How to run multiple teams without crowding the same stop

Here is the problem, stated plainly. Thirty colleagues, five teams of six, ten stops, one route. Everyone starts at the same moment at stop one, so five teams stand in the same place at the same time. Then they all move to stop two together, and they queue there too.

Nobody planned a queue. It happens because a route is an order, and if every team has the same order they are all in the same place all evening. The visible symptoms are a photo challenge with thirty people waiting for it, teams copying the answer off the team in front, and a cafe or a small square with more of your group in it than it can hold.

The fixes are below, cheapest first.

Stagger the start times

Send team one off, wait three or four minutes, send team two, and so on. It works, it costs nothing, and everybody understands it.

Two things to know. It costs event time at both ends: the last team starts sixteen minutes late and finishes sixteen minutes late, so a ninety minute hunt takes closer to two hours of your evening. And it only holds while the teams move at the same speed. One team that stops for a long argument about a quiz question hands its gap to the team behind, and by stop six you are back in a queue.

Good enough for two or three teams. It starts to fray at five.

Write a different route for each team

The proper fix is that each team walks the same stops in a different order. Teams spend most of the event at different places, and the queues mostly disappear, though a fast team can still catch a slow one at a stop.

Doing this by hand is miserable. Five teams and ten stops means five different sheets, each with the stops in a different order, and every clue on every sheet has to point to the right next stop for that team. Change one stop the day before and you are rewriting five documents. This is the reason most large hunts just accept the queue.

Rotate the starting point instead

There is a middle option that gets most of the benefit for almost none of the work. Keep one route and one order, but start each team at a different point of it, and let each team wrap around to the stops it skipped.

With five teams on ten stops you turn stops one, three, five, seven and nine on as starting points, and the builder splits players evenly between them. A team that begins at stop three walks three, four, five and onwards, then wraps around to one and two. Every team walks all ten stops, every team walks them in the same order, and the teams begin two stops apart instead of shoulder to shoulder. Speed differences can still bring two teams to the same stop during the evening, but they no longer start every queue together.

Two conditions make this work. The route has to be a loop or close to one, because a team starting halfway will end halfway. And the clues cannot say “walk east from the previous stop” for the stop where a team begins, so keep the arrival instructions self-contained.

How this works in HedgeHunt

The builder has a control called Player routes, and it offers exactly the two options above. Multiple start points is the rotation: same order for everyone, each group begins somewhere else. It is free on every plan. Custom routes, where you set a different order for each group by hand, is part of the paid plans.

For a company hunt with five teams, multiple start points is almost always what you want, and it takes about a minute to switch on.

Do points and the leaderboard settle it?

Only if you turn competitive scoring on. That is the setting that makes the score mean something: hints cost points, and wrong answers reduce the score.

Under the default casual scoring, every finisher earns full points. The leaderboard still exists and still ranks everyone, but with equal scores it is effectively ranked by how long each team took. That is a perfectly good way to run a friendly hunt, and it is worth knowing before you stand up and announce that hints will cost the team points. If you want that to be true, name the scoring mode when you set the hunt up.

What happened when we generated a five team hunt

On 31 August 2026 we typed the prompt at the bottom of this page into the HedgeHunt generator, with Old Town in Prague set as the place. We generated and reviewed the draft. We did not go and walk it.

It took about seventy five seconds and produced the full ten stops that were asked for, running west to east across the old town. In order: the Gothic tower at the Old Town end of Charles Bridge, the Rudolfinum, the Old-New Synagogue on Červená, the Spanish Synagogue, the Jan Hus monument, the Astronomical Clock, the Týn Church, the House at the Stone Bell, then Celetná Street out to the Powder Gate and the Municipal House. Those are all real, correctly described, and in an order a Prague guide would actually walk.

It also read the competitive part of the brief properly without being told which setting to use. It turned competitive scoring on by itself, and it weighted the last two stops higher than the rest, so a team that is behind can still change the standings at the end.

And it did not solve the crowding at all. The draft is one route in one fixed order, so all five teams still leave stop one together and all five teams still arrive at the Astronomical Clock at the same moment. The generator writes the hunt. It does not know how thirty people move through it.

That is the whole point of this article: the fix is not in the words, it is one switch. Turning multiple start points on takes the same ten stops and starts the five teams two stops apart instead of all together.

Two smaller things needed fixing in that draft as well, both map pins. The Týn Church stop was pinned well east of Old Town Square, out near the Powder Gate, and the first stop was pinned to the whole of Charles Bridge rather than to the tower at its end. The builder warns that the locations are AI guesses and tells you to check them on the map, and it is right to.

The prompt we used

A team building scavenger hunt for thirty colleagues split into five teams, ten stops around the Old Town, a mix of quiz questions and photo missions, points on every step so the leaderboard settles it.

Paste that into the AI scavenger hunt generator and swap Old Town Prague for your own city. Then fix the pins, turn multiple start points on, and release the hunt again so your players actually get them.