of the space, the new storyline, everything. If I buy a game today, I think I have a lot of experience that learning process that we had from that particular experience. I think we will be completely different. I didn't talk about the upsides either. Because there are some upsides. I think that crazy storyline of the game, I would never have come up with that by myself. And I think it's just incredibly amusing. And it's the most unique storyline that we have at Red Fox. And when we have people from out of town and they're escaping enthusiasts, and they can only do one game, I always recommend that one, because it's something they won't have seen before. I probably haven't seen a 1941 submarine, but they probably seen a submarine. And also, some of the props-- like, it never would have-- and this thought was triggered by what Niko was saying. Because in our other games, with all of the way Niko has done the electronics, we can remotely solve various puzzles. If people are being slow and they aren't that into the puzzles anyway, we can pretend like they did things right. And then the puzzle gets solved. With a lot of the geophronics, that is not possible. People literally have to screw in the screws. They have to hit the right switches on the motorcycle. And we can't intervene in those electronics with the way Niko has done things to remotely solve it. But those actual props themselves, it was fascinating to me that there's something-- there is a sweet spot in the middle. That's not even a sweet spot. It's a type of puzzle which appeals to everybody. Because it's not actually difficult to solve what you're supposed to be doing. But it's physical in such a way that it causes delight to everyone. It's a feel thing. Yeah, it's a feel thing. But there's a puzzle where you have to hit various switches on the motorcycle. And then something happens. It's like everybody likes the fact that you're interacting with this motorbike and actually does something. There's another puzzle with a car window where you do everything right and you hit the button. And the car window comes up. And I think it's unexpected. But whether you've never done an escape room before and you're just trying to keep your 12-year-old entertained or you have done a bunch of escape rooms, the particular puzzles that Jeff came up with there appeal to that whole spectrum of people. And I think that was really special about the thing that we got from the original game. When you enter to the body shop, everything feels like decoration. Like sophisticated decoration. Because you have pieces of cars. You have a motorcycle and everything. And then when you're playing the game, it becomes the puzzle. The decoration itself surprises you saying, hey, this is a puzzle. I'm just showing you this and that. And I think that is a part that people really love. It's an unexpected, very well thought decoration that ends up being part of the game. And I think that we have it. We tried to do that with all our games. Definitely, we will not be able to do this level of welding and hard work that Jeff did before by our cell. Just because our skill set is not there. It's not the same to create a problem made out of wood that wants to be metal than to have the real metal thing that is a real door out of a car that used to be on the street for like years. And he has all the wear and tear. And it looks like a door. But then that is part of the puzzle, right? There's a pleasure in handling something that's mechanical and lovingly handcrafted. [MUSIC PLAYING] Buzzshot is a scaperom software, powering business growth, player marketing, and improving the customer experience. They offer an assortment of pre and post-game features, including robust waiver management, branded team photos, and streamlined review management for Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google Reviews, and Morty. Buzzshot now has integration with Repod Sponsor Cogs for all of your technology needs. I truly love all of our sponsors this season. And you know what I love best is that Buzzshot also integrates with Morty and Cogs. Picture this. The team fills out the Buzzshot waiver. And they're automatically sent a link to review the game on Morty. At the same time, the player's names or the team name can be automatically inserted into the game by the Cogs integrations to add a personalized and customized game experience. I truly think the possibilities are endless. Streamline your marketing and grow your escape room business. Repod listeners get an extended free trial and 20% off your first three months with no setup fees or hidden charges. Visit Buzzshot.com/repod. That's our EpoD to learn more link and details in the show notes. Creatively, the body shop feels like it took more risks than your previous two games. I personally think that those risks paid off. And it sounds like you feel that way, too. I'm curious what lessons you took away from the choices that were made in that game and the choices that you made in adapting it. I think I took away the risk taking you talking about, the risk taking on having a storyline that is somehow going to stick with people and that's just what