What is the Hamburg outdoor escape game?
The Hamburg outdoor escape game puts escape-room thinking on the pavement: your smartphone sets a puzzle at each of the 10 stops, and the answer is always somewhere in the brick, water and detail around you. Count on about 2 hours in total, of which 64 minutes is walking and the route adds up to 4.9 km.
The puzzles sit at the City Hall, St Peter's Church, the Chilehaus with its ship's-bow corner, St Catherine's with its golden crown and in the warehouse streets of the Speicherstadt, and each one is self-contained, with no plot linking them. Three levels of hints are on hand if you need them. Hamburg works well for this, because the route follows canals and harbour basins and stays flat the whole way.
- Durationabout 2 hours
- Walkingabout 64 min · 4.9 km
- Stops10
- LanguagesEnglish, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish
What you do on the escape game
Think it through
Every stop holds one puzzle you solve by looking carefully and reasoning. No background knowledge is expected.
Read the brick
Dates, ornaments, ship motifs and warehouse doors carry the clues, so circle the building before you answer.
Cover ground
Google Maps leads you from puzzle to puzzle: 64 minutes of walking, 4.9 km in total.
Pause freely
There is no countdown. Take a hint, stop for a Franzbrötchen or a coffee and continue later or on another day.
See the route and attractions →
How it works
- Book online Choose the number of players. Your booking reference arrives by email straight away.
- Get the app Download the World City Trail app from the App Store or Google Play and enter your booking reference.
- Play when you like Start whenever you are ready, walk at your own pace and pause any time. No guide, no fixed schedule.
Who it suits
Friends
Enough puzzles to argue over and enough harbour views between them. Nobody has to know Hamburg in advance.
Couples
A long but easy walk with something to solve together, finishing among the canals of the old harbour.
Team building
Teams of up to 5 play on their own phones, so colleagues can set off as several groups on the same route.
Good to know
- Bring a charged smartphone with mobile data; a power bank helps.
- Best started in daylight, so you can see the details the puzzles ask about.
- No entry tickets needed: everything happens outside the buildings. Going inside is optional and paid separately.
- Family friendly; children must be accompanied by an adult.
- Not suitable for wheelchair users and difficult with strollers.
- Teams of up to 5 work best; bigger groups split into several teams, one ticket per player.
- Every purchase helps support stray cats and dogs in Greece.
Puzzle route: from the City Hall to the Hohe Brücke
10 stops · about 64 min walking · start: City Hall (Rathaus) · finish: Hohe Brücke
You open at the City Hall on the Rathausmarkt and finish at the Hohe Brücke, where the Nikolaifleet meets the Binnenhafen. In between come St Peter's Church, the Chilehaus, the St Nicholas Memorial, St Catherine's Church, the International Maritime Museum in Kaispeicher B, the Kesselhaus, the Speicherstadtmuseum and the stone oriental carpet in HafenCity. Daylight is worth planning for, since every puzzle is read outdoors and wind off the water makes a wet day feel longer. Google Maps does the navigating, the order of the stops can be changed in the app, and nothing on the route needs an entry ticket.
Open the route map ↗
1City Hall (Rathaus)Start
Hamburg's neo-Renaissance City Hall was completed in 1897, long after the old town hall was lost in the Great Fire of 1842, and it has more than 600 rooms. As Hamburg is a city-state, it houses both the senate and the parliament. In the courtyard the Hygieia Fountain recalls the cholera epidemic of 1892.
2St Peter's Church
St Peter's is the oldest parish church in Hamburg, first recorded in the 12th century. The present neo-Gothic building replaced the church destroyed in the Great Fire of 1842. On the main door, look for the bronze lion's-head knocker from 1342, said to be the oldest work of art in the city.
Read the full story →
3Chilehaus
Fritz Höger built this brick office block between 1922 and 1924 for the shipowner Henry B. Sloman, who had made his fortune trading saltpetre from Chile. Its pointed eastern corner looks like the bow of a ship, and since 2015 it has been part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with the Speicherstadt.
4St Nicholas Memorial
The neo-Gothic St Nicholas' Church, designed by the English architect George Gilbert Scott, was destroyed in the air raids of 1943. Only its 147-metre tower, briefly the tallest building in the world in the 1870s, and parts of the walls survive. Today the ruin is a memorial to the victims of war and tyranny between 1933 and 1945.
Read the full story →
5St Catherine's Church
St Catherine's is one of Hamburg's five main Protestant churches, a brick Gothic church whose baroque spire is topped by a golden crown. According to legend, gold from the treasure of the pirate Klaus Störtebeker, executed in Hamburg around 1400, was used to gild that crown.
Read the full story →
6International Maritime Museum
The museum fills Kaispeicher B, built in the late 1870s and the oldest surviving warehouse in Hamburg. It opened in 2008 to show the collection of Peter Tamm, with ship models, paintings and nautical instruments from thousands of years of seafaring.
7Kesselhaus (Old Boiler House)
This brick building from the 1880s was the boiler house of the Speicherstadt, producing the power that worked the hydraulic cranes and hoists of the warehouses. Its arched windows and brick façade match the style of the warehouse district around it.
8Speicherstadtmuseum
Housed in a historic warehouse, this small museum shows how goods such as coffee, tea, cocoa and spices were stored, sampled and handled in the Speicherstadt. The warehouse district was built from 1883 on timber piles along the canals and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015.
9Stone Oriental Carpet (Steinerner Orientteppich)
The name of this artwork means stone oriental carpet, and it plays on a piece of Speicherstadt history. For decades the warehouses here stored one of the largest stocks of oriental carpets in the world. Look closely at the ornamental pattern to see how a carpet design has been translated into stone.
10Hohe BrückeFinish
The Hohe Brücke, the High Bridge, lies on the edge of the old town where the Nikolaifleet canal meets the Binnenhafen harbour basin. Close by is Deichstraße, with some of the oldest merchant houses in Hamburg, where the Great Fire of 1842 broke out. From here you look across the water to the brick warehouses of the Speicherstadt.
Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review.
Jennifer– United Kingdom –
Collected on GetYourGuide
We needed clues for the first couple but then they seemed to get easier.
Daniel– Denmark –
Collected on GetYourGuide
Det var ikke altid helt klart hvad spørgsmålet var
Germany –
Collected on GetYourGuide
Die Rätsel waren stellenweise viel zu abstrus und dadurch frustrierend. Die Tour selbst und die gegebenen Infos waren dafür aber recht interessant und sehenswert.