Chad Stratton
You may not be sure you are in the right place at first, arriving at an anonymous seeming office park- but give them a chance. Having completed both Ransom and Electrovault, Countdown Games takes an artisan approach to their rooms that elevates them above their competitors. While the narrative involved different interests (Music vs Electrical Engineering), you don't need to know anything about those areas- it can in fact be a detriment, distracting you from the underlying puzzles with your own knowledge of trivia. While the rooms were different, the designers have a few tells- they like to provide unlockable new sub-rooms; the clues to progress beyond your current subroom are sometimes "unused" items from earlier rooms; they like puzzles involving different modalities; they expect you to have a charged cellphone and be able to use the base-line tools it provides. But they real genius of the designers lies in giving enough challenges, of enough different kinds, to show you other people's strengths and display your own. I've done a fair number of team building exercises, but this was by far the most impactful in terms of leaving with more mutual respect than we entered with.
