Sticky Fingers
A card-based escape room built on collaboration and creative problem-solving.
Sticky Fingers is a card-based escape room where participants take on the roles of a heist crew attempting to steal a diamond from a museum.
Core Concept
The game centres on distributed information mechanics. Players each possess knowledge unavailable to others, creating a structural requirement for collaboration. The puzzles can't be solved by any single person working alone — they require every perspective in the room.
What Happens in the Room
The first five minutes are chaos. Everyone gets their cards, looks at what they have, and tries to figure out what it means. Some people go quiet and process. Others immediately start announcing what they've got. A few start physically moving toward people who might have what they need.
A natural leader almost always emerges — not appointed, just the person who says "okay, everyone tell me what cards you have." Whether the group follows that person or ignores them tells you a lot about team dynamics before the debrief even starts.
Groups that solve it fastest establish a communication protocol in the first ten minutes. Groups that fail spend 45 minutes with individuals working privately on sub-problems, occasionally surfacing to check if someone has a specific card, then going back down. The solution was always possible. The bottleneck was always communication.
What It Reveals
The experience exposes team dynamics during problem-solving under pressure. Here's what actually surfaces:
- The announcer vs. the hoarder. Who immediately shares what they have without being asked — and who waits to see what others do first. Both patterns are visible within the first two minutes.
- The natural coordinator. Someone usually steps up to aggregate information ("tell me what you've all got"). Watch who that person is — and whether the team actually listens to them.
- The solo problem-solver. In almost every group, there's someone who works privately on a sub-problem for long stretches, convinced they can figure out their piece before looping in others. The game makes this strategy visibly inefficient.
- Decision by drift vs. decision by choice. Does the group ever explicitly agree on an approach — or do they just fall into one? Most groups never have a single moment where they decide how to communicate. They drift into a method and live with it.
- Who gives up first. When the group gets stuck, someone usually disengages — sits back, stops contributing, waits for others to solve it. The debrief connects this directly to real work behaviour.
- The reframer. Occasionally someone notices the group's approach isn't working and proposes a different method entirely. This person is easy to miss in the moment and worth naming in the debrief.
Who It's For
Sticky Fingers suits cross-functional and project teams, particularly those experiencing organisational silos. It's effective for groups where prioritising creativity and innovation development is the goal.
When to Bring This In
- New teams that haven't developed communication norms yet. The game creates a shared experience to build from. Better to surface the patterns in a game than in a live project.
- Teams where communication breakdown is a known issue. If the post-mortems keep mentioning "people weren't talking to each other," this game will show you exactly what that looks like in real time.
- Large group events — company offsites, town halls. Works at 150. One of the few games that holds energy at scale. Good high-energy opener before a longer session.
- Cross-functional teams collaborating for the first time. Different functions, different locations, different ways of working — the game surfaces whether the team has built enough shared language to actually work together.
When This Isn't the Right Fit
- When the real problem is trust, not communication. Sticky Fingers will surface that people aren't sharing information. It won't tell you why. If the root cause is psychological safety or interpersonal conflict, this game shows the symptom — but the debrief won't reach the cause.
- Very senior leadership teams who want depth. One hour is short. Senior leaders who've been to a lot of offsites will find it engaging, but it works better paired with a longer game than as the centrepiece of a leadership development day.
- When you need individual data rather than team patterns. The game generates team-level insight. If you're trying to assess individual leaders, a different format will serve you better.
What Happens in the Room
The first five minutes are chaos. Everyone looks at their cards trying to figure out what they have. Some people go quiet and process internally. Some immediately announce what they're holding. A few start moving around the room looking for specific cards.
What separates groups that solve it from groups that don't: whether someone establishes a communication protocol early. "Everyone tell me what suit they have" takes 90 seconds and changes everything. Groups that figure this out in round one finish with time to spare. Groups where everyone works their own sub-problem privately spend 50 minutes with the right cards in the room and no solution on the table.
At 150 participants, the coordination challenge scales up dramatically — and the facilitator can observe the emergence of informal sub-leaders across the room managing their local cluster. That emergence, and who steps into it, is some of the richest behavioural data the game produces.
Specific Patterns That Surface
- Who speaks up immediately with what they have — versus who waits to be asked before contributing
- Who takes on coordination ("let's organise this") without being asked — and whether the group follows
- Who works solo even when the game makes solo work structurally impossible
- Whether the group makes explicit decisions about how to organise, or just drifts into a pattern
- Who reframes the approach when the initial strategy fails — and how quickly the group adopts the new frame
- Who gives up under time pressure — and who stays constructive and keeps the group moving
When to Bring This In
- New teams that haven't developed communication norms — the game creates shared experience and shared vocabulary in one hour
- Large group events and offsites — works at 150, high energy, good as an opener before a longer session or deeper debrief
- Teams being asked to collaborate across functions or locations for the first time
- When you want individual behavioural data at scale — it's easier to observe 150 people in Sticky Fingers than in most other formats
When This Isn't the Right Fit
- When the communication problem is actually a trust or psychological safety problem — the game surfaces the symptom but the debrief won't resolve the root cause without more direct work
- Very senior leadership teams wanting depth of reflection — at 1 hour, the session is energetic but brief; better to pair it with a longer game or use it as a warm-up
- When you need individual psychometric-style data rather than team pattern data — this is a team game and the unit of analysis is collective behaviour
The Debrief
Every session ends with an EPPA debrief: Experience, Patterns, Principles, Application. Participants don't leave with general reflections — they leave with a named behaviour to change and a specific situation to apply it in. The debrief is facilitated by the same person who ran the game. That continuity is what makes the insight land.