Treasure Hunt
The team follows clues and evidence across the city.
What it looks like
A video says in thirty seconds what a page explains in a thousand words: how loud it gets, how much laughing there is, what the hands are doing.
What it is
Teams follow a chain of clues through a place chosen for the story attached to it: the alleys of the Old City, the creek at Deira, the towers of Dubai Marina, a stretch of coast or of desert. The narrative is built to measure from the legends, the history and the culture of that place, and you only reach the answer by completing the steps in order. The teams move with iPads or with maps, depending on how you want to run it.
Actors can move among the participants playing characters from the story, and a secret has to be got out of them by persuasion. Introductory videos, purpose-made soundtracks and augmented reality can all be added, so that something appears on the screen that isn’t in the street.
An adventure to live as a team
More than a sightseeing game, the Treasure Hunt turns a place into a living training ground. We’ve designed them in more than fifty cities, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Doha among them, and beyond the cities we take teams out to the coast and into desert settings.
Our locations always come with a story full of mystery, built for the occasion out of the legends and the history attached to those spaces. The teams have to work the secrets out and get through a series of steps that lead them to the final answer.
Each location is a place to be discovered step by step, clue by clue. Only a team that genuinely works as one gets there. The format puts three things together: urban orienteering, problem solving and a live action game, so the teams have to coordinate, decide collectively and use what each person is good at. The day after, the treasure they’ve actually brought home is a clearer idea of how the group holds up under pressure and uncertainty.
A treasure hunt between adventure and mystery
Seeing a place through a team building activity has very little in common with the usual tour. It means, first of all, an experience that runs outside the usual limits, outside the boundaries and outside the patterns. It means forgetting the familiar reference points and going to discover what a place has in it in an adventurous, original way, with nothing to rely on but your own instincts and your teammates’.
Exploring the places that matter, the landmarks and the best views, has never been this curious. Because even when they look like ordinary tourist spots, taking part in a treasure hunt changes your angle on them entirely. Everything stays interactive and hands-on, and the group keeps moving on its own legs and its own decisions.
Augmented team building
Exactly as in Dinner with Murder, a Treasure Hunt can include actors in costume. Our people play the characters in the story and populate the location. The teams face challenges of interaction, trying to persuade each character to give up their best-hidden secret. They need to be good strategists, and they need to play it cleverly.
Our Treasure Hunts can also use more advanced technology. We produce introductory videos and soundtracks made for the setting, and we can use augmented reality, adding virtual elements to the real surroundings the teams are moving through.
The secret is the location
What we propose rests on a careful selection of the places worth going to. Every one of them is unique because the people who live there are unique, with their own traditions and their own customs. The scenery matters less than what the teams do inside it: a challenge planted in the right alley makes people think, talk and choose together.
To that we add mystery and intrigue, and get a mixture of history and adventure with nothing quite like it. Exploring the streets that don’t get walked, finding what’s particular about places, out in the open air. Mystery and adventure are the tools here, and team alignment is the point of using them.
Three different settings, three different activities: under a minute each.
A fort
Actors move among the participants playing the characters of the story, and the parts change from one edition to the next: who they are, what they’re hiding and which of them will help you depends on the story written for that day.
A city
In Dubai we’ve run it through the Old City, along Deira Creek and among the towers of Dubai Marina, with Palm Jumeirah and the Burj Khalifa as landmarks along the way.
Our corporate team buildings
Close to the Treasure Hunt and different at the same time: Urban Game
Technology in play
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