UK Escape Room Awards

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

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 three phases:

Our aim is to announce the award winners this autumn, with applications for players opening in the next few weeks. Exact dates will be confirmed shortly.

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.

No. Rooms cannot apply to be included, they must be nominated by approved participants. Venues are welcome to encourage their players to apply and nominate, but the process must be driven by the community, not by venues themselves. Venues should not offer incentives such as discounts, free games or rewards in an effort to encourage players to vote or nominate their games.

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 have been open to the public during the relevant awards year (i.e. in the preceding 365 days to the opening of the nomination stage)
• The room must be currently operating (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?

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.

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 drag 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.

We will publish the methodology and algorithms we will be using for the awards in the very near future.

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 room that opened within the past year. 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.

However, you must declare all affiliations honestly during signup. Your votes will be automatically excluded for any rooms you are affiliated with. Equally, we ask you to refrain from vote swapping. We have a number of methods in place to catch this behaviour and can exclude votes, individuals and companies if this is found to be the case. Please nominate and vote honestly and without any agenda.

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 encourage them to apply if they’re eligible
• 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
• Game master or front-of-house staff (current or former within the past 2 years)
• Manager or operations staff
• Set designer, prop builder, or puzzle designer
• Investor or financial stakeholder
• 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, declare it anyway. The board will review it and advise. We take conflicts of interest seriously. All participants must declare affiliations with escape room venues or companies at the point of application. Affiliated votes are automatically excluded from the relevant rooms.

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 punishments

Depending on the severity and nature of the violation, consequences may include:

• Removal of specific votes or nominations from the tally
• Suspension of a participant for one or more awards cycles
• Permanent ban from the UK Escape Room Awards
• Disqualification of a room from the current and/or future awards cycles
• Disqualification of a venue’s entire portfolio of rooms
• In the most serious cases, public disclosure of the violation

We will always act proportionately, but we will act decisively. The integrity of the awards depends on it.

Your individual nominations and votes are private. We will not share your specific nominations or rankings with venues, companies, or the general public.

The board has access to vote data for the purposes of administering the awards and detecting cheating — this is necessary for the awards to function. Board members are bound by confidentiality in how they handle this data.

Aggregate data, such as the total number of nominations a room received and the final ranked results, will be published publicly after the awards cycle.

What the admin team can see

For the purposes of running the awards, the board can see individual participant data including nominations and votes. This access is strictly limited to what is necessary for administering the awards and is not used for any other purpose. Your data will never be shared with venues or used to identify how any individual voted in any public context.

The UK Escape Room Awards is committed to complying with UK GDPR. Your personal data is:

• Collected only for the purposes of administering the awards
• Stored securely and not shared with third parties without your consent
• Retained only for as long as necessary
• Available for you to request deletion at any time by contacting info@ukescaperoomawards.org

Our full privacy policy will be publicly available on the website soon.

For any questions not covered here, please email us at info@ukescaperoomawards.org or use the contact form on our website (when it is live).

There are several ways to get involved with the UK Escape Room Awards beyond participating as a voter:

• Representatives — we are exploring opportunities for experienced players to promote the awards and represent their region.
• Promoting the awards — if you run a venue or community platform and would like to help spread the word, see the relevant FAQ or contact us directly.
• Suggestions — we welcome feedback and suggestions for how to improve the awards. Email us or use the contact form and we’ll read every message.

We are a volunteer-run organisation and genuinely value input from the community. Just getting to this stage has taken hundreds of hours of work. The awards belong to the escape room community, help us make them as good as they can be.

The UK Escape Room Awards is overseen by a volunteer board of escape room players. The board is responsible for the structure and integrity of the awards, but has no influence over the results, which are determined entirely by the community vote.

Board members:

• Zoe Bushell
• Sarah Dodd
• Mike Etheridge
• Sharan Gill
• Gord Soutar
• Liz Soutar
• Mark Tobin

Full bios will be published shortly on the website.

The board does not have any special weighting in the voting process. Board members who meet the eligibility criteria may participate as voters, but their votes carry exactly the same weight as any other participant.