Today, some friends and I played a game that we invented. I was on the host team and I think a lot of people would love to do this, so I want to explain it here.
The game is basically a geocache race. We’ve incorporated some of the elements of The Amazing Race to the game just for kicks. If you are familiar with what both of these are, then you’ll get the gist of what we’re doing. I’ll explain some of the rules we’ve developed over three different races so you can host your own Amazing Geocache Race if you want.
Here’s the way we play it:
The host team is in charge of the game activities on a given day. You pick 4 or 5 spots in your town where you are going to hide your “caches.” For our game, we use the little vinyl flags you get at Lowe’s or Home Depot. They are usually in with the sprinkler supplies. If you use a permanent marker, you can write coordinates on the flags. For instance, start the race by giving teams the first coordinates.
Each team is comprised of 2-4 players and we’ve used different techniques to get things going. For instance, if you can create a simple challenge for each team to complete, it will help provide a little time separation between them. Today we had each team bounce a super ball into a bucket to get their first set of coords. It’s simple, but it worked. The first team got it on the second try. The last team took about 8 minutes to complete the task.
Then each team uses a GPS to drive to and locate cache #1 (the first group of flags). They take one flag and using the coordinates written on that flag, they get back in the car and drive to cache #2. We usually play with 4 or 5 different caches and we have included a “detour” in each race. For example, today we had teams find and purchase an item at a local dollar store using a 1 dollar bill we gave them at the start of the race. They didn’t know what the dollar was for until they found the flags at cache #4. Each flag had a Zip-lock bag attached (weather protected) with a picture inside. Last night the host team and I took camera phone photos of several random items at the store and then printed them on my ink jet printer. The captions simply said, “Detour: go to the dollar store behind you and purchase this item before following these coordinates.”
We have had different finish lines activities. Today, we tried to keep each team in the dark about what place they were finishing. They had to put their super ball into a cardboard tube and they were told to meet back at my house at a designated time. All the teams pretty much knew what place they were in, but it was still kind of fun to save a little drama for after everyone was done racing. Which brings me to my favorite part. After the race we all meet up for barbecue and stories of the crazy events that have taken place over the 1.5 to 2 hour race.
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