Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

The UK Escape Room Awards exist to celebrate the creativity, craftsmanship, innovation, and excellence of the people who design, build, and operate escape rooms across the United Kingdom.

From puzzle design and storytelling to set construction, programming, creativity, artistry, acting, game mastering, and operations, these awards aim to recognise the extraordinary talent, passion, and dedication that continue to shape and elevate the UK escape room industry.

These awards are not decided by a panel of judges or industry insiders, but by the people who know escape rooms best: experienced players who have travelled across the country in search of exceptional games.

Our goal is to create the most credible, rigorous, transparent, and community-driven escape room awards in the UK. This is a non-profit organisation, and a passion project to do our bit to the industry we love so much.

We have set a minimum requirement of 50 UK escape rooms played. We believe this strikes a fair balance: accessible enough for dedicated players, while also ensuring voters have a strong breadth of experience and a solid understanding of the quality, creativity, and variety within the UK escape room industry.

To be eligible to participate you must:

• Have personally played 50 or more unique UK escape rooms
• Be able to provide evidence of your experience
• Declare any affiliations with escape room venues or companies

The following count toward the 50-room threshold:

• Traditional in person, puzzle-based escape rooms at a physical location in the UK

The following do not count:

• Online/virtual escape rooms
• Escape room-style board games or home kits
• Outdoor puzzle trails or similar
• Repeated rooms (the same game played more than once, including in a different venue)

If you are uncertain whether a particular experience qualifies, but believe it reasonably fits the spirit of a timed, puzzle-focused, privately bookable, physical adventure or escape room-style experience, you are welcome to include it.

Evidence of experience

We accept the following as evidence:

• A profile on Morty (morty.app)
• A profile on Escape the Review (escapethereview.co.uk)
• A personal spreadsheet or log (subject to verification)
• Social media profile (Instagram profile)
• Corroboration from other known community members
• Any other reasonable evidence at the board’s discretion

It may be that one of these methods is sufficient, or we may need more information. Each application is like a puzzle for us, we need to know that you’re a real person, with real experience.

The aim of the evidence verification is to make it harder for bad-actors to make it through and manipulate the awards in their favour. So if we come back to you to ask for more evidence, this is not a reflection on you, it’s just our way of trying to make these awards something special.

Just to be clear, having a Morty or Escape the Review profile is not a requirement. They’re simply two examples of evidence that can sometimes help us verify applicants; the fuller list of what we consider is above.

It’s also worth noting that having a Morty or EtR profile doesn’t guarantee a successful application either. We’re aware it’s possible to sign up and immediately add 50+ games without necessarily having played them, so on its own a profile doesn’t constitute proof. It’s just one part of the evidence we look at, and we always try to look across multiple sources rather than relying on any one of them.

We know that plenty of experienced players don’t log every game publicly, or even privately, so we’re happy to work with people on a case-by-case basis. As mentioned above, we can also consider things like personal logs, social media posts or photos, previous TERPECA verification, vouches from other well-known players or owners, historic activity in the enthusiast community, or simply having a chat with us about the games you’ve played. Ultimately, we look at the overall picture rather than any single piece of evidence.

We’ve taken this approach purely to protect the integrity of the awards. We’ve already identified a handful of people trying to misrepresent their experience, so we need some way to distinguish genuine applicants from bad actors. Our goal is not to keep legitimate enthusiasts out, quite the opposite. If you’ve genuinely played the required number of games, we’ll do our best to find a sensible way to verify that. Please do apply with whatever you have, and we’ll work with you from there.

Rules

By participating you agree to:

• Only nominate and vote for rooms you have personally played
• Declare all affiliations honestly and in full
• Not share your nominations or votes publicly, or with venues or companies
• Not attempt to coordinate voting with other participants
• Abide by the requests, rules and decisions of the board in all matters

The 2026 awards run across the following phases:

The winners will be announced shortly afterwards. The official awards announcement date will be confirmed soon.

*Please note, whilst we aim to stay on schedule the exact dates are subject to change to ensure the smooth and fair running of the awards.

Applications are made through our online portal (link announced soon). You’ll be asked to provide:

• Your name and contact details
• Your region
• The number of unique UK escape rooms you’ve played
• Evidence of your experience (see above)
• Any industry affiliations

Our team reviews every application and you will receive a notification by email if your application has been approved. Equally, if we need more information in order to verify your application, we will be in touch. Please keep an eye on your spam folders.

