Thursday, December 4, 2008 by Dave Blum
In a recent post, I listed a variety of my favorite scavenger hunt ideas and suggested a few innovative ways to use puzzles in our daily lives. One of the treasure hunt ideas I neglected to mention, however, was: Announce Events. I mean, why send out a simple Evite when you can tease people for days, weeks, even months in advance with a series of puzzling, online announcements?
This is exactly what Jen and I did for our October ’07 wedding. It all started back in January of that year, when I first popped the question. Jen’s second response (after saying “yes”, of course) was, “We are going to have treasure hunt clues, right?” How could I refuse! Grabbing pens and notepads, we immediately started generating treasure ideas for the monthly puzzles we’d be writing to cryptically broadcast the details of our wedding and reception. Since we’d chosen Golden Gate Park’s Shakespeare Garden for the site of the ceremony, we just HAD to start with a puzzle in the form of a sonnet. For conveying the time of the wedding and a schedule of activities, we quite naturally chose a tricky clock clue. And being the movie buff that I am, we couldn’t miss including a wedding movie trivia clue. All told, there were 8 clues I think, with the last one being a particularly tricky 3-parter.
Almost any event can be announced this way. You just start with a scavenger hunt list and let your creativity flow from there.