• A Scavenger Hunt Sampler: From Credit Card Theft to Mayoral Races

    ByMichael Andersen
    Great Gotham Challenge 2026 told me to steal a credit card

    The paraphrased instructions that came through on my phone were more than a little intimidating. “Go two blocks west, and look for an old Fung Wah bus. Go back to the seventh row, and you’ll find a woman sitting there. You’ll find her wallet inside her bookbag. Take it out, and steal her credit card.” And I did exactly that. Luckily, she was so engrossed in her book that she didn’t even notice.

    Of course, the woman was a paid actor and the credit card (made out to one Anne N Igma) couldn’t actually make purchases, so I didn’t actually commit a crime just because a prompt on my phone told me to do so. Instead, the credit card’s embedded NFC tag scanned to a bus-themed game of multiplayer Snake that served as one of the puzzles for this year’s Great Gotham Challenge, an annual scavenger hunt ARGNet previously covered.

    Over the past year or two in particular, I’ve played a lot of scavenger hunts. And the blanket term describes a wide array of experiences. Consider this a tour of what the term means, across different communities.

    BAPHL 2026 stickers and one side of the “Wormhole” puzzle

    The Puzzle’s the Thing: The Live Puzzle Hunt Experience

    Boston was secretly founded by aliens: at least, that’s what a group of antennae-wearing conspiracy theorists tried to convince us, when they handed over a packet of research materials.

    One particularly impressive item in the extraterrestrial packet was a 3D-printed block with logic puzzles printed on the surface of two sides, and holes carved through the middle so that when we dribbled water into a hole on one side, it would come out a “wormhole” on the other side. Mapping out these connections and dependencies made both grids solvable, and helped our team get one step closer to uncovering Boston’s true origin story.

    This was one of the puzzles from the Boston Area Puzzle Hunt League (BAPHL), a recurring hunt that guides players through the city through a series of puzzles. This year, I joined a team of National Puzzlers League members to uncover “Boston’s Alternate Past Hypothetical Lore”, a hunt themed around four different unhinged conspiracies about the city’s founding. Each location gave us a packet of materials to solve themed around a different conspiracy, and solving the metapuzzle tied to each location sent us on our way to the next location with a thematically appropriate sticker.

    The specific locations our team visited didn’t factor into the solutions, but physical materials were handed out at each location that made the live solving experience necessary. Different Area Same Hunt (DASH, for short) works on similar rules, giving different cities the freedom to run the event at the same time, finding appropriate locations to host each puzzle stop.

    Jackson Lynch’s IllumiNYti hunt, which concluded with a “Not A Spy” victory

    Location, Location, Location: Extracting Meaning from Stops

    There’s a stretch of sidewalk in Manhattan where the New York City subway grid is replicated with vault lights and strips of metal. After sending out a GPS ping confirming we reached the art installation, our mobile app updated to provide a series of station stops. Physically tracking those vault light-marked stops gave us the password to unlock a series of tasks to complete. As we made our way to the next puzzle location, our group stopped to check one of those items off the list…by serenading a table of bemused diners with the classic song, Old MacDonald.

    After Jackson Lynch posted a TikTok video talking about a free scavenger hunt running throughout much of Brooklyn and Manhattan, half a dozen people sent the link my way so I assembled a crew to tackle The IllumiNYti. The mobile app-based experience doubled as tour of some of the weirder corners of the city, drawing heavily on the corpus of Atlas Obscura landmarks, structured around three tasks:

    • Solve a series of twelve cryptic clues hinting at locations across the city, and then map out the most efficient route to reach as many spots as possible within the six hours allotted for the hunt;
    • Upon reaching each location with the full team, activate the “check location” feature of the app to confirm the team has found the right location, activating a puzzle tied to that landmark – solving the puzzle earns 4 points;
    • After entering the correct answer to the puzzle, a series of three challenges appear, offering 1-3 points for increasingly hard (or embarrassing) challenges. Locating the original Winnie the Pooh dolls might earn an additional point, while shouting “showtime” and delivering an impromptu subway performance or serenading a table of outdoor diners might earn three.

    For Lynch’s hunt, each location puzzle was intrinsically tied to the location: competitors might need to cross-reference a book mentioned on a historical marker, anagram specific letters on a mural, or index into a series of bronze sidewalk plaques. And because there was no set pathing for the event, the challenge was as much a wayfinding exercise as anything else: our team spent the first 15-20 minutes camped out at a table in Bryant Park roughly sketching out a path from Rockefeller Center to the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch that would guide us efficiently from location to location, which likely contributed to our eventual victory.

