Scavenger Hunts
I’ve always loved them – both as a participant and as a creator. Yep, i’ve created them before too – for friends in high school and college. But yesterday i was a participant in one here in SF, put on by Go Game. And it was awesome.
It was called the “Everywhere Game“. You create your own team (they recommend 4, but we had 6), you need web-enabled cell phone and a digital camera capable of pictures and video. Using the phone, you retrieve your missions and answer trivia. The missions often involved going somewhere, noting a sign or picture, then combining that with other clues to get the answer. Once you submit the answer on the phone, they supply the next mission. They grouped several missions together in different neighborhoods. For example, we did about 4 missions around the metreon, then did a bunch around union square, then hit the marina. At the end we all met up at the mezzanine to watch team submitted pictures and videos and see who won.
These Go Game guys have been around, had some good challenges, but the game was far from perfect. Most pictures and videos submitted had problems, and twice during the game their servers went down. Our team did well, getting over 90% of the answers correct within the time limit. We got more points than the other 3 teams we spoke with, but still got less than half the points the winning team got. How is that possible? The go game people don’t disclose how people get points, or what is the worth of points. I remember the old scavenger hunt days – you get a list of a bunch of things and you can decide if you want to do easy things for small points or hard things for lots of points. This game seemed to randomly assign missions – except that the winning team was friends with the go game people, so it may not have been so random.
That said, our team had a blast and i’m totally down to do it again. Only $10 and proceeds benefit Alex Smith Foundation.
Have you ever done one? Where was it, and would you do more like it? Leave me a comment.