Company Event Ideas: Start the Game Before Everyone Arrives

The venue is booked, the food is ordered and the start time is on the invite. Then the start time comes and goes. A handful of people are at the bar, someone is still circling the car park, a few haven’t left the office yet, and the ones staying at the hotel are somewhere between their rooms and you. Meanwhile you’re refreshing the group chat.

Most company event ideas start at the venue, so the event only begins once the last person walks in. But the people you’re waiting for are already doing something together: they’re all heading to the same place, just from different directions. If the last stretch of that journey is on foot, the walk can be the opening round.

This guide is for organisers of company events, training days, conferences and hotel gatherings where people arrive from different places. It covers how a walking quiz works when nobody shares a starting point, where it fits, how to size it to the walk, and when to leave it out.

How a walking quiz works when everyone starts somewhere different

The game we use for this is Walk & Win, a quiz you unlock on foot. Walking earns keys, and keys open questions. Stop moving and nothing new unlocks.

Each question carries a difficulty label. Easy ones are cheap to open. Harder ones cost more keys, which means more walking, and they’re worth more when you get them right. So every key is a small decision: spend it on a safe question now, or keep going and save up for a bigger one.

What makes it work as a journey game is where the keys come from. They’re earned by steps, not by reaching particular places, so you don’t need a shared start line or checkpoints along the way. Someone leaving the office, someone walking from home and someone crossing from the car park are all playing the same game on their own routes.

When we explain it to clients, it comes down to this. It’s a really simple game. You set it up and share the code. People walk, pick up keys for their steps as they go, and answer the questions.

Where a journey game fits

It suits any event where people walk in from different directions and you’d rather they arrived warmed up than cold. Here are five situations where the idea holds, with what the questions could cover in each.

Company events at a restaurant or venue

Colleagues are heading to a company gathering from their desks, from home or from wherever their afternoon ended. A light quiz on the way can cover company history, the people in the team, the odd facts every workplace collects, or the theme of the evening.

The payoff comes at the door. Instead of “did you find it all right?”, people arrive with something to compare: which question they spent their keys on, and who knew the answer about the founder.

Training days

Participants come to a training session from different offices, homes or hotels. Questions on the training topic bring the subject in before the first slide goes up. People walk in with a few ideas already turning over, sometimes with a question they want answered, and that gives the trainer an easier start.

Conferences

Attendees come from hotels, car parks and nearby transport stops. A short walking game can introduce the conference theme, the destination or the organisation hosting it, and nobody has to gather anywhere first.

One rule matters here. The game is for the walking part only, so anyone arriving by bus or car starts once they’ve stepped off or parked, never on the way. Once they’re inside, you’ll want them meeting people other than the ones they arrived with, and our guide to networking games for conferences picks up from there.

Hotels and countryside venues

At a large hotel complex or a countryside venue, guests are spread across rooms, buildings or cottages, and they all need to reach the same meeting room, restaurant or event area. The walk between them becomes the activity.

Have people start outside. The game measures walking with GPS, and GPS can’t do that reliably inside a building, so the long hotel corridor isn’t where the game begins.

Team dinners after work

Colleagues are meeting at a restaurant after work. Instead of squeezing a separate team-building activity in before the meal, the walk there is the activity. Everyone sits down with something in common to talk about, even though they each took a different way to get there.

Match the game length to the walk

This is the setting that decides whether the idea lands. A quiz that’s still mostly locked when people reach the door feels unfinished, and one that’s done well before the venue leaves people with nothing to do on the final stretch.

Walk & Win has a setting called Auto Key Rate, switched on by default. It works out how many metres each key costs so that walking fills the whole game duration you set. It assumes a relaxed pace of about 65 metres a minute. Faster walkers can get through everything, and slower ones stay busy until the end, with the last question or two needing a bit of focus right at the finish. Change the duration or the number of questions and the rate recalculates straight away.

So start from the walk, not the game. Find the longest walk most of your group will make, divide the distance in metres by 65 to see how many minutes it takes at the game’s assumed pace, and set the duration around that. The game page suggests planning for about an hour, which suits a full outdoor game. For a journey game, fit it to the walk instead. If you’d rather control it directly, switch Auto Key Rate off and set the metres per key yourself.

