Corporate Gifting

A Puzzling Pursuits game is an escape room game in a box that a team plays around a table, and one box seats up to six people. That single fact is what most planners come here for, because it changes the arithmetic. A team of twenty-four needs four boxes. Most people budget for twenty-four. You are buying one box per table rather than one ticket per person, and the boxes are yours to keep afterward.

If you already know you want twenty or more games, email us at gifting@puzzlingpursuits.com and we will help you pick titles and get them shipped where they need to go.

What an escape room game in a box actually involves

Each box holds printed materials: documents, coded messages, photographs, and the pieces of a story told in two parts. A table works through them with a pencil, and when they think they have an answer they check it in our online companion guide, which also hands out hints when a group gets stuck. There is no timer and no facilitator on a video call telling anyone what to do next.

Nobody has to perform. This matters more at a work event than people expect, because the alternative formats mostly ask someone to act or speak in character in front of their manager, and plenty of people would rather do almost anything else. Here everyone has paper in their hands and something concrete to work on. The quiet person who is good at ciphers becomes useful about ten minutes in.

Games run two to four hours across the two parts, which most teams split into an afternoon, or play one part over lunch and the second the following week. Ages are 14 and up across the catalog. No puzzle requires cutting or writing on the materials, so a box survives the event intact and can be passed to another team or taken home.

How the arithmetic works out

Hosted team building sessions are quoted per person for a fixed hour, so the bill scales with your headcount and buys exactly one hour whatever you pay. We sell boxes, and a box covers up to six people for an afternoon. That is the comparison worth making before you sign anything, and it is the one that holds whatever either side charges: their number multiplies by your team size, ours divides by it.

So the number to work out first is not a price. It is how many boxes you need.

One caveat worth knowing before you order: six is the ceiling per box, and tables of four or five play better than tables of six. A group of six can get crowded around a single document. If your budget allows it, buying one extra box and running smaller tables is the upgrade we would spend the money on, which is why the third column above gives you both.

The place most corporate buyers start is our wartime thriller The Fifth Column, which holds 4.9 stars from 151 reviews. Current prices are on each product page. For twenty or more games, email gifting@puzzlingpursuits.com before you budget, because we do not publish volume pricing on the site.

Which escape room games in a box suit a work crowd

All of these run one to six players and check answers through the same companion guide. They differ in tone, and tone is the thing that matters when the group is a department rather than a family.

The Fifth Column

Manhattan, June 1945. Germany has surrendered and a plot is still running on American soil, and your table is trying to stop it. This is our best seller by units over the past year and the one we point corporate buyers at first, not on price, since our standalone boxes are all priced alike, but because a wartime thriller has no corpse and no suspect list. Nobody at a work event has to accuse a colleague of murder, and it comes up in almost every corporate conversation we have. Rated 4.9 stars from 151 reviews. One to six players, two to four hours across two parts, ages 14+. See our wartime thriller The Fifth Column.

Blackbrim: 1876

Victorian England, and this one is genuine detective work: your table is chasing a criminal named Reager Skinner across the city. It is a manhunt rather than a whodunit, so the deduction is about where he went and what he is planning. Our most-reviewed single box at 4.8 stars from 525 reviews. One to six players, two to four hours across two parts, ages 14+. See our Victorian detective game Blackbrim: 1876.

La Famiglia

Chicago, 1929. Your table is working with the FBI to bring down a mafia organization, which gives the whole thing a period-crime feel without asking anyone to play a character. Rated 4.8 stars from 99 reviews. One to six players, two to four hours across two parts, ages 14+. See our 1929 Chicago game La Famiglia.

Mission: Elfpossible

A Christmas game set at the North Pole where the job is rescuing Santa, and the only title we make that is 100% digital. It arrives by email within minutes of purchase, so there is nothing to ship and no delivery date to plan around. It is also the least expensive thing we make. One purchase covers a whole group playing together, so the per-box arithmetic above does not apply here: a distributed team can buy a single copy and play it across several laptops at once. Everyone needs a laptop or desktop, because a phone screen is too small and a tablet will not work for one part of the game. Rated 4.7 stars from 26 reviews. One to six players, 1.5 to 3+ hours, ages 14+. See our digital holiday game Mission: Elfpossible.

One customer, Chris G., left this on the Elfpossible product page: "We played Mission: Elfpossible as a team building event. We completed just a hair under 90 minutes. The story was great, the art fun, and puzzles just challenging enough for puzzle noobs."

The Blackbrim Trilogy

Worth knowing about if what you actually want is a gift rather than an afternoon activity, for a client, a retiring colleague, or the team that had the hardest year. Three connected games in one box, ten or more hours of play across six parts. Rated 4.9 stars from 533 reviews. One to six players, ages 14+. See The Blackbrim Trilogy.

