Urban Game
The team scatters across the city with an app and a set of missions.
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 set off from the same point with an app in hand and a list of missions. They cover the route for a few hours: places to find, photographs and videos to shoot inside the app, quizzes and puzzles to answer, challenges to get through, people to ask. Every mission is worth points, and the feedback arrives in real time. At the end everyone regroups, the points get added up and the best team takes the prize.
You will also find it under the name city game. It is the same activity.
In Doha it runs in Souq Waqif or in Katara. The two routes, and how to choose.
When it makes sense to choose it
It works well when the group comes from different offices and doesn’t know each other: walking together for a few hours does more than a dinner. It’s particularly effective for teams that have drifted apart or have a communication gap, and for multicultural groups, where finding a shared way of talking is half the exercise. It works well too when you’re guests of a city for a convention and you want people to actually see it, instead of doing hotel-room-hotel.
It works less well if there are mobility difficulties in the group. Heat on its own is not a reason to give it up: that is what the Katara route is for.
The clues are never hidden under a plant pot. The answers come from looking, from thinking and above all from asking the people who live there. Anyone who gets their phone out to search loses the point of the challenge, and usually the points too.
How it actually works
Three moments, and the interesting part is the middle one.
The briefing. The group splits into small teams, typically between five and fifteen people each. The mechanism gets explained, everyone gets into the app and the first mission arrives.
The missions. From there each team moves on its own, choosing its own order and its own route, and can send messages or video updates to the other teams.
The leaderboard. Everyone regroups, the points are counted and the prize is given.
The missions do not all take the same time and some are worth more than others, so the team has to decide what to let go. It is a choice made while walking, with the clock running, and it separates the groups that organise themselves from the groups that chase.
Some challenges are written precisely so that anyone reading in a hurry falls for them. What the scoring rewards is creativity, clear thinking and working together, so a team that runs everywhere and agrees on nothing finishes behind one that walks.
The clues are never hidden under a plant pot. The answers come from looking, from thinking, and above all from asking the people who live and work there. Anyone who gets their phone out to search loses the point of the challenge, and usually the points too.
The day after, the group has a concrete picture of how it decides when nobody is chairing the meeting.
Three ways to run it
With remote support. The teams follow everything through the app and technical support stays reachable from a distance. It is the lightest formula and the most economical.
With a supervisor. One of our people is on site and coordinates the group while the activity is running.
With a trainer for each team. Every team has its own dedicated guide, and the activity becomes far denser in interaction.
Three questions
How long does it take?
Between two and three hours. Beyond that the walking gets tiring and the activity loses its rhythm.
Do you need to know the city?
No, and people who have never been do not start at a disadvantage. The answers get asked for rather than remembered, so nerve counts for more than memory.
Can it run indoors?
Yes. If you have a venue, a museum or your own offices, the same game runs inside with QR codes to find and scan. A smaller space makes the challenges tighter and puts them within everybody’s reach.
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.
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? · info @ teambuilding.qa