Blue Lab
At the beginning of 2020 I made an Escape Trip to Bulgaria together with the SwissKnife Escape Team Lausanne, alias Ayah and Maxime. Anyone who thinks I do tight travel planning doesn’t know Ayah. She actually managed to find some gaps in my initial schedule (where I thought it is already fully packed) and to fill them by skilfully shifting some slots back and forth, so that in the end we were able to visit 16 providers in and around Sofia to play a total of 23 rooms.
Blue Lab was pretty high on my priority list on this trip. On the one hand because I had already heard good things about it, and on the other because I am a huge fan of the TV series Breaking Bad, which inspired this escape game.
We received an exceptionally warm welcome. Our gamemaster ensured a very casual and relaxed feel-good atmosphere right from the start. From the introduction to the game accompaniment to the debriefing, everything was really excellent. That is how it should be!
The task: (How should it be different?) Cooking crystal meth.
The time limit: 88 minutes.
The environment: A well-equipped industrial chemistry laboratory.
The problem: We have no plan how to produce methamphetamine in particularly good quality, and moreover the laboratory seems to have been out of order for a long time – in other words, nothing works!
After a crash cooking course, we quickly begin to repair the laboratory equipment in order to put our newly acquired basic knowledge of crystal meth production into practice.
Nice puzzles and demanding dexterity tasks (some with a non-linear structure), machines and equipment that seem pretty real (and not fake), a good narrative (the story and our actions in it make sense), funny moments and some references to TV-Series that will delight Breaking Bad fans.
For experienced players I recommend playing Blue Lab with three people, otherwise with a maximum of four, as there are also some bottlenecks in the game. A visit to Endorphin Games is worthwhile, and was certainly one of the highlights of our Sofia trip.