it's owned delight in the storyline. I think it's the first one of all games that actually has a real storyline, right? The heist is like every heist movie of a scene. You start off in your hideout, you break into the art gallery, you find the thing. You solve all the puzzles, you find the thing that you are hasting. Our EpoD one, yes, it has its own little story and you end up having to dive the EpoD and resurface the EpoD. But essentially, if you're on the EpoD, you need to find the ending, the code books, then we can get off the EpoD. And this one has a proper storyline where if you're paying sufficient attention, you can actually even see it evolving as you go through. Many people, there's just one moment of where they're like, aha, that's what's happening in the story. But I think with the next game that we're working on, I'm really striving to have that kind of scene, somewhat fantastical, putting people into a different character that they are playing in the game. But it's more fantastical in the way that like a adult being girl scouts doing what they're doing in this game is obviously not real life. Whereas you can still imagine yourself as a British Navy officer on a U-boat. This is, yeah, I think people find delight in that. The storyline is definitely memory. I'm like you, I don't always pick them up in the moment. And the thing I also liked about it was that unraveling the narrative was also a slight puzzle in and of itself, right? You're kind of like, oh, this is, now I understand what's happening, it's not just all served to you on a silver platter. - Yeah, a couple of the puzzles, which are part of the expanded game, they definitely help flesh out the storyline. So it's always a pity to skip one of them in particular. You're basically identifying wanted people on a poster. And that's kind of early on in the game, you're not quite sure how this fits into the whole story. You're getting maybe an inkling and most people don't get to see that puzzle. But I think there was a lot that we learned just on many different levels about the difficulty, adjustment and the fun storyline. - And also, I don't know if this is relevant to that, but we have seasons of players. That means we can totally see like July, you know, vacation, there's a lot of kids, families, and we are into, we need to do something in the city. And then we have September, October, where the students are coming back. We live in Cambridge, so there's a lot of schools around here. And then we have kind of November, December, all the team building activities with all the companies finishing up the year trying to do a company outing, right? So you can see that even though the game is the same game, when we are game mastering, we enable and disable things through the game, you can see the three different games, I will say, that we end up happy. And some of those groups, the storyline is not that important for them. And some of the other groups, they are there to do the puzzles. I don't know how to explain that. - One other thing that I just remember, which was really surprising to me about this game. So I always thought that this is the country of haunted houses. This is a country full of people who like spooky stuff and that's going to be incredibly appealing to a lot of folks. And Halloween, and we're going to get really fully booked in the body shop. And that is absolutely not true. If you look at the evolution of kind of escape rooms across the world, Europe very much seems to have a significant fraction of the game moving towards the more story orientated, less puzzle orientated. And very much like the spooky creepy horror dreaming, I am amazed what woose is so many of our customers are. Like they are just, they can't just, yes, there's some blood and gold, but I think it's painting plastic. It's not, and yet they're just, they're making such a fuss. And like they're so worried, even though we're very explicit on the website. No dump scares. It's just got a gory prop. People are very worried about that. And we actually have had to add to the game shroud that we put over the gory prop for some groups because they're just too weirded out by it. I was so wrong in that assumption we don't get extra bookings at Halloween in that game. And yeah, I would not do another scary or Halloweeny game again. I think that might be a regional thing for you. I think because we have haunted houses and maybe because we have Salem, Massachusetts has a lot of this kind of crowd will go to those places. And then you have the scaperum crowd that is a different set of people. And I feel like in other places, you don't have the separation of haunted houses, scaperums. You have a mix experience of both of the horror spooky thing. That certainly seems to be the case in Europe where they don't have the haunted house culture and escape rooms seem to have stepped into, fulfill that and other things at the same time. Nico, you build all of the technology at Red Fox. How has your approach to this changed over the years? No much. I used to be a systems engineer. The last company that I worked for was a DNA sequencing company. Before that, it was an tech