Give a Clue!
Okay, I really need to make an entire holiday-related post, but I don't really have the time right now, so I'll get to my main point:
As part of our family's Fourth activities my mom and I are planning a city-wide treasure hunt for the kids (now that Older-Younger Sister can drive and has a car). We're going to give some clues as riddles, some as codes, some as mini-logic puzzles, etc.
And, yeah, it's kind of last minute, seeing as we only really decided to do this...yesterday.
But we've taken snapshots of certain locations and will use those as photo clues. We've even talked to the management of a couple local businesses, including our favorite Chinese takeout place, into letting us leave clue envelopes with them.
My question is: Have any of you guys done something like this before? Do you have any advice or suggestions for fun ways to give or hide clues? (I realize that you don't know our community, but certain things translate almost universally.)
Some of our more creative - or at least unique ideas:
- Music clue! A CD playing "YMCA" to lead them to our local branch.
- Math equations or the numerical answer to logic puzzles to lead them to numbered streats/7-11, etc.
- Using synonyms in some of our more well known street names and locations (i.e."Coffee Creek" would become "Expresso River")
- We wrote down the lyrics to the first verse of "America the Beautiful", removed certain letters to spell out a clue, then cut the verse up and will leave individual words scattered through clue envelopes. They'll have to collect them all, put them in order, and figure out what the missing parts say. (They will LOVE this since the idea is stolen bodily from one of our favorite children's books - The Westing Game - It just happens to also be thematically appropriate for the date!)
- We'd thinking of sending them into Home Depot and have to assemble the parts to something, or collect information from a bunch of different places in the store in order to move forward, but I'm not sure what.
Ideas?
Any kind of "Roadblock" or "Detour" (to use the The Amazing Race vocabulary) type things you can think of would be fun, too.
The Siblings are 17, 15, and 12, so keep it, you know, LEGAL.
As part of our family's Fourth activities my mom and I are planning a city-wide treasure hunt for the kids (now that Older-Younger Sister can drive and has a car). We're going to give some clues as riddles, some as codes, some as mini-logic puzzles, etc.
And, yeah, it's kind of last minute, seeing as we only really decided to do this...yesterday.
But we've taken snapshots of certain locations and will use those as photo clues. We've even talked to the management of a couple local businesses, including our favorite Chinese takeout place, into letting us leave clue envelopes with them.
My question is: Have any of you guys done something like this before? Do you have any advice or suggestions for fun ways to give or hide clues? (I realize that you don't know our community, but certain things translate almost universally.)
Some of our more creative - or at least unique ideas:
- Music clue! A CD playing "YMCA" to lead them to our local branch.
- Math equations or the numerical answer to logic puzzles to lead them to numbered streats/7-11, etc.
- Using synonyms in some of our more well known street names and locations (i.e."Coffee Creek" would become "Expresso River")
- We wrote down the lyrics to the first verse of "America the Beautiful", removed certain letters to spell out a clue, then cut the verse up and will leave individual words scattered through clue envelopes. They'll have to collect them all, put them in order, and figure out what the missing parts say. (They will LOVE this since the idea is stolen bodily from one of our favorite children's books - The Westing Game - It just happens to also be thematically appropriate for the date!)
- We'd thinking of sending them into Home Depot and have to assemble the parts to something, or collect information from a bunch of different places in the store in order to move forward, but I'm not sure what.
Ideas?
Any kind of "Roadblock" or "Detour" (to use the The Amazing Race vocabulary) type things you can think of would be fun, too.
The Siblings are 17, 15, and 12, so keep it, you know, LEGAL.