The Lost Pearl of Oyster Point – A Campus-Wide Pirate Adventure
Client
What the customers say:
"The thing that made The Hunt most meaningful for our team is getting out of conference rooms and working together in a fun way!"
Challenge
Stripe wanted 250 teammates out of conference rooms and exploring their Oyster Point campus together. The brief: get people into corners of HQ they had never seen, reflect Stripe's culture of building with intention and detail, and create core memories across teams in a single 2-hour window.
Handstand Magic: The Lost Pearl of Oyster Point
We built a pirate adventure set entirely on Stripe's campus. Teams followed hand-drawn maps, bargained with pirates, fished the bay for rubber duckies, spun nautical wheels, and dug up buried treasure, all while solving riddles rooted in Stripe lore and Oyster Point history.
Three things made it land: a game designed around the campus itself, immersive actors who kept the story alive, and physical props built for this one event. Each is broken down below.
The result: a 9.5/10 average rating, a 72 NPS, and 100% of players saying they want another event. The DEeP team called it one of their most memorable gatherings to date.
Case Study Video
What Stripe Asked For
Four goals shaped every design decision, from the storyline to the last prop.
Explore the campus
Send teams into parts of the Oyster Point HQ they had never visited, and make the office itself part of the puzzle.
Get out of conference rooms
Put teammates who usually meet over video on the same beach, pier, and lawn, working on something together.
Reflect Stripe's culture
Build the story around Stripe's own lore and its habit of building with intention and detail.
Fit 250 people into 2 hours
Run every team through the full arc, from first riddle to buried treasure, in a single afternoon block.
What We Built
🗺️ A Game Designed Around Oyster Point
The objective: get Stripes exploring the office they work in every day and seeing it fresh.
We spent a week walking the Oyster Point campus with Stripe's workplace design team, learning the lore behind the space and the easter eggs woven into the office. (Did you know the lights shift color temperature through the day to match natural sunlight? Neither did we.) Those details became riddles. Teams were sent across the campus, down to the bay, and into corners of HQ most players had never visited, following a storyline rooted in Stripe's own culture and Oyster Point's history.
How it landed: players called out "the variety of the riddles" and "the integration of Stripe's culture." One teammate in their first week said it was "the absolute best way to learn about the company and meet my coworkers."
🏴☠️ Immersive Actors Across Campus
The objective: make the story feel alive, so teams met characters instead of just reading clues on a phone.
We cast and costumed a crew of pirates and sea folk and stationed them across the campus. A pirate captain guarded the treasure chest on the beach. A fisherman ran the rubber-ducky fishing hole on the pier. Each actor had a role in the plot and a leg of the hunt to run, and each one sent teams off with their next clue in character.
How it landed: the actors were the moments people stopped to pose for. Team selfies with the crew filled the recap, and the player feedback was simple: "SUCH a good time, loved all of the creativity."
⚓ Props Designed and Built for Stripe
The objective: put real artifacts in players' hands, so the story was something to touch, not just read.
Everything was designed and produced for this one event: hand-drawn maps with puzzles hidden in the illustrations, custom-etched nautical wheels, twine-tied parchment bundles, Lost Pearl stamps, and a treasure chest buried in the sand for the finale. Every prop had a job in the game. The maps hid puzzles, the wheels had to be spun to decode a clue, and the chest was the ending every team was racing toward.
How it landed: players named "the artifacts and details" as a favorite part, right alongside the riddles themselves.
Favorite Moments
Client
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