It’s been a busy March for us here at Buzzshot! Between working on some exciting new updates for our escape room customer service platform, we’ve also been travelling all around the world. In particular, last month the Buzzshot team attended the TransWorld Interactive Entertainment Show in St Louis, MO. Here’s a wrap on how TransWorld 2024 went.

TransWorld is one of the world’s largest conferences dedicated to the interactive entertainment industry. Originally titled the Room Escape Show, TransWorld now covers a wide range of industries under that umbrella. Not just escape rooms, you’ll now find vendors and industry leaders from axe throwing, VR, paintball, laser tag, arcades, and absolutely everything in between. Here at Buzzshot we’ve been attending TransWorld for several years, and it’s always a delight to see the conference grow and change with the needs of the industry. This year in particular we spotted a lot of familiar faces amongst the new vendors and attendees, and there in the middle of it all at Booth #2223 you’d find Tom and Carl.

Designing an Escape Room Puzzle Hunt at TransWorld

This year however, we decided to do something a little different at our booth at TransWorld. To celebrate the conference’s escape room roots, we designed an interactive “puzzle hunt” for attendees to take part in. A nine-part scavenger hunt that would take participants across TransWorld in search of clues, solving puzzles, and collecting tokens along the way. Attendees who wanted to take part could start the puzzle hunt at any time by picking up a booklet at any participating booth.

The idea was simple, players would travel around to different booths around TransWorld and solve a puzzle at each one. Upon completion, they’d receive a sticker with that company’s logo for their booklet. A filled booklet meant a finished game!

The team at Escape Room Novi have solved the puzzles!

With this puzzle hunt we wanted to encourage visitors to travel round to all parts of the conference floor and solve puzzles at a number of different booths. In order to claim the sticker, players would need to verify their answers with the booth holder. Each one of the participating booths were spread out and each puzzle had a unique flare relevant to the booth. For example:

Buzzshot - At our own booth, we encouraged players to make the most of our branded team photography feature. To take part in the puzzle, players would snap a photo of themselves with Buzzshot, as if posing for a post-game team selfie. The customisable escape room banner that appeared in their photo held the key to solving the puzzle

COGS by Clockwork Dog - At our good friends COGS’s booth, players had to push a button to open a box. Sounds simple? Think again. For this one, players had to get hands-on in the software to solve it, and actually build the puzzle before they could solve it, luckily this is super easy with COGS’ incredible software.

Spooky Mirror - These interactive designers specialise in creating fantastic talking paintings and spooky ghost mirrors that liven up any escape room environment. It was therefore very fitting that to solve the puzzle players had to explore their booth and simply “Seek the Wizard”. Spooky!

Chaos FX - Minding the blood spatter and realistic limbs, Chaox FX’s puzzle had players looking for “hidden names” inside seemingly innocuous sentences.

Mind Games - These creators of many escape room scenarios and builds had a puzzle perfect for the escape room enthusiasts among us. An escape room and TransWorld themed crossword puzzle to solve, with a secret message hidden inside. In fact, if you’d like to try solving it yourself, have a go here.

Thrill Builders / Halloween FX - These escape room prop designers had a ‘what links’ style of puzzle, mixing up various single-word codes and asking players to find the missing ‘link’ between them.

Intelligent Entertainment - Designers of boutique escape rooms, mini golf courses and more, the Intelligent Entertainment puzzle challenged players to explore TransWorld. Its puzzle involved using the map to trace a series of directions between locations encoded with riddles, drawing a shape in the process. Problem was it turned out the event wasn't giving out paper maps this year! Luckily the folks at Intelligent Entertainment did some quick thinking and directed players to one of the large wall mounted maps situated around the venue.

Weldwood Marketing - A marketing agency who likes to think outside the box, the Welwood Marketing booth puzzle challenged players to think outside the box… Or rather, the QR code. A series of encoded instructions allowed players to navigate a maze of emojis and draw out a secret number.

Smithworks Creative Arts - Last but not least, the Smithworks team challenged players to solve the mystery of the Maya calendar, an interactive exhibit set up at their TransWorld stall. This brilliant puzzle prop went on to win TransWorld’s “Best New Product” award.

Photo (c) Smithworks Creative Arts

That’s a Wrap on TransWorld Conference for Escape Rooms

We’re thrilled with how our puzzle hunt was received by the attendees, and we extend a big thankyou to all the participating booths and everyone who took the time to play the game. We’d also love to offer a big shout out to the organisers of TransWorld for putting on another fantastic event in 2024. If you haven’t been to TransWorld yet, we’d highly recommend it - it’s a great opportunity to see the latest vendors and products on the market, as well as to network with escape room businesses across the USA.

Speaking of escape room businesses, this year we noticed a common theme among vendors and attendees were questions about increasing the average spend per customer. It’s a big challenge in the escape room industry, and one we’ve discussed plenty on this blog. Talking to business owners at TransWorld revealed that many choose to upgrade their sites and add new builds to create an ultra-immersive environment so a player spends longer on site, and many others opt for diversifying an escape room’s offering with other immersive activities like VR, axe throwing, or quiz-style activities.

With this in mind, we were thrilled to be able to demonstrate just how Buzzshot helps with this by putting the customer at the centre of the experience. Buzzshot supports thousands of escape rooms around the world, and we’re proud to be delivering an innovative system that supercharges the customer experience, expertly designed just for escape room businesses like yours.

If you didn’t get a chance to speak to us at TransWorld, or would like to try out Buzzshot for yourself, sign up now for a free trial below.

Until next year, TransWorld 👋