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  • The Witching Hour Might Be My New Favorite PostCurious Game

    ByMichael Andersen
    The Witching Hour, by PostCurious

    The seemingly quaint village of Old Miring hides a dark secret. Every few generations, a child goes missing. According to local legend, it’s because of a mystical maze that appears that only people younger than sixteen can enter. The last person to disappear was your grandmother’s younger sister Lily. Tomorrow is your sixteenth birthday, so you’re almost free of the curse. Surely, you won’t have to enter the maze and uncover the town’s secrets…right?

    This is the setting for PostCurious’ newest narrative puzzletale The Witching Hour, which just launched a Kickstarter campaign for the project. ARGNet covered PostCurious’ games extensively in the past, as the at-home games offer a rich experience that prioritizes narrative storytelling as much as the puzzles themselves. And it’s the strength of that story that makes The Witching Hour my new favorite PostCurious game. To successfully navigate the maze, players will need to piece together the town’s history, figure out what happened to Old Miring’s missing children, and piece together who was ultimately responsible for the disappearances, adding a classic whodunnit challenge to PostCurious’ puzzling repertoire.

    The Witching Hour game components and instruction manual

    A Brief Introduction to The Witching Hour Gameplay

    For the introductory phase of The Witching Game, gameplay revolves around a deck of cards, designed to be drawn in sequential order. Narrative cards will tell players what card to draw next, while puzzle cards might task players with solving a puzzle to figure out the next card to draw in the sequence. This style of gameplay should be familiar to fans of games in the Unlock and Exit: The Game franchises.

    What sets The Witching Game apart from the boxed escape room market is that some cards direct players to open one of the game’s eight packets of in-universe artifacts. An artifact might include newspaper clippings and posters, or even larger objects like a clasped locket. Some objects lead players to pull additional cards, while others provide more direct narrative clues to the secret of the maze and the town’s disappearances.

    Select artifacts from The Witching Hour, along with the pull-tab hint system

    Hints are managed through a pull-tabbed card system. Each main puzzle phase has a symbol associated with it, and lifting up the pull tab reveals progressive hints to guide players through the solution process, with the first hint outlining what materials are necessary to solve the puzzle. This mechanism is particularly helpful since some puzzles may draw upon clues from multiple envelopes. Knowing whether you have enough information to solve a puzzle is typically fairly intuitive, but the reinforcement is particularly helpful given the game’s non-linear gameplay system that could have multiple puzzle tracks in play at the same time.

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  • Tales From Woodcreek Turns Actual Play into an Immersive Sampler

    ByMichael Andersen
    Deborah Ann Woll greeting the players for season 1 of Tales From Woodcreek

    Last year, Deborah Ann Woll acted as Dungeon Master for Tales From Woodcreek, a tabletop actual play adventure in eight parts. But while most actual play games rely on a combination of vivid descriptions or miniature battle sets to immerse players in the story, Tales From Woodcreek took its players on location to Ontario’s Village at Black Creek transforming an entire historical village into the game’s haunted play area. The resulting production turned into something of an immersive sampler: a tabletop adventure at its core, but drawing on everything from immersive theater and Larp to escape rooms.

    Tales From Woodcreek is looking to return for a second season, and the show seems to be adding an alternate reality game to the immersive sampler. Starting last week, the show’s Kickstarter campaign started slipping in narrative puzzles into their updates, teasing the new season’s setting and the threats to come.

    Dungeons and Dragons in a party limo, on the way to a live scavenger hunt finale

    The Session Zero is a Scavenger Hunt: Prelude to Woodcreek

    Tales From Woodcreek set the stage and expectations for the show with its “Session Zero” for the tabletop game. Typically, these sessions help guide players through character creation, acclimate to the system, and familiarize themselves with safety mechanics before the adventure formally begins. Because much of that activity happened offscreen, Tales From Woodcreek‘s “Session Zero” instead focused on introducing players and viewers alike to the format, through a one-shot adventure.

    For the first few minutes, the initial session started out normal, using the Dungeon Dudes’ studio to introduce the characters and the conceit of the one-shot. But at a critical juncture, the player characters are frozen and brought in to see a mob boss…at which point, the action transitions to a party limo, and the trip to their next destination is used to plan out a heist. Before the resulting scavenger hunt is through, the group follows a series of clues leading into the heart of a hedge maze on Toronto Island where a dramatic confrontation sets the stage for the main series.