If people will set off at different times, turn on Always playable. The game then doesn’t need one shared start, so someone leaving the office straight after work and someone setting off from home a while later both get the full game.

Walk lengths will differ too. Players choose their own pace and their own route, so someone with a short walk can take the long way round. Say so in the invite, otherwise whoever is staying round the corner arrives with most of the quiz still locked.

Writing questions people still talk about on arrival

The questions are what people carry through the door, so pick a theme that gives them something to say when they meet. A shared reference works better than a test. These are the themes that fit best:

• The company: when it started, what it first sold, the stories that get retold at every party.
• Colleagues: only questions people are happy to have asked about them. The team’s favourite lunch spot is fine. Someone’s embarrassing moment from last year is not, unless they’ve signed it off.
• The training topic: one idea from the session you want people already thinking about, framed so a newcomer can make a decent guess.
• The destination: the venue, the neighbourhood, the city hosting the conference.

Mix the difficulty on purpose. Because harder questions cost more keys and pay more, a set of only easy questions takes away the choice that makes the game interesting. A set of only hard ones means a long walk between questions. A spread lets cautious players pick up points early and gives the competitive ones something to save for.

You can write the questions yourself, use the built-in AI helper, or combine the two. Give the AI facts or topics and it writes the questions and answer options in your language, which saves typing up company facts from scratch. There’s also a starter set of 20 questions, so you can try the game before writing your own. For more on how AI handles question-writing, see how we use AI to cut event prep.

Setting it up: a checklist for the organiser

1. Pick the theme and write or generate the questions, with a mix of easy and hard.
2. Work out the longest walk most people will make, set the duration to match, and leave Auto Key Rate on (or set metres per key by hand).
3. Turn on Always playable if people will set off at different times.
4. Put the link or QR code in the invite, and again in the reminder on the day. Players join in their phone’s browser with the QR code or game code, with no app and no account. Only you, as the host, need a Games for Crowds account.
5. Add a short note for players: start outside and on foot, keep the game open on screen while you walk, and stop when you want to answer.
6. Check your numbers. The game takes up to 150 players, and people can walk it in pairs.

One detail belongs in that player note. Steps count while the screen is open. If someone closes it for a while, the distance in between is measured in a straight line, so a winding detour counts as the shortcut.

If this is the first group game you’ve run, our guide to running your first team game without it getting awkward covers explaining the game and wrapping it up well.

Keeping it safe, voluntary and open to everyone

Make safety the first line of the player note. The phone comes out for walking only. Nobody plays while driving, cycling or crossing busy traffic, and anyone arriving by car starts from the car park once they’ve parked. When it’s time to answer a question, step aside and stop rather than reading while you walk.

Keep it voluntary and say so plainly. Some people will want to walk in quietly, finish a call or just think, and arriving without having played should be completely fine.

For people who can’t or don’t want to walk, pairs and teams help. Walk & Win can be played alone, in pairs or as a team, so someone who’d rather skip the walking can team up with someone who walks and still be part of the answers. Either way, the event starts properly for everyone at the door.

Two practical notes on conditions. If the mobile signal drops, the game keeps working. Indoors it won’t work well, so any route that starts inside a building should move its start point to the front door.

When a walking quiz isn’t the right call

Leave it out when the journey isn’t a walk. If nearly everyone drives up to the venue door, there’s no stretch to play during. The same goes for routes that are entirely indoors, such as a hotel corridor or a trip between floors of an office building, because GPS can’t measure walking reliably inside.

It’s also the wrong fit when the group is already together. If everyone meets in one place first, a shared outdoor activity makes more sense than a game built for scattered starts, and our low-setup scavenger hunt ideas cover that case. For what to run once everyone is in the room, the guide to team building games by occasion sorts it by type of event.

What to try next

Walk & Win is the game for this: steps earn keys, keys open questions, and the harder ones cost more to reach. Each player picks their own pace and route, alone, in pairs or as a team, which is what lets the event begin on the way in rather than at the door.

Open Walk & Win, set the game length to match the walk to your venue, and send the link out with the invite.