No. A well-designed virtual team building activity should run entirely through an app and a video call, with nothing to ship, unpack or store. If a supplier’s “virtual” experience still involves a box of props turning up at each participant’s home address, that’s a legacy in-person format bolted onto a video call, not a format genuinely built for remote and distributed teams.
Why do some “virtual” team building experiences still involve physical kit?
A lot of virtual offerings started life as in-person activities that were adapted for video calls when remote work became the norm. The easiest way to adapt a physical puzzle box or scavenger hunt kit is to keep the physical kit and add a video call layer on top. It works, but it inherits every problem physical kit has, just spread across dozens of home addresses instead of one venue.
What’s the actual cost of kit-heavy virtual team building?
Three costs that rarely show up in the headline price:
Shipping. Every participant needs their kit to arrive before the session, which means lead times, courier costs, and a real risk of late or missing deliveries derailing the day for whoever didn’t get their box in time.
Storage and reuse. Kit that’s shipped out once is rarely reused. It either gets thrown away after a single session or sits in a closet, which is both a cost and, increasingly, a sustainability question organizers are asked about internally.
Setup time. Someone has to package, label and dispatch kit to every participant’s address, which is real admin time on top of the activity itself, before anyone has actually played anything.
How does an app-based virtual activity avoid this?
Wildgoose’s virtual environment runs entirely through the Mobile Adventures app on a participant’s own smartphone, alongside a video conferencing platform like Zoom or Teams. Participants use their laptop screen to interact face-to-face in digital breakout rooms, while the app on their phone handles the interactive layer: inputting trivia answers, cracking escape room codes, or submitting photo and video challenges. Nothing physical needs to arrive beforehand. A remote host can brief the group and run the wrap-up over video, or the whole thing can be self-managed with a step-by-step guide, with no courier, no packaging and no kit to store afterward.
Does removing physical kit make the activity less engaging?
Not in Wildgoose’s experience. The engagement in a well-built virtual activity comes from the same place it does in-person: real-time competition, a live leaderboard, and tasks people actually have to think about together, not from unwrapping a box. Photo and video challenge submission, live scoring and breakout-room collaboration are all handled through the app, so the “physical” feeling of a team activity comes from participants seeing and reacting to each other on screen, not from a shared prop.
What should you ask before booking a virtual team building activity?
Ask specifically whether anything needs to be delivered to participants before the day. If the answer involves shipping addresses, lead times or a returns process, you’re booking an in-person activity with a video call attached, not a genuinely virtual one. For distributed or work-from-home teams, that distinction matters more than it might first appear, particularly if your team spans multiple countries and shipping becomes a customs and cost question as well as a logistics one.
Wildgoose’s virtual team building activities run entirely through the Mobile Adventures app alongside your video call of choice, with nothing shipped to participants beforehand. Get in touch with the Wildgoose team.
