Four Treasures of $10,000 each, for a total of $40,000 in Cash Prizes, is waiting to be claimed in The Great US Treasure Hunt. Jeff Kessler and David Steele have come together to launch a treasure hunt across the continental USA. A book of four chapters holds clues to four different proxy items. These items, only recognizable by decoding a chapter in the book, are hidden in four different locations. A searcher will use the discovered proxy, along with the exact ‘message decoded’ from the book, with photos of the exact location, to claim the full cash prize of $10,000!
Who will win one or more of these four Treasures? Who’s ready to solve some codes!? It sounds like it is going to be an awesome adventure!
Let’s learn more about this exciting and real life treasure challenge in Six Questions with Dave!
Six Questions with Dave:
- 1Q) In an interview with your teammate, Jeff Kessler, it is mentioned he liked ‘location’ and you liked ‘puzzles’, so you decided to put them together for The Great US Treasure Hunt. Can you share a bit about both your backgrounds and how did you meet? What inspired you to create a treasure hunt, besides those two elements of Location and Puzzles?
In Jeff’s interview with WITI Milwaukee, his original answer explained that I owned an Escape Room for 5 years, while he’s a Realtor, so I’m all about “clues and codes and puzzles” while he’s all about “location, location, location”, and when you put clues and puzzles together with location, that equals a Treasure Hunt. I believe the editing of the story might have removed some of that answer, so it wasn’t as complete as it could have been. Jeff and I have been friends for about 15 years; we met when we both sold new homes for a major homebuilder in the Austin area.
- 2Q) I’m sure you researched or had possibly worked on other treasure hunts before creating The Great US Treasure Hunt? What do you feel makes a fun hunt? What do you feel makes for a bad hunt? How did you include or exclude these items in The Great US Treasure Hunt?
*Must be tough but fair. I feel one of the critical elements of any Hunt is…in looking back on the solution, do people say “oh, that’s tough, but fair.” or do they say “well, there’s just no possible way I could have ever figured that out”? If it was tough but fair, that’s a good hunt. But if people feel that there was no way to figure it out, then that sours people toward other treasure hunts. So hopefully we’ve come up with one that is tough but fair.
*Not open-ended. There has to be a winner. If it turns out that our story is too tough to “crack” then we’ll drop clues every 30 days (or faster) so that we definitely have 4 winners before next summer, when we want to do another hunt. It’s just disappointing when a Hunt never ends or never seems to end (Fenn, Secret).
*Safe and no digging. The best part of the Treasure’s Trove hunt was that it proved items could be hidden without being buried. We wanted to replicate that. Places that were easy to reach, items that weren’t buried.
*Doesn’t cost the hunter a fortune to take a shot at it. The $7.77 pre-order price should be all you have to spend…until you actually decode a message and have to travel to the site. And because the messages point to the exact location, you won’t be wandering from one vague location to another. No expensive expeditions where “maybe it’s here, maybe it isn’t.” There are a couple other hunts out there right now with a $50 entry fee…a little steep, in our humble opinions.
*No secrets after it’s all over. We’ll reveal all the solutions, the winners, the locations, the items, once all 4 items have been found, and everyone will be able to say “okay, that’s where it was. Rats, I was so close.” And hopefully everyone will be ready to take another try when we do #2 next summer.
- 3Q) What do you expect from the hunt? As someone who has experience in Escape Rooms, I’m sure you’ve seen how ‘puzzlers’ think? What do you believe is the difficulty level of the codes within the book? Escape Rooms range from novice to expert. Where would you rate the coded chapters to solve in the book?
I just hope that we get a lot of players, and everyone looks back after it’s all over and says “okay, that was fun, it was fair, and I’m looking forward to the next one.”
The hardest part of creating an escape room and the puzzles within is not knowing if a particular puzzle is easy or hard until you actually begin using it in a real-life game situation. Sometimes you’ll create a puzzle that you believe is easy, but turns out to be far more difficult than intended. And vice versa. You want people to be able to solve all the puzzles within 60 minutes and have fun doing so…it’s easy to make a puzzle that takes longer than 60 minutes to tackle, but then that’s not fun for the players. So you have to design each puzzle with the players in mind.
Unfortunately, I didn’t write the book, and I don’t know how to crack the codes in each chapter, though our author (Theco DeMaster, an obvious nom de plume) helped me create some puzzles for the Escape Room, and we’ve talked about how the puzzles in the chapters should be far more difficult than an Escape Room puzzle…clearly, we don’t want all 4 items found on the first day.
