The 2025 ERChamp qualifiers are in the books! Congratulations to the teams that finished the fastest and will be making their way to Sofia, Bulgaria for the in-person final round this fall.
Rewinding a tad for those who aren’t familiar with ERChamp- ERChamp is short for Escape Room World Championship, which gives thousands of players from around the world a shot at solving puzzles for eternal glory. For the past several years, we’ve followed the same formula: start with an online qualifier round, with the fastest teams getting a chance to compete in an in-person final challenge.
I’m a puzzle designer for the qualifier round, which in some ways probably results in me writing about ERChamp less than I otherwise would. Especially before each year’s contest, but even after it (for the impact it might have on subsequent years), I don’t want to accidentally reveal an insight about my or others’ design approaches that would give any kind of advantage to participants who know me.
All that being said, this year was a fun one to design. Players could probably tell how much fun the design team had, and in my personal opinion this year hit new high marks for the coordination between the game’s various sequences so that it felt like a cohesive and coherent experience. Though I’m a designer, I got to have some fun running through beta testing and solving drafted versions of all of the game’s puzzles, including the ones I created.
First off, if you played the game, yes, the Sun and the Moon puzzle killed me during testing, too! I tested solo and had to pause for the night and come back later to close it out. I don’t know if the puzzle changed before the final, but at the time I tested, the window panes were partitioned into vertical sets of two, and I spent a LOT of time combining colors within those sets. In retrospect, the final answer made a lot of sense, but latching onto a visual clue in the wrong way can be a death sentence in a competition like this. Based on where the progress bars stopped before hints got released, this was the most common challenge this year.
Secondly, I was a bit surprised by the biggest sticking points I saw commented on in the ERChamp Discord. I didn’t see any stuck comments on what I thought were the two hardest challenges after Sun & Moon. It’s possible those puzzles were tweaked after initial testing (one of the challenges I had was due to wording and I tried multiple solutions based on my interpretation of it) but I’m impressed at the aplomb with which most teams seemed to make it through the Greenhouse stage. It seemed based on Discord comments that the Pipes puzzle late in the game was the next biggest blocker, but I loved that puzzle and felt the mechanism behind it was very clear and intuitive.
Thirdly, I continue to be impressed by the distribution of top-performing teams by country. Teams from five different countries make up the top ten, with no country having more than three representatives. In spite of removing the Polish version of the game this year and switching to English only, a healthy two teams from Poland qualified for the finals. It’s always a point of emphasis to keep the games fair and avoid potential language / culture barriers in the puzzle, and the results this year indicate to me that our efforts here were a big success.
Every year ERChamp grows and matures, and it’s been a blast being part of this journey. Looking forward to seeing the adventure that unfolds on October 20th in Sofia!!!
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