If you are stuck on a puzzle, stop and take a look at it from another angle. Put yourself in the mind of the person setting the question. The first thing this person had was the answer, then they constructed the puzzle to arrive at that. If you know the puzzle maker, consider their style and any similar combinations of questions and answers they may have come up with previously. Also consider where they would have sourced the answer from – do their other answers suggest that they can see the object they are making questions about.

The person who has set the problem obviously wants you to solve it, but they want to stretch you to the limits of your ability so you get the maximum personal reward by solving it. The secret to the answer will always be in the question.

Read it very carefully and slowly, not getting hung up on one particular detail. When you have the correct answer, it will feel like it makes perfect sense.

Example

Let’s take Question 3 of the puzzles from the 25 Riddle Puzzles For You To Solve:

What am I? I look sick. I won’t cut like a knife but have similar qualities. I hang around in big groups. If you cut my head off – I look great.

Let’s break it down.

1. What am I: This means it is a Thing.
2. I look sick: Think of what symptoms you have if you visually appear to be ill.
3. I won’t cut like a knife but have similar qualities: It is something that isn’t sharp, but may appear so.
4. I hang around in big groups: When you see this Thing, it will be amongst many other similar Things.
5. If you cut my head off – I look great: The Thing looks better with the top taken off.

Starting with 5, we can discard anything that doesn’t look better with its physical head on i.e. anything animal. As we know from 1 that this is a Thing, then we can discard conceptual objects or words. From 2 the visible symptoms of sickness are that it is something like, sweaty, pale or green. 3 tells us that it contains a knife’s qualities like a blade.

The (1) object is (2) green, with a (3) blade, seen in big (4) clumps that can be trimmed (5).

The answer is: GRASS  (drag cursor across to highlight and see).

If you have a puzzle you can’t solve – post it here and we’ll see if the reader’s of Treasure Hunt Design can solve it.

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.

The book includes a pirate dictionary, ideas for other clues and alternative themes for FREE.

If you would like a professionally organised large treasure hunt then please get in touch with Treasure Hunt Design.

In order to secure a successful treasure hunt, a key part of the publicity has to be the signage leading up to the event.
The first and easiest is to have a pop-up banner in reception for all your existing clients to get the message.

The beauty of a pop-up banner is that they are quick, convenient and can convey a great deal of information fitting in with your brand.

The next is to arrange to have road signage leading to the event.

Remember to keep the details to an absolute minimum as you only have a fraction of a second to get the message to the motorist.

Finally posters and leaflets promoting the treasure hunt event are a real boost. Make sure they are eye catching and appealing to your target audience, positioned where they are likely to be lingering.

Your brand is really important so make sure that you combine any theme you choose with the overall guidelines of your property/company (or use people that can (like Treasure Hunt Design for example)

If you would like a treasure hunt event, or professional signage for an event designed and produced then the very first thing you need to do is get in touch!

TV Treasure Hunter to the Rescue

Professional treasure hunt expert, Sam Gething-Lewis, has been called in by Ruth Watson from Channel 4’s Country House Rescue to help revive the fortunes of an ailing property in Watford.

Garston Manor was bought by Sheila O’Neill for £500,000 as a wreck. On the programme to be shown this week, her daughters plan new money-making schemes, including a UFO academy and a treasure hunt at the Georgian property.

“It was great working with Ruth, she is a real professional,” said Sam, who’s from Blakeney. “The girls at Garston were a scream, you’ll have to watch the episode to find out how it all turns out!”
Sam launched Treasure Hunt Design in 2009 and the business has grown from strength to strength, featuring everything from hi-tech cross-country adventures with the Land Rover Experience, to baffling brainy professors in city centre puzzles.

Treasure Hunt Design has recently completed a successful pilot for families with the National Trust in Montacute House in Somerset, with a view to rolling the model out to properties across the country. More locally, during the last decade Sam and his team have completed almost thirty treasure hunts for one location alone. You can take part in one of the treasure hunts over this Easter weekend at the spectacular Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire, hunting for the hidden giant eggs.

“He is very creative and his work is slightly ‘off the wall’ which makes it much more interesting and unusual, said Simon Foster, Eastnor Castle’s estate manager.

Treasure Hunt Design’s latest project in development is a creepy hunt featuring elements from all of our nightmares from clowns and ventriloquist dummies to mannequins and skulls.

