Escape Rooms — Northstar Show Systems

The challenge

Many groups a day. Zero room for a stuck puzzle.

Escape rooms live and die on turnover. A jammed reset costs you a group. A confused puzzle costs you a review. Northstar handles the choreography so the game-master can focus on the players.

Puzzle dependency graphs

Author the room as a DAG in Compose. Puzzle A unlocks B, which arms C, which reveals D. Polaris enforces the order.

Hint pushes

Game-master types a hint in Cuemaster, it appears on the in-room screen — text, audio, video, or a triggered visual cue.

One-click reset

Group exits, GM hits Reset. Polaris re-cocks the mag-locks, resets the props, clears state, dims the lights. Ready for the next group.

GM dashboard

Cuemaster shows the room from above: progress bar, current puzzle, hint history, time remaining, all live.

Branching logic

Easy/medium/hard variants, skip paths, custom endings. Compose has if/then for puzzle order without touching code.

Analytics by room

Win rate, hint count, puzzle bottlenecks — all logged by HelmOS, queryable in Cuemaster. Tune the room from data.

A typical escape room deploy

What's usually in the rig.

1 × Helm per facility — runs every room in the building from one server.
Polaris per room — sized to puzzle count, with one for reset orchestration.
1 × GM tablet per room — runs Cuemaster for full control over the running session.
In-room display — wall-mounted screen for clues, hints, and timer.
TrueNorth network — covers all rooms plus the GM station.
Compose — design new rooms on a laptop, deploy without scheduling downtime.

Every puzzle.
Every reset.