Two busy people turned team building for 42 teammates into a memorable adventure

Once a year, Hostinger’s Summerfest brings team members from across the globe for a week of celebrating the year’s wins, working side by side, and catching up in person at HQ in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Emma Young, who heads up the Organic Marketing team, wanted to bring the whole department together and create a fun team-building experience that would stick with them.

It wasn’t an easy one, as Organic Marketing is one of Hostinger’s largest departments, made up of five teams with teammates spread across countries. And Summerfest only gave them one packed week in Vilnius to bring everyone together.

Between workshops, meetings, lunches, dinners, and everything else on the schedule, carving out a few uninterrupted hours for 42 people was already a challenge. Taking everyone somewhere outside the city? That raised the stakes even more.

So Emma turned to Gediminas Rekašius, our Organic Operations Lead, with a puzzle to solve: how can we bring teams across this department together to have fun and bond, given all the limitations?

From there, it was just the two of them piecing together the entire event, with everyone else kept in the dark until the big reveal.

The main premise: Get people lost together

Alongside all the serious work conversations, Summerfest week almost felt like a holiday for colleagues who aren’t from Lithuania. Emma and Gediminas wanted to lean into that vacation theme for the attending Organic Marketing department.

They came up with an activity that would mean exploring Vilnius together: discovering iconic places, taking on challenges, and finding plenty of reasons to laugh along the way.

To get everyone invested, they raised the stakes by offering the winning team a hot-air balloon ride over Trakai’s scenic lakes, a beautiful area about an hour from Vilnius.

The 42 participants were split into eight teams, each representing a mix of people who, up to that point, hadn’t had much chance to work closely together. Each team got a different-colored bandana to wear and two hours to complete as many challenges as possible and rack up points.

The challenge pool included 70 random challenges, divided into easy, medium, and hard levels, plus location-based challenges across 16 Vilnius landmarks. 

Challenges were worth different numbers of points based on their difficulty, giving teams the freedom to choose their own strategy, and they had to submit a photo or video as proof to claim their points.

There was no fixed route or single way to play. Each team chose its own path – giving everyone a reason to explore Vilnius, step outside their comfort zones, and bond through doing something a little silly.

Gamifying the challenges

Once Emma and Gediminas had mapped out the game rules, the next step was figuring out how to actually run and score a scavenger hunt at that scale.

A shared document and group chat wouldn’t cut it. With 42 people across eight teams submitting photo and video proof within two hours, and just two people reviewing it all, they needed a better way to keep the game moving.

Teams needed to know which challenges were available, where to submit their proof, and how to check their scores. Emma and Gediminas needed to review submissions and count scores in real time without creating a bottleneck.

And the whole thing had to work outdoors, on phones, with potentially patchy Wi-Fi and limited battery.

They first looked at existing scavenger hunt apps, but paying for a platform for a single team-building event didn’t make much sense. More importantly, the available tools couldn’t quite accommodate the game they had in mind.

So Gediminas decided to use Hostinger’s own product to build exactly what they needed – a web app with five main sections:

• Scoreboard: A live leaderboard showing team scores and completed challenges.
• Submit: A place for teams to upload photo and video proof.
• Gallery: A collection of completed submissions.
• Rules: The game rules and full challenge list.
• Admin: A password-protected dashboard where Emma and Gediminas could review submissions and manage the game.

He vibe-coded the entire app using Hostinger AI Builder, building it himself over 34 rounds of prompting in plain, everyday language.

Before sending his first prompt, Gediminas worked through the game mechanics with Claude, mapping out the rules and edge cases: what happens when a submission is rejected, how scores are calculated, how two referees divide the review queue, and what happens in a tie.

By the time he opened the AI Builder prompt box, he already had something close to a product requirements document: 

• A defined data model
• A timer designed to avoid phone-clock discrepancies
• Tie-break rules based on team color order
• Clear submission states
• Device-based team identification instead of requiring players to log in

That preparation meant fewer foundational changes later – and fewer AI credits spent fixing things that could have been figured out beforehand.

The fun chaos that bonded the team together

The game kicked off at Hostinger HQ in Vilnius, where each team was handed a product-related riddle. The fastest teams to solve it unlocked the app link and received a secret code to get started. And yes, they were allowed to start moving as soon as they cracked it.

As expected, the eight teams went in eight completely different directions.

Some teams went straight for the location-based challenges, like the Red team, who decided to take on the climb to Gediminas Tower to collect points.

Meanwhile, the Navy team decided there was no need to roam all over Vilnius just yet. They stayed closer to the office and started ticking off the easier challenges, including one that involved “hijacking” a nearby bar counter and posing as its employees.

Behind the scenes, Emma and Gediminas were trying to keep up with the stream of submissions – and cracking up their way through them. The game had barely started, but the photos and videos coming in were already giving them plenty to laugh about.

Every submission was automatically assigned to one of them for review, while a shared queue let either referee jump in when things got busy. A locking system that Gediminas vibe-coded made sure they never accidentally reviewed the same submission twice.

They also had full veto power to award bonus points for submissions that were simply too hilarious to ignore.

