We had a few friends over for New Year’s Eve this/last year. We ate, drank and played a few games.
I also created a short treasure hunt, which was well received but suffered from four mistakes. Oops.
The first mistake
First, I planned for five players. That was my Mrs and Miss H, along with three friends who were joining us for NYE. So I built a treasure hunt that had five parts.
The idea was that each part would lead to a letter, which could then be formed into a word that would lead to the hiding place for the treasure.
That final word was Volvo (the treasure was in the boot of my car).
To make it a little harder, I gave the letters as shapes, like this:
And then Mrs H reminded me that one friend wouldn’t be joining us until about 11 pm, after she had finished her shift at The Crown. Oops.
The second mistake
To make the final puzzle a little easier, I put the letters in age order. So the oldest player would get a V, the next oldest would get a O, and so on.
That meant that the clues for each letter were player-dependent.
Rather than write the name of the player on each clue, I created a code for them to crack. So, taking A=1, B=2 (and so on), I took the letters of each name and added them up.
So Steve would be 19+20+5+22+5 = 71.
(You can probably see where this is going.)
Unfortunately, it was only after I handed the players the clues that they told me that two of the numbers were the same! I genuinely hadn’t spotted my error before that.
(Luckily, it was easily fixed – once they solved the clues and worked out which set of clues was whose, I made sure they went to the right place.)
The third and fourth mistakes
For the next part of the hunt (the main part), the players had to answer questions that would lead them all over the house. The answer to each question was a letter – either an actual letter (“Eighth letter of Dunstanburgh Castle artist (in the kitchen)”) or a number that would give them a letter (“How many coat hooks are there by the front door?” – there are five, which gives E using the code as above).
Answering those clues led the players to where they would find the final clue (the shapes described above).
Only, as ever, there were two mistakes in this part of the treasure hunt… Again, they were easy to fix – but they were a little annoying.
No playtesting
It’s not the first time I’ve let (very avoidable )errors slip into my treasure hunts. In fact, I can’t think of a hunt that hasn’t had an error in it.
But that’s because I don’t test them. Inevitably I leave them to the last minute, so I don’t check them thoroughly.
And as my treasure hunts are one-and-done events for my family, anyone who could test them is inevitably playing them.
So I suspect the errors are here to stay.
