I have had a lot of team building experiences, both as a facilitator and participant. I've done high ropes courses, problem solving tasks, search and rescue drills, and even a formal week long type experience where you're in the same team all week and taking turns leading the tasks.

However, none have worked better than this one I stumbled onto and tried at a retreat in the desert with 8 teams of 5 guys. You could do it with a lot smaller group, but it was awesome! Here's how it works:

1. CREATE A LARGE GRID ON THE GROUND: You can make it out of duct tape on a large tarp and do it indoors or out of stakes and rope on the ground like we did outdoors. Ours was 20 ft by 20ft and was divided up into 100- 2 ft by 2 ft squares. (The picture below shows white ropes on the outside, yellow ropes on the inside going one direction and the other direction was made of pink string that is kinda hard to see in the picture. But that is just what we had. You could do this all with one color rope or twine or whatever.)
   
   
2. CREATE A MASTER ROUTE: On a sheet on graph paper, map out only one correct route from one side to the other. Do not mark it on the Large grid and do not show it to the teams. (pictured below is my route)
   
   
3. DIVIDE AND NUMBER YOUR TEAMS: Teams of at least 3 are good. Any number of people and team sizes will work. Just adjust your grid accordingly if you want.
   
   
4. STEP IN: Team 1 picks any square on the starting side and steps in it. If it is the square you have designed as the correct route, then you as the director are silent. If it is wrong, you say, "you're dead" and they are done for this round. If it is correct, they have now found the first correct square.
   
   
5. CONTINUE: Once the correct square is chosen, they are safe. Now they can continue trying to take the next step toward the other side, by stepping in any next square, diagonally, forward, sideways and even backwards. Once a wrong move is made, no matter how far along the route they were, they are dead and the next team gets to go. They must step in all the right squares again to try and get back through the known route to the next step until finally one person safely makes it all the way across.
   
   
6. RULES: each team must rotate the "walker" each turn. You can only step in one square each step, so no jumping squares. No physical notes may be taken. It would defeat the purpose if players marked the squares with a rock or something, because you would give away the correct route to anyone playing, including their opponents- so marking squares is out too.
   
   

• QUITING IS EASY: some will hate this and want to quit. Sometimes the call of God is hard and the easiest thing is actually to quit trying.

• DECIDE WHO YOU CAN TRUST: inevitably, some on each team will be better at this than others. Each team learns quickly who it is that best knows the route and takes their instruction from them. They also will be yelling at the opposing teams and giving them wrong instructions, hoping to trip them up. The winner will have to learn whose advice can be trusted and whose should be ignored.
  

• SOMETIMES THE GODLY ROUTE IS NOT ALWAYS THE CLEAREST ROUTE: the most natural way to get from one side to the next is straight across. It's really annoying sometimes to find that you have to go sideways or even backwards from your intended goal in order to stay on the route of "life".
  

• STEP OUT OF THE WILL OF GOD, AND YOU'RE DEAD. No you don't necessarily physically die. Lots of people "died" in this exercise when they were told, "you're dead". However, when you chose to go your own route through life, you are the walking spiritually dead.