SUMMARY
Murder Mystery meets Escape Room meets The Apprentice.
CONCEPT
Summer 2023 felt like a cultural inflection point. War loomed. AI promised everything and nothing. Technological optimism coexisted with quiet and persistent dread.
A Corporate Leadership Retreat timed precisely to the turn of Q2 into Q3 felt like the right container for that tension. If the world was fracturing, our would-be entrepreneurs would at least get lanyards.
PLANNING
We knew we wanted to take things up a step from previous adventures.
We wanted to scale up: actors, outdoor treasure hunts, escape mechanics, fireworks. It was our first summer build, which meant sunlight, open space, and Hawaiian shirts rather than candlelight and drawing rooms.
Outdoor puzzles are harder to control, so we split the group into smaller teams exploring modular puzzle routes at their own pace. This allowed us to experiment with a design we had long wanted to attempt: a puzzle whose surface varied subtly between groups while resolving to the same structural endpoint.
ADVENTURE
One of my favourite moments when hosting puzzles is the initial nervous energy when the guests first arrive. Traditionally, we leave invitations sufficiently vague that our adventurers genuinely have no idea what to expect the moment they arrive.
In this case, guests were registered, signed a waiver, and handed a welcome package. It goes without saying that the package contained clues to later puzzles if they remembered to keep it with them; the registration page was printed on an image featuring the location of the final key; the waiver contained crucial clues as to what to do with that key.
Anxious anticipation not yet dispelled, our adventurers were first subjected to several ice-breaking games, branded here as Exertivities. Part of the ongoing joke was that we were awaiting the arrival of our guest speaker, CEO Tobias “Tobes” King, on a Harley Davidson. As the Exertivities continued, our mission was successful in fostering an atmosphere of healthy scepticism.
All of this was punctured when the roar of a Harley Davidson engine could be heard coming up the drive…
Tobes arrived and brilliantly elevated the expectation amongst the adventurers that anything could happen. Before anyone had time to absorb the reality of the situation, Tobes was already taking the adventurers on an extended tour of the gardens.
Following a light dinner, Tobes delivered his Keynote Address. Playing the part perfectly, he went from fierce bravado to timid wreck following a mysterious phone call. His parting words were “If you’d just pop along now and follow in my footsteps, we’ll make a leader out of all of you”.
The well-equipped puzzlers amongst the group immediately recognised this as a cue to retrace Tobes’ tour from before dinner. Sure enough, at every location he had stopped at, there had been several coloured balloons.
By popping the correct balloon, it was possible to find emoji stickers within. Arranged in the hinted order, these spelled “Llamas Are Key”.
The group was then divided in three in order to continue Tobes’ Exertivities in his absence. These included a walking tour of the garden, an escape room in the wine shed, and a series of traditional puzzles.
By solving these puzzles, the groups were eventually able to ascertain that Tobes King was a puppet hired to push an “artificial intelligence” engine that simply outsourced its questions to underpaid workers overseas. The goal of the adventurers was now set on discovering the truth about the AI and destroying the chips that made their business viable.
The three sets of Escape Rooms in the wine shed eventually resolved upon the phrase “Monochrome”. When accompanied with “Llamas Are Key”, the adventurers recalled the bizarre invitation video which featured stock video along with Llamas, some of which were black and white.
By pausing the text on every black and white llama image, the adventurers were able to extract the following words
- Rectangular
- Baseless
- Outboard
The paper puzzles resolved to the phrase “What Three Words connects the answers?”
Some of the experienced adventurers immediately recognised What Three Words as the geospatial reference company. The location of this triple was less than a kilometre away from the house.
Whilst the adventures were off, solving the final clues, we had time to rig a firework display behind a wall in the garden. We had tested a new remote squib detonation tool the previous week and were confident that we could time a firework remotely from within my pocket. The adventurers had found the source of the AI’s power: a mysterious ProtoChip that contained an inert-looking filament.
Drawn to the waiver the guests had originally signed, the first letters of each clause spelled the following phrase:
“Let fire free you from your legal constraints and free those whose minds have been enslaved. Trigger the escape clause.”
The escape clause involved everyone burning their invitations (which had been daubed with a chemical to create a purple flame), linking arms (a wry allusion to LinkedIn), triggering the ProtoChip (which set off a loud noise when a circuit is linked).
The leader of the group was then elected to dispatch the ProtoChip over the wall, ostensibly triggering a loud explosion as I triggered the firework display from within my pocket.
The power of the ProtoChip had been destroyed, Tobes’ death had been avenged, the sky had been turned orange.
And our adventurers had learned the real treasure was the Business Acquaintances we made along the way.
AFTERMATH
The scale of CL2 2023 was a step up in almost every direction: outdoor modular routes, actor integration, layered narrative, live pyrotechnics. It could easily have tipped into chaos.
The modular design worked. The documents paid off. The balloon mechanic held. The waiver was not dismissed as paperwork for long. Most importantly, the tone landed: absurd corporate satire sliding into something sharper and with higher stakes.
More than anything, the weekend gave us confidence. It proved we could design experiences that moved across spaces, formats, and scales without losing structural coherence. Bigger builds no longer felt theoretical, they felt achievable!