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The Armchair Treasure Hunt Club’s 2015 Club Meeting

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Generic blue cartoon armchairThe 1979 book Masquerade established the genre of the Armchair Treasure Hunt: a treasure hunt where a document contains all the clues to solve a series of clues that (typically) points to a location, – in the grandest hunts, a physical item has been buried at that location. People still set such hunts – for instance, the final chapter of The Cloud Quest was published last month; rumour had it, a few years ago, that there were still dozens of books with prize competitions being published each year. While treasure hunts have longer histories still (any excuse to link to the story of the Treasure Hunt Riots!) Masquerade is still the most famous.

The genre still has many devotees, with the Armchair Treasure Hunt Club being a prominent virtual gathering-point for them. The site tracks open armchair treasure hunts, some open to the public, others intended for club members alone. The club also has an annual meeting, open to all and sundry rather than just to its membership. The invitation describes how the day will run. This site shan’t repeat it, for fear that even a simple transcription might somehow obliterate a pre-clue hidden within the invitation. Players will arrange themselves into six or so teams, investigate the Cathedral and more, share a buffet lunch in a pub and then solve a hunt in the afternoon. A full day’s play, including food, for £25 per player sounds like a good deal, and this is certainly the right company in which to enjoy the event.

The club also has an announcement from Steve Miller of Pyro Puzzles about his mechnical puzzle projects, as previously discussed. Steve recently exhibited his wares and ran a hunt at the Nine Worlds convention in London – making the event even cooler still!

Introducing Pablo’s Armchair Treasure Hunt

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LogicaCMG logoA little too late for the above logo, one of the UK’s longest-running hunt traditions is gearing up for its annual Christmastime conundrum. In 1985, an IT consultant at Logica, Paul Coombs, had the idea for an armchair treasure hunt, vaguely comparable in style to that of the Masquerade book from a few years previously, complete with treasure buried somewhere in the south of England. He co-ran the first four year’s hunts and ran more in later years. Every year but once since then, an annual hunt has been set for members of Logica and their friends.

Historically, Logica have provided some backing for prizes (moderate cash prizes, but often many of them). After Logica’s merger with CGI a couple of years ago, this year the cash prizes have been eliminated and the ties with the company have been severed. From now on these will be referred to as Pablo’s Armchair Treasure Hunts, after the crossword compiler-style nom de guerre by which Coombs was known. This year sees the hunt open to allcomers and a renewed push to attract first-time players with a resources section, so perhaps it’s a good year to get into the habit. The hunt is to be respected for its tradition as well as its creativity.

Happily, a full archive of 28 hunts, plus solutions and setter’s notes exists, often with tales from those who played each year. This is the best way to pick up the form. Taking the 2012 hunt as an example, it’s not uncommon that there are pictures to identify, cryptic questions (usually about the year’s events – though, historically, there have been references to Logica and Sean Bean in many years) to answer, anagrams to crack, some hidden messages and a final code. Answering the questions gives you the source material to crack the code which will give you the directions to the physical hidden treasure.

While there is glory in being the first to find the treasure, there’s also a prize awarded for the most complete solutions, measured through a scoring system. Question answers, decoded references, solved directions and more each earn points. If there are, say, thirty teams submitting answers to a year’s hunt, then a question that is solved by 29 teams and missed by one team will earn one point for the 29 teams that solve it. A harder question that is solved by two teams and missed by 28 will earn 28 points for the two teams that solve it, and so on. In this way, you can make meaningful, measurable partial progress even without finding the treasure outright.

That’s the basic form; the hunt varies from year to year. For instance, the 2013 hunt features a mighty jigsaw, but this is only the starting-point; further clues were wound around the rest of the Web, including three Facebook accounts, an assortment of virtual treasure sites and more. Possibly the most impressive of all was (Coombs’, naturally) 1992 hunt which dispensed with overt questions altogether; instead, there were dozens of images, which came from sets of images with one missing. Identifying the missing item from each set sent you on your way. Brilliant!

This post is happening today because the “poster” (actually, an online video) for the 2014 hunt has been released. Form suggests there are likely to be some clues to this year’s event at least alluded to in there. The text is a reference to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; if that turns out to be the theme, or one of the themes, then it’s likely to be a popular choice. Further details will be teased out in a week’s time, with the puzzle itself released in mid-December.

