Mysteries and Crimes
The team investigates a mystery through the streets of the city.
What it is
It’s the Urban Game with a storyline built on the darker, stranger side of a city. Teams move on foot or by bike, take on creative challenges and have to deal with the places and with the people who live there.
The route takes in the corners that don’t get walked rather than the postcard landmarks: the old quarters, the markets, the places that stay out of the guidebooks.
When it makes sense to choose it
It works well when the convention is in that city and you want people to actually see it. The mystery gives them a reason to go into places an ordinary tour doesn’t reach.
It works well with groups who live there too. A city with a reputation of its own usually has an ironic relationship with it, and playing on that works even with people who know the place.
It works less well if you want a format you can repeat elsewhere. This one is cut for a single 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.
How it actually works
The mechanism is the Urban Game one: teams, missions, points, a final leaderboard. What changes is the storyline holding it together, built on the myths and the legends attached to that place.
A lot of the answers aren’t written down anywhere and have to be asked for from the people who live there. It’s the point where the activity stops being a hunt and becomes a reason to talk to strangers, which is the part people tell you about afterwards.
Three questions
How is it different from Urban Game?
In the mechanism, not at all. It’s the same activity, with a storyline and a route built on one city. If the city is a different one, the format to look at is Urban Game.
On foot or by bike?
Both, and it gets decided by the group and by how much ground you want to cover.
Do you need to know the city?
No, and people who have never been don’t start at a disadvantage: the answers get asked for, not remembered.
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