Treasure Hunt Builder

Although it's impossible to know for certain who staged the first Treasure Hunt Party, good old wikipedia says, "The treasure hunt as a party game is attributed to socialite Elsa Maxwell. Elsa was a gossip columnist, author, songwriter, and professional hostess renowned for her parties for royalty and high society figures of the 1920's. She developed a gift for staging games and diversions at parties for the rich, and began making a living devising treasure-hunt parties, come-as-your-opposite parties and other sorts, including a scavenger hunt in Paris in 1927 that inadvertently created disturbances all over the city." I remember the first Treasure Hunt Party I attended. It was in Hollywood in 1981 at a friend of a friend's house. Besides the Treasure Hunt, there were other games like darts and charades. But what struck me most, was how organized the Treasure Hunt was and how much fun it was to try to find the clues with a team of strangers. We all got to know quite a bit about each other over the course of the evening. Unfortunately, we did not get to the Treasure first, but that didn't dampen our enjoyment of the game one bit.

There has always been some confusion about the difference between a Treasure Hunt and a Scavenger Hunt. Simply put, a Scavenger Hunt involves going to random places to obtain items on a list. For instance, you may be given a list including "spatula" and "baseball cap". You would then have to go to places where you might be likely to find these items. The first person or team to obtain all the items on their list wins the game. A Treasure Hunt, on the other hand, involves a series of clues that ultimately point to a "Treasure", which will have much more value than any of the items on the Scavenger Hunt list. Each clue will be a puzzle and will point to the location of the next clue. Each person or team competes against the others to try to find the Treasure first. The clues mainly consist of puzzles, pictures, maps or directions, and rhymes, short poems, or limericks. The Treasure Hunt Builder also utilizes rebuses (in our free Christmas Images Treasure Hunt) and eye-spy type puzzles. We do not make scavenger hunts, but you can find many examples by searching the internet.