[lucidhalloween]

Hi all

Ok, time has come to start planning this year...
I was thinking about having a kind of hillbilly roanoke cannibal colony meets jeepers creepers with a little dash of wrong turn about it. Scarecrow for the front garden, skelly in a rocking chair, bone wind chimes, pig mask skellies in the back BBQing a corpse.. you get the idea.

The problem I'm having is that I like it to be interactive, almost like an escape room with a prize at the end for people who solve the riddles/ collect tokens. It's always a fairly small party, so I'm happy with people wondering through the house, and usually theme each room.

Do you lovely people have any ideas about either riddles or puzzles or something I can do that would tie in with this theme?
So far I've got a vague idea about a 'trophy room' with paper mache hybrid animal heads mounted and a checklist.. kind of a spot the missing animal which is then the clue for that room. Also toying with a face puzzle.. like a skinned face when put in the right order will have a clue on the back to solve that room (Granny's quilting room?)

Any suggestions appreciated!

 

[Frankie's Girl]

I've done photo scavenger hunt type of games before. Especially easy if all your guests tend to have mobiles with decent cameras.
For my photo scavenger hunt, I did 13 thirteens. I had either the number "13" or a group of thirteen objects. The first one was in the game instruction sign itself "the first one is free - this sign is one of 13! Take a photo and good hunting!" There were 13 spiders crawing on the kitchen wall. I had a entryway garland that contained 13 bats woven into the drapery. There was a bloody hashmarked count on a clown's jack in the box lid that added up to 13. An actual photo of myself and husband in with the rest of our "normal" photos with us holding up 13 fingers. A 13 hour clock on the mantle...

Or could be actual collecting of objects: the way I did it is to make scenes that contain a variation of a specific icon, but HIDE it really well. So like one year, I had made up 4 inch paper disks that had a cool spider graphic icon (it was for my Spiderific Invasion party). I made them black and white so it wouldn't be super easy to go hunt for a specific color. I put double stick tape on them and then hid like 100 something of those things ALL OVER THE HOUSE/YARD. Nowhere that required rifling through books or drawers (this was made clear in the sign posted with the game rules - all spiders were going to be "out and about" so no need to flip the books and pilfer through the cabinets). I put one on a hubcap of a car in the driveway, then another on a clock. One was just the right size to prop open the skull's jaws of a skeleton display in the graveyard in the walkway. One was taped to the windchimes hanging off the porch. One on the cover of a magazine, taped to a newspaper, used AS a bookmark hanging out of a book, inside a display of 3d spiders... I actually was still finding them for at least two weeks after the party was over with.

Any spiders found, the player was instructed to turn them in at the spider containment center. I built a small cage with a slot on top and had a supply of pencils nearby. Instructions were to sign their name neatly on the back and drop their spiders inside. At an appointed time, I counted up the spiders and awarded the winner a door prize. I did have to set a start time as well as I had a few earlybirds that were SUPER EAGER to start collecting and likely would have cleared them out of house and yard in 15 minutes if I'd let them!



For your theme, you might look for crows since there was a running theme of crows/scarecrow imagery. OR even better... Jeepers Creepers' Creeper hunted body parts for himself to stay alive. So you could have them looking for actual body parts. So you could do a standard looking drawing or even go get a bunch of different ones and have each room (or divide up different areas) and have them contain specific body parts and hints/riddles of which one they're looking for.

I love the idea of even using lighting or sound to give the hints - like have one area lit red and have a low drumbeat soundtrack playing just loud enough to hear when standing right there - for a heart. Or a vignette that contains books and brain teasers and references to the mind and thinking.... for a brain.



The first movie was concentrating on eyeballs so it could even be locate the eyeball in each scene. Could be quite fun figuring out how to include them. Could be a realistic bloody eyeball hanging from a skull's socket. Could be a lovely black and white framed anatomical drawing. Could be a blown up page out of a storybook that happened to include a passage about an eyeball...

But in all these cases, you'd need to decide if you want people to actually be touching your stuff, or just taking a photo (I liked the photo part because they didn't have to mess with things, but the paper icons were actually fun and no one messed up anything). And it was hilarious how sneaky folks got about finding things and trying NOT to alert others to the stuff they found!

 

[lucidhalloween]

Frankie's Girl.. that's awesome! Pure gold! I never thought of people taking pics instead of physically getting things.. I love it and am totally stealing your ideas... thank you!