Can a remote team play an escape room game in a box?

For a team in one building this is straightforward. Boxes arrive at your office, you put one on each table, and you are done.

For a distributed team it is worth being honest about the logistics, because you will hit them on day one. A physical box has to reach a physical address. That gives you three real options, and they are not equally good.

The first is shipping to pods, where you have four people in Denver and five in Austin and you send a box to one person in each city who hosts. This works well and is what most of our remote buyers do. The second is shipping to every individual home address, which we can do for orders of twenty or more, though it costs more and takes more coordination on your end. The third is skipping shipping entirely with Mission: Elfpossible, our one digital title, where a single purchase covers the group and everyone joins from their own laptop.

Albert X. described that third option on the product page: "Our group of five people greatly enjoyed playing Mission: Elfpossible. We played remotely with 3 different laptops and didn't have any issues getting through it. The puzzles were challenging but varied so everyone helped with different puzzles."

What does not work well is one physical box shared by six people who are all in different cities, because the materials are printed and only one person can hold them. We would rather tell you that now than have you find out on the day. If your team is fully remote and you want the full comparison, our post on online team building activities for remote employees covers the options we actually rate, including several that are not ours.

Why team building activities leave half the room out

We wrote up the rules we design against in our guide to designing escape room puzzles, and one of them is worth repeating here because it is the exact thing that goes wrong at corporate events. A puzzle has to survive a group.

A single-thread puzzle means one person solves and everyone else watches. That is fine at home with two people on a sofa. Put twelve colleagues in a room and it becomes the standard failure of team building: two people do the activity and ten check their phones. At work there is a sharper version of the problem, because the two people most likely to grab the thread are usually the two most senior in the room, and everyone else politely lets them.

The fix we design for is parallelism, where several strands can be worked at once and combined, or a puzzle with enough physical surface that multiple hands are genuinely useful. That is why our boxes are built for one to six players rather than one or two. It is also the question we would ask any team building vendor before booking them: what is everyone else doing while one person solves it?

Ordering twenty or more games

Email gifting@puzzlingpursuits.com and tell us your team size, your date, and whether you are shipping to one address or many. We will come back with titles that fit the group and sort out the shipping, including getting boxes out to a lot of separate addresses, which is the part that gets fiddly at scale. We do not publish volume pricing, so it is worth an email before you set a budget. We are a two-person company, so you will be talking to one of us rather than to a sales team.

If your team shares an office and you want a walkthrough of the day, our step-by-step guide to hosting an office murder mystery game night covers timing, table setup, and what to do about the group that finishes early. It is written around the murder mystery format specifically, so read it for the logistics rather than the theme if you would rather nobody at your event plays a suspect.

Common questions

How is this priced compared with a hosted session?

Hosted team building is quoted per person for one fixed hour, so the bill multiplies by your headcount. A boxed game is priced once per box and covers up to six people for an afternoon, so the same purchase divides across the table instead. That difference is what makes the gap widen as your team gets bigger, and it holds regardless of what either side is charging on the day.

How many boxes does our team need?

Divide your team size by six and round up. Twelve people need two boxes, twenty-four need four, and sixty need ten. Tables of four or five play a little better than tables of six, so if the budget allows it, buy one extra box and run smaller tables.

Can a remote team play this together?

Yes, with one caveat about the format. The boxed games are physical, so a distributed team either ships a box to each pod of players or ships to individual home addresses, which we handle on orders of twenty or more. Mission: Elfpossible is 100% digital and arrives by email, and one purchase covers a group playing together over a video call from separate laptops.

Do you offer volume pricing?

We do not publish volume pricing on the site, so email gifting@puzzlingpursuits.com with your headcount and your date before you set a budget. That is also the right place to ask about shipping to many separate addresses.

How long does delivery take?

Orders generally ship one business day after they are placed. Standard delivery to the contiguous US takes three to seven business days, and expedited delivery takes two to four business days. For a holiday event we would order at least three weeks out, and earlier if any of your team is outside the contiguous US.

What arrives when we order?

Each table gets one sealed box. Inside are all the printed materials for that game, and the story runs across two parts. Your team supplies pencils and a table. Answers and hints live in our online companion guide, which needs a browser and nothing else. No puzzle requires cutting or writing on the materials, so the box can be reused by another team afterward.

Shipping

Standard shipping to the contiguous US is free above a set order total, which most multi-box orders clear comfortably, with a flat rate below it and an expedited upgrade available. We also ship to Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico, and internationally to Canada, the UK, Norway, Singapore and Australia.

Current rates and transit times for every destination are on our shipping page, which is where we keep them so they stay in one place. Order well ahead of the date for anywhere outside the contiguous US, and note that international orders may owe a customs duty before the parcel is released. For twenty or more boxes we quote shipping directly, so email us rather than working it out from the page.