Forty interns, a half-empty office, and a "send-off picnic" that turns out to be forty people standing on a lawn holding paper plates, talking to the same three people they sat next to all summer. The VP says a few words. Someone takes a group photo. By 1:30 the ones with Tuesday flights have gone.
Labor Day 2026 is Monday 7 September, and for a lot of US companies that's the interns' last week or close to it. (1 May is Labour Day in Malaysia, Singapore, and most of Europe; this post is about the American Monday in September.) The version of the send-off that works treats the intern class as a cohort about to scatter: one structured hour together, then food.
Ninety minutes. Not a half day. Anything longer and the ones with flights disappear at task four, and the ones without flights start checking Slack.
Here's what the hour looks like. Someone on the L&D team spends an evening in a web editor writing three chapters, each with a handful of tasks: a check-off, a photo, a QR on a door, one written question. At 10:00 the join QR goes on the all-hands slide; interns and mentors point their camera at it, a web page opens, they type a team name, and they're playing. Nothing gets installed, so a personal Android and a locked company iPhone join the same way. You watch a dashboard, end the game when the food arrives, and download the results afterwards. Up to 25 phones at once is free, with a small watermark. Forty interns and twenty mentors joining together is 60 phones, which is the USD 79 plan; pricing is here. That's PlayTours. If IT asks about BYOD, this post is written for them.
Tell it as a story, not a checklist
Most hunts let teams do tasks in any order. For a send-off, switch that off so every team goes chapter by chapter, because you want a beginning and an end.
Chapter one breaks the ice. A check-off task, which the team marks complete themselves: find the intern who started the same week as you on a different rotation. Then a photo task: the worst coffee machine in the building.
Chapter two covers the building or the campus lawn. A QR code on a mentor's door, with the mentor's permission, and a photo task for "a thing you shipped, even if it's a slide." PlayTours checks the photo against the instruction, so nobody's approving images during the hour.
Chapter three is the one grown-up question. A written-answer task: "What should next summer's intern class get that you didn't?" Each team types a paragraph and it's saved against their name. Nobody else sees it during the game, and the answers are what L&D will still care about in October.
The timer matches the lunch reservation
Set a 90-minute time limit on the game. The countdown can't be paused, so if a VP's toast runs long, end the game from the dashboard and move to lunch. Put the join QR on the slide at 10:00 sharp; if people have to hunt for the code, the hour is already late.
Summer 2026 intern programs were short in a lot of tech and finance offices, so don't assume they know the building. If you're tempted by GPS tasks in a glass atrium, read this first.
What to leave out, and what to do after
Jokes about unpaid overtime, photos of badges, and anything that requires posting to TikTok. Make the whole thing skippable for someone with a family barbecue, and say so in the invite. There's more on making mandatory fun less painful.
After lunch, download the results from the dashboard. Read the written answers privately unless the intern is happy to share. If you'd like a sanity check on the chapter order, email me the floor map and the intern count at hello@playtours.app.
-Mo
If you're building this in PlayTours
Turn on "complete challenges in order." Use Instant Join for the QR, a no-answer task for the check-off, AI-judged photo tasks, a judged-text task for the debrief, and a 90-minute session time limit. Optional: hide the next challenge on chapter three so nobody skips the question for the leaderboard; Clans to score interns and mentors separately; the friendly leaderboard if ranking would sting; automatic hints after three minutes on the QR tasks, because interns will stand in a hallway a long time before they email you. QuickBuild will draft the skeleton in ten minutes; add the debrief question by hand, because the AI doesn't know your coffee machine.