Taking your game off-site: what changes when you leave the building

The request arrives by email and it always sounds easy. A company two neighbourhoods over has forty people in a meeting room on a Thursday afternoon and wants to know whether you can bring one of your games to them. You have the puzzles. You have the staff. How hard can it be.

Hard enough that operators who treat off-site as the same product with wheels usually lose money on it for a year before they work out why. Off-site is a different business wearing your brand. The design constraints change, the labour model changes, and the failure modes change from the ones you have already engineered out of your building.

What actually travels

Start by separating your game into what is portable and what is architecture. Portable means a self-contained puzzle set that fits in cases, a briefing that works from a person rather than a screen, a timer, a scoring method and a reset routine. Architecture means anything bolted, wired, plumbed, hidden in a wall, projected onto a specific surface, or triggered by a sensor you calibrated once and never touched again.

The awkward truth is that the things your reviews praise are usually the architecture. A magnetic reveal in a false wall does not fit in a case. So an off-site version is not your room in a bag, it is a new game that borrows your story and your puzzle sensibility. Design it as one. Tabletop and case-based formats, parallel sets so several teams play at once, and a competitive scoreboard are the shapes that travel because they degrade gracefully in a room you have never seen.

The labour arithmetic nobody does before the first booking

Your in-venue economics are built on a one-hour session in a room that is already set up. Off-site, the session is still an hour and everything around it is new cost. Write down your own real numbers for a single booking:

• Load the vehicle and check the manifest.
• Travel out, park, find the loading door, wait for the person with the pass.
• Carry in, set up, test every mechanism in a space with different light and different noise.
• Wait, because the client is always running late from the session before yours.
• Run the game.
• Tear down, reset the puzzles for the next booking, carry out, travel back, unload.

Do that honestly, with two people, and the hour of play is often the smallest block on the list. That is not a reason to refuse the work. It is the reason your off-site price has almost nothing to do with your in-room price, and why one booking a day is frequently the maximum a single kit and crew can serve.

The variables you do not control

In your building you own the light, the sound, the surfaces and the power. In theirs you own none of it. The failures are always mundane, and always the same list:

• Power. How many outlets, where, and are they on the wall you need. Bring your own extension leads and assume you will need more than you think.
• Tables and chairs. Who is providing them, how many, what size, and who is moving them. Write it into the confirmation or you will be stacking furniture in a suit.
• Noise. Four teams in one room means four briefings competing. Corporate rooms have hard surfaces and no soft furnishing, which makes them louder than anything you have designed for.
• Light. You cannot turn off a conference room's ceiling grid in most buildings, so any puzzle that relies on darkness, projection or a torch is a puzzle that will not work.
• Connectivity. Guest wifi with a captive portal, no mobile signal in a basement function room, a client IT policy that blocks your device. Anything that must be online is a liability off-site. Build for offline and treat connectivity as a bonus.
• Access. Loading bay hours, lift dimensions, security sign-in, a building manager who needs notice. Ask these before you quote, not on the morning.

Turn that list into a written pre-event form the client completes and returns. It is not bureaucracy, it is the difference between a smooth Thursday and an apology.

Questions to ask before you put a number on it

Some of these are conversations with your broker and your own advisers rather than things to work out from an article, but you should know they exist before you quote.

1. Does your insurance cover you and your equipment away from your premises, and does it cover damage you might cause to someone else's floor, wall or lift.
2. Does the venue require its own paperwork from suppliers before you can enter the building.
3. Who is responsible for the participants. At your venue that is clear. In a client's office, agree in writing who supervises, who handles a medical incident, and who has authority to stop the activity.
4. Is alcohol being served before or during your session, and are you comfortable running a timed activity in that setting.
5. What happens if the client cancels three days out, and what deposit protects you from that.

Price for travel time, not session time

The instinct is to price an off-site booking like a private hire of a room and add a bit. That undercharges every single time, because the driver of cost is distance and duration on site rather than the game itself. A cleaner structure is a base that covers the crew for the whole block from load-in to load-out, a travel component tied to distance, and a per-participant component that reflects how many parallel sets you have to bring.

Charge a real minimum, because a small off-site group costs almost as much to serve as a large one. And decide in advance whether you will discount for a repeat annual booking, which is where the money in this line of work actually is.

Is it worth closing a room to do it

Often the honest answer is no. If the off-site booking pulls your best game master out of the building on your busiest evening, and the kit you are carrying is a room that would otherwise have run four sessions, the off-site fee needs to beat those four sessions plus the cost of the disruption. Thursday afternoons are the sweet spot precisely because that is capacity you were not selling anyway.

There is a version of this that avoids the trade entirely: a game the city hosts instead of a vehicle. City Sleuth partners run a GPS-triggered mystery route through their own downtown, which takes a group of any size out of the building with nothing to transport, no set to reset and no crew on site for the whole block. It is a different answer to the same question a client is asking, which is usually not can you bring a room, but can you entertain our forty people somewhere that is not our office.

The honest test

Before you build an off-site product, run the numbers on a single imagined booking with your own labour costs, and ask three questions. Can you serve it without pulling staff out of your busiest hours. Does a second identical booking in the same week make you money or exhaust you. And would you be proud of the game if a client had never seen your rooms and judged you only on what came out of the cases.

If the answer to all three is yes, build it properly and price it like the logistics business it is. If it is no, the demand is still real, and there are other ways to serve a group that will not fit in your building. The City Sleuth version is at the partner overview, and we are happy to talk the trade-offs through at contact whether or not you end up working with us.