Riddles and Scavenger Hunts: A Guide

[lisa]

A scavenger hunt is a game that is set up by a person or people in which another person or group of people must use a list of clues or riddles to find several things or places. Best Riddles They can be a fun and creative way to entertain people of all ages or to surprise somebody with something at the end of the hunt.

These puzzles became popular in the 1930's when a gossip columnist hosted a series of parties based around scavenger hunts for the New York elite.

The parties were a great success and became very popular. Since then scavenger hunts have maintained some popularity but the target audience for them has changed drastically. Although many adults still participate in these hunts and there are some popular ones, the primary use of riddle-based scavenger hunts is for kids, especially in classrooms.

Probably the most popular modern use of riddles in scavenger hunts was in the movie The Da Vinci Code. Good uses of scavenger hunts are in classrooms, ones done over the internet, and special occasions (wedding proposal).

Writing a scavenger hunt: Writing a great scavenger hunt is an art that takes a lot of creativity and practice. The first step in this process is to pick the overlying theme of the hunt.

If you're writing a riddle for children in a classroom and they are currently studying fossils you could do a dinosaur based scavenger hunt, or if you are making one for your girlfriend you could choose your experiences together as the theme (i.e. all of the important landmarks of your relationship, or items that represents these).

Once you have the theme chosen the next step is to pick all of the specific items and places that you want to be included in the hunt. When doing so, just make sure you try to stay along the lines of the theme you chose.

For example, if you chose dinosaurs as the topic you could chose the following items and places: eggs, a fern plant, a water fountain (especially to relate to prehistoric water animals), and a skeleton.

As you can see, the things you choose as answers don't have to be directly related to your topic, it just has to be related in some direct way, connections can be made later.

The final step in making the hunt is to write the riddles and clues for all of the things and places you choose earlier. To do this make a list of all of the ways that the object/place relates to the theme you have chosen and form them into a riddle. For dinosaurs and eggs we can say that dinosaurs have eggs, baby dinosaurs come from eggs, and that they are now fossils.

So a riddle for this could be: I trap baby dinosaurs and I feed them too. When their mothers dropped me I was new. But now I'm just rock, through and through.

Once you have all of these riddles written you can decide how you want the riddles to be set up; you can either give whoever is solving the riddles all the clues at once or you can place them at each subsequent thing/location to be found after each riddle is solved (i.e. give them the first riddle, the next one is at the solution to the first riddle, etc.).