Anyone up for some puzzle games? What about twelve hours of puzzle games…during the holiday season?
Well, okay but…they better be really interesting games…
In fact, they were. The holiday season of 2019 set James and Elyssa Warner, self-described escape room and puzzle aficionados, on a path that would ultimately see them launching their new business, Paruzal, in the early weeks of the 2020 pandemic.
Paruzal puts on live-hosted escape room games that are played over video conferencing platforms. The business has been more successful than they had ever imagined it would be. In the first three months after hosting their first game in March 2020, James and Elyssa hired three additional hosts and have run games for a variety of occasions they hadn’t foreseen, including professional conferences, children’s birthday parties, game design college lessons, holiday celebrations, kids’ camps, corporate team-building exercises, and sobriety anniversaries. Although some of Paruzal’s original popularity came from word-of-mouth in the escape room community, the games quickly caught on with people who had never even heard of real-life escape rooms.
“We were really surprised at how popular our games became outside the escape room community,” notes Elyssa. “If you ask people whether they want to pay to be put into a physical room and solve puzzles for an hour, a lot of people will look at you like you’re crazy. But if their friends tell them they just had a great time playing this remote, live-hosted puzzle game, everyone’s excited about it.”
How did Paruzal come about?
James and Elyssa are big escape room fans and have played more than 150 games together. Leading up to the 2019 holiday season, they had been exchanging holiday gifts with each other for four years through homemade puzzle hunts. These hunts involved features of their apartment or geographic features of the city in which they lived. One year, James wrote out turn-by-turn directions for Elyssa to follow during a run. She’s a long-distance runner, so James knew she’d rise to the occasion. When she got home, she synchronized her GPS watch to the corresponding app and saw that she had just spelled the word “railing.” She looked at their porch railing, and sure enough, there was a present waiting for her. Each year, their friends and family, scattered around the world, would hear about the puzzle hunts, but until 2019, the hunts were always location-dependent.
In 2019, James and Elyssa had a total of six puzzle hunts that took 12 hours to play. Three of the puzzle hunts were playable remotely and were in the style of scripted escape rooms. James is an avid SCUBA diver, so Elyssa had written two such scripted games about diving after extensive research (she’s not a SCUBA diver) — one based on a real shipwreck in the St. Lawrence River, and the other about a real dive boat company in upstate New York. As Elyssa started putting on the first game for James on Christmas 2019, she had butterflies in her stomach. James would be the first player of her first scripted escape room game, and she worried the whole thing would fall apart — after all, she hadn’t tested it on anyone.
The game went well. James had a lot of fun playing it, and Elyssa had a lot of fun seeing her creation come to life. Additionally, they didn’t have to retire the games once the holidays were over. Over the next few weeks, the couple hosted the games for friends and family who enjoyed them so much they encouraged the couple to put the games as a business.
James and Elyssa decided over the holidays that they wanted to launch in late summer 2020. This would give Elyssa enough time to create about half a dozen additional games. In the meantime, James would register the business name and social media handles, build the paruzal.com website, and learn about scheduling and payment software. By March 2020, they managed to build a functional website, three games, and had a vague idea of how they wanted to run their games. But businesses were starting to close and stay-at-home orders were being issued, so James floated the idea that they should launch Paruzal early. They did, and they haven’t looked back.
The decision to launch early meant they had to flex on certain business goals. Instead of launching with eight games, they launched with three. By early April, James also had to learn how to hire and pay additional staff, and quickly, since the demand for games, and therefore game hosts, was growing faster than the couple could keep up with. They added a fourth game in mid-April, and are working toward a bigger game selection. To give Elyssa time to create more games, she stopped hosting games in June, and James runs most of the rest of the business, including interviewing and training employees, responding to customer inquiries, and he still hosts the occasional game when large groups want to run multiple games simultaneously.
“I never thought I’d be employing people during a pandemic,” says James. “It has been a real blessing to know that we are able to bring laughter to far-flung friends and families and give them a chance to share experiences during such a stressful time.”
Six months ago, neither Elyssa nor James envisioned being successful entrepreneurs, but they have no regrets about Paruzal. Elyssa, a breast cancer advocate and science policy analyst and editor, has always had a creative but analytical mind. Creating these games helps keep her busy and her mind occupied after her own cancer treatment. James has a background in network security and enjoys working through the details of business management and customer interactions. Together, they know the stress of enduring cancer treatments and the couple uses Paruzal to brighten those patients’ days as often as they can.
Their games may have started as a labor of love intended to be shared with their own friends and family in the holiday season, but Paruzal’s games continue bringing laughter and thoughtful puzzling experiences well beyond the couples’ expectations.
