This past Sunday I was running around downtown DC with about 10,000 other people trying to solve riddles and piece together clues to win a $2000 prize. It was the second annual Post Hunt.
The whole Hunt was done on foot in a section of DC that was mapped out in the Washington Post Magazine. Solving some initial trivia told you where on the map to go to find the five clues. At each of these five points were Post Hunt volunteers providing the clues in brilliantly creative manners, such as:
House Bill 98999
Two faux members of the House debating the merits of the text of bill 98999 and stating that it lacked accountability. Nowhere in the text of the bill could you find one word of accountability.
Do you get it?
For this clue you had to pull out your phone and “text” the word “accountability” to the number 98999. You immediately got a response that “The solution is a simple majority”. Being that this was a faux bill in the House of Representatives, which has 435 members, the majority would be 218. That was the answer: 218.
All the answers were numbers and corresponded with clues in that same Post Magazine. Once you had all five clues you were prepared to hear the final puzzle, which would be a race to finish, first one to solve it wins the whole Hunt.
We did ace all five clues, but sadly, we took a wrong turn in the third or fourth step of the final puzzle and ended up not finishing. Still, it wasn’t about winning or prize money, it was about you and your team having that eureka moment when you suddenly discovered a right answer.
I am really glad I joined a team to play this year and familiarized myself with the event, and hope I can get a lot of you all out next year to join me on the Hunt.
Wow… that is some crazy-hard sounding stuff! I’m really sorry we didn’t make it this time, but i definitely would like to try to do this with you next year. My brain really does not normally work this way, but perhaps I can train : ) It’s an interesting way of giving the clues, and more like a puzzle- just a method of play we’ve never really incorporated into the Jeff’s Annual event… I think it would be cool to try to add this idea in a little more to what we do. Mix it up!
I would love to do this next year! I’m afraid I’d feel really dumb, though – I totally didn’t get your clue above!
This post is more cryptic than the actual “Representatives” were because I only mentioned text and accountability one or two times, where they were saying it in different ways over and over again until you couldn’t help but hear “text accountability”.