If you think that your venue would benefit from having income from a treasure hunt then you can contact Sam on 07551 875604.

Having adapted the stage version of Me and My Girl in the mid-eighties, Stephen Fry was overwhelmed by its success. When he received a call from Stephen Sondheim, the hugely successful American composer and lyricist, responsible for hits including West Side Story and A Little Night Music, he was tremendously excited at the thought of working with such a great musical talent.

Sondheim asked after Fry’s fax machine, which at that time was something of a novelty. It turned out that the composer wanted Fry to be part of a Treasure Hunt that he was running in America, persuading Mr Fry to religiously spend the whole of his Saturday evening next to his newfangled machine in the UK sending back replies to the participants on the other side of the pond.

Stephen Fry is still waiting for the elusive commission to materialise.

His book elaborating on this story and many others, The Fry Chronicles, is available to buy now…

If you are looking for a rich variety of clues in a treasure hunt, then give us a call www.treasurehuntdesign.com

If you failed to notice the phenomenon that is Tomb Raider, then these words are wasted on you. The treasure hunt themed Tomb Raider was a computer game so popular, that generated it’s own movie franchise. Lara Croft is the Guinness Book Of World Records official Most Successful Human Videogame Heroine. Ian Livingstone from Choose Your Own Adventure books fame is the President of Eidos.

If you apply the reasoning that treasure hunting is now an activity that instead of digging up gold, involves solving a series of puzzles in order to achieve a goal then that introduces a realm of computer games.

Professor Layton has a large series of mind-straining challenges on the Nintendo DS which conform to the “armchair treasure hunt” formula. Similarly, Indiana Jones has now been converted to a huge variety of formats including Lego.

Here’s a thought – why don’t you have a treasure hunt based on a video game… we know just the people www.treasurehuntdesign.com

The earliest appearance of treasure hunting is in Robert Louis Stevenson’s  Treasure Island. Published in 1883, it was the first time that the concept of treasure maps, hidden pirate’s gold and x marks the spot appeared in the public domain.

More recently, Dan Brown has been assaulting our senses with his Da Vinci Code series. They are all based on ancient unsolved or undiscovered puzzles permanently installed in the landscape and architecture.

In the late 1970’s and early ’80’s before the takeover of computers, there were a huge variety of Choose Your Own Adventure books. These series of puzzles allowed you to choose your own path through the books and to a satisfactory conclusion (treasure).  Key components of this were Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. Both of whom crop again in gaming circles, both board and computer based, significantly with Tomb Raider.

If you search online, there are quite a few treasure hunts floating about in print. The “World’s Greatest Treasure Hunt” is a bit better than most as it is built on twelve separate factual stories of treasure hunting history. The prize is one of the emeralds from Mel Fisher’s Atocha mounted in a Golden Eagle. All you have to do is answer some trivia questions. This particular hunt purports to be all for charity but has not featured too highly in the media recently since it was launched earlier in 2010.

The book of all treasure hunting books is this, Masquerade by Kit Williams. He sold hundreds of thousands of copies of the book when it was launched in 1979. It was a legendary success. Williams buried a golden hare that he made in a metal-detector proof ceramic cast. In the book is a rhyme which tells you how to solve the riddle. The rest of the text is all just misleading. Connect the right eye to the right pointing digit on all creatures, reveals letters on each page – stringing them together gives the location. The prize was located by Ken Thomas in 1982. Legend has it, that at the same time two teachers worked it out, dug it out without realising it for Thomas to recover from their discarded soil. Thomas then went bankrupt trying to profit from the hare and it was auctioned off. It later turned out that an old housemate of Williams’ was married to Thomas’ business partner, and that Thomas had sent in a copy of a map that he had already known about – and was announced the winner. We mustn’t feel sorry for Kit as he was so relieved to be out of the limelight and not to have to open all of his post or answer the telephone any more. Previously he received 100’s of letters a day had to read every one just in case they had answered it.

If you would like to “book” a treasure hunt – get in touch www.treasurehuntdesign.com

Channel 4 were hugely influential in the production of puzzle, challenge and reward based programming starting with The Crystal Maze. Teams raced around different zones, solving puzzles to release a crystal within a time limit. If they failed then the individual attempting the puzzle would be locked into the room. Crystals bought you time in the whooshing air filled Dome, where the more gold pieces of paper you grabbed flying about – the more you would win.

