Every escape room slot has to include the time to reset the room — reset props, wipe surfaces, re-lock boxes — between one group leaving and the next arriving. How many bookable slots a room can run in a day is the open minutes divided by session-plus-reset, rounded down, because a partial slot at the end of the day is not sellable.
720 open minutes with a 60-minute session and a 15-minute reset is 9.6 slots — sellable as 9.
The example
Three rooms with different session lengths and reset times at the same venue.
| A | B | C | D | E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Room | Open minutes | Session min | Reset min | Slots/day |
| 2 | The Vault | 720 | 60 | 15 | 9 |
| 3 | Asylum | 600 | 45 | 10 | 10 |
| 4 | Pirate Ship | 660 | 75 | 15 | 7 |
The formula
Add session and reset together first, since that combined block is what repeats through the day:
How it works
One addition, one division, one round-down:
C2+D2is the real length of one slot on the schedule — the 60-minute game plus the 15 minutes it takes staff to reset the room, or 75 minutes total.B2/(C2+D2)divides the total open minutes by that slot length: 720 / 75 is 9.6 slots.FLOOR(...,1)rounds down to 9, because the 0.6 of a slot left over is not enough time to run a full game and reset before closing.
Build the actual time-slot list (9:00, 10:15, 11:30...) with a short fill-down formula once you know the slot count, rather than typing start times by hand.
Try it: interactive demo
Enter open minutes, session length and reset time.
Variations
Build actual start times from the slot count
Once you know the slot count, generate each start time by adding the block length to the opening time, row by row.
Different reset time for a messier room
A room with more physical props to reset (spilled sand, scattered cards) often needs more reset minutes than a mostly-digital room — look the reset time up per room instead of assuming one value for the whole venue.
Pitfalls & errors
Do not forget a lunch or dinner staffing gap if the venue closes the room mid-day — subtract that block from open minutes first, or the formula will schedule a slot that has no game master to run it.
If open minutes come from subtracting two time-of-day values (like 9:00 PM minus 9:00 AM), make sure both are true time values, not text — a text-formatted time will make the subtraction return an error or a wrong number instead of minutes.
Round down, never to nearest, for scheduling slot counts. Rounding 9.6 to 10 would schedule a slot with only 60 of the needed 75 minutes, running the last group late into close every single day.
Practice workbook
Frequently asked questions
Why FLOOR instead of ROUNDDOWN?
Should reset time include restocking consumable props?
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