The best hiding place is one people walk past twice before they look at it properly. Not the one nobody can find. There is a difference, and getting it wrong is the single most common way a scavenger hunt dies in the first ten minutes.
A clue that is genuinely invisible does not make the hunt harder. It makes it stop. The difficulty should live in working out where to look, never in whether the thing is physically findable once you are looking in the right place.
The rule that decides all fifteen
Before you hide anything, say the location out loud as if you were giving up and telling them. If the sentence is "it is taped under the third drawer, at the back, behind the silverware tray", that is too many steps. If it is "it is in the freezer", that is one step and the clue can do the rest of the work.
Indoors
- Inside a book, at the right page. Works best if the clue before it names a number. A page number is a satisfying thing to be given.
- Taped behind a framed photograph. Visible the moment anyone lifts it, and nobody lifts it without a reason to.
- In the freezer. Genuinely a good hiding place, and the reason is that it is funny rather than difficult.
- Rolled inside a paper towel tube. The tube is already in the room and nobody has ever looked inside one.
- Under a doormat. The most obvious place in the house, which is exactly why it survives three passes.
- Inside a shoe. Pick the one shoe in the house that is unmistakably somebody's. Ownership makes it findable.
- Behind a wall clock. The clue before it should mention a time.
- In the pocket of a coat that is hanging up. Not a closet. A coat someone can see.
Outdoors
- Under an upturned flowerpot. Weatherproof and reusable.
- Tied to the underside of a backyard bench. Findable by anyone who crouches, invisible to anyone who does not.
- Inside the mailbox. Only if you can stop the mail arriving.
- In a hanging basket. High enough to need looking up, which people rarely do.
- Under a specific paving stone. Mark the right one so it reads as chosen rather than as forty identical stones.
- Wedged in a fence panel gap. Good for a folded card, bad for rain.
- Inside a garden shed, on the door itself. Face height, which is the one place nobody looks in a shed.
Want more than fifteen? 100 Places to Hide a Clue sorts a hundred spots by room and by how hard they are to find, from easy for little kids to sneaky for teens.
Making one harder without making it unfair
If a hiding place is landing too quickly, do not move it somewhere harder. Change the clue that points at it. The location stays fair and the thinking gets longer, which is the part people actually enjoy.
Before anybody plays
Walk the whole hunt yourself, in order, at the pace a player would. It takes ten minutes and it is the only reliable way to catch the clue you hid somewhere you later moved, or the one whose answer you can see from where the previous clue was found.
- Hide everything, in reverse order, finishing with the first clue.
- Walk it forwards without reading your own notes.
- Fix the two that did not work. There are always two.
Running one on Halloween? Halloween Treasure Hunt Clues has twenty riddles ready to hide, each one pointing at a spot most houses have.