The Armchair Treasure Hunt Club’s annual Club Meeting

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Oakham horseshoeThe above graphic is taken from the Armchair Treasure Hunt Club‘s web site, and this site very much hopes that they won’t mind its reproduction to promote their annual event – perhaps they might show a little Christmas spirit, in the spirit of the message central to the cartoon. (Hey, only four months and a day to go!)

The Armchair Treasure Hunt is a genre most famously exemplified by the 1979 book Masquerade, but people set new hunts every year. While none has caught the public attention in quite the same way, some are still high-concept and massive in scale; others are less ambitious and set for the entertainment of only a few dozen players. Some have clues to a physical prize to be recovered; others are purely virtual. The Armchair Treasure Hunt Club has a list of such hunts, and its members often host their own; the prizes might not be so massive, but you can rest assured that they have been composed with love by those very familiar with the genre, its common pitfalls and how to avoid them.

The club has an annual meeting which features an in-person one-day hunt. The invitation explains that Although we used to call them ‘meetings’ these events don’t have any formal ‘meeting’ part – they offer a chance to meet like-minded treasure hunters and swap ideas. But the heart of the events is a real outdoor hunt designed for teams of all ages. Members and non-members are equally welcome at these events. Accordingly, why not go along to the next one? It will happen on Saturday 13th September in Oakham here in the UK. Those who revel in minutiae of administrative subdivisions may know Oakham as the county town of the smallest historic county of England; to the rest of us, it’s in Leicestershire, in the East Midlands.

The event will start at 11am, your £22/player fee includes a carvery lunch and the whole enterprise is set to be done and dusted by 6 o’clock. To help set your expectations and decide whether the event is for you, the bottom of the invitations page has links to, near enough, twenty years’ worth of past hunts – plenty of evocative photos, many full descriptions of the hunts themselves. Stephen Miller of Pyro Puzzles writes that there can be expected to be teams wandering around Oakham before the hunt to familiarise themselves, then they’ll be given clues to get them going and exploring to find the answers. Then there’s usually a number of code breaking challenges which reveal cryptic clues to the location of the treasure, then it’s a mad dash to be the first with their hands on the prize. As the festivities start the night before, there may be some fuzzy heads in the morning, before the investigation and carvery lunch hopefully get people into gear for the afternoon’s hunt itself!

On a related topic, some reports are coming out from the International Puzzle Party in London at the start of the month: to name but four, Allard, Jerry, Kevin and Roxanne all convey senses of the fun they had. Allard and Roxanne also have gorgeous, must-read reports from Stephen Miller’s “Top Secret” in-person puzzle hunt from the start of the month, too. (This site also really enjoyed Allard mentioning that two teams of five IPP attendees also battled it out at HintHunt in London. Yep, there’s definitely a crossover interest between all the different puzzle hobbies!)

One of the highlights of the IPP is the Edward Hordern Puzzle Exchange, in which 100+ participants bring a copy of an unpublished mechanical puzzle for each other participant, and spend most of a day trying to ensure that they swap one-for-one with each other participant. (Then work out how they’re going to get 99 puzzles home, which sounds like an inside-out hip-hop song.)

Jerry specifies that contributions need not be the exchanger’s own design. He/she can commission or use someone else’s design (with permission of course). Out of the 99 puzzles that were exchanged at IPP34, almost 40 exchangers adopted somebody else’s design. (…) The exchanged puzzle must not have been previously in someone’s collection nor commercially available prior to the exchange. Another highlight is the Puzzle Party as such, surely the highest-end puzzle bring-and-buy sale in the world.

On the subject of rounding up recent events, last Friday saw the Mind Sports Olympiad‘s annual sudoku-and-Kenken competition, a 3½-hour paper with eight difficult examples of the two types to solve. Subject to confirmation, The Magpie‘s Mark Goodliffe may well have repeated his triumph in the contest from 2013. Next up: if you took part in the remote qualifying contest, which took place over 9th-13th June, perhaps you have been invited to the in-person finals of The Times Sudoku Championship, which happen on Saturday. Good luck if you have!

Coming up later this year: Autumn

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Autumn logoAs the second part of this two-part feature, here are the events that have recently reached us which are set to take place later on in the year:

August 3: ‘Top Secret’ One Day Cryptic Treasure Hunt, in-person, Essex
August 22: Mind Sports Olympiad KenKen and Sudoku puzzle contest, in-person, London
September 6: save the date
September 13: Armchair Treasure Hunting Day, in-person, Oakham

This site has discussed the “Top Secret” hunt in Essex in August previously, but some more information has been revealed: The event will be team based, with each team consisting of up to six participants. Teams are requested to be there well before the 10:30am start time, for a 6pm finish. The event is described as “similar to ‘escape the room’ events”, except with multiple rooms; many of the rooms will contain mechanical and physical puzzles, codes and riddles that need to be solved in order to reveal an escape route that the teams can use, but there’ll still be more to do even after escape. The planned treasure should deliver a haul of limited edition puzzles valued at £300 to each member of the winning team. I would expect the event to be particularly heavy on physical puzzles; if you want practice with them, the 15th Midlands Puzzle Party will happen on June 15th, and you can read an archive of reports from past events.

