Software for Escape Rooms

How can I take great pictures for my Escape Room players?

You will need a decent quality phone or camera and, crucially, a Games Master who can make good use of these tools to take great pictures. It's worth spending time planning how your photos are taken. You want a good backdrop that preferably advertises your escape room and you want a high quality photograph that fits everyone in. Framing and composition are important and you will want to take more than one picture so that you can select the best.

You want a picture players will show off and treasure and share on social media? They'll advertise your escape room far and wide with the best marketing ploy of all - personal recommendation.

Think props from the game and don't be afraid to marshal people into the right position - use all those tricks that professional photographers use. You can say "Say Cheese" to get the smiles but try and think of something that is relevant from your Escape Room so that you keep it fresh and not, well, cheesy. 

Take a look at Buzzshot's Blogpost for some hilarious failures and some good tips on making those portraits count

Given that what you mainly want is to brand your photos and ensure people know where the team pictures come from, Buzzshot is a great option which can do all this automatically.

What's the best booking software for Escape Rooms?

 This article, Most Popular Escape Room Booking Systems analyses quite a few booking systems on the market. 

Here's three to look at that we picked out from their longer article:

• Xola -booking software with a customized module for Escape Rooms, and the article above seemed to rate it for that fact.
• Nowescape is a system that the article above again rated very highly - although it does seem they wrote the article. They are an aggregate Escape Room booker so you don't buy their system, you just point people at it.  
• Resova (which includes Bookify now)  -  is a fairly big player in the bookings industry and does have some special features for Escape Rooms

In looking at these think cost obviously, but also think scalability - how big will your business be in 3 or 4 years time?  Taking online bookings is going to be critical for your Escape Room business so finding the right one is very important.

What's the best control software for Escape Rooms?

If you are using lots of electronic gizmos, Arduiono, Raspberry Pis, intelligent lights and more then software that integrates these into your story-line is worth the investment.

There are a number of players in this market - all of them would require an in depth look, so we'll just summarise below.

Do take heed that integration with games room hardware such as Arduino, Raspberry Pis etc. will often require programming knowledge. 

COGS is a system that’s used by the biggest Escape Room companies in the UK as well as many large immersive theatre productions. COGS was made by escape room designers Clockwork Dog, so is built with operators & game masters in mind. COGS is a good combination of plug and play hardware working with easy to use software which means you don’t need to understand electronics or programming to use it.

Escape Room Supplier's offering does not require any specialized programming knowledge and allows you to track and message your players throughout the game, integrating with Universal controllers if required. It's certainly a cheaper monthly rate than some.   

Escape Room Master is a browser based management tool that offers video messages, Arduino, Raspberry Pi integration, as well as a add-on for waivers and digital marketing.

M3 is programmable to link all our devices and players via logical trees and timelines, providing an automatic interactive experience. Appearances can be changed in html, you can even add stuff with the c# scripting ability.

While the above have a monthly fee payable applications, Houdini is a one off purchase. It allows you to communicate with and trigger the various stages of your game. It too has the ability to interact with games room hardware.