Author

Sabrina Baier

Tim Adler

Publishing date

Language

English

Sabrina’s parents are fans of Disney movies and riddles. So what better birthday gift than a Disney-themed scavenger hunt?!

General setup

Story: The overall story is that the group are “special friends of Disney heroes and heroines” and are called for help. At each of the stops, a Disney character asks for support. Helping the character, which often means solving a riddle, leads to a number with which the next character can be found.
Coordinates: In the beginning, the group gets a long table with two columns. One contains numbers the other coordinates. The table can be used to map numbers to coordinates. That means if the solution to a riddle is a number, this number can be used to find the next location. For us, the table looked like this:
QR codes: At the individual stops, which can be found via the coordinates, QR codes are placed in advance. E.g. they are taped to street lights. These coordinates can be scanned to find a letter from a Disney character asking for help. For us, this looked like this:

Tasks

Snow White wants to know how many of her animal friends are coming to the party. In advance, we placed pictures of Disney-style forest clearings, lakes, etc. with hidden animals. These pictures had to be found and the animals had to be counted.
Russel needs help with his homework, which was a pub quiz about Disney franchises. Either the answer to a question is a digit or the first letters of consecutive answers (read top to bottom) spell a digit. Taking the digits together leads to a number for the next coordinate.
Belle is sad because the sheep tore pages out of her favorite books. …
Stitch has an intergalactic communication issue, which can be remedied by solving a sudoku. Solving a sudoku together was actually a lot more interactive and fun than I thought.
Remy mixed up the ingredients in his chocolate cake recipe. In this case, the group gets four little bags, which contain chocolate and have a weight, e.g. 100g, written on them. By tasting the chocolate in the bag (without looking) the group decides which numbers go where in the recipe. Reading the first digits in the ingredients list top to bottom gives the number which matches the next coordinates
Alice is looking for the title and artist of certain songs, which are played to the group. As a thank-you gift, she gives the group a pen with which the secret ink on her letter can be deciphered to reveal a number and thus coordinates. This is the only time the letter has to be actually printed.

It takes time. A walking route of 30 minutes and six stops led to a scavenger hunt of about two hours.
The list of coordinates and the QR codes make the scavenger hunt easily transferable to different locations or cities. Even different groups can do it in parallel. We reused the scavenger hunt again for the birthday of a friend. To make the transfer easier, we wrote a little helper script that can create the coordinate tables (including random numbers and random coordinates to throw the group off).
The questions on Disney movies were a lot harder than I thought. In general, it seemed like riddles that are too easy are less of a problem than riddles that are too hard.
We did not think hard about the ending of the tour or a price. The hunt ended back home where we ate a birthday cake. Maybe it would have been nice to put a bit more effort into the ending.