Puzzah! is a Unique Colorado Experience

Ryan Pachmayer opened up Puzzah! with partners, Derek and Sarah, over Halloween 2014. They've taken the escape room concept and added some fun and unique twists. We talked with Ryan to find out more about this new and exciting business.

Puzzah! is located in downtown Denver, Colorado and is open 7 days a week. You can visit www.puzzah.com for full details.

What exactly is Puzzah!?

Our main attraction is our puzzle rooms. You come into a room with a group of 2-5 people, and you work to solve unique and interesting puzzles all with the goal of completing a mission.

In our first room, Tick-Tock, a mad composer has taken over backstage at the performing arts center and planted a bomb. Players are detectives, and have to solve a variety of audio themed puzzles and disarm the bomb, all within 60 minutes.

We also have a lobby with hand puzzles and games. Think Rush Hour for games, and Hanayama for puzzles. We also feature some local designers such as Doug Engel, who designs and constructs some excellent puzzles. We host board game nights as well as puzzle parties.

How did you come up with the idea for Puzzah?

My partners (now married) met in London a few years ago. Derek was in finance, and Sarah was in design school. They were playing some of the escape rooms out in London and had a blast. After playing more of these around the world, from Singapore to San Francisco, they found that some of the early magic had worn off, due to many of the rooms having game flaws, repetitive word puzzles and a lot of scavenger hunting. But the businesses were still incredibly popular.

We decided that we wanted to build an experience that was a bit more enriching and unique, replayable. So we came up with the idea to build a “puzzle room” that focused on unique puzzles and challenges, all built around a core theme. Instead of escaping through a locked door, you're disarming a bomb that is counting down. Instead of an employee walking in to deliver a clue to help you solve a word puzzle, you might hear the voice of a scientist trapped in time, helping you find a chemical needed to help bring him back to present day.

What does someone experience in the room? Do you have any pictures to share?

You can expect up to an hour of fun. You might find things that work in ways you never thought possible, and you will probably end up solving some puzzles that you had no idea you could solve. People come out of these rooms with such enthusiasm, it's the best part of this job.

Here are some pictures from our media coverage.

How do you come up with ideas? Who comes up with the games?

We think of individual puzzle components and once we have a certain amount we build a theme around them. Sometimes puzzles don't fit and we need to drop them, sometimes puzzles aren't viable or we decide they aren't fun enough for the rooms. There's a lot of tinkering. For our first room about halfway into play-testing we realized that we needed an additional puzzle. We went out to lunch and discussed it and came up with the foundation for what has been a pretty popular puzzle in the room.

As for who comes up with them, Derek has led the way thus far. He thinks very technical about game components, that's his strength. Sarah has a good mind for theme, and I'm kind of a mix of the two. We also picked up another talented member during the first room build, his name is Tom and he has a good mind for puzzles. Tom is also constructing all of the puzzles in room 2 (a heist theme, ala Mission Impossible).

How do you construct the rooms?

Sarah and some of the fabricators scour the internet for visual inspiration. Then we look at materials available and their cost. One important part of the materials process is factoring in the cost of installing the materials. If you are comparing $200 stick-on flooring to $300 wood flooring, the real cost difference might be far more than $100. It's easy to glue flooring or tape down carpet squares, but it's far harder to install real hardwood floors, so time is a huge variable. That's a more obvious decision, but these types of decisions require a lot of planning.

From that point, we have a good team of fabricators. Most of the members of our team have worked previously on theater set design. We have one member that has a background in building museum exhibits. Derek is a good programmer and Tom is skilled with electronics and wood working. It's really a team effort from start to finish.

Your branding is sharp, how did you come up with it?

Sarah is our designer/branding leader. She came up with the logo and pretty much every visual you can find that has to do with Puzzah!

Are you afraid about relying so heavily on technology? What if stuff breaks?

Things are almost always going to break, the goal is really to use technology that is 99.9% reliable. If you do that across the board, you might have a few “breaks” every thousand plays. But even "non tech" is going to break. Sending an actor into a room to give a clue is not going to be nearly as reliable as a mechanical switch sending a message to a microcontroller that the team has completed puzzle #2.

Technology is all around us though. Take cell phones, for example. In my city, my old provider had a 3%+ dropped rate frequency. That's huge! I switched to a provider that had a .4% dropped rate frequency. The difference between that, to me, is the difference between having a reliable and successful product and having an unreliable one. We're constantly tinkering and upgrading our rooms so that we're offering a robust experience that should be reliable day in and day out. Whether it's tighter coding or a newer microcontroller, we're constantly evaluating what is out there and upgrading when appropriate.

How many rooms do you plan to have?

We have one open right now, a second is about to go into testing mode and we should begin some construction prep in the next two weeks on our third and fourth rooms.

