One reasonably major puzzle hobby that has not yet really been touched on in this blog has been that of the armchair treasure hunt, wherein a book, web site or some other publication has cryptic clues to the whereabouts of, usually, one or more physical hidden treasures. This has a long history; I enjoyed reading of the Treasure Hunt Riots in the UK at the start of the twentieth century, and mention of “Manx Gold”, a novelette by one Agatha Christie to promote tourism in the Isle of Man. Arguably you can trace the genre back probably almost two thousand years to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
However, at least in modern times, probably the most famous example of the genre is Masquerade from 1979, explained page-by-page on Dan Amrich’s site, with further discussion of the unusual conclusion to the hunt. Masquerade caught public attention to the point where it (re?)sparked interest in the genre; Mark Parry’s site has details of other such armchair treasure hunts of the 1980s and early ’90s; for the most recent two decades or so, the state of the art has been the work of the Armchair Treasure Hunt Club. Additionally, the IT consultancy Logica (now part of the CGI group) have had their own hunt in the south-east almost every year for nearly thirty years. (My pick of the bunch is their 1992 hunt, which dispenses with their usual question-based format and does so with great style and internal logic.)
Membership of the Armchair Treasure Hunt Club is a very reasonable £20 per year via their registration page – but a free competition starts at midnight BST tonight with a prize of a year’s membership. The club has run four such competitions already, with the hunts and their solutions still available online so that you can get used to the form. The last competition was open for a little over a month and was resolved by a random draw between five correct submissions, so your odds are not bad at all!
What was “The Logica ATH” is now on a new site, called Pablos ATH (http://www.pablosath.com/)
The entry above is correct in the sense that “CGI GROUP” was/is involved – but the main site has changed.
The poster for the quiz will be published on 21 November 2014.
Please be encouraged to participate. Contact the site for more details.
Thanks for that, Shireen! I had checked a week or two ago, found the changed URL and seen the announcement of the date. Tomorrow I may very well post about the event, time permitting.