This paper presents a plurilingual didactic Escape Room designed and piloted at the University of Bolzano, a multilingual and multicultural institution. Grounded in the CEFR Companion Volume (Council of Europe 2018), the project promotes an action-oriented approach, mediation, and plurilingualism as core principles of meaningful language learning. The Escape Room engages learners in collaborative, goal-oriented tasks within a playful narrative set in the Dolomites, where participants must rescue the university from the evil King Laurin. The activity brings together students of Italian and German as second languages, who normally attend separate courses. Within the game, they collaborate in mixed groups, using both Italian and German to solve linguistic and cultural challenges. English serves as a bridging language, and elements of the South Tyrolean dialect are included to connect the activity to the local context. Three sample tasks are analyzed – an intercultural crossword, a dialect- based decoding exercise, and a comparison of news articles – designed to foster mediation, intercomprehension, and intercultural competence. The feedback phase, conducted through a questionnaire and reflective activities, served as the concluding moment of the game and revealed its educational potential. While exploratory, the findings suggest that Escape Rooms can be powerful environments for promoting plurilingual interaction and mediation.