company. Before that, it was other big systems and usually in bigger systems, there's a lot of failures. And the anecdote that I tell everybody is like, well, if you have hard drives that they fail once every two years and then you have 700 hard drives, which is a low number for a data center, you end up having a hard drive failure every single day. Places like at Google, they will have piles of hard drives that have to be destroyed manually. So probably they have somebody with three PhDs just destroying hard drives all day because they have to get rid of the sensitive information in there. When you come from that background, it's completely different how you approach the resiliency of software, basically. So there's a lot of systems that I was already familiar with in the networking communications. All of that knowledge I got applied to the creation of the technology that we have right now at Red Fox. So for me, it was very natural to think a wireless connectivity because I just have one network with every single problem. And I just make the level of resiliency that I need just like it will be transmitting genes from China to United States. Kind of that was in my mind when I told this to other fellow business owners slash escape promoters, they say I was completely insane. And the reason for this is most of them, they just run a wire because they can run a wire from one front to another and people like the great months at Bokseroo, they actually have hundreds of wires. And when you go to other places, I did a backstage tour in Palace game, for example. They have millions of wires. Some of the games that they have Edison, they have a lot of tech and everything is wire. So I have a couple of pictures of the huge amount of wires coming down into this. I would say tens of, if not hundreds of electronics. That is a complexity that I didn't want to have. So I have some other type of complexity that I'm dealing with, but basically it's at the software level. So technology is still there. We use all this, but in terms of design or experimentation of the beta testing phase, it's much, much easier for us to move things around in the games. So we have from time to time, we try a prop on this side, it doesn't work. We just unplug it from here. We plug it over there with 12 volts basically going all over the place. And that's all we needed to do to actually do experimentation. That flexibility, you don't have it with other technologies, basically. If you put wires all over the place, it becomes a little bit more rigid to actually define the game. And when we create the game with Marie, she goes back and forth in a lot of ideas. So being able to actually execute, we can do this, we can do that. I want this sometimes in a piece of paper. We share the breakfast that she tells me in a piece of paper something she wants to do. And having something ready, like a noon to test it, that really shortens the time of us testing puzzles in general. There's a build of face that we know that we're going to be doing a lot of changes. So it's good to have that flexibility. But my IP basically is at the software level. So creating this brain that controls every part of the game, has a state of the game. And when the players they interact with the sensors, that goes into this kind of like brain. I just sound like a little programming language that I describe what the game is. So you have an if this and that, but you can map it out in a graph, everything. And this comes all the way back in 2019. When with Marie, we will go to scaperoms. And we will, after the game, we will go to a bar, get a beer and try to map out the experience. So there's a lot of graphs that I was creating in a formal language to actually know what was going on. And then from there, we say like, oh, this is the game that we want. And then I created the language to actually read that to make the game itself. He can also reach things on high shelves. So he's got extra skill theft. But also the next game, I've been researching on tech to actually create this delightfulness, like sound and kind of synchronization of sound, music, props, have one consistent real-time feed of everything that is happening. Because I can see like the bigger companies they have this. You go, some of them, they're very delightful, the cinematics that they have. And so far, the lower tier of scaperoms, they jerry rigged. This is connected to that and this is connected to that. But there's a lot of gaps. If we can make a solid experience where everything's connected. I feel from my perspective, we can actually go up and down in the storyline. And it will be much more seamless transition, basically. Again, we are developing everything that I'm saying right now. Marie's looking at me very likely and thinking is there's so much to do. One of the things I noticed about your games when I visited last year is that your games have all been built into an old, very unusual building. So what were some of the unique challenges of building an escape room in this space? And how have you conquered them? I guess the biggest challenge was just upfront that we had to invest an enormous amount of money to bring