The one thing a tech team can't Google the answer to.

TELUS, Deloitte, Amazon Business, Kabam Games and Remitly have all booked this. A team that spends the day in front of screens responds hardest to something completely physical: cards, coins, objects borrowed straight off the table.

It also crosses every team boundary in one room. Engineering, sales and support don't naturally mix at a holiday party, and a shared impossible moment fixes that faster than an icebreaker ever will.

Lindsay Ross runs corporate events and experiences at TELUS, and she told me once that her job is to be the quarterback of these nights. The first one she booked me for was the Sales Summit Awards Gala at the Vancouver Convention Centre — 1,200 people, every one of them on the TELUS sales team, and one hour of roaming during the cocktail reception. TELUS builds these properly: the Film Noir night in the West Ballroom had the most polished black-and-white staging I have worked in.

What I did not expect was what came next. She hired me for her own son's dry grad — 230 graduates at Central City Fun Park out in Surrey, which is about as far from a convention centre ballroom as this job goes. A corporate buyer putting you in front of her own kid's grad class is a different kind of endorsement than a repeat purchase order. She still keeps my name on file between TELUS events, and the direction that company takes changes year to year.