The challenge: Every shift a scheduling puzzle.

When your business runs on bookings and walk-ins, staffing isn't a weekly task — it's a daily recalibration. For The Escape Game, that challenge is multiplied across 60+ locations. Games are booked by the hour, guests walk in off the street expecting to play immediately, and every room needs a trained guide to run it. Getting staffing right is a puzzle in itself.

The difference in demand on a regular weekend versus a holiday weekend can be huge."There's seasonality to our business," says Daniel Daher, who oversees Marketing, Guest Care, and Sales, "and then there's seasonality within the seasonality." Each location is making these calls every week.

At the Times Square location, that variability is especially visible. Alec Deske, General Manager, puts it plainly: "At a location like Times Square, you're going to have people walk in and want to play. The difference between bringing in too many people versus not bringing enough people and turning guests away who want to play — it's a very thin line."

Times Square draws guests from every country in the world, many on vacation with no plan — they spot the location, walk in, and want to play. A day that starts with four games pre-booked can end with 20. On a busy Saturday, the location runs up to 60 games.

Previous tools — Paycor, then ADP scheduling — couldn't keep up. For a company growing from 16 to 60+ locations, they needed something better.

"Our biggest challenge has been finding things that scale with us. There's just not a lot of software built to fit multi-location retail. Homebase has done that — and that's impressive."
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— Daniel Daher, Sr. Director of Marketing, The Escape Game

The solution: A scheduler built for multi-location ease.

The Escape Game moved to Homebase early on and found exactly what they were looking for: a tool that works the way they do, not the other way around.

"There are so many softwares in our lives that make things more difficult — they're trying to fit you into a box. With Homebase, we're just able to use it exactly as we need to get done what we want, which is no small thing because what we want to do is complex and challenging."

— Daniel Daher, Sr. Director of Marketing, The Escape Game

For Alec at Times Square, that flexibility shows up every week. He builds the schedule over a couple of days — starting from a saved template, slotting in game coverage and training needs, and adjusting start times nightly based on the next day's expected bookings. The whole process takes about two hours.

"It's my own little game that I play with scheduling," Alec says. "Being efficient, but also looking to make sure that I'm ready for my team members to grow and learn more games."

Before the week even starts, Alec has a clear picture of what staffing is going to cost. The wages and hours projection gives him a projected labor baseline to work from — one he adjusts as bookings shift. "I look at the wages and hours view the most," Alec says.

The team side runs the same way — without guesswork. Team members submit availability requests directly in Homebase; Alec reviews and approves them before building the week. "I love that they're able to submit an availability request to me and then I can approve that," he says. It keeps availability current and the schedule accurate.

Once the schedule is published, Homebase messaging takes over. The Escape Game replaced Slack with Homebase's built-in chat across the company. For a business that takes pride in its hospitality, where every team member needs to be prepared before their shift starts, read receipts matter. "You can see who's read the messages," Alec says. "That is super helpful." At a location running up to 60 games on a Saturday, that visibility is part of how the day stays on track.

At the company level, Daniel's guest care team uses Homebase alongside call volume data to align staffing with the expected curve of incoming calls, shifting a team member's start time when demand will peak earlier. When a new schedule is published, the whole team gets notified instantly.

The results: Scheduling at scale across 60+ locations.

Since adopting Homebase, The Escape Game has grown from roughly 16 locations to 60+ with Homebase keeping pace every step of the way. Today, the platform supports ~1,500 team members across the country, giving every location manager the same scheduling visibility and communication tools, without a complicated setup for each new store.

At Times Square, the proof is in the day-to-day. According to Alec, he and his team have been crushing their goals since opening in December. The wages and hours projection gives him a clear picture of projected spend before the week begins. Daily adjustments keep labor aligned with actual game volume. Availability requests come in through the app, get approved, and flow directly into the schedule. And a well-scheduled, well-informed team means Alec isn't scrambling when walk-in traffic spikes on a Saturday afternoon.

"Homebase is the best scheduling software that I've used."

— Alec Deske, General Manager (Times Square), The Escape Game

Alec's been on the other side of Homebase too, when he used it as a team member at a water park in college, long before he was building the schedules himself.

The next level.

The Escape Game is approaching its first full year at Times Square — and for a data-driven operation, that milestone is meaningful.

"Once we have a year under our belt, we're able to look back in Homebase: what did we do on this day last year?" Alec says. That historical view is exactly what makes next year's scheduling decisions a little less of a guess.

This summer, the team expects some of the busiest weeks the Times Square location has seen. New games are in development in Nashville. The Great Big Game Show is expanding. A new concept — Adventure Mining — just launched its first Tennessee location. For a company that started with seven locations and now operates nearly 80 entertainment experiences across the country, the growth shows no signs of slowing.

At its core, The Escape Game is “a hospitality company disguised as a game company.” Delivering an epic experience for every guest depends on having the right people in the right place, every single day. The scheduling puzzle never really gets smaller. It just gets more important to get right.