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Jason

About Jason

https://crossroadsescapegames.com

I grew up in the high desert and went to several colleges around so-cal. Tested out of most of my core classes for my English degree so I spent most my time learning about literature, psychology, and philosophy. Took every creative writing course I could and put most of my efforts into my writing via clubs, classes, and meet ups. After college, I continued studying and writing for pleasure. Eventually I used my unique collection of knowledge and skill to publish a book. I published Darkness and Joy last year and have been working on the sequel most of this year. I have been working at Cross Roads Escape Games since September 2016 and I am currently a Manager and Game Master.

Posts by Jason Sakal:

Happy halloween!

Halloween at Cross Roads!

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Greetings and salutations dear readers. It is I, Zoltar the Great, the seer of secrets, the prevailer of spooky season greetings, and your guide to a thrilling Halloween!

As always, Cross Roads Escape Games is the place to be on Halloween. If you are looking for a thrilling survival adventure you can test yourselves in the Hex Room. The Hex Room is a thrilling experience where you and your team will be split into six different rooms and forced to work as a team in order to survive.

If you prefer your experiences to be more on the psychological side, then you can admit yourselves to our Psych Ward. In this game you will be pitted against one another as two teams compete to earn as many points as you can within the hour. The trick is that you do not know who is with you and who is working against you. So, bring your thinking caps and prepare to dissect your friends… behavior!

And of course, there is always the greatest room on earth… the Fun House, where yours truly has been known to assist circus hopefuls in their path to becoming magnificent magicians. This room is suggested for those that are not looking for a scare but still wish to test their wits in an escape room.

And if you are feeling very brave then you can help my newest friend, Ruby in our newest adventure, The Séance. I have talked to Ruby at lengths and even got a reading from her. I got to say, she really gives us fortune tellers and psychics a good name.

From what she tells me, she is looking for brave souls with open hearts and open minds to aid her in her journey through the veil. She couldn’t tell me much but did mention that the journey ahead is perilous and fraught with dangers. And also, only for a limited time! So, if you are looking to join Ruby in her Séance then you’ll need to schedule your reservation soon!

Regardless of what you choose to do this week, be sure to be safe and enjoy the remaining week of spooktabulous fun.

Till next time dear reader,

Zoltar the Great and Terrible

The Psych Ward at Cross Roads Escape Games

New twist to The Psych Ward

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In the beginning of August, Dr. Griffin has made some groundbreaking new changes to his experiments within the testing facilities of the Psych Ward. In a recent interview about his findings, Dr. Griffin stated that the experiment has been a huge success so far but that more research is still needed. He says that the changes to the experiment are designed to illicit more fruitful interactions between both sane and insane patients.

Dr. Griffin states that after each completed task, a scanner will come on and allow patients to scan for points. However, at least two patients are required to scan for each completed task. This means that after each task, patients will have to choose at least one other patient to scan with them; making trust an even more valuable commodity inside the experiment.

In addition, after each patient has scanned their wristband, they will be prompted to anonymously select which team to send their points to; One button will give points to the sane team and the other will allow the insane team to steal the points for the task.

This is helpful for those patients that are trying to mask their identity from other patients. If a patient is under suspicion of being insane, they may choose to give the sane team their point in an attempt to deceive the sane patient.

This allows the insane team to stay under cover, but at a sacrifice of helping the sane team.

This opens the experiment to even more strategies, and not only for the insane patients. Doctor Griffin is curious to see the different ways his patients will try to help their team win.

This means that patients will have to pay very close attention to the behaviors of other patients throughout the entirety of the experiment, and that the question of who to trust has become an even more troublesome inquiry to answer than ever before.

Dr. Griffin would like to remind everyone that his experiment is for the patients’ own good and is critical to his ongoing research. The experiment is designed to study how patients interact with one another and that there are no other experiments going on inside the testing facility. He promises.

Well, you heard it here first folks. The psych ward has interesting new changes that allow for even greater acts of trust and betrayal between patients. And if Dr. Griffin says it is for their own good, then you know it has to be true. He is a Doctor after all.

From Cross Roads Behavioral Science Journal, September 1976

Jason Lee Sakal- Amateur Journalist, Day Manager, Game Master

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Expecting the Unexpected

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Predicting Players in Non-Linear Games (Part Two): Expecting the Unexpected

In part one of Predicting Players in Non-Linear Games, I talked about how you can influence which puzzles your players will go for first by making certain options more accessible and noticeable to them. In this post we will be discussing what to look for in your beta tests and how to expect the unexpected.

