Christmas Day Treasure Hunt 2017

I was put in charge of entertainment for our family Christmas. So I decided that I’d make my family complete a treasure hunt in order to find their Christmas presents.

It started well before Christmas by telling them that the Christmas day entertainment would be tennis and that they needed to bring appropriate clothing. This seemed to work pretty well as none of them suspected anything. Even my girlfriend who I live with and had to hide all the preparation from had no idea.

The first step of the treasure hunt was hidden in the Christmas crackers. Each one was personalised with a custom made, named, commemorative hat. They also contained a note telling them that if they wanted their presents, they were going to have to work for them. Their first clues were also in the crackers in the form of jokes. The five family members were split into two teams based on the colours of their hats and had to combine their jokes to work out where to go next.

Each team then had to work through a series of puzzles. Here are a few of my favorites:

• A piece of paper that said “https://tinyurl.com/MatthewMakesAReallyTasty_____”. I’m known in my family as making good pizzas. When they complete the url and put it into a browser, it directs them to a Youtube video of the Postman Pat theme song. Their next clue was in the mail box. This one worked out really well as it took them a little while to figure out that it was ‘pizza’ (my pizza’s obviously aren’t quite as good as I thought), but once they got it, they were quite excited to see the Postman Pat video.
• The clue in the letter box was a letter. It was from me to my family but it didn’t say a lot, it just rambled on for a bit. But there were some extra letters in some of the words that looked like typos. They had to find all the extra letters, and it spelled “peanutbutter” backwards. Their next clue was in a peanut butter jar.
• A piece of paper with a seemingly random grid of numbers. If you look closely, there is a series of sequential numbers and if you join them up with a pencil, you get a picture of a hat. I was worried about this puzzle as it seemed quite hard. I actually tested it on a few of my co-workers to see if they could complete it. I adjusted it a bit based on watching them struggle. Luckily, my brother was on top of it right away and had found the next clue with just the right amount of struggling.

After each team had worked through a few puzzles, I threw in the curve ball. The final clue each team got was a ripped bit of paper that had half of a set of GPS coordinates on it. My intention here was that the two teams would have to come together and combine their bits of paper to get the full coordinates for the next clue. Christmas is all about togetherness right? What actually happened was they tried to steal each others bit of paper and even once they got the full coordinates, they were still in full on competition mode trying to out run the other team to the next clue. It was quite entertaining to watch, but not quite what I intended.

Once they worked out the last clue, they knew the presents were in the boot of my car but they were still in competition with each other. Both teams were trying to convince me that they had won because they got to the car first. I had to inform them that they were all winners and all got presents (it was Christmas after all). Strangely they were quite disappointed by that because all they wanted was the satisfaction of beating the other team. They all seemed to have a lot of fun though and it was certainly entertaining to watch them searching around the house, chasing red herrings.

Designing puzzles like that is a challenge because how I think about things is not how everyone else thinks about things. You really have to try to put yourself in the shoes of your intended audience and think like they do. But even then, you can’t really predict what someone is going to think in a given situation. It really showed me how tough it must be to be an escape room designer. You have people of all ages, backgrounds and lifestyles and your puzzles have to be hard enough to keep them all entertained but easy enough that they can solve them. It’s a fine balance and must take a lot of play testing.

Overall, this was a really fun experience. It made me think about things in a different way and try to see others perspectives. It was also great to see my family all enjoying themselves and I got my moneys worth watching them struggle. I also felt like a bit of a ninja hiding all the clues on Cristmas eve and Cristmas morning. None of them noticed me even though I hid one of them while some of them were in the room with me.

This was the design of the hats. They are made from thick card and feature adjustable sizing.

This is how I made the circles on the tops of the hats. I didn’t have a way to cut out tidy circles and I had a bunch of them to do. It’s just an arbor in the lathe and I sandwiched the card with a little part that I turned up and a live center in the tail-stock. I’d just turn the paper off like it was metal. It worked really well and once I had it dialed in, it was really quick.

This is the completed hat puzzle mentioned above. It kinda looks like a hat, right?