Results :: Grand Family Treasure Hunt, 2010

Challenge #1: Deciphering the Letter [details]

Every team understood what to do quite quickly. (During the initial reading of the letter to the group, one person even said, loudly, "kind to the bearer, eh?" This may or may not have aided other teams.) Folding the letter correctly proved slightly difficult. The folding style we chose for the KOB was not the one known to most people. Even if the style had been known, there are 128 different ways to fold the note (depending on which way you bend each fold) and still get a right-looking result. This problem—along with a desire to ensure an obvious solution and quick success for the first puzzle—was why we included such obvious folding instructions along with a correctly-folded example.

For those who still got it wrong (and some did, initially) all combinations of incorrect foldings resulted in gibberish being shown. Most combinations even included at least one word like "wrong" or "not". We definitely did not want teams heading off to a bad location because of a missed fold. Every team, once folded correctly, understood the clue and headed to the correct destination.

Even with all this, some teams were unable to fold the letter correctly. My wife (who was giving hints at the starting location) had to walk some teams through the folding process one step at a time.

Lessons Learned: Some people are bad at rigorously following directions? I do not think I would change much about this challenge.

Challenge #2: The Map Grid [details]

This challenge was a definite failure, on several levels. Although it was not initially intended to be very difficult (we wanted to ease people into challenges) several problems conspired to make the teams feel stupid, frustrated, and ultimately lose some faith in the game itself. What made it so painful?

It was not obvious that the stickers we included with the map were intended to keep bored children entertained. Most teams pondered their use rather deeply. ("So, this has a bear...do you see anywhere on the map with a bear?") Some teams thought they needed to put a sticker over each location, which then make it impossible to see what was underneath the sticker.
Although not unexpected, some older team members complained about the tiny text on the map. They were unable to help the team find locations on the map.
All teams were able to locate all locations on the map. It was not obvious to them, however, that the order of the locations made any difference. I overheard at least one team searching the grid for the number one, to figure out which location to go to first. (Some teams thought they were supposed to perform a connect-the-dots on the map to draw the next clue.)
The grid completely baffled every team. One team saw a "10s₁" in the grid and thought that the entire puzzle was just a pun for "Tennis, anyone?". Luckily they asked me before heading off in search of tennis courts. At least some teams reasoned out (due to the presence of numbers above 26) that the grid didn't correspond to letters of the alphabet, but no team was able to deduce what the grid values were for. With some teams it even took multiple direct explanations before they understood what they were to do. (For example, the subscripted number was misinterpreted to be the first n characters of a name, not the nth character.) I definitely should have made the grid simply be letters of the alphabet; I was too caught up in trying to tie the puzzles to the family.
Though I had hoped it would be a nice bonding experience for the multiple generations to collaborate and derive the proper ordering of all family members, for some teams it turned out to be unachievable. Even once told how the grid was to supposed to be used, they simply had no idea how old certain of their cousins were, and had no faith in their own generated list. Sadly, I didn't have my (broken; see below) list with me to be able to supply to teams in need.
As described on the puzzle page, the knife in the heart of this challenge was that the grid itself was broken. The list of family members that I generated—with full genealogy including birthdates in hand!—was wrong. I left out two people, and consequently all clues referencing someone below a certain age were clearly wrong.
As I watched two teams decode the puzzle using the list, I saw them write down "SWA". I incorrectly remembered the message (I thought it had started with the word "switch") and intervened. When I saw that the third letter was not an 'I', using an obviously-correct family member list, I apologized, aborted the challenge, and gave each team that asked their next destination. Although this was probably the right choice (given that later on some letters in the grid were broken), I should have been better-armed with the exact phrases each team was to decode. (I had them on my laptop, but didn't bring my laptop with me to staff the archery challenge.)

Lessons Learned: Quadruple-check any tricky sources of data. In a game where 'fun' is supposed to outweigh challenge, and in a location where cell phone and Internet access is unavailable, be sure to supply all information needed to the teams. I still love the look of the map and the idea of many team members poring over it in parallel, but it took up far too much time and caused far too much non-enjoyment for the teams. In the end, my wife (who kept telling me that it was too hard) was very much right.

The Archery Challenge [details]

This was a lot of fun for almost everyone. Some of my manly cousins (who would pull the bow back as far as the arrow would allow, and then drive the arrow well wide of the target) were bested by children (who lobbed gentle shots in the direction of the target). One even missed the target from approximately six feet away. There was a lot of laughing, groaning, and cheering by the teams.

The greatest frustration was teams spending minutes between archery rounds trying to find well-buried or long-skipping arrows in tall grass, and then many more minutes at the end trying to find the elusive missing arrows abandoned earlier in the rounds.

