Eleven questions that separate a provider from a reseller

Anyone can show you a showreel. Cut to music, a room laughing, a whiteboard, a testimonial. It tells you a session happened and nothing else.

These are the questions whose answers cannot be improvised, and what a credible answer to each one sounds like. They are ordered roughly by how quickly they separate people.

1. Who wrote this game?

Good: a name, a date, and an account of what it was written to do. Often a story about what the first version got wrong.

Weak: "it is based on established research." Every game is based on established research. The question is who sat down and built this one.

Providers who license someone else's catalogue are not disqualified by this — most good regional providers do exactly that, and they should say so plainly. What matters is whether they can tell you who designed it, because a provider who does not know has never spoken to anyone who did.

2. What happens in the first fifteen minutes?

This is the fastest credibility check in the list. Someone who has run the session many times answers it in concrete, slightly boring detail: the briefing, the materials going out, the thing participants always misunderstand.

Someone who has run it twice describes the concept again.

3. What does a bad session look like?

Good: a specific failure, and what they changed. "It does not work with fewer than three teams." "We stopped running it as the opening item because people arrive late and miss the setup."

Weak: "it always works." Nothing always works, and a provider who says so is either inexperienced or is managing you.

4. Who will facilitate mine, and have they run this title?

The person selling is often not the person delivering. That is normal. What is not acceptable is not knowing the answer at the point of purchase.

Ask how many times that named facilitator has run that specific title. Ask what happens if they are ill.

5. What do you need from us, and by when?

A provider who has done this at scale has a list, and the list is longer than you expect: room layout, table count, power, a named contact on the day, participant numbers locked at a date, any language requirements, who briefs the sponsors.

A short list means the surprises arrive in the last week and land on you.

6. How does this change for our context, and what does that cost?

Customisation has three tiers and they are priced very differently: renaming things to match your organisation, rewriting scenarios to match your sector, and rebuilding the underlying model. Most providers blur them.

Ask which tier is included, which is charged, and what the lead time is for each. Ask what they would recommend, and be suspicious of an enthusiastic yes to the deepest tier — heavy customisation of a well-tuned game usually makes it worse, and a provider who knows the game well will tell you which parts are safe to move.

7. What is the facilitator to participant ratio, and what happens if we exceed it?

A number, and a consequence. "One per forty, and past that we bring a second, which is charged." That is an answer.

"It scales" is not an answer.

8. What do we get afterwards?

Specifically: what document, containing what, by when, and who writes it.

A provider who hands back a deck of photographs has given you a memento. A provider who hands back what each team decided, where the decisions diverged, and what the facilitator observed has given you a baseline you can measure against in ninety days.

9. What happens to our participants' data?

Increasingly the real answer to whether a provider is a professional operation. Where is it stored, for how long, under what basis, who can access it, and what is deleted at the end.

For a digital title this is a substantive question. For a physical one the answer might correctly be "we collect nothing," which is a fine answer, given plainly.

10. Can we speak to a client who is like us?

Not a testimonial. A conversation, with someone who bought it for a comparable group in a comparable sector.

Expect this to take a week and expect some clients to decline, which is legitimate. Expect the provider to be able to ask. A provider with no reference they can approach after five years of delivery is telling you something.

11. What would make you say this is the wrong session for us?

The question that most reliably identifies who you are dealing with.

A good provider has a ready answer, because they have said it before and it has cost them work. "If what you actually need is a decision made, a simulation will not make it for you." "If the group is under ten, this one does not produce enough divergence."

A provider who cannot name a single circumstance in which their product is the wrong choice has told you that the recommendation was never conditional on your situation.

Using the list

You will not ask all eleven. Ask 1, 3, 4 and 11 and you will know most of what the other seven would have told you, because those four are the ones that cannot be answered from a brochure.