To provide evidence of your escape room history, you can find your profile links or usernames by following these steps:

Escape the Review:

1. Log into your account at escapethereview.co.uk.
2. Click on DASHBOARD in the menu to open your personal dashboard.
3. Your username is displayed at the top of the page on desktop, or at the very bottom on mobile. You can also copy the full URL from your browser’s address bar (e.g., escapethereview.co.uk/profile/?user_id=XXXX) to use as your link.

Morty (Mobile App):

1. Open the Morty app and tap your profile picture in the bottom-right corner.
2. Your username appears at the very top of the page and sits right below your photo in bold.
3. To copy your direct profile link, tap the Share icon or the gear settings menu at the top of your profile and select “Copy Link”.

Morty (Website):

1. Log into morty.app in your browser.
2. Click your profile picture in the top-right corner and choose View Profile.
3. Copy the full URL path straight from your browser’s address bar (e.g., morty.app/@yourusername).

No, owners or those affiliated with specific escape rooms cannot apply for them to be included, they must be nominated by approved participants. Rules about affiliations and nominations can be found above.

Affiliations are declared by selecting your company from our list. If your company has opened recently and isn’t yet listed, please contact us at info@ukescaperoomawards.org and we’ll add it so you can declare your affiliation. Please don’t attempt to take part without declaring an affiliation you hold.

Any approved participant can nominate rooms during the nomination phase. There is no geographical restriction, you can nominate rooms from any region of the UK, provided you have personally played them. If you are approved, you are welcome to participate in both the nomination and the voting stage, but it is up to you how much you take part.

You can nominate up to 20 rooms per awards cycle.

You are not required to use all of your nominations. We strongly encourage players to nominate only those games they believe demonstrate a truly distinguished level of quality, consistency, and craftsmanship across multiple aspects of design and execution, and which stand out regionally or nationally as exceptional examples of what the UK escape room industry has to offer.

What rooms are eligible for nomination?

• The room must be located in the United Kingdom
• The room must be currently operating, and have been open for at least four weeks prior to the voting stage (permanently closed rooms are not eligible)
• You must have personally played the room

Franchises and duplicate rooms

Where a company operates the same room across multiple locations, each location is treated as a separate room for the purposes of nominations, voting and awarding regional titles. Duplicate games, however, will only count once in the ‘Top Games in the UK’ award. In this instance all locations which host the game will be listed under a single winner, averaged from the scores across regional examples.

What if a room isn’t in the database, or I spot an error in the database?

Our database contains over 1,800 UK escape rooms, and the list is pulled, with permission, from EscapeTheReview. If a room you’ve played and wish to nominate isn’t listed, you can request it be added through the portal during the nomination phase. Requests are reviewed by the board and added promptly where they meet the eligibility criteria.

As the database has not been populated by us, there may be a few inconsistencies. If you spot an error in the database, for example: a room that has since closed, an incorrect game name, the wrong company linked to a game, an ineligible listing (such as a portable/play at home game) or any other inconsistency that needs correcting, please e-mail us and we will investigate and resolve the issue if necessary.

In simple terms: you rank the rooms you’ve played from your favourite to least favourite. Every room in your list is then compared head-to-head against every other room you’ve ranked in other people’s ranked lists. The room that wins the most of those matchups ranks highest overall. We will be implementing a methodology that relies on mathematical voting algorithms used worldwide. We will add additional details about this soon.

How do I rank rooms?

Through the portal, you’ll see the full list of finalist rooms. You select the rooms you have personally played and move them into your preferred order, most favourite at the top. You only rank rooms you’ve played; you don’t need to rank every finalist.

If you have declared an affiliation with a company, the games will still be visible in your portal, but you will not be able to rank them.

What should I consider when ranking?

As mentioned, we encourage you to nominate and vote for games which you believe demonstrate an exceptional level of quality, consistency, and craftsmanship across the board, and which stand out regionally or nationally as exceptional examples of what the UK escape room industry has to offer. How you decide to weigh individual factors (such as puzzle design, narrative, theming, build quality and overall experience) is left to your personal judgement.

Why are some rooms not appearing on my list?

The voting list shows all confirmed finalist rooms. If a room you expected to see is not appearing, it may be because:

• It was not nominated enough times to reach the finalist threshold
• It was permanently closed before the awards cycle closed
• It was deemed ineligible by the board

If you believe a room has been excluded in error, please contact us.