One thing that all escape room owners can all agree on is that if players are given the ability to do something, they are going to do it. It doesn’t matter how alien the concept may appear to you, there will be someone down the line that will attempt ANYTHING to solve a puzzle. The human mind is an incredible thing and some players will come up with some truly spectacular ways to try and solve the puzzle, and sometimes… it will work.

This is why beta testing a room is so vital to the design process. You might think that you have the perfect design for a room but the moment you put a player inside it, they will find flaws in everything that you have made. If there are numbers spread randomly around the room, then expect the players to randomly guess the correct 5-digit code out of a group of 10 numbers and open a lock way before they are supposed to.

If it is an outlier event, then don’t worry too much about it. But if you find that the behavior keeps happening over and over again during your beta test, then you know there is something in your room that is leading players to taking that particular course of action. Interview each player afterwards and ask them how they solved it. If they point to something and explain that they used a clue in a way than you intended; good! You have found something that needs to be changed. Alter the prop so it can’t be used in that way or change the puzzle to exclude that option from its solutions. Keep testing and changing until all of your puzzles can only be solved the way that it is intended.

Though it is true that each person is unique, groups of people tend to follow certain patterns of behavior. Believe it or not, people become more predictable when you put them in a group. There are tons of psychological studies done on peer pressure and group mentality. But most of them agree that if enough people in a group react a certain way to something, everyone else in the group will follow along/react the same way.

This behavior is great for all of us that are trying to predict what a person will do. So, at the end of the day, the best thing you can do is beta test your room again and again with as many different types of groups as you can find. Show it to people that love escape rooms, people that dislike them, and people that don’t even know what they are. When you start having groups reacting in the same way, that’s when you know that you really got ‘em!

Coming up next, we will discuss an important problem with non-linear games… the dreaded BOTTLE NECK! Till then, good luck to you.

Jason Sakal

Game Master and Manager

Cross Roads Escape Games 

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Bad Habits of Escape Room Players

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As an escape room enthusiast, I try to take every chance I can to play an escape room. I have played good rooms, bad rooms, and rooms that have almost melted my brain with the creativity and complexity of their puzzles. I have also game mastered here at Cross Roads Escape Games for several years now and there are a quite a few habits shared by both new and advanced players alike.  

If you’re like me, you are always looking to improve your escape room game. Here is a list of four habits that I have noticed cause even the most advanced player to fail from time to time.

1. SOLVING BEFORE SEARCHING

I see this all the time. A player will begin to search their room and the moment that they come across a puzzle they immediately start trying to solve it, before finishing their room search. Often times this leads to them not giving vital clues to their team mates in a timely manner or completely missing clues that help them solve the puzzle they are stuck on.

It is much more efficient to search your room and take note of all the puzzles that you find and gather all your clues before you even attempt to solve your first puzzle. This affords you the benefit of having all your clues in front of you and gives you the ability to determine which clues probably go to which puzzle. You have to search your room fully anyways, so don’t stop half way through just because you fall to the temptation of the first puzzle you see.

2. GETTING MARRIED TO YOUR FIRST SOLUTION

Now I don’t mean to break up any warm fuzzy feelings people have with the first solution they come up with for their puzzles, but like your first love… your first guess is pretty unlikely to be “The One.”

Of course, there is nothing wrong with getting the wrong answer to a puzzle, but if your gut reaction to a lock not opening is to assume that the puzzle is broken, then you might have this bad habit.

It is pertinent to double check your work and try the solution more than once, however if the answer just doesn’t work, move on! There are so many people that get a single idea stuck in their head and are then unable to look past it to find any alternative solution. They stop trying different ways to solve the puzzle and just assume that the puzzle is malfunctioning or outright broken. Trust me, save yourself the head ache and give puzzles the benefit of the doubt; especially if the room has already been open for a while.

3. NOT SHARING YOUR RESEARCH

This one seems like it would be common sense really, but you’d be surprised how often people don’t think to tell their team mates what they have learned from their attempts at trying to solve a puzzle.

If you try multiple times to solve a puzzle only to find yourself coming back to the same solution over and over again, then it is probably time to tag someone else in. That being said, when your team mate decides to give it a shot at least tell them what methods you have already tried and what codes you got. This will save them some time and help ensure that your team mate does just keep bashing their heads against the same wall that you have been. Let them try a different approach while you give a new set of eyes to a new puzzle.

