NextClue
A chain of puzzles. Some you crack from a chair. Some you have to go and stand in.
You have walked past it a hundred times.
The brass disc set into the paving. The date carved above a door nobody uses. The one tree on the quad that does not match the others. A campus is thick with things hiding in the open, and the only reason you have never noticed them is that nobody ever gave you a reason to look.
NextClue is that reason. Six chapters of it.
It is a chain, not a scavenger hunt.
This is not a set of places to go and tick off in any order you like. It is a sequence of steps, and each one is there because of the ones around it. The order is not decoration — it is the story, and it is also the difficulty.
Some open together. Some wait their turn.
Parts of the chain unlock as a group, so a team can split up and run several at the same time. Other parts stay shut until something specific has been finished. Working out which is which — and who goes where — is most of playing this well.
Finishing one hands you the next one's key.
A step can leave your team something, and a later step will ask for it. Some of it is physical and lives in your bag; the app will name what you need and then get out of the way, because it can tell you what a step wants and it cannot see whether you have it.
Real coordinates. Real weather.
Some steps can only be finished while you are standing in front of the thing, so some of this happens outdoors, at walking pace, in a place you were fairly sure you already knew. Not all of it. You will do a few of these sitting down.
Not one of the real ones — this one is only here. The wheel is set to the number of chapters in The Rose Garden Cipher. Turn it back.
RKJMKX
- P01
- P02
- P03
Three steps, open together from the moment you start. Nothing says you have to do them in that order, or that the same person has to do all three. Split up.
- P14
- P15
- P16
And then a run where finishing one is the only thing that opens the next. No amount of splitting up gets you past this — the team arrives together or not at all.
The whole event is those two shapes, interleaved — and the last step will not open until every single thing before it has been done.
Real coordinates, all of them — about 5.0 km end to end. Some are where a puzzle lives. Some are where the answer to a puzzle you are already carrying only becomes visible in person. None of them gets a pin until a clue has earned it.
2–5
Small enough to argue. Big enough to split up when a puzzle needs four of you in four places.
CLOCK
Start in March, finish in September. The timer belongs to your team, not to a calendar.
A PLACE
Before you buy one, the screen shows you the place on the board it will drop you to. Bought for the whole team, with your name on it.
Orientation is a slideshow. This is a reason to walk into a building you have no class in.
The best way to learn a place is to need something from it. So NextClue puts the answers in the world instead of on the screen: you cannot finish it from a laptop, and you cannot finish it alone. Five people who have argued their way across a campus together know it — and each other — better than five people who sat through a tour.
Organisers write the clues, drop the sites on a real map, and set what a hint costs. Everything else is the teams.