Every voter’s comparisons count equally. There is no weighting based on how many rooms someone has played or ranked. This stops ‘heavy-hitters’ overly affecting the rankings, everyone’s vote matters.

Following the close of nominations, the nominated rooms which have achieved a specific number of nominations* will be confirmed as finalists. The finalist list will be announced publicly before voting opens.

The number of finalists per category will be confirmed alongside the announcement of nomination dates.

Once the awards are closed, we will announce the results publicly and these will also be posted on the UK Escape Room Awards website.

*The nomination threshold will be announced at a later stage

The UK Escape Room Awards are likely to be an ever-evolving project. For 2026, the UK Escape Room Awards has three categories:

Overall Winners – The highest-ranked eligible rooms across the entire United Kingdom.

Regional Winners – The highest-ranked rooms in each of the 13 UK regions, based on the NUTS 1.5 regional classification:

• North East
• North West
• Yorkshire and The Humber
• East Midlands
• West Midlands
• East of England
• London
• South East
• South
• South West
• Wales
• Scotland
• Northern Ireland

Regional rankings are calculated from the same vote data as the overall ranking, no separate voting is required.

Newcomer Award – Awarded to the highest-ranked rooms that opened within 2025/26. This recognises outstanding new additions to the UK escape room scene.

To be eligible for the Newcomer Award, a room must have opened within the qualifying window and received sufficient nominations to become a finalist.

An escape room can be eligible for multiple awards. For example, a single game could win a regional, national (overall) and newcomer award in the same year.

In technical terms “The NUTS 1 (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) map system in the UK is a hierarchical, 12-region geographical classification used primarily for reporting regional socio-economic statistics”

We found that the NUTS system was a great way to give clear borders and division between areas so there was no ambiguity for what region a company was located in. Some of the regions classified in the original NUTS system contained a disproportionately high number of escape room companies and games compared to others. To balance this, we have created a modified NUTS system, that we have lovingly called ‘NUTS 1.5’.

The key difference between NUTS and NUTS 1.5 is the South where we have created a further region to provide a more equitable split for escape room companies across those areas.

We have created a map that shows the delineation of these areas. Our system will automatically place escape room companies into their relevant area.

Yes! We are well aware that many of the most experienced escape room players in the UK work in the industry. Room owners, game masters, managers, and other industry professionals are welcome to apply as nominating and voting players, provided they meet the 50 room eligibility threshold in their own right.

In signing up, you agree to make any affiliations clear (including historic ones in which your involvement may still carry weight or financial gain). You also agree that you will will not attempt to vote-share or vote-swap, nor rank rooms based on your friendships, or competition.

We have a number of methods that will analyse voting between neighbouring companies, look for vote-swapping (including circular vote-swapping by multiple companies in an attempt to make it less obvious), as well as concerning patterns of voting between individuals associated with companies, and associated individuals. Please remember, your votes are anonymised and your best friend/neighbouring company won’t know what you really think!

Simply nominate and vote honestly, and without any agenda.

If you feel you cannot vote honestly as an individual player, please enjoy the awards as a supporter and observer!

Apply to sign up, nominate and vote!

Companies and affiliated individuals are very welcome to let their customers know about the awards and encourage eligible players to apply to become voters.

However, they must not encourage players to nominate or vote for their own games, venue or company specifically. Likewise, companies must not offer incentives of any kind (including discounts, free games, gifts or rewards) to encourage nominations or votes.

Any company found attempting to influence the outcome of the awards in this way will be deemed ineligible for that year’s awards.

To help protect the integrity of the awards, ‘secret shopper’ members of the community will be monitoring for behaviour of this nature.

Our shared aim is to create awards that genuinely reflect the views of experienced players and celebrate excellence across the UK escape room industry and we ask everyone to act in the spirit of fairness and transparency.

We encourage venues to help spread the word about the UK Escape Room Awards to their players. You are welcome to:

• Tell your players about the awards and ask them to apply if they’re eligible. But we ask you not to incentivise voters, or encourage biased voting
• Display QR codes or printed materials in your venue pointing players to the awards website
• Share our social media posts and tag us in your own posts
• Use the UK Escape Room Award logo, where appropriate, in your own marketing (logo assets will be available on request)
• Celebrate if your room is nominated or wins. Share the news proudly!

Logo assets, printable materials, or QR codes will soon be available on the UK Escape Room Awards website.