4. NEVER PASSING THE BATON

I know we touched on this a little bit in the last one, but seriously gang… it is okay to admit that you don’t understand what to do with a puzzle. It is okay to ask for help. Sometimes what you really need to do is pass off the puzzle to one of your other team mates and step away from it. A lot of times this happens when someone gets stuck in a certain way of thinking (see getting married to your first solution above).  If this starts happening, just pass the baton and see if you can help one of your other team mates with something. Just make sure you share your findings with your team mate before walking away from the puzzle.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of habits that could hinder your gameplay, but I believe these are four of the most important ones to focus on. It’s important to step aside and analyze yourself from time to time, just like you would with any other hobby or activity you want to improve on.

Do you have anything that should be added to the list? Let us know in the comments below!

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Predicting Your Players in Non-Linear Games: Part One

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Possible Paths vs. Most Accessible Paths

Non-linear games have several possible puzzle paths from the very beginning and players can choose between any of them. However, you will notice that players tend to choose certain puzzle paths more than others. Why? The answer can be a number of things from prop design, clue placement, lighting, etc. Figuring out what is drawing your players to certain puzzles is key to being able to create predictable outcomes.

For instance, if the players enter a dark room with a light shining down on a bright red phone located on a desk in the center of the room and all other locks are obscured by shadows, then you can be fairly certain that one of the first things (if not the very first thing) that the players will investigate will be the phone. The moment the player picks up the phone, an ominous voice whispers, “follow the stars” and the lights come on. Now the players can see three visible locks and, unknown to the players, there are three hidden puzzles as well that can be discovered by searching the room. Since a ton of new info was just introduced, you can be fairly certain that the players will now divide and investigate the room separately or in small groups.

In this fictional situation, we started by drawing attention to the phone, which would give them their first clue and turn the lights on. Because of the clue they received on the phone, they are most likely to be drawn towards anything with a star on it. The players are not limited in what they can do and there are other puzzles that can be solved, but by setting up the situation like this, we can be fairly certain that the players will act a certain way without destroying the feeling of the game being non-linear.

The “Lone Wolf” players may still work on different puzzles by themselves and the rebels will purposefully ignore direct information given to them, but the majority of the players will try and hunt down information pertaining to the clue they were given: “follow the stars.”

From an outsider’s perspective it looks like the players have been “set up,” but because options were never taken from them, the player will feel like every choice they make is their own. And the choice of what to do should always be in the players hands, but it is a game designer’s job to try and predict what a player will do so that we can add more to the experience.

In part two we will discuss how to expect the unexpected and how beta tests can help limit the number of unexpected behaviors in the room. To keep your finger on the pulse of this topic, follow us on twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Jason Sakal

Manager and Game Master

Cross Roads Escape Games 

zoltar_ game of thrones

Summer Is Coming

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Hello again, dear reader. T’is I, Zoltar the Great, the Seer of Secrets, Solver of Locks, Knower of Unknowns, and today I am your guide to staying inside!

            Now you may have realized that our winter is coming to an end and summer is nearly upon us. The temperature is rising, and the children are no longer held at bay by their educational overlord. This means that we must, once again, face the question of what to do with our summer break.

            The days are growing longer and hotter and many people are looking to escape rooms to help them beat the heat. And why wouldn’t they? Escape Rooms are a fun and immersive way to challenge your brain while enjoying the cool, relaxing comfort of modern-day air conditioning. If you worry about your flawless complexion as I do and are looking to get away from the deadly laser that is the sun, then come on down to Cross Roads Escape Games.

            We have three exciting games here that can be played by enthusiasts of different ages. If you are 16 years or older, and you are feeling particularly brave, you can try our Hex Room where your wits and bravery will be put to the test! If you are 14 years or older, then you can attempt to assist Dr. Griffin in his mind-bending new experiment in the Psych Ward. And of course, if neither of those rooms fit your needs, then we have the one and only Fun House! The Fun House is a game for all ages, but we recommend the adult version for those that are 13 years or older. If your magician youths are under 13, then we do have the Fun House for Kids where we change some of the puzzles around to make them a more appropriate test for those who are younger than most!

            So why burn in the heat like one of the common clowns when you can thrill yourself and test your wits like the marvelous magicians that you are? And if you walk away with only one piece of information that you remember from this, then let it be this… Outside is hot and full of terrors! I should know: I’m a painting!

Till next time dear reader. Stay Cool.

