Sadly but predictably, my student dorm’s yearly festival was super canceled this year, so I wanted to do something fun to bring a little excitement into my roommates’ lives. I had a few clues for a treasure hunt thought out already, so I joined them together with a couple new ones and got up at 3:30am (!) to sneak around and prepare everything without anyone noticing.
The treasure hunt was kept entirely within the confines of our dorm, using locations and clues familiar to my roommates in order to make the hunt feel custom-made for them—which it was! I hoped to have quite a few people working on the treasure hunt at the same time, so I tried to have as few “moving parts” as possible to prevent clues from getting lost and me having to reset anything. Clues were fixed semi-permanently in their locations, and the hunt ran without my interference—mostly.
I kicked off the treasure hunt with an introduction poster, mysteriously letting my roommates know that I’d hidden a treasure somewhere. I placed some fridge magnets and a label with an anagram of my name to let people know where to find the next clue: three labels hidden in our shared kitchen, the locations of which were alluded to by fridge magnet poems.
From there, I had people spelling words based on our respective refrigerator shelves, solving ciphers written in graffiti on my bathroom walls, and spelling out the treasure’s location with Scrabble tiles, just to mention a few of the clues.
It took them almost two days of on-and-off treasure hunting to finally get to the treasure, and generally it went really well. As the hunt progressed more and more people joined in, forming big teams that competed for the treasure and played a truly disturbing amount of mind games on each othe. Everyone I spoke to when the treasure had been found was really satisfied and felt really happy that I had designed such an experience just for them, which made me feel really good.
People mostly had no trouble figuring out the clues themselves, something I had initially been quite worried about, but during the hunt I ran into two interesting problems:
First, on two separate occasions people simply couldn’t find the next clue. In one case a group of my roommates spent over an hour looking at the graffiti on my bathroom wall, simply unable to figure out which part they were supposed to be looking at. In another, people needed to backtrack to our supply closet to find another clue and several times someone walked in there, stood right next to the clue, and walked out again.
I should probably have made these clues even more obvious (and they definitely did diverge from the look of the previous clues which made heavy use of the typewriter/label maker aesthetic), but I found it really interesting that both times after a group of people had declared it impossible, one person who hadn’t been involved before walked up and found and solved the clue in just a few minutes. I think there was a sort of bystander effect going on, with the larger group as a whole making each person less likely to look really closely. I guess there’s no way to prevent people stressing each other out without imposing some sort of structure on the treasure hunt, but I think clearer communication of where to find clues is going to be a positive no matter what.
Second, almost everyone on my floor participated in solving the last few puzzles, but only a few people even saw the first few locations of the treasure hunt. Partly I think the fact that one of the later clues was very visible from the beginning (which I had tried to take into account), leading people to believe that this clue was the real starting point of the hunt, but the fact that latecomers would simply join in at the most recent clue with everyone else definitely had something to say here. In retrospect this shouldn’t have come as a surprise; when people are solving a puzzle in your hallway, you’re not going to start from clue one and see if you can catch up. Once again I’m not sure there’s a good solution here, but perhaps there is an argument to be made that the last few clues in a treasure hunt warrant a lot more care and attention than the first few ones—they’re simply going to get more eyeballs.
Oh, and a kind of funny thing happened. One participant very quickly ended up at the clue in my bathroom, and I was really impressed that she’d worked through the previous clues that quickly. It turned out that she’d simply noticed the riddle on a cupboard in our hallway, figured out the right location (but for the wrong reason) and skipped right past the first part of the treasure hunt. Something like this:
I guess I was lucky that the treasure hunt degraded that gracefully; I wonder if there’s a way to codify that.
All in all, everyone had a really good time, myself included! It was really fun watching everyone run around trying to be the first team to solve a clue—and being bribed with beer wasn’t too bad either.
NMBJ 