Treasure hunt in Budapest: we tried UrbanGo, the escape room-like city tour

UrbanGo is an outdoor interactive self-guided tour that mixes the puzzles and riddles of escape rooms with relaxed sightseeing. The game was finally brought to life in 2015, after 16 years of dreaming, planning, and experimenting.

The aim was to create a chill yet exciting sightseeing opportunity that is fun for all generations, thus offering a unique family program, says Réka Vaszilievits-Sömjén, co-founder of UrbanGo together with her cousin, Beáta Horváth, and her husband, Miklós Guthy. She says UrbanGo is for everyone who loves to play: groups of friends, families, those who love to be outdoors, and those who love Budapest.

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We chose the first really hot day of this summer to try out the game.

Our group arrived at the designated location in Gozsdu courtyard at 11 a.m., equipped with a code word and the pre-downloaded UrbanGo app. Telling our team name and passcode to a helpful waiter, we then received a package with all the necessary equipment, and the treasure hunt could begin.

First, we found the information needed to launch the app which contained hints for the game. We also received two decks of cards which guided us through the game, giving the tasks and riddles we needed to find the next step while containing fun facts and historical background stories for the locations as well.

We will not tell you exactly where our path led, but we spent about three hours on the Da Vinci code-like investigation, walking up and down the most beautiful part of downtown Budapest.

Having lived here all our lives, we found great pleasure in visiting this part of the city a little bit like tourists, rediscovering the well-known sights from a new angle, searching for sculptures, hidden motifs, and covert clues in shop windows, and cracking location-based riddles. The puzzles and tasks are not hard, but they are challenging and creative enough to keep the game exciting and everyone involved. Some of the clues are ingeniously hidden, and we quite enjoyed measuring things with tape, blowing up a balloon, or fishing with a magnet.