Zoltar the Great, Amateur Meteorologist, Fortune Teller, and Avid Indoor Dweller 

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Mechanics & Game Play: Changing the Game Part 2 of 3

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With so many escape rooms opening up each year, one of the most important traits a new game needs in order to stand out is unique gameplay mechanics. Most escape rooms follow a pretty standard formula when creating their experience. Basically, your group will be locked in a room together with puzzles and clues hidden throughout the room. You must solve puzzles to unlock puzzles and then solve those puzzles. Once you have solved enough puzzles your group finds a way to escape the room.

That formula is tried and true and can produce very effective experiences. However, if you follow this formula, then your room will compete for space in the memories of your players; especially if you share a theme with other rooms. In essence, the more qualities your room shares with other rooms, the more likely it is to be forgotten in the sea of experiences.

This is why Luke and Madison Rhoades set out to create an escape room that did things differently than any other escape room at the time. The Hex Room, Cross Roads’ first escape room experience, altered the formula to put each and every player in the hot seat at the same time. Rather than allowing your team mates to carry you through the horror experience, the Hex Room requires that each and every player contribute to the game or risk causing the untimely deaths of their entire team.

In the Hex Room, each player takes a personality test before the game to determine which stereotypical horror movie character their personality best fits. Casting players into these archetypes serves two goals. One, it heightens immersion by making the players excited to see which character they got (complete with costumes of course). Two, it lets us know which room each player will be starting in.

Each player will be divided between six different rooms and forced to find ways to communicate and pass clues between the rooms while being physically isolated from their team mates. This adds a challenging new obstacle to the game: the level of communication that is required to succeed was drastically increased. Gone were the days where a team member could point, grunt, and say “look at what I found.” Now the players were expected to not only find their clues, but adequately describe what they found to their team mates. On top of this, each player was now responsible for solving puzzles on their own.

Rather than the entire team focusing on one or two puzzles at a time before moving onto more puzzles, players were working on up to 6 puzzles at once all while screaming to their leader, the Detective, for help. Add in a large timer counting down, movie-quality set design, and suspenseful music, and you have a great recipe for a truly memorable experience.

Sprinkle on a hint system that can only be used when dispatch manages to patch into the detective’s office phone, and you have yourself a brand-new breed of escape room; a fully immersive escape room focused on the goal of creating completely different experiences within the room for each and every single player.

These sorts of innovations are what allows Cross Roads Escape Games to stand out amongst the rapid spread of the escape room hype. It has been several years since the Hex Room was opened and it has gone through many changes and revamps, but its beloved gameplay mechanics have allowed it to compete in the market even to today.

Jason Sakal
Game Master and Manager at Cross Roads Escape Games
Magic Puzzle Wizard Genius

changing the game

Actors and Interactivity, a Focus on The Fun House

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Changing The Game Part One:

Actors and Interactivity, a Focus on The Fun House

Escape rooms have been exponentially advancing in puzzle design, creative tech installations, and immersive elements, and some rooms do this VERY well. Here is part 1 of 3 where Jason talks about actors, interactivity, immersive elements, and how we utilize them all in The Fun House!

 

One way that escape rooms have tried to change the game is by incorporating elements of immersive theatre to their rooms. Usually, this takes the form of an actor or actors that play certain roles within the room. By adding actors to your room, you can increase the immersion for players by giving them a living, breathing part of the game to interact with. The actors can be used to illicit a variety of emotional responses from the players, based on what theme the room is.

For instance, if you were designing a horror room you could implement a scare actor to pop out and frighten the players adding an aura of dread that will follow the players as they open each new room. On the flip side of that, you could always employ an actor to play a funny or silly character. A great example of this is The Great and Amazing Zoltar, the Seer of Secrets who resides in our Fun House.

Zoltar interacts with players by telling really bad “Dad jokes”, puns, and by being strange and bizarre. Zoltar serves a dual function: he adds to the wacky atmosphere of the game with his witty humor and narcissistic demands for compliments, while also serving as our game’s hint system. Regardless of how Zoltar is utilized by the players, simply being a live, interactive experience enriches the overall atmosphere of the room.

Instead of having a game master enter the room to give hints, he is always present and feels like an interactive agent for progress that works with the players. Often times we have players that spend the entire game joking and interacting with Zoltar, never once using him as a hint system. One player said it best when she commented that “the game would not feel the same without Zoltar. I couldn’t imagine playing through The Fun House without picking fun at him at least once.”

The key to a successful interactive Escape Room element is, you guessed it, immersion. When a player approaches Zoltar and tries their best to flatter and persuade him onto their side, it feels like it is part of the game. The players are not just standing around waiting for someone to show up and point something out, resulting in getting pulled out from the immersion. Instead, they are playing a sort of minigame with Zoltar where their reward is a riddle, piece of elderly advice, or joke that points them in the right direction. They are immersed in the experience while receiving hints AND while completing the room.

