Escape Box

A case arrives closed on the table. Inside there are nested boxes, padlocks, hidden keys and codes to find. A timer starts, and the team has to open everything in order before it runs out. The case comes to where you are: your meeting room is enough.

What it makes visible

The clues are distributed: the person holding a number does not know what it is for until they say it out loud. In ten minutes you see who shares and who holds back, who listens and who decides alone, who keeps the time and who loses it. And you see the cost of every piece of information kept to oneself, the same cost that in the office hides inside emails with the manager in copy. What the team keeps: the habit of saying what it knows before it is too late, the taste for thinking outside the box, and the patience to look together for a solution that nobody holds entirely.

How it works

Every team gets its own case. The boxes are nested: to open the second you need something from the first. Taken one at a time the puzzles are within everyone's reach; they become hard because the clock is running and because nobody has all the pieces. From there the format takes two roads. Team Race sets the teams against each other. Escape Together does the opposite: each team solves its own case, but the final code is obtained only by combining what every team found, because no single case holds everything. Teams that spent half an hour racing each other suddenly have to talk.

Three questions

Do you need to be good at puzzles?

No. The clues are of different kinds: numbers, words, objects to look at carefully. It is built so that more than one head is needed.

How long?

Sixty to ninety minutes, depending on the version. With briefing and debriefing, count two hours.

Where?

Where you are. One table per team, roughly one case per ten people: a group of forty needs four tables. Any hotel meeting room works, and the puzzles are in English.