One of my favorite online contests, ERChamp, is approaching rapidly! November 13, 2021 is the date.
ERChamp is an online escape room game championship. Simple as that- teams of up to four race against the clock to complete an online escape room first.
The competition is stressful in the best way, since every minute counts. Last year, we had a few stressful missteps that cost us a lot of time. In the qualifier round, we got stuck on one puzzle that only one player could access at a time, forcing us to a bottleneck on how many solutions we could try. In the finals, we spent way too much time missing a tiny item sitting in a drawer.
I’m not complaining about it- far from it. Challenges like this get me excited to improve for the next go-around. My team took 41st in the finale, and I’m looking to move up much higher this year.
So what are we doing differently? For one thing, no one on my team had done a puzzle hunt prior to last year’s ERChamp. It was ERChamp that sparked our interest in puzzle hunts to begin with. Not that I expect ERChamp to have any of the puzzle hunt staples like metapuzzles or cryptic crosswords, but having gone through puzzle hunts, we’ve found additional ways to stay organized and communicate more clearly on challenges like this.
I guess that’s pretty much it, actually. Aside from staying more organized, we’re not changing that much. Maybe we’ll think through ahead of time how we coordinate when there’s a one-person-only puzzle, how we divide and conquer when we suspect we missed a small item, or when and how brute force makes sense.
I mentioned it before, but I’m really looking forward to this one! The puzzle design was great last year, and my favorite puzzle contests are ones that don’t demand more than a few hours of my time. ERChamp hits all the right marks!
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