The team behind “Top Secret” claim responsibility for three past Armchair Treasure Hunt club events, and a date has been announced for the next one: September 13th. The announcement makes it clear that non-members are welcome along with club members. The event will be taking place in Oakham, in the traditional county of Rutland – or the East Midlands to the rest of us. I have heard rumour of something happening on September 6th, rumour which might never be mentioned again if nothing comes of it, so the week of the 6th to the 13th might be a big one, not least because of Puzzled Pint in the middle of it!

Armchair Treasure Hunt Club open free worldwide competition tomorrow

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Armchair Treasure Hunt Club logoOne reasonably major puzzle hobby that has not yet really been touched on in this blog has been that of the armchair treasure hunt, wherein a book, web site or some other publication has cryptic clues to the whereabouts of, usually, one or more physical hidden treasures. This has a long history; I enjoyed reading of the Treasure Hunt Riots in the UK at the start of the twentieth century, and mention of “Manx Gold”, a novelette by one Agatha Christie to promote tourism in the Isle of Man. Arguably you can trace the genre back probably almost two thousand years to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

However, at least in modern times, probably the most famous example of the genre is Masquerade from 1979, explained page-by-page on Dan Amrich’s site, with further discussion of the unusual conclusion to the hunt. Masquerade caught public attention to the point where it (re?)sparked interest in the genre; Mark Parry’s site has details of other such armchair treasure hunts of the 1980s and early ’90s; for the most recent two decades or so, the state of the art has been the work of the Armchair Treasure Hunt Club. Additionally, the IT consultancy Logica (now part of the CGI group) have had their own hunt in the south-east almost every year for nearly thirty years. (My pick of the bunch is their 1992 hunt, which dispenses with their usual question-based format and does so with great style and internal logic.)

Membership of the Armchair Treasure Hunt Club is a very reasonable £20 per year via their registration page – but a free competition starts at midnight BST tonight with a prize of a year’s membership. The club has run four such competitions already, with the hunts and their solutions still available online so that you can get used to the form. The last competition was open for a little over a month and was resolved by a random draw between five correct submissions, so your odds are not bad at all!

August 3rd: one-day Cryptic Treasure Hunt in Essex

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Pyro Puzzles logoExciting news arrives (and thanks to puzzlehuntcalendar.com for this one!) that Sunday 3rd August will see a highly relevant-looking cryptic treasure hunt (heck, it’s a puzzle hunt to you and me!) taking place somewhere in Essex, probably not far from north-east London.

The hunt will be a team event, with each team consisting of up to six participants. The objective for each team will be to escape the puzzle box and locate the prizes once outside. This is similar to the exit games we discuss here, except that here there will be multiple rooms to challenge and confound the participants. Many of the rooms will contain mechanical and physical puzzles, codes and riddles that need to be solved in order to reveal an escape route that the teams can use, but there’ll still be more to do even after you’ve escaped. Apparently the venue was designed to securely contain 300 people away from the outside world, so escaping will be a real challenge!

The hunt is being organised by Stephen Miller, Nick Ball and others, who have been running such puzzle hunts for many years. A full write up of one such hunt can be found here to give you an indication of what goes into them. It’s interesting to see ATHC at the top of the document; this surely refers to the Armchair Treasure Hunt Club, who hold one-day puzzle hunts like this, extended research-based hunts and online competitions. Much more about them some other day.

The whole event will be themed, but this will remain “Top Secret” until the day of the hunt. (Whether this has a double meaning, and that the theme will actually be revealed to be “Top Secret”, rather than being kept as top secret, remains to be seen!) The winning team (and hopefully the runners up) will be able to claim limited edition puzzles as their prizes for being the first to escape and find the treasure.

There’s a little more information about the logistics on the hunt’s web site, as well as an entry form and PayPal link to pay the £25/person fee. The site also has an e-mail link which will surely reach the organisers.

Very exciting! More news about this as it reaches us.