    The “Session Zero” preview set expectations for the main event: gameplay was just as dependent on escape room style puzzles and location-specific clues as it was on dice rolling, and the game’s core cast of players (Kelly McLaughlin, Montgomery Martin, and Anjali Bhimani) would be assisted along their way by a rotating cast of guest players, starting with Ginny Di.

    Immersive highlights from Tales From Woodcreek season 1

    Escaping Woodcreek’s Curse with Flair and Panache

    According to Tales From Woodcreek‘s lore, the townsfolk of Woodcreek discovered a glowing gem that granted the town’s founding fathers magic and riches. But after a time, the magic turned into a curse that robbed the town’s descendants of love, luck, and prosperity. The events of the show’s first season see three victims of the curse returning, in hopes of freeing themselves from their collective fates.

    Every couple of episodes, a new player rotates in to assist them in this task: Iman Villani, Jessica Henwick, Shaun Majumder, and Wil Wheaton. And each episode has at least one major set piece drawing on different immersive disciplines, to take full advantage of the show’s aesthetic setting.

    Scenes that lean heavier on escape rooms might revolve around finding the right books on a bookshelf when viewed under the right light, or hunting through a space to find keys to open an elaborate locked box. Scenes pulling on immersive theater might provide instructions to one-on-one interactions at the bottom of a teacup or searching a space for hidden clues, while more Larp forward scenes might involve conversing with a sentient book or navigating a combat scenario on a maze of tiles. Even more traditional tabletop mechanics make an appearance, with multiple variants of miniature-based combat, adapted to suit the location. Watching Tales From Woodcreek felt more than a little like a tour of the various immersive art forms.

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  • Prelude to Doomsday: Are We Getting an Avengers ARG?

    ByMichael Andersen
    Robert Downey Jr, letting Denim Deadpool Ryan Reynolds talk, via Marvel on YouTube

    Last week, one of the highlights of Marvel’s Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con centered around Ryan Reynolds ask a question in a full denim Deadpool cosplay, during the Avengers: Doomsday segment. Reynolds had apparently spent the day gallivanting around the convention center, anonymously meeting fans in the costume. But that wasn’t the only bit of Marvel fashion to catch fans’ attention at the panel, as Robert Downey Jr’s sartorial choices might have teased an alternate reality game.

    Luckily, fans weren’t expected to unravel the threads of Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom themed jacket unassisted: early clues had already been seeded at a Latverian coffee popup months prior, at SXSW London.

    Images from the SXSW London popup via CBR.com coverage

    Something Is Brewing: The Dom Latveria Coffee Popup

    The Russo brothers started teasing that something would be happening at SXSW London shortly before their panels at the event, leading to the announcement that Dom Latveria Coffee would be serving small batch coffee and specialty drinks in Shoreditch, along with take-home bags of the brew. The popup was littered with easter eggs, ranging from a menu declaring “Richards was wrong”, to references to Latverian history like the Fortunov and Zefiro drinks, referencing the country’s former rulers and Victor Von Doom’s own clan, respectively.

    The coffee branding also provided an early primer to Latveria’s runic script, with Dom Latveria Coffee transliterated in English and Latverian.

    Neon green shoes with Latverian runes, posted to Robert Downey Jr’s Instagram

    Decoding Latverian Fashion: The San Diego Comic-Con Panel

    Which brings us back to San Diego Comic-Con. When Marvel’s panel started talking about Avengers: Doomsday, Robert Downey Jr walked out in a black suit jacket with neon green embroidery. The back of the jacket featured a minimalist depiction of Doctor Doom, while the cuffs, pockets, and lapel were covered in runic symbols expanding on the set introduced at SXSW London.

    Using the previous Latverian coffee branding as a starting point, Christopher Millon (editwithego), was able to piece together the messages on Robert Downey Jr’s jacket, cracking all but one of the messages. Based on his best guesses, the runes translate to:

    • “To The Victor” and “Go the Spoils” on the left and right cuffs;
    • “Justice” and “Revenge” on the left and right pockets;
    • “There is No Promise of Tomorrow” on the lapel; and
    • An as-yet-untranslated word on the breast pocket that likely matches the pattern L?O?
    The “Doom Script” as identified by editwithego, tweaked for horizontal viewing

    Millon walked through the solving process on his social accounts, and then compiled the alphabet for future reference.

    This effort has already proven helpful, since Robert Downey Jr subsequently posted on Instagram about his fashion choices for the weekend, including pairs of previously unseen shoes with Laverian messages written on them. Millon quickly translated the text to read “Valeria”, making yet another reference to Fantastic Four lore.