everything up to code. So the boxing gym that we mentioned that had been down there, they'd been occupying the space for a decade. And somehow the previous lease that they had managed to sign, the person who created the lease on the landlord's behalf, forgot to put in a rent escalator. So they were paying less than a third of what we paid day one per month. So we didn't kick them out because we came along, they just couldn't pay market rent. But they had not invested anything in the space at all. Absolutely everything had to be redone from all the electric wiring was like old wiring. We had to take out all of the sewage, all the plumbing had to be redone, all of the lighting. There were holes in the ceiling. They used to be a dunk in donuts upstairs who would have have frequent floods which would then come through the ceiling and be incompatible with our business. So up front we just had to bring the space up to modern day and have all the sprinkler heads in the right places and all the ventilation outlets. Because it's an old building, right? I remember you gave me a tour. In the bottom level you said used to be like old stables or something. Which is mind blowing to me because I live out in California. No, you don't have anything, any buildings that are older probably than a hundred years. Yeah, and I think you must have seen them. I can put these in the show notes. We have a bunch of photos of mass av, which is Massachusetts Avenue, the street that we are on. We have photos of that whilst they were building the red line subway, which runs a long mass ab. So right behind the wall, because we're in the basement, before it became the subway, they actually, yes, our space was old stables and they would open up into a space that was underground there. And actually in the years before we moved in, they had infilled the space between the subway line and our front wall underground with concrete, because there was really not that much soundproofing. And in all our games, you can hear the subway going past a couple of times an hour just because of our location. It's an old building so they managed to get grandfathered in with a non-handicap accessible. So it is handicap accessible if you've got 24 inches or less wheelchair, but we really wanted our games to be accessible and they all are. We even had lined people playing our games, which was an interesting challenge, but they loved it so they played all our games. But yeah, having to turn away people who have like bigger wheelchairs is unfortunate. We have brought people in through the back, through the freight elevator, but even the freight elevator is very old and rickety. It's one of those ones that you see an old New York City movies where you have to pull the shutters across only it has a very small weight capacity. So we can't bring anything terribly heavy down into the basement. We just got the motorcycle in there by the like skin of our teeth, but that was as big as you can get in the basement. And we also got the safe we have in the Umo, we have an old safe and it was a funny story because we got that safe almost for free. Just think the weight over a thousand pounds. It's a very small safe, but it's just it's like solid cost iron incredibly incredibly heavy. And so we actually had to get like a 15 foot truck the smallest one you can get with a ramp and then even set up a pulley system in order to get the safe down the ramp without getting crushed by this thing. Yeah, it was a insane moving this incredibly heavy thing, which was very small. He had one four times as big. He offered us money to take it away from him, but our freight elevator could not have used it. It would have taken four strong men just to move it along a flat surface, net alone, navigating everything else. We didn't get our massive free safe, but the saves are very beautiful. There's no such thing as a free safe. It's indeed not. Are you working on a new game and can you share any details? Yes, we are working on a new game. So we did a little California trip where we played by the recommendation of Matthew Stein, who works in RIA with you guys. He recommended a couple of competitive games and a couple of points based games, which we played just after we finished the body shop as a little research, dash, congratulations, we finally finished the body shop trip. And we discovered from that, so one of our philosophies, which we haven't mentioned so far is we really try very hard to get most of our customers to the wind state. There's many ways of achieving this. One of them is giving unlimited clues. Another one is having adaptive difficulty in the games. But then when we were in California playing the competitive games, we realised that the problem with the competitive game is off the people's lose. And for many reasons, we didn't like that dynamic in the field. People get more disgruntled when they lose something and they start picking the whole experience apart about why it wasn't unfair for them to have lost. So we immediately, even though we had done an awful lot of design work on this competitive game, and it was going to have this delightful scoring mechanism where you would get