When building experiences, the more customisations you can make, the more creative you can get. Why pass up the chance for people to see the amount of thought you put behind every decision, especially in your scavenger hunts?
Whether you’re building a remote team-building activity or seeking to gamify an event with hundreds of participants, our app’s got customisations not limited to
- Adjusting to the Number of Participants and Locationsome text
- Number of Participants
- Remote or In-person
- Branding and White Labelling
- Mission Variety and Multimedia Support
- Level of Competitiveness via Leaderboards and Scoring
- Admin: Announcements, Automation and Communications
- Pricing
We’ll show you how these customisations can work in PlayTours’ scavenger hunts for two polar opposite types of events: remote team-building events and in-person event gamification.
Any Scale, Any Event
Number of Participants
Your app needs to accommodate the number of people playing. With PlayTours, there are different ways to accommodate either a small player base or even larger groups split into clans and teams.
PlayTours supports up to 120 active computers or smartphones at once, but you can contact us to adjust for more active devices.
For smaller-scale remote events, 120 is a cosy number for events where one player can use one device.
For larger-scale in-person events, one team can use one active device to increase the number of players beyond 120. These teams can also be combined into clans, giving you a lot of flexibility in how you want your players to compete.
Features for Remote and In-person Events
Our scavenger hunt app doesn’t need installation from the organisers or the players. Just head over to our game link, scan the QR code or key in the game code, and you’re set!
Save the Children used this for their remote team-building activity. As a global non-profit operating in over 100 countries, Save the Children needed to foster team-building and collaboration among its staff scattered across its office in Singapore and its virtual employees across Asian branches.
They broke geographical boundaries with a game that was accessible to participants from various locations with minimal technical setup - all that was needed was a smartphone or computer. You can check out how they used our app here.
PlayTours has features that enhance in-person events too. PlayTours’ easy-to-install interface provides players nad organisers a fuss-free registration and safety briefing. Memories of the event and venue can be captured and encouraged by including photo-taking into the scavenger hunt tasks.
Make-a-Wish, a non-profit organization that grants life-changing wishes to children facing critical illnesses, used these features in their “Walk for Wishes” event.
Over a weekend, Make-A-Wish organised their event at Columbus Zoo & Aquarium to raise funds and fulfill the dreams of children facing critical illnesses.
During the event, players signed up seamlessly with a simple QR code scan. All their photos and videos captured during the event were captured in the PlayTours’ Gallery which allowed organisers to access participant submissions at any time, preserving a rich collection of cherished memories.
Looking to include scavenger hunts in your next event? PlayTours can support events of any sizes and has been tried and tested by many organisations. Whether your event is a remote team building event or a massive event with 120 teams, we can help
Reach out to us via the banner below to find out more!
Branding and Multimedia Support
Fonts, colours, and logos are part of a brand’s identity and you can customise these in your scavenger hunt. Here’s an example of Accenture’s staff retreat scavenger hunt screen:
These are just some of the things you can adjust. There’s more where that came from:
You can find out more about branding customisation on our white labelling blog post.
A few more visuals and music go a long way to add atmosphere too. Here’s a sample of a virtual escape room about a murder mystery on a train with a background sound.
Being able to use multimedia like this opens up a lot of mission variety as we’ll see below:
Mission Variety
Being able to include audio, video, and online map data into your scavenger hunt lets you create experiences that would take more physical effort and planning to do without using an app.
For example, PlayTours lets players begin their hunts when they arrive, listen to audio instructions via their phone and also includes support for a virtual space where people can navigate a 3D environment within the app shown below:
All these add more interactivity to your scavenger hunts, especially for remote work settings. PlayTours supports plenty of task types as well, with a few of them listed below:
- Crosswords
- Multiple Choice
- Word Search
- Matching Pairs
- Scrambled Phrase
- Image Jigsaw
- Combination Lock
- Puzzles
- Text
To see the full task list, you can check out our demo by signing up for a free account.
There’s no limit to how you can use these features, and there are plenty of options to spice up in-person events.
Tasks are not limited to just quizzes, and you can even use the app to get your participants to take part in ‘Amazing Race’ or ‘Running Man’ style challenges. To do this, you can give the code to a facilitator who only gives the ‘answer’ or clue to the team that has completed the task.
As PlayTours makes use of players’ smartphones, there is full support for taking photos and selfies. All these image submissions will be consolidated on the admin panel for the organisers to access and judge.
Features like QR codes and geo-location can also help you guide your participants around your decided play area for in-person events. These can be adjusted for any geographic scale, from city and campus tours to getting people to explore different stations in your event.
You can set stations up at a set of coordinates so that the next clue or task shows up only when people arrive for instance.
Looking for QR codes can replace hunting for physical clues or task sheets, as we can see from how Malaysia’s Ministry of Health used them.
Malaysia’s Ministry of Health used QR codes to encourage people to explore more of the exhibition area during their “Bulan Malaysia Sihat Sejahtera” event.
The ministry wanted participants to visit every location to be rewarded with a goodie bag. However, they wanted to do something more than just the traditional paper-and-stamp method.
They placed QR codes strategically throughout the event space with clues in the app to lead people to each one. Once visitors scanned them all, they received a digital completion certificate in the form of a QR code which they could use to redeem the goodie bag.
If you want to use this feature without overcrowding stations all at once, you can shuffle the task to split up groups to different stations first:
QR codes are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the types of activities you can do. You can find the full list of mission types by signing up for a free account. You can also check out our pricing below if you want to upgrade:
Pacing and Competitiveness
Leaderboards and Scoring
Sometimes, you’ll want to encourage teamwork through competitive pressure. Other times, scavenger hunts can be free-and-easy self-guided tours where enjoying things at your own pace and finishing only the interesting tasks are sufficient.
