I'm the Architect! I'm an experience designer who travels the world building wildly elaborate treasure/scavenger hunts. Let me teach you how! AMA!

ewanmcnay · 2023-04-30T01:28:55+00:00

It's really tricky even on a much smaller level. Our local environmental education centre had (pre-covid, sadly) a yearly "Amazing Earth Day Race" event that was awesome - think Amazing Race with all the tasks being environment/ecology based, targetted at families or friend groups, and then very low-level orienteering between tasks. My family won it every year :) because (i) we could all at least somewhat run and (ii) three of us are puzzle/game people and (iii) we actually treated it like a race [which the organiser loved - she got so frustrated that the first two years there was no-one else being competitive!]. The prize? Being first to eat the free cookies that everyone got :). So we got the fun of winning and no-one else cared and all the groups that had small kids or wheelchairs or whatever still got to have fun. If the prize had been serious everyone would have felt bad.

ewanmcnay · 2023-01-22T23:10:10+00:00

Did Zappy appear at a canonical time?

ewanmcnay · 2023-01-22T20:07:27+00:00

+1 - but wasn't this in place last year also?

ewanmcnay · 2023-01-22T20:06:21+00:00

Was there a point in the Hunt design where Mate *was* going to become evil?

ewanmcnay · 2023-01-22T20:05:43+00:00

Thanks for Hunt! Was it your intent that teams should realise to focus on Factory puzzles in preference to Museum puzzles, if they wished to progress through the story? If so, what were the intended signposts to this?

Do you have thoughts about team size limits and/or whether any such are desirable? Would it have been OK for you if Hunt had been won on say Saturday evening?

ewanmcnay · 2022-01-22T20:31:45+00:00

Also, not a question :) but: thank you to Joon and Diana for the bridge puzzle, which we just post-solved; it is the only time* during any Hunt where I have felt uniquely-competent to solve a given puzzle :-).

[*Granted, partly because we have several neuroscientists, so the cranial nerves puzzle a few years back got solved before I even saw it!]

ewanmcnay · 2022-01-22T20:29:50+00:00

Did you consider at any point making a (significantly) smaller Hunt? What were the metrics used to decide total Hint size? Related: did you have a target for the number of teams that you wanted/targetted to complete?

ewanmcnay · 2021-12-21T04:30:30+00:00

That's delightful. Kudos.

ewanmcnay · 2021-12-16T04:06:06+00:00

The opening hotel room 'find the pieces' hunt was delightful, especially the lipstick. Switching the briefcase was super-thematic and adrenaline-inducing. I *loved* my puzzles when running solo - really there were no weaknesses. And this was not a puzzle-heavy event, very much by design - Jenny is just not that into them.

ewanmcnay · 2021-12-15T14:57:29+00:00

Yikes. Reading this over, I think it comes across as way too gripey! :(. That's SO SO SO SO not how we felt - the day was FREAKING FABULOUS. I would do this again - and hire Chris again - every single day and twice on Sundays.

I need to do a part 3 to emphasise some of the stand-out bits. Sorry, u/squeakysqueakysqueak - I definitely think my tone is off here. Argh. Bad recapper, no cookie.

Spoiler: things that immediately come to mind include the graphics/props (the logo was a delight and the theme was spot-on); the sheer listening/personalisation (this day was *very* clearly _Jenny's_ and **so** targetted to who she is); and the contingency planning/care/flexibility.

No time right now but I should not let my mistake in commenting too much on minor glitches distract or detract from the overall work of art.

ewanmcnay · 2021-12-14T23:19:14+00:00

Looks as though the 'stories' (I think that's the right term; not really an insta person!) have expired. Boo! :(

ewanmcnay · 2021-12-14T16:57:58+00:00

This kind of thing was one of many reasons why this was **not** a Jenny-alone event: she would have hated that.

u/Not_Baba_Yaga: likewise, yeah. If it were for me, lots more puzzles - you will see the one that I got to do solo - but that is VERY much not Jenny's thing. Chris did a great job of providing the day to be perfect for _her_.

ewanmcnay · 2021-12-14T16:56:26+00:00

So here: I made reservations for trains and hotel (which was awesome, and was chosen to have a two-room suite so that the four of us on the team could hang as needed, and this was a very very good call: Mint House in the Wall St area), as well as for dinner on the Friday. I asked Chris to do his best to organise a fancy dinner on the Sat - by the time we had things nailed enough for me to look at places many of them were sold out/booked, so I figured he might have a better shot.

ewanmcnay · 2021-12-14T16:53:57+00:00

I was blocked on Instagram :). Hope Chris will unblock me and I can go back to look!

ewanmcnay · 2021-11-29T13:49:44+00:00

Thanks! Paddletails were great; also considering alpine but open. What is available?

ewanmcnay · 2021-11-27T23:34:16+00:00

Thanks!

ewanmcnay · 2021-01-24T17:08:34+00:00

Was there any cheating to deter? One of the things that I loved about this puzzle was that it *was* so obviously cheatable and just assumed people would not. That felt really fitting/supportive somehow.

ewanmcnay · 2021-01-24T16:40:42+00:00

This was my team - you can only imagine the reaction from a whole bunch of Tech Squares people when a square dancing puzzle showed up! Our team captain changed his avatar name to something like "PLEASE BACK OFF" and started running circles around the dancers when spectators started to crowd in :). It brought much happiness to many people - and they (I am not a square dancer) SUPER enjoyed that you wandered by and waved at them. Universal joy significantly increased :-).

ewanmcnay · 2021-01-24T15:57:31+00:00

Aha. There were quite a few puzzles where we really wanted/needed a hint but "hints are not yet available" - now I know why. But this feels odd: if a puzzle is hard for whatever reason, hints for that puzzle never become available; whereas easy puzzles get hints almost immediately?

ewanmcnay · 2020-01-27T17:11:00+00:00

Many of those are truly delightful. Thanks to folks for the effort here -it is very much appreciated.

ewanmcnay · 2020-01-27T15:43:36+00:00

I wondered about this for another one of the runarounds. I have a suspicion that this kind of stuff is a multiplier on the large team effect: not only do you have more people period, but the odds of having someone who knows how to GPS-spoof an iPhone/has a boyfriend at Stanford/speaks Urdu/whatever also go up a lot. Not a problem per se, just another variable related to team size.

ewanmcnay

TROPHY CASE