marbles out of all of the games and you'd put them into this little marble kind of rubbed gold burble machine in the middle and then whoever had the most marbles at the bottom in the pot at the end would win that all got abandoned. And then we thought, okay, it'd be played another game, which I think David has just played called undercooked. And we thought, yeah, a points-based game could work very nicely because it's another mechanism whereby you could a) have a spectrum of difficulties of the puzzles. Finally, we can have a whole bunch of puzzles that will appeal to kids, which right now, younger kids, there's just not enough to keep them entertained in our games. And we have turned away so much business. We have sent thousands of customers to Boderborg and Level 99 in Inatic, just to give people recommendations of stuff that would be more child-friendly. We can have those puzzles, but also some more intricate, brainy puzzles, which I wouldn't normally be able to have in a regular escape from just because you'd have to clue people through them. So like this, if you don't have to solve every puzzle, there'll be a nice spectrum. So we thought, okay, we'll keep that part of it. And so the current setup, and it could well change, so don't hold me to this. The feel of the game to be like Harry Potter-esque, not Magic Theme Detall, but that kind of fantasy world like Wes Anderson, like the movie "Hugo", this very pretty set, very atmospheric, they'll start off quite dark and then they'll get incrementally lighter and more delightful things will start coming on and moving as you've grasped through the game. And so this is the Ministry of Memories, which is where memories go before they completely fade away and have forgotten forever. This is the last place they might be retrieved. And so you are working there trying to save these memories, and within each memory is embedded the name of the person that belonged to. It's like this fantasy world where you are saving memories from fading away. I love it. It's a charming concept. I can't wait to play it. In my imagination, it's beautiful. And in my imagination, it's replayable, but we'll see. Does your imagination have a food high ceilings? In my imagination, I have 50 foot high ceilings, which I would love to have. Oh, more escape removers with ceiling envy. Yeah, such ceiling envy. I hate our low ceilings so much. And also we have a software that is like the space itself that we have to work with. It's very restrictive. Like making something magical and beautiful in that constraint is very challenging. But it's a challenge, that's all. We can buy you to the challenge. Yeah. What's the best way for people to connect with you? Come and say hello. People want to email us. We are, I think we are some of the most responsive, most willing to talk to other people, owners that there are out there. And I think we've spoken to several people before they started their own escape rooms and given them everything that we know and have learned. But if anybody ever wants to chat, they can just email us. Hello at redfoxescapes.com, which is both of us. We do have an Instagram is redfoxescapes. We do have a Facebook page, this red box Boston, if I remember correctly. But I'll be honest, we are older people. We are not into social media that much. It doesn't have the attention it should have. The web page redfoxescapes.com is the one that you buy the tickets, but doesn't have a lot of content. It's just, you go to the web page you buy the tickets. And I think that just like Marie said, this is in real life entertainment. We really like people to come all the way to Cambridge and play our games. The way to get the most out of redfox is coming to the location and play a game. And we put a lot of love in the real life venue rather than all the digital outlets that we're trying to get better at that stuff. So we are hiring for somebody to do marketing as well as game mastering right now. Fantastic. And I also agree people should go out and play your games because they are wonderful. Thank you so much. Marie, Nico, thank you for joining us. Thank you for speaking at Recon last year. Thank you for being such wonderful and delightful creators and for being so open with your process and your learnings. It's been a pleasure having you on. Yeah, thanks for creating Recon so close of redfox because we were like next door there. That helped a lot. It was a very long day for me running games, but definitely was very good to actually meet all the people there. I love this industry. I think people are very generous. We didn't know when we were getting into the industry. You don't know how jealous people were in a bee, non sharing secret. It's very life of to find other owners that they just want you to succeed. We need more scape rooms, better scape rooms. I don't want 50% of our customers saying I never done a scape room. I want 100% of our customers saying I've done hundreds of scape rooms. I just want to know your game or know your experience. And that is something that we all have to work on. You know I agree with you. The reality of skate pod is produced by Teresa Piazza with support