How to Run a Mall Scavenger Hunt for a Church Group

Getting the mall’s okay

Call the mall’s management office about a week ahead, not the morning of — that gives them time to tell security you’re coming. Give them your group size, the date, and roughly a two-hour window; say plainly you won’t be interfering with store business and that adults will be present the whole time. Ask where they’d rather you set up a base — the food court is the usual answer, but let them pick. Write down the name of whoever said yes; if a guard stops a team later, that name turns an awkward conversation into a short one.

Boundary and rules

Settle the footprint before anything else: one floor or two, which anchor stores are in bounds, which are off limits, and where the food court sits as home base. Smaller is safer and easier to enforce — a wing and a half of one floor is plenty for forty or fifty sleuths. Read the rules aloud at the start rather than only handing out a sheet. That same boundary is the line an organizer draws on the map in the app, so every sleuth sees it on their own screen.

• Stay inside the boundary — from the food court to the west anchor store, this floor only
• No running. A mall floor is tile and someone will go down
• No fitting rooms, stockrooms, loading docks or any “employees only” door, ever
• Phones on and reachable for the full two hours
• If a guard or store employee stops you, stop, apologize and walk straight to base — an adult handles it from there
• This is still a public mall full of other shoppers — no blocking storefronts, no cutting through checkout lines

Teams and suspects

Four sleuths to a team is the number that holds up in a mall: small enough to move together, big enough that no one is alone if the team splits near a store. Mix ages within a team rather than grouping by grade or by family — the hunt plays the same either way, and a mixed team argues less about direction. One phone per team is enough.

For suspects, five to eight volunteers covers forty to eighty sleuths comfortably — enough that no team waits long for a find, not so many that the mall feels emptied of ordinary shoppers. The disguises that work best borrow the mall itself: a shopper with two bags, someone on a bench with a coffee, a person pacing near a window on a phone call. Nothing needs to come from a costume shop — the point is to look like anyone else in the building. See the suspect rules for how a suspect signs up, what the pass phrase is for, and what happens after they’re found.

The two-hour schedule

1. 15 minutes — gather at base, read the rules, hand out teams
2. 5 minutes — suspects disperse into the mall
3. 60 minutes — the hunt
4. 10 minutes — teams return to base
5. 20 minutes — reveal and snacks
6. 10 minutes — clean up and head count

The head count at the end is not optional, even though the live board already shows who checked in. Match that number against your own count of who actually arrived, out loud, by name if the group is small enough. A mall does not close just because your hunt ended, and a sleuth who wandered into a store is a far easier problem to catch at the ten-minute mark than to discover later when a ride is waiting outside.

What goes wrong, and the fix

• A team wanders out of the boundary — the map already shows them the line, so it’s usually a shortcut, not confusion. One warning by phone; the second time, adjust their score down rather than ending their game.
• Security stops a team — apologize immediately, walk straight to base, and let the organizer do the talking. Nobody argues the point in the moment.
• A suspect is found in the first two minutes — that’s fine. They move to a new spot, adjust the disguise if needed, and keep playing after the unmask; other teams can still find them.
• Phones die — this is exactly why one phone per team is the rule, not four. Keep a charger at base for the one team that forgot.
• Rain closes an entrance or a wing shuts early — shrink the boundary before the hunt starts, not partway through. A smaller footprint still works; a boundary that moves mid-hunt does not.

Running it with Hide & Sleuth

Hide & Sleuth runs the base-camp side of a mall hunt from a phone or laptop instead of a clipboard. A lobby screen can sit on a tablet at your food-court base showing who has checked in while stragglers arrive. Once the hunt starts, finds land on a live scoreboard within seconds, and a bulletin — say, “check-in moved to the pretzel stand” — reaches every team’s screen at once instead of a round of texts.

Before the hunt, an organizer draws the boundary on the map so every sleuth sees the same line on their own screen; it’s informational, not a fence, which is why the warn-then-adjust rule above is still how you enforce it. After the reveal, the app opens a gallery of every selfie, with a slideshow view built for that same screen at base. Building the hunt — teams, suspects, the boundary, a print kit for a join poster and badges — costs nothing; a Hunt Pass, starting at $19, is only needed to press Start. See pricing for the full breakdown.

Questions