February 25, 2016
For me, inspiration comes from all over; from reading, traveling, writing and constantly inquiring about the world around me. Last February, my family and I visited my daughter Baylee who was studying abroad in Europe. As part of the trip we went to Prague and Budapest. Although I might argue that the beer spa in Prague was my favorite find, I discovered something else that became the inspiration for what we at TeamBonding believe will become the next big trend, the new team building activity: Escape Room & Games.
One in particular that we visited was a three-room basement that we still might be in if it weren’t for the help we had with some of the puzzles we encountered. As a clock wound down from 60 minutes, my family and I had to work together to escape the room. Unfortunately, we didn’t technically escape, but it was great fun nonetheless and a fantastic example of a potential new team building activity. I walked away from the experience needing to understand more about what we had just encountered and how we could apply it to our business.
When I returned stateside, I started to research Escape Rooms for immersive team building and found out that they had originated in Hungary and their popularity was quickly spreading around the world. I knew that we had to be not only a part of this trend, but that TeamBonding had to lead the way.
As of today, TeamBonding is excited to be offering three types of escape rooms/games to meet the diverse needs of the corporations we work with, including Google, Apple, Fidelity, and Direct TV.
Safe Cracker
Safe Cracker is a mobile escape room with custom-made set pieces and a countdown clock that adds to the game’s excitement. While it shares similarities with other traditional escape rooms, there’s a big difference: we take SafeCracker to you — your office, your meeting, your conference — wherever you are! We’ve licensed this program from a company in the Netherlands who has been running it successfully for the past year — we think that our corporate clients and college clients are going to love this new team building activity!
Escape from Hotel California
Born out of our Innovation Lab — where we offer deeply discounted rates for ideas we are incubating — Escape from Hotel California is virtual escape game that brings all the live-action adventure of escape games right to your meeting room, hotel or conference center. We created this offering with the help of treasure hunt designers whose acumen for maps, clues and puzzles helped transform what has historically been an event designed for small rooms and teams into an experience for teams of all sizes.
Escape from Werewolf Village
If you know me, you know I couldn’t stop there — I had to go even bigger. The creators of this concept and I found SCRAP who has been in the Escape Games business in Asia since 2007 and continues to push the the envelope when it comes to larger games. In January, I participated in Escape from AT&T Park in San Francisco with one of our facilitators and 2,000 of our closest friends. It was a complete blast. We’ve since licensed one of SCRAPs most popular Escape Games, Escape from Werewolf Village and our facilitators were trained in January and are ready to take this to companies all over the country.
Escape Rooms and Games remind me of our first scavenger hunt, the limousine scavenger hunt. We used to call them “team building by accident” as it turned out you needed to work as a team in order to succeed. Our new team building activity, the Escape Room concept works the same way; to escape the room or win the game, teams need to work together to solve puzzles, brain teasers and challenges while utilizing the individual strengths of their team members. A perfect Team Building Event.
A year from now, every team building company will be offering these type of programs, but today we are proud to be leading the way for what will continue to be a very exciting space to watch!
