Escape Box: Save Santa
Same box, same hour, a story that only works in December
Santa is shut in by an elf who has decided the whole thing is off, and the team has to get him out before the evening ends. It is the Escape Box with a different story on it: the mechanism, the hour and the debrief are the same, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What changes is the tone and what it has to fit inside. The December version almost always sits in the middle of a dinner rather than in a training room, and that imposes things the standard version does not have to think about.
Why it is worth a page of its own
Because the constraint is the dinner, not the puzzle. The box has to open between courses, which means a hard stop rather than a soft one: the service does not wait. We run it shorter, with one fewer chain of clues, and the briefing happens while people are already seated instead of standing in a room.
Because the group is not the usual group. A year-end dinner has partners, it has people from three offices who have never met, and it has somebody who arrived at six in the evening from another city. The puzzles are built so that nobody is left out for not knowing the company, which is a different design from the one you use with an intact team.
Because the ending is the point. The standard Escape Box ends with a debrief about how the team decided. This one ends with everybody in the same photograph. That is a legitimate objective for one evening a year, and saying so is more honest than dressing it up as training.
Practical
We run it in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. It needs a table per team and enough light to read by, which in a restaurant is the thing to check first.
December fills up from September. If you think about it in November the good dates have gone, and this is the single most useful sentence on this page. The other occasions in the year are on the occasions page.
It is not a Christmas party and we do not sell it as one. It is a December evening with a story attached, and in Saudi Arabia that distinction matters to some clients and not at all to others. Tell us which you are and we will pitch it accordingly.
Let’s talk about your next team building
You don’t need to have picked a format yet. Tell us what you want your team to take home, how many of you there are and where you’ll be, and we’ll do the rest: within 24 hours you get a considered proposal for your case, with the formats that hold up against your numbers, and what each one leaves the team the day after.
Prefer to talk? · info @ teambuildingsaudi.com