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Comment by peeters | Hacker News Reader

So, my story about one of these. Had a great time; were on the verge of winning. All of the puzzles had resulted in us finding a cellphone. We find the 4-digit pin to unlock it. With a minute to go, we get into the phone and find there's one new voicemail on the phone. We hold 1 for voicemail, and hear:

"This account is currently out of funds. To complete this call, please add credit to the account or place a collect call."

So the buzzer runs out as we are trying to remember how to make a collect call (to voicemail no less).

Afterwards we asked the staffer how we were supposed to fetch the voicemail, and she said "wait, there was a voicemail on the phone?" Turns out there was also an already-read text message on the phone that we were supposed to look at, but we were successfully red-herringed by some random person leaving a message at the wrong number.

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I feel like your staffer should have noticed what you were doing; every time I've done one of these, the staffers were usually fairly attentive, and would guide us away from the inadvertent red herrings like this.

How was the setup for you? For us I think there were cameras in each room, and a radio we could use to ask the staffer clarifications about the game itself. But they weren't present in the room itself and I don't think they had audio.

I agree you need a hands on approach to guiding. For example, in the same game we found a pencil but the lead was broken. So we asked "is the lead supposed to be broken; if not I have a pen in my pocket..." and they gave an emphatic "yes it's part of the challenge". So when other obstacles came up we of course assumed they were part of the challenge too.

In every one I've done, there was a staffer present in the room; we were also allowed to ask them three questions per game, and in one variant, each question would dock us X minutes off the clock.

The one I played, we did get some assistance with one puzzle we were fumbling on for quite a while. But the poster here specifically says they only had one minute left. I think that's a really short time to jump in on without feeling like you're railroading someone through the room.

In this case, a short "there shouldn't be a voicemail on there" would definitely have helped us without explicitly pointing in the correct direction. However, I really liked that there weren't staff in the room with us. I think it would have lessened the immersion and experience if while we were working out the problem, there was someone sitting in the corner who knew the answer and was holding a stopwatch. But then ideally they would have an audio feed from within the room, instead of just video.

"some random person leaving a message at the wrong number."

Or some telemarketer robo-dialing?

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