Six Questions with Wgardner: Creator of the Kodewords Kards Armchair Treasure Hunt

Two $500 Cash Prizes! Can you be the first person to find the Final Kodeword or can you be the first person to find ALL the Kodewords in the deck of Kodewords Kards? Or maybe…..will you be both, and win a $1000 prize?!

This Thanksgiving Holiday comes with the release of the long awaited adventure presented by Wgardner– entitled Kodewords Kards. It will be exciting to open our country mailbox and see the deck of Kodewords Kards waiting there. And for those not receiving physical decks, I’m sure Printers are ready to create your own! Join the adventures on the Kodewords Kards Facebook Page or on the MW Forum!

I was thrilled to catch up with Wgardner and learn more about this fascinating hunt! Let’s hear what he had to say! Enjoy!

Six Questions with wgardner!

• 1Q) A deck of ‘Kards’ with cryptic Kodewords to discover? What a neat idea! Will you share what inspired you, or how you came up with the idea to create puzzles utilizing a deck of Kards?

First, thank you Jenny for your interest in this project and for all that you do for the community! I have made custom decks of cards for a few other games before, so I was familiar with the process. As I’ve gone through treasure and puzzle hunts before, I thought of a few interesting ways that coded information could be hidden into multi-piece puzzles and cards. As I pondered how I might make a treasure hunt different from those that had been done before, the deck of cards concept came naturally.

BTW, in case anyone was curious, gmail and social media accounts for codewordscards were largely already taken. That’s why it ended up being Kodewords Kards with ks instead of cs.

• 2Q) For those searchers who are printing out their own ‘deck of Kards’, is there anything they need to be concerned with during the printing process? For instance, my printer doesn’t always print the sharpest colors or clearest details. Will these, or other things, be an issue? Would you suggest using a professional service to print out decks or is an ordinary, maybe not so wonderful, home printer ok?

A decent home color printer should be good enough in most cases. You can compare the PDF file with the printed kards to see if you think your printouts are missing anything. Certainly if you think you can’t read text or symbols on your printouts that you can see in the PDF on your computer screen, you might want to take it to a print-shop to be printed.

Also if your printer has poor alignment between the sides, that could cause a problem. If you trim a mm or two off the edges of the kards, that will probably be fine, but it’s helpful to have the two sides be aligned close to perfectly.

If you’re not sure, you might want to just print out the first two-sided page as a test. If that prints well with good clarity and alignment, print the rest. If not, head to a print shop.

• 3Q) Before creating Kodewords Kards, had you worked on any other treasure hunts? What type of treasure hunts do you like best? Fully armchair, physical boots on the ground, or a mixture of both?

I got interested in treasure hunts recently after reading an article about the community in Game World of Puzzles. Since then I’ve picked up a bunch of different puzzles and hunt books including Masquerade, ATT, Dar, Fandango, Beacon Star, Oracle, Golden Apple Tale, and your Introduction to Codes and Ciphers. I’ve also participated in The Art of Hidden Messages and Lamp with Four Keys hunts, which were interesting non-book challenges.

I like hunts where most-to-all of the challenge can be solved at home. I prefer that the challenge be something that is solvable by most folks who try it. BOTG can be fun but can also be hard for many folks who don’t have the means to travel, and a BOTG hunt had better have a large enough prize to make traveling to the treasure site worth the trip!

For Kodewords Kards, I tried to make the challenge accessible to almost anybody. I also tried to structure it so it would start easy and get more complicated the further a participant gets, like some video games that have introductory levels that teach you how to play the game before getting to the “meatier” levels later. The challenge does require working with codes and ciphers and some high school math. If folks aren’t comfortable with things like binary numbers then Kodewords Kards may not be for them.

• 4Q) What did you enjoy most about the process of creating Kodewords Kards? How long did it take you to produce the treasure hunt and Kards?

I like the challenge of structuring the overall top-level puzzle as well as incorporating many different ways of both encoding and hiding information. I also enjoy digital image manipulation so the process of generating and manipulating the imagery was fun too. I probably worked on this on-and-off for a few months, primarily in the summer.

• 5Q) The rules include a split of prizes, if more than one correct submission is received by the end of the day December 1st- EST (2019). Are you expecting the puzzles to all be solved by then?

I’m hoping it won’t be solved by then, but I know of a few hunts that were solved in a surprisingly short time so I figured I’d cover my bases. I also wanted to make sure that folks who received their kards in the mail a day early didn’t have a large unfair advantage.

One of the challenges in creating a treasure hunt (as opposed to a puzzle hunt) is making something that isn’t solved very quickly and also is solved at some point. That’s a tough balance to find.

After the teaser puzzle was released, many experienced puzzle-hunters submitted correct entries and won decks. I’ll be interested to see how puzzle-hunters find this challenge as it is closer to a treasure-hunt with hidden information to find than it is to a puzzle-hunt with a set of presented puzzles to solve.

• 6Q) The hunt has begun! Do you have plans on creating others? Or what are you doing with your free time now that the wonderful project of Kodewords Kards has been released? Thank you for the Fun!

I’ll see how this one goes before I decide whether or not do work on future hunt designs. I also enjoy many other types of puzzles and have recently started trying to create crossword puzzles. I am married and have two teenagers at home and an older son in college, so they take up a lot of time too. 🙂

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