Next time on “Changing the Game” with Jason, we discuss game play mechanics and obstacles with examples from our beloved Hex Room!

Jason Sakal
Game Master and Manager at Cross Roads Escape Games
Magic Puzzle Wizard Genius

Clueless clown

The Zen of Being a Clueless Clown

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Greetings and salutations dear reader. I am Zoltar the Great, the seer of secrets, and today I am your guide to the rest of your life as a clueless clown. Yes, dear reader, even though you have failed to escape the Fun House and now find yourself eternally employed as a clown, there is still so much to look forward to.

Under the big top there are thousands of jobs that must be done every day, and not all of them are suited for a magician. After all, while they were off solving puzzles and using their enormously large brains, was it not you that was shouting the loudest? While they were trying to carefully inspect their clues, was it not you that was juggling the fastest? That’s right! There are many things that a clown does that simply makes no sense to a magician. So, if the job requires a bit of nonsense or general whimsy, a magician will simply fall flat. And because of that, there will always be a need for clowns.

It is simply a fact of life that clowns have more fun than magicians do. I mean… sure… you could just play the game and solve the puzzles needed to escape; but a clown will take time to smell the roses along the way. For a clown, it isn’t enough to simply get a secret spinning decoder used to translate ancient and esoteric hieroglyphics into a usable clue; a clown must spin that secret decoder several dozen times simply because it spins. Oh, how wonderful it must feel to be a clown!

See, don’t you feel better now? Some people get so carried away with the idea of “winning” or “losing” and they forget that the most important part of the Fun House is… the FUN. Win or lose, magician or clown, as long as you had fun playing, that is all that matters. So, go ahead and shine on my crazy diamonds… shine on.

Zoltar The Great
Seer of Secrets, Motivational Clown Speaker, Incredibly Handsome
Cross Roads Escape Games

Zoltar's New Neighbors

Zoltar’s Neighbors

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Greetings and salutations dear readers. T’is I, Zoltar the Great, seer of secrets, blogger, avid gossiper, and your guide to understanding my strange neighbors.

You have no idea how often I get asked about the “goings on” in my neighbors’ rooms. Honestly though, if one more detective asks me about “disappearances” or if I can use my crystal ball to “solve pending murder investigations” I swear I am going to lose my marbles. I mean, come on detectives… haven’t you heard of a thing called privacy before? I will be no one’s minority report.

 

Either way, since people keep asking me about the Hex Room and the Psych Ward, I figured it was a good topic to cover in my blog. After all, I am nothing if not a servant of the people.

First, I will start with the Hex Room. So many people misjudge my neighbor. They hear “Hex” and they think “curse” when in reality, the name is merely a geometry pun. Get it, Hex Room… because there are six rooms. Hex… Six… You’d be surprised how many times I have to explain that. Moving on!

My neighbor may seem a bit obsessed with horror films, but honestly what would the world be without a few nutty cinephiles in it anyways? Every day he hosts screenings of his favorite scary movies and invites strangers to come and see what it’s all about. They must be having a grand time over there as well, because I hear screaming at all hours of the night. I guess it is a bit too much to ask to get an invite myself. Not like I am the seer of secrets, a national ping pong celebrity, and happen to be a KILLER edition to ANY party. But whatever. I don’t mind.

And as for my newest neighbor, Dr. Griffin. He seems friendly enough. Maybe a tad bit on the workaholic side of things, but I hear he is working on something very VERY important! And whatever he is working on must be big, because he sure does recruit a lot of volunteers.

I also hear that he is helping many unfortunates in his hospital. Everyone that leaves the hospital has a distant look and a wide smile on their faces. I am sure they are reminiscing on what a great time they had and all the important friendships that they made during their stay. All the nurses say it, but I guess it must be true… Dr. Griffin is a great man… though not as great as some. A particular painting comes to mind…

You see, dear readers, there is nothing really to talk about when it comes to my neighbors. Just your standard, run-of-the-mill, neighbors that are obsessed with either their work or their hobbies. Nothing too interesting there. Nothing as cool as a magical all-seeing painting capable of mystical perception and intuition. That is to say, they are nothing as grand as yours truly, the great and magnificent Zoltar!

Till next time dear Reader.

— Zoltar the Great, the amazing, the perfect, the beautiful, the seer of secrets, and self-designated neighborhood watch leader.

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