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  • One of the Best Larps I Ever Played Was at a Theme Park

    ByMichael Andersen
    A moment from Ghost Town Alive 2024, which saw a shaky bandit alliance formed

    Every summer, Knott’s Berry Farms transforms its cobbled together collection of historic buildings into the thriving mining town of Calico, California in Ghost Town Alive. For the price of a day pass to the park guests can live out a day in the twilight of the nineteenth century, helping shape events in the town. And while the event isn’t explicitly billed as a live action role playing game it nonetheless serves as one of the best introductions to the space I’ve seen, for children and adults alike.

    What sets Ghost Town Alive apart is how permissive it is in letting guests’ imaginations run wild. When I went in 2024, our group finished the day off having successfully convinced the town to switch their currency to a button-based economy, rigged an election for bandit leadership, cycled multiple members through the coveted role of mayor-for-the-hour, and also had a few members spend some less coveted time behind bars.

    A Bit of Ghost Town History to Set the Stage

    Ghost Town Alive started in 2016 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the park’s iconic ghost town. Knott’s Berry Farm started out as a farm stand, and expanded into a restaurant known for its fried chicken dinner. Once the wait times for the chicken dinner started to stretch into hours, Walter Knott started displaying Wild West memorabilia and transplanting actual historical buildings from nearby farms and mining towns to create the ghost town that became the focal point of the amusement park that would eventually emerge.

    So, for 2016, Ghost Town Alive did just that – it populated the town of Calico with a series of colorful characters, and played out a drama that played out across the historic buildings. And the event was enough of a rousing success that it was brought back every year since, save for two years during the pandemic. Notably, every summer Ghost Town Alive plays out a different story set in the town, centered around a different day in the fictionalized town’s history.

    Kid Friday welcomes Ghost Town Alive guests from the hotel balcony, in long underwear

    Early Introductions to the Mechanics of Ghost Town Alive

    While the exact events of Ghost Town Alive vary from year to year, the core structure remains the same: guests are welcomed to the town for Founders Day at a ribbon cutting, followed by an introduction to the various factions that make up the town. Individual characters might enlist guests to help them with anything from planning bank robberies to helping collect news for the town’s paper. The newspaper itself is released multiple times a day, serving as both periodic record of the day’s events and as a source of quests.

    My particular adventure started off with a visit to Town Hall, where I was sworn in as an honorary citizen of Calico and asked to sign the town register. After doing that, our small group of newly minted citizens were shown a scale model of the town to help us get our bearings, with a stray button resting on it. Our guide helpfully explained that this was left by Willow “Buttons” McKitrick, whose clothes are adorned with all sorts of buttons and keeps dropping them around town. We were told she’d be happy if we returned any buttons we found to her, but also encouraged to consider using them as leverage: if we wanted to, we could demand rewards for their return, threaten to blackmail her with the buttons…practically anything we could imagine.

    An issue of the Calico Gazette, enshrining our efforts to establish the “Button Standard”

    Shortly after, another member of our group proved how flexibly the buttons were used, as they discovered a stray button in the Calico bank and the teller insisted that Buttons should pay a fee for leaving the buttons there, leading our group to conspire to get buttons introduced as legal tender so the bank would owe interest for the button-based deposit. The townsfolk of Calico entertained this ludicrous idea, but didn’t make it easy to accomplish. In order to enact our plans of establishing a “Button Standard”, we needed to get signoff from one of the town’s lawyers Herbert Bird, convince the bank it was in their best interest to corner the market on the new alternative currency before it was formalized, and elect one of our cohort as mayor-for-the-hour.

    Issues of the Calico Gazette, along with calls to action on how to get involved

    While our particular situation was unique, much of Ghost Town Alive acts under similar models of escalation. Guests start out ingratiating themselves with townsfolk through small acts: an ad in the town paper might recommend checking out the Post Office to help with deliveries, joining the Calico Gazette to help report on all the news that’s fit to print in town, or joining the bank. And the initial requests are straightforward: pass a note to another townsperson (but don’t read it!), deliver a package, or find out if a character might be interested in sharing a dance at the hoe-down. But soon enough, things spiral until you’re trusted with bigger tasks to advance the day’s events like helping figure out how to safely crack a bank vault, or figuring out how to weaponize electricity to turn potato batteries into impromptu explosives.