Social media: Instagram: UKEscapeRoomAwards – Facebook: UK Escape Room Awards. Other social media handles and pages will be announced shortly.

You must not vote on any room with which you have a conflict of interest. This applies even if you genuinely believe you could be objective.

What counts as an affiliation?

• Owner or co-owner of the venue
• Current or former game master or front-of-house staff member
• Manager or operations and technical staff
• Set designer, prop builder, narrative writer, software/hardware developer
• Investor or financial stakeholder
• Anyone who has designed, or contributed to the design or development, of a game, regardless of where that game is hosted or whether you have any ongoing or formal relationship with that company. This includes selling games or game designs to a company you do not otherwise work for. For the purposes of these awards, this affiliation extends to all games operated by that company, not just those you worked on, as the success of one game contributes to the success and reputation of the business as a whole, including the game/s you were involved in creating.
• Immediate family member of any of the above
• Any other relationship that could reasonably be considered a conflict of interest

If you are unsure whether a relationship constitutes an affiliation, please declare it. The board will review the information and advise. We take conflicts of interest seriously.

All participants must declare any relevant affiliations when submitting their application. Any votes relating to venues, companies or games with which a participant has declared an affiliation will automatically be excluded from the relevant award categories.

Repercussions for breaking the rules

We take conflicts of interest extremely seriously. If a participant is found to have voted on affiliated rooms without declaring the relationship:

• Their votes on affected rooms will be removed from the final tally
• They may be suspended from participating in future awards cycles
• In serious or repeated cases, they may be permanently banned from the awards
• In egregious cases involving coordinated cheating, the matter may be made public

All participants agree to the UK Escape Room Awards rules and code of conduct on signup. The key rules are:

• Only vote for rooms you have personally played
• Declare all affiliations honestly
• Do not share your votes or nominations with venues
• Do not coordinate your voting with other participants or venues
• Do not attempt to game or manipulate the ranking system

We have multiple systems in place to detect and prevent cheating, both human and technological. We will not detail these publicly, as doing so would assist bad actors. What we can say is that we monitor for unusual patterns in applications, nominations and votes and that our board reviews the data throughout each phase of the awards.

If you become aware of any attempt to manipulate the awards, please report it to us confidentially at info@ukescaperoomawards.org.

Potential consequences

Violating the code of conduct will result in immediate disqualification of all submissions, permanent exclusion from future voting eligibility, and potentially bringing any coordinated manipulation to the attention of the wider community.

The purpose of the UK Escape Room Awards is to recognise and celebrate outstanding escape rooms across the UK. For that reason, we have chosen to publish the Top 50 games nationally, while continuing to recognise all of the remaining finalists without placing them in a public numerical order.

Reaching the final is already a significant achievement. We do not believe that publicly distinguishing between, for example, a game that finished 87th and one that finished 127th adds meaningful value to that recognition. In fact, presenting every finalist in a single ranked list risks turning what should be an achievement into a perceived negative for those appearing towards the bottom of it.

There is also an important statistical reason for this decision. The awards are based on the collective results of many experienced players, using comparisons between the games they have played. Towards the top of the results, there is sufficient information and separation between games for us to have greater confidence in the overall ranking. Further down the list, however, differences can become increasingly small and the available comparisons less comprehensive.

As a result, precise ordinal positions can imply a degree of certainty that the underlying data does not necessarily support. A game appearing 112th rather than 96th might look like a meaningful distinction when presented as a numbered league table, while statistically there may be very little separating them.

Publishing those positions would therefore not necessarily make the awards more transparent or more accurate. In some cases, it could do the opposite by giving relatively small differences in the data a significance they do not warrant.

There is an additional complication with our regional recognition. Regions vary considerably in both the number of escape rooms and the number of eligible players who have played them. A game can therefore perform extremely strongly within its region without occupying the same national position as a highly regarded game from a region containing many more rooms and player comparisons. Publishing every national position risks encouraging direct comparisons between two forms of recognition that were deliberately designed to answer different questions.

We always aim to be transparent, open and clear about the structure of the awards, and take every effort to create a fair and representative system. We will continue to be transparent and clear about how the awards work, how decisions are made and what the published results represent but will not publish underlying information where doing so could be misleading or counterproductive to our mission.

Ultimately, we want the awards to help players discover excellent games and to celebrate the creativity and hard work of the people who make them. Publishing the Top 50 gives us a national ranking where we have the greatest confidence in the distinctions being made, while allowing every other finalist to retain the recognition of having reached the final.

