Room Escape Artist

A.I. Invasion is a team building experience through gameplay, designed for corporate groups, and created by Amplio Games.

Format

Style of Play:

• Point-and-click

Who is it For?

• Any experience level
• Teams working on improving their effectiveness

Required Equipment: Mobile Device

Recommended Team Size: 3-5

Play Time: 60 minutes

Price: $800 to $2400, depending on group size, remote vs in-person setup, and feedback structure

Booking: contact Amplio Games to book

Description

This game is geared toward corporate team-building and focuses on not only solving puzzles, but how the team works together to do so.

Using a mobile device, players see puzzles and interact with them. The puzzle state is shared across all of the player devices, and collaboration is required to solve some puzzles.

This game can either be played in-person or remotely, but the gameplay is solely on mobile devices.

Tammy McLeod’s Reaction

This is not a traditional escape game, but rather one that is designed to reveal the communication and teamwork-related skills of the players. The puzzles are deliberately structured to require very specific abilities from each player. This information is rarely available to team leaders, but can definitely be valuable. While the game itself was enjoyable from a puzzle standpoint, its entertainment value to me as an individual player is no higher than that of a regular escape room. However, to an organization who is looking for actionable avenues to improve their team effectiveness, this game and its accompanying performance analysis is worth considering.

Brett Kuehner’s Reaction

• + Good collaborative structure with multiple participants required for some tasks
• ? Most puzzles could be solved in parallel, but some puzzles required only a subset of the players. Those were less engaging but also gave a chance to see how the team self-organized.
• + Puzzles were generally fun, and one had a structure I hadn’t seen before
• + Good mix of puzzle types, including codes, word puzzles, and visual ahas
• – Interacting through a phone screen was somewhat frustrating at times. I would have preferred a full computer screen for easier visibility and more precise control.
• – For one of the games, it was initially unclear if the response was lagging erratically or if there was intentional complexity in the input behavior. It turned out that it was intentional, but it felt annoying until we determined that.
• + At the end, a review of team performance and analysis of team behavior gave useful insight into the group dynamics

Kurtis Rohlf’s Reaction

A.I. Invasion was a mobile-based team building game played either in-person or over Zoom. I enjoyed the variety of puzzles offered in the game between word puzzles, making visual connections, and maneuvering space as a team. I found the mobile integration to be clean and functional making moving between and interacting with puzzles go well. I had fun working together with other teammates to regain our corporate secrets from the rogue A.I. This game was geared toward corporate team building and can be scaled to many groups playing at the same time. I found the puzzles to be easy-to-medium in difficulty and believe that even those new to puzzles will find success.

Theresa Piazza’s Reaction

A.I. Invasion is a level up from the last Amplio Games experience I played. The puzzles were engaging and allowed for more of the team to participate at once, which I always prefer. Overall, the game felt more like several independent puzzles, held together with a loose thread of “A.I./ Computer” but that was really secondary to Amplio Games’ goal with this game. The main goal was to observe how a team functions through puzzle solving and then highlight those unique working styles in a debrief hosted after the game ends. The value of this puzzle solving adventure is really arming folks with the knowledge to improve how they interact together on a day to day basis. Casual enthusiasts can skip this game, but if you’re a puzzle enthusiast looking for a teambuilding game that will both be entertaining and also subtly highlight that you can’t get a word in edgewise when your coworker “Jim” is in a meeting… this is it!

Disclosure: Amplio Games provided the Hivemind reviewers with a complimentary play.