Room Escape Artist

Don’t be a jackass

Location:  Phoenix, AZ

Date Played: October 19, 2024

Team Size: 6; we recommend 6

Duration: about 5 hours

Price: $510 per team

Ticketing: Private and Public, in a way. You play with your group, but others are also playing, and you’re in a public space.

Accessibility Consideration:  You will either be sitting in a car, or jogging around the Phoenix desert in the dark.

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

Background

This past October, I participated in the Arizona Treasure Hunt. For those unfamiliar with the hunt, it takes place on the outskirts of Phoenix under the Hunters moon in mid-October and has been running for over 70 years! Our team of 6 raced around Phoenix using a paper map for the better part of 5 hours. I haven’t had this much fun 1) in the dark, or 2) in a car, in ages! 

Huge thank you to Team Prospect who were gracious enough to welcome me to the team for this experience. In advance of the hunt, all teams are armed with some pre-work for the hunt, namely, specific items that we were requested to bring and research we were intended to do, in the form of an HWOW.

Here’s the story of my experience at the Arizona Treasure Hunt 73.

Road Atlas FTW

The hunt begins with each team getting assigned a start time, and about once a minute, teams are given their puzzling materials and released out into the world. You’re given the exact coordinates to find your first puzzle, and if you don’t need to open any emergency envelopes to get GPS coordinates of your next puzzle location, this is the last time you’ll be able to punch an address into your GPS.

I found myself surprisingly thankful for all the times that on my family’s long drives from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, I entertained myself by digging out the road atlas and following along exactly where we were on the roadway map by identifying which exits on the highway we were passing. Young Theresa would be thrilled to know that not only was she finding a reprieve from boredom during a 4-hour car ride, but she was also honing a very useful skill for her puzzle hunting career 20 years later.

How to Solve

Anyway, back to the hunt logistics. Once you’ve arrived at the coordinates for your first puzzle, you then need to jump out of the car, and find the exact puzzle location somewhere in the Phoenix desert nearby. 

The puzzle style was varied, and AZTH breaks their puzzles into 3 categories: paper, visual, and working visual. Working visual, in this case, means a puzzle that you didn’t just look at but had to physically manipulate or verbally interact with in some way. The varied puzzles kept me engaged. I especially loved a paper puzzle that we ended up solving on the hood of our rental van, the only surface large enough to spread out the materials we were provided. Our car came with a built-in table, cool!

Answer Ambiguity

By far the biggest weakness of this hunt was its methods for answer selection and validation. Each answer resolved eventually to an icon printed on the map, but frequently it was not clear if we had actually arrived at the end of the puzzle. We’d think we had an answer, and a corresponding icon on the map, but was that the end, or should we look for another extraction? Would we overcomplicate the solution to the puzzle by taking it a step further? Who knows?! Personally I was able to overlook this weakness and attribute it to the quirks of this particular hunt and its facilitation methods, but can certainly see how this would be frustrating to other participants. 

If you arrive at a not-quite right but pretty close answer, sometimes you’ll find yourself confronted not with the next puzzle, but instead, a jackass.

Like other notable treasure hunts, winning is not always a coveted position and second place is actually where you’d like to place. First place comes with the additional prize of being responsible for creating the hunt for the next three years.

Low Tech

The structure of the hunt is unlike any hunt I’ve participated in before. There’s no fancy app or technology used to enter answers. The hunt relies on a paper map for navigation and sealed envelopes for hinting and revealing answers. When you’re finished with the hunt, and turn in your answer packet, all the scoring is done by hand. It’s endearing.

Doing something low tech means it’s harder to accommodate puzzle errors once they happen. There was clearly a lot of love that went into this hunt. At some point during the experience, a small (but critical) typo was discovered in a clue, and the organizing team went through over 100 pages and hand wrote the correction onto each and every page. 

In Conclusion

I loved this hunt. I’d love to participate again in the future because I really enjoyed the “race around the city” aspect of this hunt. I’m not always the smartest puzzler in the group but I really love being able to supplement my puzzling ability with my willingness to sprint or jog to a target… or run around the Arizona desert at night. 

We found not just one but two jackasses 🙂

Tips For Visiting

• While the hunt is difficult, securing your team entry is even tougher. Entries often sell out in a matter of minutes. Make sure to solve the puzzle that will allow you to know the exact time that tickets will go on sale. 
• All the materials for previous years are available online. Newbies should review a previous year in order to prep for the experience in the hunt.