How To Make Your Own Simple Treasure Hunt
By Sam Gething-Lewis
This is a guide to creating a great treasure hunt for your home, which can be adapted for your town, park or even your holiday. You’ll learn how to create a number of different clues, pick a theme as well as how to make an authentic looking treasure map.
All you’ll need is a couple of household objects, some willing pirates and of course – some TREASURE!
The brilliant treasure hunt that you create is limited only by your own imagination, kids' party, hen do or team building event.
Rev 03
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Sam Gething-Lewis
License Notes
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Contents
Chapter Three: The Treasure Map
Chapter Six: Pirate Dictionary
Introduction
Ahoy There Me Hearties!
Ahaaaargh – it is time for a Treasure Hunt you scallies!
Right,
apologies for all that, all the pirate talk is now out the way for a
while.
This is a guide of how to make a simple treasure hunt.
What is a treasure hunt?
This book will show you how to create a clue based scavenger hunt consisting of a variety of puzzles leading to hidden treasure. There are other definitions, such as diving for sunken treasure or metal detecting for buried booty but for the sakes of saving your front lawn from being dug up, we will concentrate on the clue style.
How long will it take?
Depending on how hard you make it and how many clues you have you can work out roughly how long the activity will take. We will use a five clue treasure hunt which should take approximately an hour to make and thirty minutes for participants to complete. Allow five to ten minutes for each clue, some travel and discovery time. Take into account the abilities of your buccaneers.
Theme
For the purposes of this guide, we will adopt a pirate theme in a house, but you can replace the locations and vernacular to suit your geography and theme. See the chapter on Themes for more alternatives.
Treasure
What is the treasure? The better the treasure , the more motivated your hunters will be. It has to be something that they want to find – even if that something is a mysterious treasure. Chocolate gold coins are a good booty, or something more suitable if it is a stag or hen do. If you don’t have any actual treasure, you could put a promise note of a treat and some congratulations for finding the treasure. There is a slim chance that the treasure won't be found so avoid using live animals.
Treasure Chest
We would benefit from having something special to put the treasure in. If you happen to have a small portable treasure chest lying around use that, or get an old biscuit tin or container, depending on the size of your treasure. It will have to be hidden so a carrier bag may come in handy.
If you are going to have more than one person/group hunt for the treasure, and you are a meanie, put a little note under the treasure saying “Too late scurvy dog! Th’ treasure do be plundered!”. This grants some bragging rights to the winners and adds to the gamesmanship.
Ingredients
This is what you will need
Treasure
Treasure chest/container/carrier bag
Pieces of paper - one for each participant
Scrap of paper - for you to scribble notes on
Cup of tea (keep the tea bag - you can drink the tea)
Black pen - preferably fibre tip
Pencil
Optional extras
Hair drier
Oven grill
String/ribbon/elastic band
Chapter One
Unlike most things in life, you don’t start from the beginning. With a treasure hunt you start from the end. The end is the final answer that we want our intrepid adventurers to arrive at. This will be what unlocks where the treasure is concealed.
This will be a five clue treasure hunt, so we need a five letter word for the answer.
An object that most places have is a TABLE. This will be our final answer that we will work back from for the purposes of this guide. If your answer is longer but they don't have the time to solve the clues you can gift them some of the letters.
Put the treasure into your container, plus a note if you have more than one person taking part (see the introduction).
Hide the object on part of the table – if possible tape it to the underside, or on a stool underneath, or concealed from view on top by other objects.
So now we have the answer write it vertically down the centre of your scrap of paper:
We are going to now look for answers that fit in with the letters we have.