We think that strikes the fairest balance between transparency, statistical robustness and the purpose for which the awards were created.

For similar reasons, we have chosen not to publish a complete list showing every game that received a nomination.

Nominations are the first stage of the awards and are designed to identify games with enough support among our participating players to progress to the final. They are not intended to produce a definitive list of every worthy escape room in the UK and this distinction is important to us.

A game receiving only a small number of nominations tells us relatively little about its quality. It may be a newer game, be located in an area visited by fewer participating players, or simply not have been played by enough of this year’s participants. Equally, there are excellent games that received no nominations at all. An absence of nominations should therefore never be interpreted as an assessment that a game is not good, nor a single nomination be an assessment that a game is of a higher quality compared to a game that received none.

Once several independent players nominate the same game, we can have considerably greater confidence that we are identifying a broader pattern rather than an isolated preference. That is why a threshold is used to determine which games progress.

Publishing every game below that threshold, particularly alongside the number of nominations it received, would risk creating an unofficial ranking that the nomination data was never designed to support. A game with two nominations could easily be perceived as having performed ‘better’ than one with none, despite there being nowhere near enough information to draw that conclusion.

We would much rather use nominations for their intended purpose: identifying the games with sufficient independent support to progress to the next stage.

We also hope that the awards will continue to grow. As more players participate, travel and discover games around the country, the breadth of nominations should grow with them. Some excellent games will inevitably be missed in any given year, and we would far rather encourage players to seek them out and nominate them in future than publish incomplete data that could inadvertently suggest a judgement we have not actually made.

This was a deliberate decision about what we want the UK Escape Room Awards to represent.

We appreciate the enthusiasm of newer players and acknowledge that the opinion of somebody playing their fifth game is no less genuine than that of somebody playing their five-hundredth. However these awards are trying to answer a particular question: which games are most highly regarded collectively by experienced players who have played widely enough to make meaningful comparisons between them? This mission requires a degree of shared experience.

The voting system is based, in simple terms, on comparisons between games. For those comparisons to produce meaningful results, participants need to have played a reasonable number of the games being considered. If somebody has played only a handful of rooms, particularly if most are from one company or one local area, they can give an entirely valid opinion about those games, but they have very little information with which to compare them against the wider UK industry.

Setting the threshold at 50 physical UK escape rooms is our attempt to strike a balance. It is high enough that participants are likely to have experienced different companies, styles, designers, puzzle structures and approaches to gameplay, while remaining achievable for people who are relatively early in their escape room journey.

Opening the awards to everybody would also fundamentally change what they measure. A completely open public vote inevitably gives a significant advantage to the businesses with the largest customer bases, strongest social media reach or greatest ability to encourage their customers, friends and supporters to participate. A player who has experienced only one company’s games could quite legitimately vote for those games because they are the best they have personally played, but multiply that across hundreds of customers and the result increasingly measures reach and mobilisation rather than comparative experience.

Counter-intuitively, that would not necessarily help smaller or more geographically isolated businesses. Large companies, chains and venues in major population centres generally have access to much larger pools of potential voters and could benefit disproportionately from an unrestricted public vote.

The eligibility threshold also helps the nomination stage remain meaningful. With around 2,000 physical escape rooms operating across the UK, dramatically lowering or removing the experience requirement would create the possibility of large numbers of games receiving a handful of nominations simply from their own regular customers. We would then need a substantially higher nomination threshold to identify meaningful wider support, ultimately recreating the same problem in a different form.

Importantly, the 50-game requirement does not mean that players must have travelled everywhere or played every finalist. The voting methodology is specifically designed to combine overlapping sets of experience from many different players. One participant may have played games A, B and C; another B, C and D; another C, D and E. Collectively, those overlapping comparisons allow a much broader picture to emerge.

That is why the collective part matters so much! We are not looking for one person’s definitive list of the best escape rooms in the UK. We are bringing together the opinions of many experienced players, each of whom has played a different selection of games, to see what emerges from their combined experience.

Location will inevitably affect which games people have played, just as it does in any national award based on personal experience. One of the reasons we introduced regional recognition alongside the national awards was specifically to help highlight excellent games from across the country rather than allowing national results to become the only form of recognition.

The 50-game threshold is not intended to suggest that newer players’ opinions do not matter. It defines the particular population whose collective opinion these awards have been created to measure.