When coming up with a scavenger hunt, especially on Liberty’s campus, there are a few things to think about:
- Will this scavenger hunt be reused?
This question matters because it determines what level of secrecy you need to have around the creation of your game. If it isn’t going to be reused, or the mechanics and objectives will be markedly different, you can distribute the list of clues to everyone involved. If not, you’re justified in limiting access to hall leadership.
- Will this scavenger hunt be completed with cars?
This sets the geographic area that you can distribute clues in. If cars are allowed, including campus adjacent areas like the Monogram and medical school makes sense, otherwise it’s a waste of time because no team will judge the disproportionate effort of hiking several miles as worthwhile, likely even if you decide to make the points commensurate because it’s more fun to do more things. Even given cars, you should consider the amount of walking from cars and parking availability in your design.
- What is the win condition of the scavenger hunt?
Your win condition will either be the full completion of a set of objectives, with victory going to the team that checks off the list first, or victory by the team with the most objectives completed in a given time; within that category, you can also apply point values to various objectives to try and balance difficulty, geography, and duration. The percentage completion win-con is the better option because it allows you to set a distinct end time and not leave a group of freshmen and a directionally challenged member of hall leadership trying to find a specific room on the fourth floor of DeMoss until after curfew.
- What is the optimal routing for the scavenger hunt?
Given a large campus and varying point values for activities, the optimal route is probably impossible to find. Your goal should be to keep it that way, so that your teams scatter in every direction and then run into each other over the course of the hunt. This also means that teams are not overly advantaged by the presence of good routers, as even an apparent optimal route may be worse than one stumbled into by the astronomy major who really wants to visit the observatory.
There’s much more to discuss:
- What activities are best to require?
- What are the best places to familiarize freshmen with?
- What should prizes be?
- etc. etc.
But I’ll leave that for another day.