Secret City Trails

You love discovering cities but classic city tours where you just check off the sights seem quite boring to you? If you're more into exploring a city with all senses we have the perfect tool for you! Instead of walking around without being involved, your city tour converts into a game! Also you don't have to pre-book your tour and stick to fixed times, just start the game when you're ready. So forget POKEMON GO and discover real hidden treasures in cities across Europe with Secret City Trails!

Secret City Trails takes locals and travellers on urban adventures in 24 cities across Europe. During the experiences players explore a city’s hidden gems and unlock stories and recommendations to cafes and restaurants while they solve a trail of riddles via a web app (works in browser of any smartphones, so no downloads are needed). Solving the riddles puts people in the present and requires focus on what’s around instead of on your phone. The city discovery games are an entertaining, interactive, instantly bookable, affordable and independent way of seeing and enjoying  a city.

How it works

The game can be played alone or in a group of up to 5 persons. First of all you need to choose one of the 24 cities and book it online before you receive an email with a unique link to play. By adding the discount code wombats you'll get off 10% a game at any city!

After that, the starting point will be revealed in the email. As soon as you open the email link in your smartphone’s browser and tap ‘Play Now’ the game starts and you receive your first riddle. Now it's your turn to search for answers to the riddles on streets, hidden courtyards, alleys, unknown galleries and even lovely shops and cafes. Answer correctly and unlock the next riddle, as well as stories and recommendations to cafes, bars, shops and more. There's no limit for incorrect answers and you get encouraged to try again. If you're stuck you can ask for a hint. There’s one for each riddle and it will get you nearer to the location where you can find your answer. Asking for a hint will cost you 10 minutes of ‘penalty time’ though. If you’re really stuck or lost, you can choose to skip a riddle. This will result in 20 minutes ‘penalty time’ which will be added to your overall time. Your total time will be revealed after the last riddle when the game ends.

We had the chance to try Secret City Trails in Vienna and we absolutley loved it! Not only that it's great fun to solve the riddles and explore many places, you also perceive the spots completely different. By focusing on the details to solve the riddles you will realize things you have never seen before! You also get to know many facts about the buildings and the history which was really interesting and we didn't know yet. Unfortunately it started to rain heavily on our Secret City Trail tour so we had to interrupt it for some time. But this wasn't a big problem as you pass many cute cafes and bars on your tour and there's also a break after you solved half of the riddles. At the end of the game you will receive a map with all the locations you have passed, so that you can come back to those places at any given time.

Travel and play as the first #secretcityintern

Secret City Trails just launched an internship that allows you to travel across Europe, play games and share your adventures on social media for in total 3 months. All travel, accomodation and games are covered, your task is it to visual report your adventures with videos and photos. The internship is starting in September 2019 in Amsterdam and Haarlem, in October you will meet two of our cities, Munich and Vienna. The internship ends at the end of November 2019 in Lisbon.