About

What is a Puzzle Drifter?

It’s a big world. There are roughly 50,000 escape rooms in it, but even most enthusiasts are only aware of a handful of highly publicized rooms outside their home markets. As we travel, we delight in visiting escape rooms in locations a little bit off the beaten path to find the gems hiding outside major markets. We primarily travel within the United States due to the logistics of traveling frequently but are looking to continue exploring more worldwide as well.

We also seek to get a truly unbiased experience and don’t advertise the fact that we blog about our experiences before we play the games. If asked directly by the game master, we’ll share how many rooms we’ve done and that we have a blog, but we prefer to enter the room as the average customer. We’ve played blockbuster games where the game master disappears on us, and we’ve played unheard of games where every customer gets the red carpet treatment, and this is an important part of the customer experience that’s hard to measure if we come with a reputation.

We don’t write about every room we play, but as we find the opportunity, we write about some of the most unique puzzle experiences we have, escape rooms or otherwise. Geocaches, murder mysteries, puzzle hunts, Rubik’s cubes- there are a lot of exciting puzzles out there.

As we write about rooms, we keep in mind that different people have different perspectives on puzzles, and we call out as much as possible who will appreciate what parts of the experience. Some escape room enthusiasts focus on the narrative first, while others are invested in finding the right mix of puzzles to evoke teamwork and identify leadership traits. We appreciate all these perspectives and celebrate the different ways puzzle experiences can reward their players.

Brian Gondek

Brian adheres to the idea that every challenge is a puzzle to be solved. Whether it be how to get to the airport on time, how to launch a new product, or how to find a way out of a locked room, there’s an opportunity to break down the problem and find a clever way through.

Brian is a leader in customer experience and data-driven decision making in the financial services industry and focuses on driving business success through finding objective and quantifiable ways to make customers happier.