Urban Game Team Building
A city becomes the playing field
What it looks like
Fifty-seven seconds of Urban Game: the city turning into a playing field, teams dividing up the streets, the clock running.
Does your team struggle with alignment, with communication, with pulling towards the same goal? Do people work on their own account, each solving their own piece, with the inefficiency and the irritation that follow back at the office? An Urban Game puts that team out on the street with a mission, a set of materials, a simplified map and a time limit. Along the route there are stages to reach, challenges to solve and creative rounds where the teams compete against each other, and points to be won. The team with the highest score is named Urban Game Master.
It’s an interactive, challenge-based activity rather than a guided tour. The teams have to weigh the objectives, choose their route together, divide up the roles and deal with the city and the people in it. Even in a city they already know, that means observing properly, communicating well and deciding under time pressure. What stays with them is the way they organised themselves to cross it, alongside people they usually share nothing but a meeting with.
It’s our most requested format, and there’s a practical reason: it works almost every time. It needs no physical preparation, it scales well from 15 to 200 participants, it fits a half day as well as a full one, and it can run in any city with a centre worth walking. If this is your first time organising a team building, this is the family to start from. The day after, even the teams that didn’t win come back with a shared reference point, and it holds up for months.
We run it across the Gulf: through the streets and the historic districts of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and in Riyadh, Doha and other cities in the region.
→ See where we run it
When it makes sense to choose it
It works well if
- it’s your first experience of team building and you want a safe bet
- the group is large and mixed in age, role and physical condition
- you’re already travelling for a convention and want to use an afternoon well
- you want people from different offices to get to know each other
It works less well if
- you have less than three hours, because a compressed urban game loses its rhythm
- the objective is deep work on an internal conflict: the register here is light
- the season or the heat rules out being outdoors and you have no indoor plan B
The formats
Urban Game with App
The technology version: each team has a tablet, the challenges unlock in sequence, photos and videos go into the app and the leaderboard updates live. Augmented reality puts something on the screen that isn’t in the street.
Rescue Team
A mission to accomplish, someone to stop, a limited amount of time. It runs through the streets of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Doha, with a lot of interaction with the places and the people in them, and it can also be set up inside your own offices. The story gets written for the occasion, around where you are and what the day is for.
Urban Movie
Turning the visit into a film of your own. An advertising spot or a genuine short film, depending on what the team imagines: somebody writes the script, somebody directs, somebody acts.
Mysteries and Crimes
An unsolved case set in the real city: the team reconstructs what happened by moving between the places.
When what surfaces deserves an afterwards
An activity surfaces a great deal about how a team communicates, decides and works together, and sometimes what surfaces deserves more time, more depth and a method. That is where a Team Coaching path can begin: a different road, to be taken only if it is needed, to turn what the day made visible into a new way of working together.
Discover Team Coaching →
Let’s talk about your next team building
You don’t need to have picked a format yet. Tell us what you want your team to take home, how many of you there are and where you’ll be, and we’ll do the rest: within 24 hours you get a considered proposal for your case, with the formats that hold up against your numbers, and what each one leaves the team the day after.
Prefer to talk? +971 50 795 9666 · info @ teambuildingincentive.ae