Urban Orienteering, Team Building Edition … What is it?
Urban Orienteering is a combination of trivia, puzzle solving, forest and urban park navigation, with mental and physical mystery challenges. It borrows concepts from popular reality TV shows like The Amazing Race but offers additional team building opportunities through team coordination, communication and strategising.
The event can be staged in a large urban centre like Calgary or in a smaller tourist village like Banff, Canmore, or Kananaskis Village.
Sample Event
Participants meet at the designated starting point, e.g., their hotel lobby, to find out who is on their team and to receive instructions.
Once teams understand their mission, a diversionary challenge will take place in order to spread out the teams. This might be a 10 question Pop Quiz (with topics such as corporate trivia & policy, local factoids, or general knowledge) or some other intriguing challenge that takes 5–10 minutes to perform. Teams will leave the starting area according to their success on the diversionary challenge.
The next phase of the challenge involves solving a Puzzle Map that sends the teams to various locations indicated on the map where they can answer a trivia question related to that location. Once all trivia answers are complete, information from each answer is used to solve a puzzle, e.g., a word search or a word jumble. The solution to this puzzle will provide the location of where to go to receive their next challenge. This secret location could be a well-known Banff landmark, e.g., Lobby of Whyte Museum, or some obscure local curiosity that will require the teams to be resourceful to find it.
The teams then travel on foot to the secret location and perform a team mystery challenge. In the 90 minute version, the first team to complete the mystery challenge is declared the winner. For the 2 hour version, the team will then embark on an orienteering course where they will collect points at several flag locations that are marked on a real orienteering map. In this scenario, all teams must finish before 2 hours have expired, and the winning team will be the one that has collected the most points.