Tips for Putting Together a Treasure Hunt

Hope all my fellow Canucks are having a fantastic Canada Day long weekend!

I’ve been creating treasure hunts since I was a kid. At first, I made them for my sister and her friends at our house. Later, I started making them for both our friends around the city. When I reached my twenties, I owned and ran a small business to make them for everyone.

I’m not going to go into the various ciphers and cool steganography tricks; those you can find online and in research books. But there are some things no book tells you, things I picked up only from experience.  Here are the ones I found most important.

Players will always find a short cut, and that’s OK.

You can think of a treasure hunt as a series of locked boxes, each one containing the key of the next box in the series. (So inside box 1 is the key to unlock box 2, and inside box 2 is the key to unlock box 3, etc.)

When you design the series of boxes, you usually attempt to force players to open each box in order. But in practice, players often find a way to pick the lock of box 6 before they get box 4 open, or to use the key to box 3 to force the tumblers of box 5.

For instance, I’ve had players:
– skip a clue that told them how to read UV ink because they figured out a way to do it in the sunshine
– trade for the answers to a fill-in-the-blank text
– brute-force a cipher instead of solving the previous clue for the key
– physically pop the lock of a locked box without finding the key
– scribble invisible-ink revealer on everything to find all the hidden clues without solving the steps in between

My initial reaction to situations like these was to panic — oh no, it’s not going the way I planned! — or to work in a complicated game mechanic that forced players to do the clues in order (for instance, a cipher letter associated with each clue that had to be compiled in order into a word and deciphered for the last step of the hunt).

However, I realized that most players actually like the game better when they figure out a way to bypass clues. It makes them feel super-smart because they used their lateral thinking (and/or social skills) to do a hard job easily. So although it’s important to make sure the game is still fair (you can’t mess up just one team’s invisible ink), it’s OK if players don’t arrive at the end the way you intended.

Most players like reaching the end better than winning.

Some players are in to win, it’s true. But most players enjoy the feeling of accomplishment from reaching the end of a treasure hunt as much or more than whatever prize is awarded to the first team to finish.

The first treasure hunts I designed were under winner-takes-it-all model. The winning team was the one that finished the hunt the fastest. Other teams might get to the end, but nobody else was guaranteed to win. Other hunts, I made finishing optional: you could choose to take a number of branching paths that each led to mini-caches of treasure, and only one led to the final, largest cache where the hunt ended.

I found that teams enjoyed the challenge, but most still felt unsatisfied if they didn’t reach the end, whether or not they’d made a deliberate choice not to do so.

I’ve tried to design later hunts so that every team or player can finish even after the winners have won.

Too easy is better than too difficult.

Or, people like feeling smart better than they like feeling stupid. Just don’t make it too easy, or they’ll still feel stupid because they’ll see how easy you made it for them.

Never leave anything in public unsupervised.

I’ve done this several times, and although it’s worked out most of the time, it’s just not worth it. Ever.

I’ve had one “You finished the treasure!” card disappear. I’ve spent hours and hours freaking out over packets of “dilithium crystals,” notes giving the next clue, and small items holding secret messages. Even if things stay in their places, you never know when you might scare someone with your strange package or have a dog eat your clue.

Instead of physical items, I’ve done my best to hide information in public by taking existing landmarks — buildings, monuments, displays, murals– and asking players to find or write down the numbers, letters, or words they contain. I find this works better on several fronts: 1) These more permanent public structures are unlike to move; 2) players seem to love to search their familiar city for “secret” clues; and 3) it makes the hunt more atmospheric when you shape it to the location instead of the other way around.

There was also that once where my sister and I dressed up as the Knights Who Say Ni, hid in the forest, and threw a wadded-up coded message at the teams while shrieking, “Ni! Ni! Ni!” I guess that’s also an option.

It must be clear immediately whether an attempted solution is right or wrong.

I’ve told this story before, so I won’t go into it here, but the basic concept is: if players don’t get some immediate form of gratification for getting the  answer, it feels to them like they never solved it. That doesn’t mean each clue must be useful immediately, but it must be clear that the clue’s solution is correct  (the cipher turns into a message; the answers obviously slot into a previous clue to create something new; part of what players found includes instructions on how to use it) and that it fits into the hunt in a particular way.

Personally, I understand it best when it comes to video games. I have such low tolerance for not knowing what to do next in a game. I hate having to run around talking to every damn person in the village three times because one of them is going to tell Link where to find the next dungeon, but only after I pick up the plot coupon from the weird guy hanging around outside in the desert whom no one is going to remind me to go see.

The game is more, not less, fun, if you allow teams to reach the end in ways other than solving the clues.

When I first designed treasure hunts, I used to do my best to keep teams away from each other. The first one I did, which my sister and I worked on together, we agreed to plan it so that each of the two teams would get to solve the same clues in a different order. This would prevent teams from being in the same place at the same time and from just copying each other to get to the end.

However, I’ve observed that half the fun for many players is conniving to figure out how to keep their information to themselves or steal answers they don’t have or… etc. Players who are extraordinarily nice people in regular life may suddenly and gleefully become backstabbers who lie to throw off their competitors, pretend to be allies and then ditch their supposed friends, or run off with key pieces of information in fits of paranoia. Some players like the competition part of the hunt but prefer figuring out how to safeguard their allies and effort and chase down their opponents rather than sitting around messing with triple code wheels.

So as long as you institute basic rules (e.g. no physical contact, no destroying clues, no going outside the game borders, etc.), players seem to enjoy options other than “solve the clues really fast.” Personally, I’ve had great response from including tag-like elements to the game. It gives everyone something to do, even when they’re stuck, and it gives players a greater number of interesting decisions to make, which is the point of games, after all.

Hunts are the most fun when the designer is there for players to consult.

This isn’t school. The point isn’t to force your players to learn something, the point is for them to have fun. As long as every team has equal access to every resource, including you, answering questions or giving hints enhances gameplay and helps you to fix any clue that got messed up as quickly as possible.