Treasure Hunt as a Company Party Program

The program for a company party is usually the last thing anyone deals with. The venue is booked, the menu is picked, the DJ is confirmed, and then in mid-November someone posts in the chat: so what are we actually doing between arrival and dinner? An answer like "it’ll sort itself out" usually means nothing sorts itself out. People sit down with the same colleagues they’ve sat with all year. Treasure Hunt fills exactly that gap. Teams head out into the streets with a phone, hunt for treasures, and watch each other move on the map. They walk into the restaurant already talking.

How the Game Works

The principle is simple. You split people into teams, and each team gets a device with the app and a map. The map shows treasures: specific spots around the city with a question or a task attached. The team runs to a treasure, answers, scores points, and moves on.

Teams navigate by GPS map in the app on a phone or tablet, hunt for treasures and collect points, and they see each other on the map in real time. That last part matters more than it sounds. When sales spots marketing grabbing the treasure on the main square, it turns into a race. Without it, you’d just have a walk with a quiz attached.

There are three formats, and they differ in how much freedom of movement they allow.

• Treasure Hunt: teams pick which treasures to visit and in what order, so strategy decides it. One team grabs five nearby treasures worth a few points; another gambles on two distant ones worth a lot. Those decisions are where the stories come from, the ones that get retold at the table.
• Mystery Trail: a fixed route with penalties. A correct answer reveals the next treasure; a wrong one sends the team to a penalty point.
• Challenge Tour: a fixed route where treasures are visited in a set order, so the group stays together. Its lighter version is Photo Tour: navigate to landmarks, take selfies, score points for the order you visit them in. Easiest on the pace.

Why Before Dinner

Walking straight from the office into a restaurant and being expected to "mingle naturally" is a task plenty of people can’t pull off. The transition is missing.

The game handles that transition for you. Ninety minutes of running around the city strips away the formality better than three drinks. People break a sweat, win or lose something, and sit down to dinner with a topic that isn’t last quarter.

When the program wraps before dinner, the rest of the evening is free. Nobody gets pushed into an activity at the point where they just want to sit and talk.

How to Organize It

You have two routes. Full service means we bring the tablets and our instructors run the whole event; you just tell us where and when. Self-service runs on the participants’ own phones and launches from a QR code, which is the cheaper option.

The app works on iOS and Android, and there’s a web app for virtual games. Offline mode with stored data means the game doesn’t fall apart the moment you lose signal in an underpass. Games are routinely built in both Czech and English, so an international team doesn’t need a special version.

Capacity isn’t the constraint people expect from a game program. It runs for a small team and for a large company group alike, because teams spread out across the city instead of queueing for one attraction. That’s the difference from programs built around a single course everyone waits for.

Book your date earlier than feels comfortable. Venues and popular dates disappear during September and October. By December you’re choosing from what’s left.

When It Rains or Freezes

December in the Czech Republic is not weather for outdoor at all costs, which is why plan B doesn’t get arranged on the morning the ice starts falling. Every booking has it built in: the program runs on the original date regardless of weather, because it switches to the indoor version.

In indoor mode the same game runs inside. Questions appear on screen one after another, and you play in a hall, a meeting room or the restaurant itself, on our tablets or on your own phones and laptops. In practice, the teams sit down at the tables and the event manager starts the game in indoor mode. No second supplier, no rescheduling.

A team that isn’t together at all is a different situation. For colleagues on vacation, working from home or based abroad, the virtual version is the answer: it runs in a web browser with Teams, Zoom or Meet alongside. You only need it for a holiday party if part of the group stays home.

The virtual escape game catalog includes titles like Amazing Race, The Cases of Sherlock Holmes, Zombie Apocalypse, Pirates of the Pacific and Quiz Hunt. For a holiday party, the lighter line beats the detective one; people came mainly to switch off.

Where You Can Play

The game is built in twenty-two Czech cities, from Prague and Brno through Kutná Hora, Olomouc and Pilsen all the way to Mikulov, Telč and Český Krumlov. In Prague you can also play up at Vyšehrad; in Brno, out at the Brno Reservoir.

When a company takes its offsite across the border, the same format runs in Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Krakow, Trenčianske Teplice and Žilina. The program doesn’t change; only the backdrop does.

The practical upshot: you attach the game to the venue you’ve already booked. A historic downtown is ideal for a Treasure Hunt, because the treasures have something to sit on and the walk between them takes minutes, not half an hour.

A Party, Not a Training Session

Classic training programs want to teach people something. Treasure Hunt at a party has no such ambition, and that’s its advantage. Nobody has to reflect on how they felt or draw on a flip chart.

You’ll still see more than you would in a workshop. Who holds the map, who counts the points, who first suggests splitting up. In ninety minutes you’ll read a team’s dynamic more accurately than in a performance review.