Terra Incognita: an indoor expedition team building for teams in Dubai

Each expedition works at its own table with a tablet running our game app. The app offers tasks on three levels - easy, medium and challenging - and the team decides for itself where to start. Codes and clues, star navigation, AI-based tasks, audio and photo riddles, video challenges and questions on logic and creativity. Every correct answer returns a clue about the map: which part of the land to look for, and where exactly it belongs.

The expeditions leave their tables and meet in pairs for challenges with props. A ten-question quiz about the region and about the team itself runs alongside, one minute per answer. Every challenge earns points and new clues for the map.

Expeditions meet in pairs with the game hosts, and each task lasts exactly one minute. A different member of the expedition takes part in each one, so almost everybody plays at least once in this round. Speed matters here, but so does accuracy: the tasks get harder step by step, and one careless move at an early stage shows up in the result at the end.

Each expedition receives a canvas with the outline of its fragment of the continent and a grid like a chessboard, plus pastels and a legend. Sea, shallow water, sand, dunes, plains, oases, mountains, rivers and roads all go onto the canvas - but only in the cells the clues point to, and only in the colours the legend allows. The rule that makes this a team game: rivers and roads have to continue into the neighbouring fragment without a break, so the expeditions have to walk over to their neighbours and agree on every crossing. No team can draw the continent alone. If the company provides them, rivers, forests and lakes are named after its values or its products.

While part of the expedition draws, the rest build the landmark of their land out of construction bricks: a lighthouse for reliability and guidance in any weather, a trade ship for commerce and tradition, a fortress for wisdom and resilience. There are no instructions at the table. One participant may go to the host and look at the sample for one minute, with no phone and no notes, then return and explain it from memory while the others build on trust alone.

All the fragments are joined into a single map and every landmark is placed on it. The continent only becomes visible when all the canvases are connected until then each expedition has been looking at a fraction of the picture. The room chooses a name for the new land and everybody signs it. The map goes home with the company as the reminder that the continent appeared only because the expeditions stopped working as separate teams.