As a puzzle enthusiast, I get a lot of mileage out of Geocaches (hidden objects at GPS coordinates). They’re great locally for getting out of the house, and while on vacation they can be an excellent way to experience the area.
One of the challenges, though, is how to retain enthusiasm for the hobby once your find count reaches the thousands. Certainly a cache hidden at a scenic vista or a puzzle cache that takes hours of effort to solve can be quite rewarding intrinsically, but many, many caches are simply tiny magnetic containers hidden in parking lots, and those don’t inspire the imagination quite as much.
The administrators of Geocaching.com understand this, and occasionally they assemble events to mix up the formula a little bit. The most recent event was the Mystery at the Museum event.
During the Mystery at the Museum event, every cache was assigned a matching clue, gem, or other piece of evidence. Players would need to find the right kinds of evidence in order to progress through the game and earn unique digital souvenirs. Geocaching.com even added a final puzzle to the challenge to reward everyone who participated.
Christina and I really liked how the event was set up. It drew us to some of the more “boring” caches in the area- the ones that can be found in abandoned parking lots and the top floors of parking garages. Because we had an objective, though, it was easy to stay focused and exciting to see what happened once we logged each piece of evidence.
We also had a few other bonus rewards- some of the areas around us we thought were boring held a few hidden gems of restaurants and stores we plan to revisit.
Aside from one streak where every cache we located was buried deep within spiders’ nests, we had a great time getting out and enjoying the summer evenings. We stuck mainly to traditional caches for this challenge (cache is at posted coordinates) rather than puzzle caches, which traditionally take longer to solve, and we still felt mentally engaged by the challenge.
I really hope Geocaching.com continues to set up events like this, particularly if they tweak the formula each time to keep us guessing. Geocaching is still rudimentary when it comes to being able to play with your data to visualize what you’ve accomplished (I’ve found Geocaches in 42 states and more than a handful of countries, and there’s no built-in way to visualize it), so there are plenty of ways Geocaching.com can make efforts to keep fans of the hobby going for a long time to come.
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