Experience Designer (Escape-Room Expert)

About Three Doors

Three Doors is a pre-launch immersive entertainment company. We're building a 90-minute live experience for teams of 3–6 where every player walks out with a behavioural profile derived from how they actually moved through pressure — not from a questionnaire. Two audiences, one product: consumer tickets for friends, couples and groups; corporate team-development packages on weekdays.

The founder is Tom Ball, who built DeskLodge (48,000 sq ft, £4m turnover, Sunday Times Top 10 Best Places to Work 2023, B-Corp) and has played 121 escape rooms in service of this.

We are pre-seed. Small team, AI-leveraged: a couple of full-time hires (Game Master, Operations Manager) plus a small consultant pool. This is the design-craft seat in that pool.

The role

You bring the design instincts that the UK escape-room scene mostly doesn't have. Three Doors is not an escape room — there's no fixed solve-and-exit loop, no inventory puzzles, no "you have 60 minutes left" — but the craft of designing pressure, agency, and pacing for a team in a room comes directly from the international escape-room tradition. We need someone who has internalised that craft and can deploy it into a different shape.

You work alongside Tom and the Game Master, with the Production Designer for physical realisation. Output is design work — story beats, puzzle logic, branching decision structure, pacing — not management of others.

Deliverables

The initial paid project is 20 days. That's a meaningful design sprint — enough to pressure-test the existing room set, redesign the weakest two or three beats, and lock the three-doors mechanic. We'd scope the exact targets at engagement start. The rest of the design work continues as follow-on engagement if the first sprint works for both sides.

The full scope this role might cover over time:

• Room-by-room beat design — what happens, in what order, with what choices. We have a working room set; you pressure-test and improve it
• Puzzle and challenge design — the cognitive and physical tasks that earn the decision moments. Each must be solvable by mixed-ability teams and double as behavioural-signal capture
• The three-doors mechanic itself — how the choice is staged, how the three options are made distinct, how consequence is delivered. This is the core IP and the design here matters most
• Branching narrative logic — how teams' decisions ripple into what they experience next without combinatorial explosion
• Confusion-pair discrimination — making sure the behavioural signals we measure actually discriminate one role from another (overlaps with FRINGE design)
• Playtest critique — sitting through trial sessions and writing the design notes the team acts on

Who you are

• You've designed at least three immersive experiences or top-tier escape rooms that real people have played and rated highly — we'd recognise your portfolio
• You have an internalised theory of why a moment works, not just that it works. You can explain it
• You've designed for branching outcomes before (Sleep No More-style multi-path immersive, well-branched escape rooms, narrative video games, RPG modules)
• You can hold the dual constraint: this needs to feel like a story and generate clean behavioural signal. Neither at the other's expense
• Comfortable with iteration. The first version of any beat will be wrong; the third version is the job

Bonus

• Experience with TERPECA-listed rooms or comparable international design standards (we benchmark hard against the global top 100)
• Background that crosses into narrative game design, interactive theatre, or LARP — different traditions, useful overlap
• Theatre / actor-direction experience — there's a live-actor layer in our model
• Experience designing for groups specifically (not just solo players or duos)

How we work

• AI-leveraged. We use Claude/ChatGPT for design support and expect you do too
• Pre-venue. The prototype warehouse is "plywood and projection" deliberately — designed for cheap iteration. Embrace that
• Cockroach, not unicorn. We optimise for surviving long enough to learn, not for looking impressive
• Bias to operating discipline over startup-theatre. Tom's background is operational real estate, not VC-circuit

Terms

Initial scope, with view to more. This is an initial paid project — 20 days, scoped as a focused design sprint. If it works for both sides, there's a lot more: ongoing design partnership through trial-session iteration, the design work for additional narrative experiences ("episodes"), and a real say in the shape of Three Doors as it scales. Several of the consultant briefs in this pool exist because the right initial engagement could grow into something bigger.

What we're imagining: 20 days total, drawn down across a 4–8 week design sprint window. Day rate or per-project fee both welcome — discussed directly.

What we'd like to see: your proposal. Per-project fee, retainer-plus-sprint, equity-weighted, something else — tell us how you'd structure it.

• Hybrid: design work mostly remote, but on-site at Henley HQ (Unit 1 Stuart's Lane, RG9 1RY) during sprint days and playtests
• IP terms. Your fee covers IP assignment on delivered design work — beat documents, puzzle specs, branching structures, design rationale notes. You retain general design methodology and the right to put a credit on your portfolio (subject to launch-NDA timing)
• Small advisory option grant available for the right candidate if the relationship extends (discuss)

How to apply

Send us, in your own words: (1) three rooms or experiences you've designed, with one paragraph each on the design decision you're proudest of and one you'd now change, (2) the best escape room or immersive piece you've ever played as a player and the specific mechanism that made it work, (3) one question you'd want to ask Tom before deciding.

Three Doors Experience Ltd is an equal-opportunity employer. We hire on judgement, behaviour under pressure, and whether you'll make the team better — not on credentials.