Waxwing is a social game company for small and large groups. We specialize in treasure hunts, murder mysteries, corporate team building, custom games, and other unique adventures.

We try to create experiences that transcend simple entertainment. In our games you will come face-to-face with your limitations as you try to solve puzzles, crack clues, think in your feet way outside the box. You will be taken to corners of Chicago you’ve never seen. You will see whole new sides of your friends (and yourself). And, just maybe, you will have an experience you won’t forget.

Waxwing started in a blizzard.

Waxwing founder, Andy Patton, and his college roommates were snowed in to their house for four days in 2006 and a National Treasure marathon just happened to be playing on TV. As Nicolas Cage used his clue-solving genius to save the day over and over (and cabin fever began to set in) someone had the crazy idea to build a treasure hunt on their university’s campus so epic that “people would talk about it for years.”

The group set to work and a few months later it was ready. Over the next week they watched their friends skip class, forgo sleep, showers, and food as they raced to be the first team to find the final clue. The group continued to design treasure hunts and social games for their friends and when Patton came to Chicago a few years later, Waxwing Puzzle Company was launched to bring the adventures to the Windy City. Since then Waxwing has been hard at work designing new games and more ambitious escapades for Chicagoans to explore their city in a unique way, meet one another, and of course, have a great time.

Over the years we’ve learned a funny thing happens in the human heart: We only need a little scrap of story and we are immersed. We need only a shred of mystery and we are captivated. If this is true in a book or film—where words lie tamely on the page and actors deliver scripted lines on a flat screen—then how much more in a story we ourselves arbitrate? Where the parts are always changing, the ending is uncertain and the adventure is infinitely variable? In a story like that, if it’s good enough, we can find escape, discovery and perhaps even a bit of adventure.

That’s what Waxwing is all about.