Le Labo Cambrai: a digital treasure hunt for the venue’s opening

The context

Le Labo de Cambrai opened its doors on 23 June 2019, in a former 17th-century Jesuit college. It brings together a library, a science centre, a heritage collection and the town’s interpretation centre for architecture and heritage. Part of the building is devoted to exhibitions: for the opening exhibition, the team wanted a game.

The brief

To accompany the Labo’s opening exhibition with a game that helps visitors discover the venue and its history.

Our adaptation

We came up with a riddle: find the five parts of a 400-year-old glass bottle containing a parchment whose contents nobody knows.

• The game unfolds in five stages, spread over five circuits grouped in the app.
• Each stage earns points: the total measures progress and makes it possible to rank players or teams.
• At the end of the trail, a form asks the crucial question: should the bottle be broken to read the parchment?
• A team mode was added later, to play the trail like an escape game.

For this first game, we entered all the content into the back office.

Key features

• Five-stage trail, with points and rankings of players or teams
• Team mode, played like an escape game
• End-of-game form, answers collected in the back office
• Self-service back office: the Labo team manages its content and checks usage and completion statistics
• Connected app: content is loaded during play from the back office

In pictures

Graphic design: LudoVisio^™ and the heritage department of the City of Cambrai.

Results

After deliberation, the bottle was not broken: the parchment keeps its secret.

Over the following three years, the Labo team created and filled its own trails, including “Voix de quartier”, about the Martin-Martine & Guise district. We stepped in occasionally for adjustments, and the app gained new features as needs arose. This first project became the foundation of LudoVisio^™ Play: stages, points, rankings and a self-service back office are found in every trail today.