Scavenger Hunt Builder
Two kinds of hunt, both printable, both free. Pick the ages, pick where they are allowed to look, and print it. No sign-up, and nothing to buy.
Who is playing?
They read it themselves and work it out.
Where can they look?
Turn off any room you would rather not have searched.
Where are they hunting?
Works in any home, in any weather, with no setting up.
How long?
How many things?
How many copies?
The finishThe sheet
Optional, and it goes on the winner's card. You do not choose where the prize goes: the last clue leads to it, so it belongs at the trail's last stop. The grown-up's sheet says which one that is.
Every sheet has a line for a name at the top, left empty for them to fill in.
Prints on ordinary paper. In the print box, set Margins to Default and turn Background graphics on, or the cut lines vanish.
Your hunt
Every room is switched off, so there is nowhere to hide anything. Turn one back on.
How to run it
Print the sheets and cut the cards apart along the pale dashed lines. The pack comes in order, and the number on each card is where it gets hidden, not the order you hand it out. So card 2 goes at the place card 1 describes. Work backward from the prize if that is easier to hold in your head.
The prize goes at the trail's last stop, because that is what the last clue leads to. The grown-up's sheet names it at the top. Put the prize there first, with the winner's card beside it, then walk the trail with the rest of the cards in your hand and drop each one as you go.
That last sheet is your copy and nobody else's: it lists every hiding place in order so you can find your own clues again, which matters more than it sounds. The stop everybody loses is the one the person who hid it has forgotten.
Hand over card 1 and say nothing else. If a child stalls for more than a minute, read the clue out loud in a different voice rather than explaining it. Hearing it again solves it about half the time, and solving it themselves is the entire point.
Why the clues come in three ages
A clue that delights a five year old insults an eleven year old, and the same sheet cannot do both. The little ones name a thing the child already knows in plain words, because an adult is reading them out. The middle set has one step of misdirection, so the answer arrives on the second look. The oldest set uses wordplay and second meanings, and is properly hard.
What none of them do is leave a player with no route in. Every clue names somewhere in an ordinary house, in words that take a second look, and never a riddle whose answer you either know or do not. If a hunt stalls completely, something is wrong with the clue, not the child.
Mixed ages
Build it for the youngest player and let the older ones be fast, or run it twice with two different age settings and two colors of paper. Two trails that meet at the same last hiding place works better than one trail everybody crowds around, and nobody notices the easier one was shorter.