We assembled at the Randolph branch of the Mint Museum in
Charlotte along with 10 other teams to test our treasure hunting skills. If you’ve never been on a treasure hunt, the
concept is this: each team is given
clues that they must solve to complete the event. The clues will generally reference some
feature of a nearby location that has to be used to solve it (so that it’s not
just sitting in a room solving puzzles).
Sometimes the clues lead to other clues that you have to find onsite and
solve to continue on the trail. Generally,
teams are required to stick together (as they were here) as this makes the
event much more fun and makes it reasonable for short-handed teams to
compete. In this particular hunt there
were eight easy clues and four hard clues - none of them unlocked subsequent
clues within the museum. All of the
clues were worth points (easy were 100, hard were 250) and players had two
hours to finish them. Finishing earlier
would give you credit for breaking ties only.
Our approach was to find all of the sites as quickly as we
could, with no concern for how hard the clue was supposed to be; we were pretty
sure we would need to solve all of them to win.
We found several hard clues and solved them rather quickly. Some were fairly interesting as well: solve a code which instructed us to apply the
supplied cold pack to the back of the clue page to reveal the answer, decode a
Vigenere cipher, solve a book-type cipher to discover the location of the UV
flashlight that reveals the real answer.
The easy clues, however, were much harder. Why?
Because the answer sheet has a certain number of boxes for each answer
to show you how many letters long it should be ...and the answer sheet they handed
out was for another city. All of the
“easy” clues were the wrong number of letters, while the answers to the “hard”
clues were common to every city (the events took place simultaneously) and the
correct answers fit perfectly. Sometimes
you could come up with another answer fairly easily and make it fit, but
usually nothing reasonable would work.
After about 40 minutes we had gathered back at the starting point with
the information we thought we would need to finish.
We inquired if the spaces on the answer key were correct
(which we were assured they were), we solved the Vigenere cipher, then went off
to repeat all of the clues that wouldn’t fit properly. During the next hour, we and the other teams
hovered around the locations that kept giving us impossible answers and wracked
our brains while the annoying obvious correct answers (that wouldn’t fit)
stared us in the face. We turned in our
answers about fifteen minutes before the deadline (and turned in first),
convinced that we would not come up with anything better. Since I was very much starting to suspect the
validity of the answer sheets at this point, we kept one answer even though it
didn’t fit and wrote all of the original answers on the margin of the paper.
Before the top teams were revealed we were told that yes, the
answer sheets *were* indeed wrong. We
ended up being declared the winner, but not surprisingly there were many
complaints and suggestions of how to rectify the situation. We let the officials know that we had no objections
to repeating the challenge and re-assigning the charity donation to the winner
of the next event (I didn’t say this about evenly splitting up the prize, as I
was rather less excited about that prospect).
After a couple of days I received an email saying that the event would
be repeated; all of the charities will get $1,000, while the winner of the
repeat event will still get $10,000 for their charity. No word yet on exactly when it will take
place. Props to Carpenter Co. (who sponsers the website) on ponying up extra charity money due to the error.
It was fun, and I would do it again (and hopefully
will). I’m definitely hoping it is more challenging
next time, and error-free.