Channel 4 were also the pioneers of the ultimate treasure hunting TV classic: Treasure Hunt – starring Kenneth Kendall and Wincey Willis in the studio with the competitors as clue solvers, controlling their Sky Runner. For the majority of the series this was Anneka Rice, however there were two more: Annabel Croft was guest Sky Runner towards the end of the run on Channel 4 in 1986; Suzie Perry picked up the jumpsuit in 2002 for a brief resurgence on BBC2.

During the interval ITV had The Interceptor, and Channel 5 introduced Fort Boyard. The Interceptor featured two participants dropped in unknown locations with Annabel Croft trying to work out where they were and get them together. Competitors carried two locked backpacks with infra-red sensors on. They had to find the other person’s key for their backpacks and then each other evading The Interceptor – a striking black leather clad Scottish menace who was armed with an infra-red gun and helicopter / motorbike / performance car. Fort Boyard was essentially the Crystal Maze but on a much grander scale based in a fort in the middle of the ocean. This was broadcast in many countries. For British viewers we mainly had the baddy, a faux grumpy Lesley Grantham, up against a team gently guided around by Melinda Messinger. The Crystal Maze, Treasure Hunt, The Interceptor and Fort Boyard were all the brainchild of one man, Jacques Antoine.

The current big daddy of the TV treasure hunting world is presented to us by the Americans – who do not do things by halves. The Amazing Race is a transglobal competition where couples compete to be the first across the finish line to win $1million hosted by a glossy Phil Keoghan. To date there are 17 series and it is in no danger of fading out.

If you want to experience a TV quality treasure hunt at your venue – there is only one thing to do. We’ll give you a clue…  www.treasurehuntdesign.com

The definition of treasure hunting nowadays has evolved from archaeological digging up of lost treasure to solving a series of puzzles to reveal a final answer or reward. There is a cult activity in Seattle called The Game that is a treasure hunt but has no treasure at all – the winners, who are the first to solve a series of diverse challenges, instead claim nothing more than bragging rights over fellow participants.

Going back to it’s original meaning, allow us to introduce you to the grandaddy of treasure hunting. The gentleman to your left is Mr Heinrich Schleimann. He analysed and dissected Homer’s Illiad to discover the lost location of Troy in Turkey in 1873.

Ten years later Robert Louis Stevenson published Treasure Island. The significance of this is that it is the first time we see the glamorisation of pirates, treasure maps, buried treasure and X marks the spot.

Forty years later in 1922 Howard Carter made his famous discoveries in Egypt of the tomb of Tutankhamen.

Advances in technology resulted in a couple more finds far more recently, especially in the field of diving. In 1985, Mel Fisher recovered $450m of gold and silver from the 1622 Spanish ship, Nuestra Senora de Atocha. The discovery, consisting of pieces of eight, emeralds (the source of the emerald city) and jewellery is more commonly known as the Atocha Motherload. Over two decades after the death of Fisher, they are still recovering articles from the site – so far they’ve got less than half of the recorded payload.

In the very recent history, Dave Crisp using a metal detector uncovered a hoard of 52,000 Roman coins in Frome, Somerset. He has been hunting for over 24 years without great success and in one week discovered two.

Oh, and if you want to have your own treasure hunt – you won’t forget us now will you? https://treasurehuntdesign.com/

We hope that everyone experienced a wonderful and magic afternoon at the launch of our TV treasure hunt for Channel 4’s Country House Rescue.

Toby Wilson from Treasure Hunt Design had laid out a fun and engaging set of clues for the locals through the woods. Secrecy about the outcome of the event is still utmost, so we can’t tell you if it was a success or not and we can’t tell you if the fairies who run the mystery location were happy with the outcome. “I saw a goblin!” said one child “I saw a REAL goblin!!” We cannot confirm or deny the sighting.

Ruth Watson and the team were on hand to gauge the reaction of participants. You’ll have to wait until the programme comes out to see if anyone actually enjoyed it or not.

Food, drink and entertainment were laid on for the launch, with bouncy castles and the occasional waft of burger. The weather was very kind. We’d love to tell you more, but then we’d have to… …you know….

To host your own – take a tour of our website – www.treasurehuntdesign.com