The teams were originally intended to have almost-equal numbers of members of various ages. However, some family members who had said they would be at the reunion did not show, throwing off team balance. Because the challenge required every team member (over 4 years old) to hit the target, the team with seven or eight eligible members (three of which were younger than 10) experienced a great time disadvantage compared to the team with only four eligible members (all over 20).

Lessons Learned: Either buy more throwaway arrows, or set up the targets so that the arrows cannot be lost. Ensure that the rules of the challenge do not severely penalize teams based on final assignments. And finally, TSA—who disallowed me bringing unstrung children’s bows as carry-on for my flight, resulting in my having to ship them back home and buy another pair at the reunion—needs to be overthrown with violent force.

Challenge #3: The Puzzle [details]

Most teams had little trouble with this challenge. The children on some teams helped put together the puzzles.

A few teams did not figure out what to do with the numbers. One team didn't even recognize them as pairs of numbers. Given the hint "read your Walden", however, all teams were able to understand their next destination.

One team had scanned through all of Walden early in the hunt, and found the clues from this puzzle. Piecing them together, they headed straight to their final destination before solving Challenge #2. Luckily, their final destination happened to be where the Archery Challenge was held, and we were able to withhold the clue for Challenge #4 until they had properly solved Challenge #3 (and then competed the Archery Challenge).

Lessons Learned: When providing a book of hints early which might apply to many challenges, and especially might allow a team to shortcut through some challenges, provide plenty of red herrings. (We had actually suspected that this was important, but after weeks of preparation we were still preparing clues past midnight before the game began, and ran out of time to do this.)

Challenge #4: The Poker Lock [details]

By this point in the game, some teams had resorted to immediately calling in for a hint as soon as it was not obvious what to do next. At least one team, however, completed this challenge without any hints.

One team arrived at this challenge having gone through Walden completely and written down all the page numbers, radio call signs on those pages (for this challenge), and used the Gentleman’s Guide to write down the frequencies for those stations. They still needed help understanding this challenge.

While all teams recognized the card sets as poker hands, and were able to correctly name what each hand represented, no teams that I witnessed ordered them according to rank. I watched teams read out the phrases on the backs of the cards in some random order (e.g. "from a poker master/minus clubs thereafter/research diamonds in a good book/a game I learned") and it did not seem to occur to them that they might make sense in another order.

One of the problems was recognizing face cards as integers beyond 10 (Queens being 12 and Kings being 13). This may have been exacerbated by the playing cards we used having explicit counts of suits on the front of non-face cards. Some teams interpreted the Queen of Clubs, for example, as a "1", since only one club was visible on the card.

The main problem with this challenge, I think, was that time had run out for the game for most teams. Lunch was being served at 1pm, and the later teams received the clues for this puzzle at 12:45pm, 12:55pm, and approximately 1pm. I became very liberal and quick to offer clues to help these teams finish and go eat. I think more teams might have succeeded at this challenge on their own, if they and I both weren't panicking about missing delicious food.

Lessons Learned: I was originally concerned that the phrases on the cards made it too obvious as to what needed to be done. During game design, I was pushing to include only "♦-♣" somewhere, or perhaps the more obscure "Wealth without Organizations". My wife pushed to make it more obvious, and came up with phrases we included. As this was still not enough of a clue for most teams, I apparently need to listen to my wife more often.

Challenge #5: Orienteering [details]

I had originally thought that this would be a fun "gimme" challenge at the end of the game. Unfortunately, there was one problem. The wording used in the clue—“start at the cross between _____ and _____ road”—misled at least two teams. The proper starting intersection had three roads coming together at almost equal angles; two teams did not believe that this could be considered a 'cross' and went searching for perpendicular intersections. Tragically, the team that was in the lead up until this puzzle lost their lead, and the game, due to this misinterpretation.

We did not have time to ensure that all teams were able to participate properly in this challenge, because we left no instructions for the winning team to take the prize but re-bury the chest. Some teams saw the winning team succeed and thus ended the game. 20 minutes into lunch time I drove to the final destination and had to announce to the team orienteering there that the treasure had already been claimed.

I was very excited to learn that the winning team had someone who had recently been trained in orienteering. Although I did not witness it, I understand that he either physically or mentally sketched out the path they needed to follow, and instead of hiking the path pointed his team directly to the region around the resting place of the prize.

The winning team was kind enough to share the Scotch with others that night, and the chocolate coins with all family members (somewhat to the eventual chagrin of some parents of chocolate-crazy children).

Lessons Learned: We should have been more precise in our clue wording. (To be fair, this clue was finally committed to paper in the early morning before the game was to start, and we were too tired to give it proper effort at that point.) I really wish that all teams could have gotten the enjoyment of this challenge. If I were to do it again, I would like to put in effort so that the winning team could quietly pick up a tiny claim check without alerting other teams near them to the proper location. It would not have mattered for this game, though, given that most teams ran out of time (or in one case, sort of gave up).