Apps like PlayTours have different settings you can play around with to help you determine how competitive your experience will be.
Let’s say that you’re making a teambuilding activity to be a race for who can find the killer the fastest, but you also want to punish wild guesses. Wrong answers can be given point penalties or time penalties for wrong answers.
If you want them to have a competitive experience, there are several ways you can go about it:
- Finishing the most number of tasks within the time limit
- Assigning points based on task difficulty (you can use this if the hunt’s players are free to finish as many tasks as possible within the time limit)
- Higher score for shorter time taken to complete the task
- Time or score penalties for wrong answers to discourage wild guessing
- Live leaderboards
Some interactive scavenger hunt apps like PlayTours can update team points in real-time, letting teams know who’s ahead and who’s behind.
Clues and Task Skipping
Sometimes, teams will get stuck and need some clues or help.
Depending on the experience that you want to give, you can limit the number of clues and how they can ask for help. PlayTours allows you to give hints based on:
- The number of times they have attempted the challenge.
- The length of time they have spent on the challenge.
- Credit-based, where they can buy hints using a limited number of "coins".
Furthermore, you can allow players to skip challenges based on the above criteria. This prevents players from getting frustrated and reduces the number of times you need to intervene manually.
If you’re going for a more laid-back experience or something they can do at their own pace, like a self-guided city tour, here are some options:
- Skippable tasks
- Not needing to finish all tasks to progress
- Disabling time limits
- No penalties
- Disabling public leaderboards
Admin: Communication, Safety and Announcements
As with any event, communication is key. PlayTours has multiple ways for organisers to communicate with players and facilitators to share key information and keep teams on track.
For outdoor games, safety is paramount. You can make use of the first chapter of the scavenger hunt to inform teams of safety rules, require your teams’ locations at all times, as well as send ad-hoc announcements when needed:
These are some of the options that you can make use of. In-door events would not need teams’ locations at all times for example.
Communication isn’t just one-way. Teams can communicate with facilitators when they need help too:
Pricing
PlayTours has the most generous pricing, and the more you use it, the cheaper it gets. We typically charge by the maximum number of concurrent devices required, so there are options for smaller remote events and larger in-person events.
For example, if your event has 300 players divided into 30 teams but only has 2 devices per team, then you will only need their 60-devices subscription.
These are just some of the options available for you to customise when using PlayTours.
To round out this post, we’d also like to give a shoutout to other scavenger hunt apps that you might want to try as well, Scavify and Goosechase. These are excerpts from our 2024 review of scavenger hunt apps that you access here.
Scavify
Simple, professional interface that gets the job done for straightforward and simpler events.
Flexibility & Customisability
Similar to GooseChase, Scavify follows a simplified task list system where players can complete tasks in any order. There isn’t a way to add any logic to how tasks appear, unlike GooseChase. This makes Scavify one of the least flexible game builders.
Variety of task types
Scavify has the following task types: question-and-answer, QR code scan, GPS check-in, photo/video submissions and multiple-choice.
However, they do have a "photo stream" feature that encourages player interaction by providing a constant stream of player photos which other players can view, comment on, and ‘like.’
Flexibility of providing players with clues
There is no mechanism to show clues. All task information is shown to the player when the task is clicked. This means that external methods like chat apps maybe needed to help participants who are stuck.
Brand-ability
You can customise the event welcome page with your logo, event name and banner photos. However, this is still visibly Scavify’s branding as they have to download the Scavify app on their phones. They also do have a browser-based version too but the welcome page will display the Scavify brand first.
Pricing
Scavify does not display their price on their website, however, we asked one of their clients for the pricing they got when they emailed them. For a team-building business with about 150 players per month, it was quoted as follows:
Up to 20 players - USD 430 (USD21.5/player)Up to 50 players - USD 900 (USD18/player)Up to 100 players - USD 1300 (USD13/player)Note: price has been slightly adjusted downwards to prevent client identification
This makes Scavify the most expensive choice among scavenger hunt apps. You can find the other apps we’ve reviewed on our 2024 review blog post.
GooseChase
The most polished-looking game builder platform out there, but with limited customisability and game flexibility. Great for simple, straightforward events.
Flexibility & Customisability
GooseChase uses a straightforward task list system, which they call "Missions". To customise the game flow, you can use their automation script feature to make tasks appear to be accessed by players.
We do feel that is it quite limited, only allowing tasks to appear based on when the experience started or an exact time.
Variety of task types
GooseChase has 4 types of tasks. For the photo/video task, you can set to only allow photos or videos.
Flexibility of providing players with clues
There is no mechanism to give clues to players in any event.
Brandability
Customisation possibilities are very limited You can only customise the logo that appears at the start of the experience, but the app will still be called GooseChase when downloaded and opened by players.
Pricing
GooseChase is one of the pricier options out there when compared with their features. This is a good option for those who prefer a good UI when building games and are looking to create a straightforward game.
Compared to Goosechase and Scavify, PlayTours gives you greater control over aspects like branding, clues and task types. However, consider your scavenger hunt and activity needs first before committing to any app.
Scavenger hunt apps come in all shapes and sizes. PlayTours offers a comprehensive and customisable scavenger hunt app that caters to a wide range of event needs, from remote team-building activities to large-scale in-person events.
With features like white labelling, multimedia support, and a variety of task types for remote and in-person activities, PlayTours gives you the freedom to create unique and engaging experiences for your participants.
Save the Children, Make-A-Wish and Malaysia’s Ministry of Health show that PlayTours can help foster teamwork, enhance participant engagement, and capture memorable moments. PlayTours' pricing model is flexible and cost-effective, making it accessible for events of all sizes.
Looking to elevate your next event with unforgettable experiences? Give PlayTours a try by signing up for a free account or by checking out our prices below!