Ultimately, we can hold at least 7 rooms in our location, probably more if we do some basic wall construction. I can see us with at least 4 rooms by spring, and the market will determine what we do after that.

How has the community responded so far?

Great. I can't tell you how good it feels to see group after group come out of the room happier than when they came into our business. A local professor calls us “proprietors of fun.” I never thought of that until he said it, but we really are in the business of fun, and it's just awesome. People come to play the room because they want to do something new and fun, not because they are forced to be at our business.

We've had some great local press. The Denver Post, Denver News, Westword, Colorado Public Radio, University of Colorado Denver Magazine have all put out positive stories about us.

Trip Advisor and Yelp/Facebook/Google reviews have also been extremely positive. We're already in the top 20 out of 120+ activities in Denver on Trip Advisor.

Where do you see this business in 5 years?

My hope is that our Denver location is our flagship. Our space has a lot of small to medium sized rooms, so it is the perfect location to test new games. I would really like to see us expand, however. Whether that means locally (Colorado Springs, Boulder), or regional (Salt Lake City, Omaha, Kansas City) or national (New York, San Francisco, Chicago) or even International (London, Tokyo, Singapore), I do not know, but I really think if we keep making rooms as enjoyable as the first, we should not have many major hurdles into expanding this fun business to people anywhere in the world.

What kind of competition do you have?

There are other escape rooms in Denver, but they are really different from our model. We're the only one downtown, we offer more interactive puzzles in our rooms and we have a full scale puzzle/game lobby. That doesn't necessarily make us better, but it makes us different. I don't really view the other escape rooms as competitors, and I strive to work together with them on mutually beneficial ideas.

Our business model isn't setup to be first or be the only game in town. We're setup to deliver a unique experience to customers, whether we're one of twenty escape rooms (Toronto market) or one of one. There are three other escape rooms in Denver, a fourth is coming sometime in early 2015, but nobody is really doing what we're doing. To me, it's like we're an italian restaurant, and we're in the same town as chinese, greek and mexican restaurants. We may all be restaurants, but most lovers of food are going to go to all the good restaurants, so we're focusing on delivering a quality experience, rather than "beating the competition."

How has your experience with HUSNG.com prepared you for this business?

In the poker world, I've learned a great deal about what goes into analyzing a decision. That's the biggest thing for me, and something I struggled with far more often prior to starting HUSNG.com. Understanding the emotional aspect of running a business is another big thing that prepared me for Puzzah! When black friday hit in the poker world, I kind of just put my head down and worked very long weeks, just assuming the hard work would lead to fruition. It did pay off, but I was much more inefficient than I should have been, because I wasn't working as smart as I could have. It's similar to what a lot of heavy grinders do at times, they just put in huge volume, and sometimes it's their B, C or even D game, not their A quality game. Black friday taught me not to think emotionally, not to work emotionally, to just work hard and work smart. I'm not trying to work a 5 hour work week, but I'm also not trying to work a 60 hour work week. I just want to put in a solid day of work, stay balanced, and make sure every hour counts and is building towards something of value.

That said, there are times when you need to grind out a ton of hours in a short period of time. But if you're working balanced and efficiently for the most part, you can just weather those crazy weeks, where you're releasing a video pack or a puzzle room, or whatever major event happens in your line of work.

One last aspect of poker that has helped me with Puzzah! is the relative freedom and flexibility that poker players have. I don't travel a ton compared to most poker players, but I do get out and enjoy myself. Whether it's hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing, caving or some other activity, I make sure to regularly get out there and have some fun. Being in Colorado this is far easier to do than many parts of the world.

Do you have any other business ideas you plan to work on anytime soon?

Nothing outside of poker and puzzle rooms. I have scaled back some hobbies to fit both of these businesses in my life. I haven't brewed a beer in about 8 months. I also feel like I know some business areas far better than others. I'm not looking to learn a lot about a new field right now. I'm plenty busy constantly learning about poker and the escape room world.

Are you afraid of failure? How likely is it that Puzzah! will be around in 5 years?

Puzzah! is new. Almost any new business is not going to have a big chance for high success. However, I am very optimistic. HUSNG.com, I had no idea how it would perform when I started it with three other partners in 2009. I've ran other businesses, and never had a high level of confidence when launching them. With Puzzah!, it has been different. It's a hot market, combined with what I think is a very unique and repeatable experience that we offer, so I think our odds of success are very high. I love the team we've assembled, we're in a great location in the heart of a vibrant downtown neighborhood in a growing city and we appeal to families, friends, education centers, tourists, corporate team building, date night crowds and more. Anything can certainly happen, but I expect we'll succeed, and if we don't, I'll be ready to immerse myself into something new, whether it is more poker ideas or something entirely different.

I'm not afraid to fail because I haven't set my life up to rely on the next big thing. If I succeed, I can realize some more dreams that I have, but if I fail, I'm still happy and living a great life and I'll be ready to try something else.