Tuesday, November 18, 2008 by Dave Blum
There are no rules for scouting out a treasure hunt location, but there are certainly some “recommended guidelines”. My three top suggestions would be:
1) Choose an interesting, walkable location without too many hills.
–Walking (as opposed to driving) hunts allow you to see a variety of details,
and you can concentrate on the activity, rather than looking for parking. The
flatter the area, the less you need to think about your own lack of fitness. 🙂
2) Find an area that allows people to avoid other teams.
–It’s no fun running into other teams at every turn. A great hunt allows people
to feel like they’ve arrived at a clue location first, with no one else around. This
means that the hunt area shouldn’t be solely along one street (one vertical
axis), where you’d undoubtedly see other teams. The area should be more of a
square or a rectangle…like a labyrinth, even.
3) Select a section of town with a good variety of historic signage and public art.
Hunt participants should discover the hidden treasures of a community, which
include statues, plaques, murals, mosaics, etc.
These are just a few of my own treasure hunt ideas. Everyone hunt master is different. As our Dr. Clue programs are designed to be corporate team building activities, we tend to look for public restrooms within the hunt area, as well as a grassy lawn or benches for our groups to sit on.
The above suggestions are for treasure hunts. There’s a whole different set of scavenger hunt ideas to consider if you choose to go that route, including creating a scavenger hunt list that matches the merchants in that area…but that’s another blog post, I think.