The 2024 award season is underway!
Would you like to contribute this year as a voter or nominator? Apply at the
Voter Portal.
Looking for the escape rooms we've honored in the past? Check out the
Room Finder.
Are you an escape room owner that wants to be sure your room is eligible?
Visit the FAQ for details.
Just want to stay in the loop? Follow us on
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Instagram for updates.
The Top Escape Rooms Project is an attempt to find the very best escape rooms in the world by leveraging the experience of the most experienced escape room enthusiasts in the world. We serve escape room owners and designers by publicly recognizing their achievements, and we serve our fellow enthusiasts by providing an international bucket list of the best rooms to play.
The top rooms identified by this project each year are awarded a Top Escape Rooms Project Enthusiasts' Choice Award, or TERPECA, which represents the best of the best in the international escape room industry.
Stay tuned -- the 2024 winners will be announced December 21st!
To see last year's winners, visit the 2023 website or to explore all the past results from this project, check out the TERPECA Room Finder .
Stay tuned -- the 2024 winners will be announced December 21st!
To see last year's winners, visit the 2023 website or to explore all the past results from this project, check out the TERPECA Room Finder .
The Top Escape Rooms Project's mission to find the best escape rooms in the world is clearly limited by the fact that the TERPECAs currently only recognize and honor rooms and companies that support English-speaking players and are in the countries and regions where such players are likely to visit. We humbly acknowledge that this approach fails to recognize many, many world-class escape rooms available around the world, so here we present a list of some of the most trusted websites from around the world that offer awards and rankings that we feel can help fill in many of the gaps left by our approach. We focus primarily on sites that offer aggregated recommendations, rankings, and awards that are derived from the opinions of many, rather than any sites that focus on the rankings or opinions of a single person or small group of people.
Note: The Top Escape Rooms Project has no official affiliation with any of the websites listed.
If you have any suggestions for more websites we should consider for this section, please contact us at admin@terpeca.com.
The Top Escape Rooms Project consists of two phases: a nomination phase and a ranking phase.
Phase 1: Nominations
In the nomination phase, which takes place during the month of October each year, pre-approved nominators (consisting of enthusiasts that have played 200 or more escape rooms) are asked to privately nominate up to 10 rooms that they feel should be considered in the conversation for best in the world. Rooms that won the Top Room award the previous year and would otherwise be eligible for the current year are granted automatic finalist status and thus cannot be nominated. At the conclusion of nominations, the threshold for the number of independent nominations required to be named a finalist is determined by the board. Those rooms that meet or exceed that threshold, along with the automatic finalists mentioned above, move on to Phase 2. In 2023, it required 5 nominations to become a finalist, but this number is likely to continue to increase as the project grows.
Owners, employees, investors, designers, consultants, and other direct affiliates of a given escape room or escape room company, past or present, as well as spouses, partners, or family members of any such affiliates, are not allowed to nominate any of the corresponding rooms for which they may have a conflict of interest.
For a room to be eligible for nomination, it must be open to the public AND playable in English for at least 30 days between November 1 of the previous year and October 31 of the current year (i.e. the nomination deadline). For regions in which English is not the primary language, English availability must be clearly designated at the company's website and/or linked booking platform, and the company must intend to continue offering English-language play as long as the room is open. See the FAQ section on eligibility for additional details on these requirements.
Details for the analysis and results of Phase 1 will be provided after nominations conclude in 2024.
Phase 2: Rankings
In the ranking phase, which takes place during the month of November each year, pre-approved voters (consisting of enthusiasts that have played 100 or more escape rooms, plus any enthusiasts approved as voters when the requirement was lower than 100) are asked to provide a complete, ordered stack rank of the rooms that survived Phase 1. They are only allowed to rank rooms that they have played and for which they do not have a potential conflict of interest, as defined in the previous section. Voters can also choose not to rank a room that they've played for any reason.
Once again, owners, employees, investors, designers, consultants, and other direct affiliates of a given escape room or escape room company, past or present, as well as spouses, partners, or family members of any such affiliates, are not allowed to rank any of the corresponding rooms for which they may have a conflict of interest.
Stack ranks are used for this process rather than numerical ratings because it forces participants to think hard about every entry in their stack, and this approach does not suffer from different people having different calibrations for numerical ratings.
Details for the analysis and results of Phase 2 will be provided after voting concludes in 2024.
For additional information on the methodology and how the project works, visit the TERPECA Voter Portal FAQ .
Stay tuned -- the 2024 nominees and finalists will be announced in early November!
Stay tuned -- the 2024 winners will be announced December 21st!
To see last year's winners, visit the 2023 website or to explore all the past results from this project, check out the TERPECA Room Finder .
Since 2020, the TERPECA Regional Ambassador Program has helped with outreach to known regions from around the world where escape rooms are popular. These ambassadors recruit participants, process rooms, raise awareness of the project, and much more.
The list of 2024 contributors will remain private until the 2024 winners are announced.
If your room or company is a TERPECA honoree or if you are a journalist or blogger writing about the project, please feel free to download these logos, subject to the usage guidelines listed below the logos.
Follow us on Facebook or Instagram for future announcements about the project.
If you've played 100 or more escape rooms and would like to contribute to the project in future years, visit the TERPECA Voter Portal to learn more and sign up.
If you have any other questions about this project, contact Rich Bragg at rich@terpeca.com.