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  • Close Enough: Welcome Back, Game Changer ARG

    ByMichael Andersen
    One of many steps in the Game Changer Hotline puzzle

    The new Game Changer ARG just launched, but it’s not tied to the newly released season of the show. Instead, it’s a community challenge for backers of the Game Changer Home Edition Kickstarter campaign, which is itself playing out as a play-at-home edition of Game Changer, where the points actually do matter because they unlock additional upgrades to the game.

    The current challenge: figure out how to leave a voicemail on the Game Changer Hotline. Sounds simple enough…but the challenge is actually a multi-layered puzzle adventure that asks players to do everything from escaping a virtual greenroom to identifying randomized clips from past episodes, on the fly.

    …and yes, if you’re looking for answers, scroll to the bottom of the article and you’ll find a few.

    Wait, “Welcome Back?” This Isn’t Game Changer’s First ARG?

    Dropout’s hit variety show Game Changer is structured so that its players are presented with a completely different game show every episode, so it’s no surprise that this isn’t Game Changer‘s first puzzle rodeo. For the show’s fifth season, the show’s host Sam Reich (or rather, his evil magician counterpart Sam Dalton) locked three contestants in the show’s greenroom, forcing them to complete an escape room to free the real Sam Reich and escape with their lives intact.

    Over the next few seasons, fans picked up on suspicious details and thought the show was running an alternate reality game on multiple occasions…a trend that continued until near the end of season 7, when the show finally did run an ARG by hiding a series of puzzles in playable minigames featured in prior episodes.

    As players progressed through the game, they learned that frequent guest Brennan Lee Mulligan conspired with the video game developers to hide secret easter eggs in each of the games, culminating in the discovery of a secret phrase that would unlock a secret final episode after it was entered 100,000 times on a website. The result: the episode Samalamadingdong, where Sam Reich was subjected to an escape room of his own, riddled with references to past shows.

    Game Changer Home Edition’s base set

    Game Changer Home Edition and the Game Within a Campaign

    Shortly before Game Changer launched its eighth season, the Dropout team presented fans with yet another surprise: a crowdfunding campaign for a “home edition” of the game, featuring playable versions of three particularly beloved episodes of the show:

    • Bingo (s06 e05), where players are trying to guess how other people will respond to prompts;
    • Name a Number (s05 e04), where players bid on challenges before knowing what the numbered bids actually mean; and
    • Sam Says (s04 e01, s05 e01, and s06 e03), a modified game of Simon Says designed to catch players in all sorts of clever loopholes.

    Smosh and Parlor Room ran playthroughs of the home edition games to give fans a chance to see the home edition versions in action, and the campaign has already raised over $5.5M from over 38,000 backers as the campaign nears its June 6th cutoff date.

    What makes this campaign particularly notable is that it acts as its own version of Game Changer, with daily prompts providing backers with multiple opportunities to play along at home. One early prompt, for example, asked something fairly simple: at least 300 players needed to give their name and phone number, no questions asked. Players who responded to that prompt were given a follow-up task yesterday, informing them that they would be getting phone calls from a number ending in -GAME within the next 24 hours. In order to score points, at least half of those called would need to answer the phone by saying, “Hello Game Changer, I’ve been here the whole time.” Over the past month fans have created edible arrangements of the Game Changer logo, submitted fake bird calls, written Sherlock Holmes fanfiction, and even replayed some of the minigames used for the original alternate reality game.

    I was proud enough of the bird call I submitted, I uploaded a backup copy of it.

    One of the key challenges with Kickstarter campaigns for projects with built-in audiences is the vast majority of the project’s most die-hard fans are going to back on day one…and while stretch goals offering new perks can help incentivize sharing the campaign, the most ardent supporters are left on the sidelines with nothing left to do.

    Luckily, a number of crowdfunding campaigns solved this problem, by turning the campaign itself into a spectacle. Machine of Death did it by offering comedic backer tiers like the “Goat Stare” level (where goats would stare at your copy of the game before it’s mailed), while campaigns like Exploding Kittens gave fans lighthearted achievements to unlock. Many of the puzzle Kickstarter campaigns featured on ARGNet have used puzzles to keep early backers engaged, with Maze of Games hiding puzzles in interviews, and PostCurious added secret puzzle perks rewarding solvers with free pins or even a chance to get written into the game as a minor character.

    The Game Changer Home Edition campaign has dabbled in a little of everything: to date, three backers have supported the campaign at the “Cuck” tier of support, where for $2,500 they get absolutely nothing from Dropout. At the same time, a number of challenges have tasked players with writing game prompts for Kickstarter Community expansions to the game. And then, there’s the puzzles. Which brings us to the Game Changer: Home Edition Challenge Hotline ARG itself.

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