1 of 20

Next Escape

Find your next escape room

Nicholas Michalak

2 of 20

Escape Room(s)

It’s a live-action cooperative puzzle game with a time limit

People pay $25-30 to solve their way out of a room together

3 of 20

You can really only “solve” an escape room once

4 of 20

Good thing there are thousands of escape rooms to choose from (hundreds in some cities)

5 of 20

Escape the Room: Meltdown

(Littleton, CO)

6 of 20

60 to Escape:

Hidden Temple

(Gurnee, IL)

7 of 20

Bakersfield Breakout Zone: Z0d1ack K1773r

(Bakersfield, CA)

8 of 20

How do you pick a new escape room?

9 of 20

Next Escape makes your choice easier

nextescape.me

I developed Next Escape to simplify that decision. Next Escape assumes you’ve played an escape room before and you liked it. Now you’re looking for a new escape room somewhere in the U.S.

The web form asks you to enter the location where you’re looking for rooms and the number of miles you’d be willing to travel from that location. It also asks you for the number of people in your group and the age of the youngest person. Last, it asks you to enter your favorite escape room. Next Escape will use this escape room to make recommendations.

When you click submit, Next Escape gives you a nice table of recommendations that you compare to your favorite escape room at the very top of the table. Importantly, each recommendation includes a link to a website to learn more about the escape room.

10 of 20

Data Source

~8,000 game descriptions and their features web scraped from worldofescapes.com

Tools: requests, bs4, pandas

11 of 20

Where your favorite room is located

Where you’re looking for rooms

Where your recommended rooms are located

Google Maps API

12 of 20

Number of Players

Difficulty Level

Fear Level

Age Requirement

Success Rate

Data

Missing data

75% of rooms had data on 5 or more features

13 of 20

Replaced missing Difficulty Level with “Average”

14 of 20

Replaced missing Fear Level with “Not scary”

15 of 20

Replaced missing Success Rate with predicted values from Difficulty Level

16 of 20

Measured room (dis)similarity with euclidean distance

x₁

x₂

x₃

x₄

x₅

y₁

y₂

y₃

y₄

y₅

17 of 20

Difficulty Level

Fear Level

Time Limit

User entered this game

Recommend

Do not recommend

✅

❌

18 of 20

Next Escape makes picking a new escape room easier

19 of 20

nickmichalak.com

20 of 20

Could use tags to better discriminate among rooms