Are Escape Rooms Suitable for Team Building Events?
Escape rooms have become a popular choice for corporate team building, and for good reason — but they're not magic. Whether they work depends largely on how you set them up. Here's an honest breakdown.
Why Escape Rooms Work for Team Building
The core mechanic of an escape room — a group of people, a shared problem, a time limit, and the need to communicate to succeed — maps directly onto the skills that matter in a workplace: collaboration, communication under pressure, and distributing tasks based on what each person does best.
Unlike most team building formats, escape rooms are also genuinely engaging. There's no presentation, no facilitated icebreaker, no group exercise that feels invented. The urgency is real (even if artificial), the problem is concrete, and the outcome is clear. People invest.
The debrief afterwards — what worked, what didn't, who took charge, where communication broke down — can be surprisingly revealing. Teams often see themselves differently after 60 minutes in a room together.
What Size Groups Work Best
At Incognito Escape Room in Dublin, individual rooms hold up to 8–10 people comfortably. For corporate groups:
- Under 10 people: Book one room and do it together
- 10–30 people: Split into groups, run multiple rooms simultaneously, compare escape times afterwards
- 30–50+ people: We can accommodate full office events across both our city centre locations — see our corporate packages here
The competitive element — which team escaped fastest, or furthest — gives a large group a shared talking point and a natural end to the activity.
Invoice Billing for Companies
We offer invoice billing for corporate bookings, which removes the friction of individual expenses claims or the organiser fronting costs on a personal card. Average corporate group spend is typically €300–900 depending on group size and rooms booked.
What Doesn't Work
A few scenarios where escape rooms aren't the right call:
Very large groups with no split format. Putting 25 people in one room doesn't work — a room designed for 8 will have 17 people standing around watching. The solution is multiple rooms running simultaneously, not trying to fit everyone in one.
Groups where hierarchy is a problem. If senior leaders dominate every room decision and junior team members disengage, you won't get much collaborative value from the session. This is a team dynamic issue, not an escape room issue — but it's worth being honest about.
Groups who aren't told why they're doing it. "We're doing an escape room" lands better when it comes with a reason. Even a simple "we wanted to do something different and actually challenging together" is enough.
How to Run It Properly
A few things that make a corporate escape room session significantly better:
Brief the group. Tell people in advance what an escape room is (especially if some have never done one), what to expect, and that there's no wrong way to play.
Mix the teams deliberately. Don't let people self-select into groups of friends. Put people together who don't normally work closely — that's where you get actual team building value.
Do the debrief. After the session, spend 10–15 minutes talking about what happened. What worked? Who surprised themselves? Where did communication break down? The escape room gives you real material to work with.
Book in advance. Corporate groups often try to book the week before. Popular time slots — Friday afternoons, early evenings — fill quickly. Give yourself at least 2–3 weeks.
Is It Worth It?
For most groups: yes. It's active, time-limited, genuinely competitive, and cheap per head relative to most alternatives. An evening activity for 12 people at Incognito costs less than a dinner at a mid-range Dublin restaurant — and generates more conversation.
See our team building and corporate packages, or get in touch to discuss a custom arrangement for your group. We're used to handling everything from small startup teams to large corporate offsites.