by Lisa Spira and Richard Burns. We're edited by Steve Ewing of Stand Inside Media, music by Ryan Elder, logo by Jeanine Proct. And all of this is brought to you by ROOMISCAPEARTHIST.com. Your home for well-researched, rational and reasonably humorous, the scape room and immersive gaming content and events. You've made it to the end of the episode. I'm guessing that you had a good time because otherwise you would have bailed. How about you go and take that good time straight over to Spotify or Apple Podcast and leave us a five star review. Help other people find what we're doing. It really helps us out and think about who you just helped out by helping them find a podcast that they're really going to enjoy. Go do it. Thank you Well folks, it is that time. You know exactly the one I'm talking about It's the one where the desperate content creator tells you please please join our patreon. Please I know you hear it from everybody, but it means so much to us the amount of time and energy and money that we put into producing Shows like this to the degree that we produce them and all of the other things that we're doing It just takes a lot and our patrons every single one of them matters at every single level So if you have the money available and it's not gonna be a hardship for you Please consider backing us on patreon and if it is gonna be a hardship, please don't and backing us at the five dollar level gets you access to the ria discord and it also gets you our bonus after show The show goes on for like another 40 to 50 minutes usually a lot of times we have the guests joining us I mean that's that's longer than that cup of coffee will last you at the 15 dollar level you also get access to our spoilers club Here we take deep dives into iconic well-known escape rooms and we're joined by the creators who come in and gives us Exclusive behind the scenes Directors cut-stale commentary. This is some of my favorite content to produce because I love talking about escape rooms in full You can learn more at patreon.com/roomescapeartist Link in details in the show notes We'd like to thank our highest level patrons Panicroom escapeism Olivier escape Jonathan Driscoll breakout games Derek Tam Joshua Rosenfeld Byron Delmonico Keystone escape games Scott Olson Paul Aswan Rex Miller and the Ministry of the Kiliarities Thank you for your ongoing support And while we're on the subject. Thank you to our new patrons Chris Post Jeff Keys and Jessica schoolman Thanks for the support In February it was my mom's birthday and she and her husband drove to Amsterdam from England and At first I was like oh mom we need to come and see you because her husband's not well So I was like there's a nice excuse to spend time with them and then two seconds later I was like oh my god, Amsterdam is full of amazing escape rooms So then it became much more of a escape room and mom trip at dot park and I actually looked up and you've played this and I wonder if you've had the same element in your game But I would say the four or five games we played up until that point they all started with a long video Introduction with the characters telling some backstory And even though they hadn't told us too going into this game we go in and it seems to be a funeral parlor There's a big coffin in the middle of the room and there's a bunch of urns And then there's a video playing up in the top right hand corner And I was a third person in the room But the boys are watching the videos was like okay fine I'm just gonna stand here and watch the video too And it made some sense it was some guy in a hospital bed So I was like okay, we're gonna find out the backstory of the guy in the coffin And this is gonna all gradually make sense I'm just standing there for four minutes and like the story is not really going anywhere There's somebody in a hospital bed and the screen is not very big and then there's two nurses talking to him And then at some point the doctor comes in and the doctor has this incredibly big German accident And the guy in the bed is like oh are you gonna kill me? Why aren't you gonna help me? Or doing anything? And then at some point I'm like guys are you sure this isn't a porn movie? And then I was like I was gonna stop playing So we start playing and then next thing we look up Five minutes later and it's just a full-on porn movie playing in the corner of the game For absolutely no reason whatsoever Like a very 70s I don't think they showed any distaste to all body parts or whatever They definitely show Oh, they definitely I saw some some juggling tits at some point But it was just too funny that we had spent like literally five minutes at the beginning of the game Just watching this porn movie un-bunished to us To the credit of the game it was a great game forget about this anecdote He was a great game the story and everything but it was just like yeah It was one of those immersive experience type games in Amsterdam rather than the Puzzle one But yeah I don't think we're gonna top that probably in any of our future game experiences And that game is the end made by Dark Park, Kice, Hughes Owner there he's a friend of the show Phenomenal game