The Camo team got the highest bonus points while taking their aquatic adventure to Užupis, where one team member actually dipped into the river to touch the mermaid statue’s tail.

Every approved submission went straight into the Gallery, organized by team and challenge. So while Emma and Gediminas battled the review queue, everyone else could watch the increasingly chaotic evidence roll in from around the city.

Adding a twist with the Blitz rounds

As the rules promised, there were also Blitz rounds – surprise moments when every challenge was worth double points. The stakes lay in the fact that only Emma and Gediminas knew when one was coming or how long it would last.

The players could only wait for the web app to start flashing red, indicating the Blitz round was on. Any challenge submitted while the Blitz round was live earned double points, so teams had to decide quickly if they wanted to drop what they were doing and chase the bonus.

Some teams had been saving their biggest challenges for exactly this moment. The Burgundy team, for example, had taken on the Hill of Three Crosses, climbing more than 200 stairs to complete the highest-reward challenges. When the app turned red, they knew they had a valuable submission ready to cash in.

Others took a simpler approach. If double points were on the table, why not grab the easiest challenges? A silly group photo could suddenly be worth twice as much while daring everyone else to match it by doing something even more ridiculous together.

Sparking extra competitiveness with the hidden scoreboard 

For most of the game, the public leaderboard showed each team’s score alongside the challenges they had completed. It gave everyone a window into how the other teams were playing.

Teams could see who was racking up points, spot strategies that seemed to work, and even borrow a few ideas. And, of course, seeing their own team climb the leaderboard gave everyone a little extra motivation to keep going.

Then, in the last minutes of the game, Gediminas pulled the rug out from under everyone. The leaderboard was hidden from the players.

Teams could still see that challenges were being completed, but they had no way of knowing whether they were leading, catching up, or falling behind. All they could do was keep playing and hope they had done enough.

Behind the scenes, Emma and Gediminas could see the scores keep changing in real time. The final standings were kept secret until the winners were announced – turning the last few challenges into a guessing game of their own.

The final count

When the two-hour timer hit zero, submissions closed automatically. Emma and Gediminas finished reviewing everything still in the queue, and the final scores were ready to be revealed.

While the last submissions were being checked, they were also preparing for the closing celebration at a nearby urban campsite.

Everyone gathered in for some well-earned refreshments – fruit, cheese platters, snacks, pizzas, and drinks – and, naturally, a chance to laugh together over the day’s most ridiculous submissions.

Across eight teams, the afternoon produced 274 completed challenge submissions. Then came the moment everyone had been waiting and guessing about: the winners were announced.

Amid plenty of cheering and laughter, Emma and Gediminas also shared some of the funniest moments they’d seen throughout the game, encouraging everyone to check them out in the app’s Gallery. 

After two hours of racing around Vilnius, it was finally time to slow down, relax, and laugh about the chaos together. 

Team Blue took the grand prize: a hot-air balloon ride over Trakai. Team Green and Team Navy received shopping vouchers to be used across Vilnius for taking second and third place, respectively.

But the prizes were only part of what everyone took away from the afternoon.

Somewhere between the challenges, the competition, and the sheer amount of nonsense happening around Vilnius, the 42 colleagues left knowing each other better. 

They had shared inside jokes, stories they’d be telling for a while, and plenty of moments to bring back with them when they return to their screens.

What would Emma and Gediminas do differently? 

They learned that building an app for 42 people is different from testing it with two. At one point, a sudden wave of photo and video uploads put more traffic on the app than it had accounted for, and the upload feature began to struggle.

At one point, the upload feature struggled with the influx of submissions. One teammate held a plank for a full minute as a challenge, only to discover that the app wouldn’t let them upload the proof.

Another team ran into a similar issue and took matters into their own hands, sending Gediminas the proof over WhatsApp instead. In the end, the submissions all made it through and counted toward the teams’ scores – but not without a little improvisation along the way.

It was a good reminder that a vibe-coded app isn’t flawless – especially when you’re putting it through its first real-world stress test. But there are ways to prepare for those moments and minimize the damage.

There were a few other small hiccups along the way, too. But things didn’t need to be perfect to keep 42 people moving, competing, laughing, and exploring Vilnius together.

If you’re planning something similar for your team, we’d take a few things from that experience:

• Start with the bigger picture. Don’t just pick an activity and hope people bond along the way. Think about what you want people to experience together, then build the activity around it.
• Add stakes so people are willing to go all in. A little competition, a good prize, or even a surprise twist can turn passive participation into genuine excitement.
• Don’t let the tools limit the idea. When the existing scavenger hunt apps didn’t fit the game, Gediminas built one himself with AI Builder. The technology didn’t define the experience – it was built around what the team actually needed.
• Leave room for people to have fun. The best parts of the afternoon weren’t perfectly coordinated. They were the unexpected silly moments like climbing 200 stairs for extra points, getting into a river for a mermaid’s tail, or simply asking a stranger for a high-five.

The bigger win was that a group of colleagues who usually existed in different countries, time zones, and Slack channels had spent an afternoon exploring the same city, solving ridiculous problems, and laughing about things they now had in common.

That’s what a good team-building activity is really supposed to do: give people a story they couldn’t have made alone.