How it works

What you need to run one

Everything practical, in one place — what to have in the room or on the route, how long it takes, and where this isn't the right answer.

Essentials

Three things, wherever you run it

Players' own phones. Any smartphone browser. Nothing to download, no account to create.
One person to start it. You, from a laptop or your own phone.
Nothing else. No app, no tablets to rent, no kit to ship, nothing for a venue AV team to rig.

Indoors

Wi-Fi, a screen, and a code they can read

Venue Wi-Fi or decent mobile signal. The games are light on data.
A screen, if you want one. The live leaderboard on a projector is optional, but it's where most of the energy in the room comes from.
Print or project the join code large enough. A QR code that can't be scanned from the back row is the most common way a good start goes slowly.

Outdoors

Location, signal, and walking the route first

GPS check-in is the default outdoors. Players count as arrived within 82 ft (25 m) of a point, and you can change that radius per quest in the editor. Phones get a cleaner fix on open ground, so you can tighten it in a park or across a campus. Between tall buildings location is less reliable — keep it at 66 ft (20 m) or above.
Players use their own mobile data. Worth walking the route and checking signal before the day — and worth warning international attendees about roaming, which is the one nobody thinks of until someone complains.
Brief your attendees that the game will ask for location. A scavenger hunt needs it — challenges won't unlock without it. People who dismiss the prompt by reflex, or who have location switched off, will be stuck, so a line in your joining instructions saves you the awkward conversation.
Printed QR markers are the alternative when GPS won't do: inside buildings, underground, or anywhere you need players at an exact spot rather than near one. They need no location permission at all — scanning uses the camera instead, and if that's blocked too, every marker carries a short printed code a player can type. That makes marker hunt the format to reach for when devices are locked down.

Sizes & timing

From a handful of players to 500

Group size: from a handful of players to 500. See the load-test numbers →
Game length: 15–30 minutes for most formats. Time Capsule runs over days or weeks instead.
Setup on the day: minutes. Send the join code and start the game from your own device. The only format needing anything physical is a marker hunt, where the QR markers go out beforehand.
Build time: an afternoon for a fully branded custom game.

Starting

Send a code, start it from anywhere

Players get in whichever way suits the room: a link, a QR code straight to your game, or a numeric code they type in at play.quizpedition.com.

You start the game remotely from the planner, so you don't have to be standing anywhere in particular to begin — or be the person who presses go at all.

If you're using teams, you set them up in the editor beforehand: named, and with an optional maximum size so they fill evenly rather than everyone piling into the first one.

Hosting

Someone else can run the room

Whoever is hosting on the day doesn't need your planner login. They open the host page with a secret code you set, and from there they can:

remove a player from the game
move players between teams
approve photo answers, where you've set a photo task to need approval
give a player a code to get back in, if they've lost their progress

Which matters because the person who builds the game and the person standing at the back of the room are usually not the same person — and because approving photos means nothing unexpected reaches the big screen in front of your client.

Fit

What it's good for — and what it isn't

Works well for

Conference breaks and post-lunch slots, offsites and away-days, sales kickoffs, onboarding cohorts, and distributed teams who are never in one place.

Not the right tool for

Audiences you can't assume have a smartphone each.
Venues with genuinely no signal, or corporate Wi-Fi locked down so guest devices can't reach the internet. Check this before the day; it's the most common surprise.
Anything that needs a person to judge subjective answers as they come in.

Languages

Your content in any language, our buttons in English

Write your content in any language — questions, clues, task text, completion messages, all of it.

The interface is English for now on both sides: the planner tools you build in, and a small number of player-facing labels like Done and Next unsolved. More languages are on the roadmap.

In practice, a non-English audience plays a game that reads entirely in their language, with a handful of English buttons around it.

Data & privacy

The page you can forward to your client's lawyer

Players never create an account. We store a nickname, an avatar, a score, progress through the game, and any photos they submit — no real names, emails, phone numbers or ages, and no GPS trace. Card details never reach us; Stripe handles payments.

Data is held in the United States. Transfers from the EU are covered by Standard Contractual Clauses, and from the UK by the ICO's International Data Transfer Addendum, both carried by our data processing agreement.

For your players you are the data controller and we are your processor. The full detail — what's stored, for how long, who else touches it, and what happens when you delete a game — is on our privacy page, which is a link you can forward straight to a client's legal or IT team.

Timeline

From brief to live

Building a custom game takes an afternoon. Give yourself a day after that to play it through, fix anything that reads badly, and rehearse the start.

Two working days, then. The slow part is usually not the build — it's getting brand assets out of your client.

Try it

Play one before you build one

Play a sample game Create your free account

90 seconds, no signup for the sample. Free plan on signup, no credit card required.