So I’m hoping he’s created puzzles that are solvable, but maybe not solvable in 24 hours. Again, tough but fair. I’ve read the book several times, and even though I know exactly what the items are and where they are, I don’t see anything in any chapter that leaps out at me as “ah, this is how we crack this chapter.” Then again, I haven’t really tried to crack a chapter. I want to be as surprised as everyone else when the winners start coming forward.
And if we have to start dropping hints and clues, that’s what we’ll do.
- 4Q) It’s been mentioned the object to find is something like an ordinary object. Is the object to find related anyway to the story, or is it only realized in the decoded message. Can you give some examples of how might this object might be hidden, if not buried? While 500 miles apart from each other, can you tell us anything more about where or where not they are at?
The objects are ordinary items, chosen practically at random. None of them have anything to do with the story, and are only revealed to the Solver once that person deciphers one of the chapters. Then they’ll know exactly where they are going and what they are looking for. They are hidden, but not buried, and I’ll let your fans think of all the ways to effectively hide something without burying it…when you think about it for a while, you’ll realize there are many ways to conceal things without burying them.
Other than 500 miles apart, other guidelines. Absolutely no dangerous areas (water, hiking, woods, roadways, etc.). They are within 500 feet of safe, free parking, with no entry fees to the location. You will be able to approach the area, get the item quite easily after what will likely be no more than one or two minutes of searching, and leave the area with an ordinary item worth $10,000.
Every location is also viewable on Google Earth and Google Street View! So when you decode a chapter, you’ll be able to verify the exact location…and when you roll up to park at the location, it’ll be like deja vu, because you’ve seen this place before.
- 5Q) What advice can you give to someone new to armchair treasure hunting, who would love to take up the hunt, but yet is concerned they won’t be able to solve the codes, riddles, or puzzles, inside the book to discover the location?
I hope that The Great U.S. Treasure Hunt might be more accessible than some other hunts because it has a very low entry price, doesn’t require complicated illustrations (text only), and someone who simply reads the story might recognize something that triggers a “what if” response…they try it, and suddenly they are decoding a message that nobody else discovered.
The best part for new hunters is that each solution is unique, so there won’t be 1,000 possible locations hinted at through overly vague clues…this was a major problem with the Fenn hunt, but as it was also a $2 million hunt, not a $10,000 hunt (times four), perhaps being overly vague was necessary in that case. The Great U.S. Treasure Hunt has one precise solution per chapter, and you won’t be sent on a wild goose chase once you’ve solved a chapter.
That’s not to say that there won’t be people who blunder off onto an adventure that takes them to the wrong location…there are always people who will be able to come up with an entirely incorrect solution that they believe is rational, but isn’t. There are countless cases of confirmation bias causing hunters to search an area simply because they wanted to search that area, and found something to confirm that they were correct…but they weren’t.
Our author, Theco, has told us that “if you can’t explain to someone else within one sentence how you decoded a chapter, try again.” So before you blunder off onto your own adventure, explain to someone else how you arrived at the solution; if you can’t convince them to travel with you, you’re probably wrong.
Most of all, have fun. Read the story. Read each chapter a couple of times before trying to decode it. Maybe read the chapters in reverse order. If you have no idea, show the story to someone else in the family. Read it out loud. Have it read to you. Try different approaches.
- 6Q) You have mentioned clues will be provided if no one is making headway in solving the hunts. And that another 6 hunts are due out after the initial 4 treasures are found. Can you share a basic timeframe for these events? How can searchers keep up to date on all that is happening?
We want to have this wrapped up and start The Great U.S. Treasure Hunt Part Two by next summer, so we’ll drop hints on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc., any time a 30-day period passes where no object is found.
If items are still not found and summer is approaching, we’ll drop hints faster than 30 days. Maybe 15 days. 10 days. 5 days. Whatever it takes to wrap it up and get the next one going, because we don’t want there to be any overlap.
There will be an e-book after the Hunt is over that reveals all the solutions, codes, winners, locations, items, and so on, before the next Hunt starts. It’s likely that anyone following The Great U.S. Treasure Hunt will already know all this information, but we’ll wrap it all up in an e-book which maybe costs $4.95 or lower price, just in case someone wants all the information in one place. We’ll also describe a little bit about each location, how and why it was chosen, what it was like on the day each object was hidden, etc.
The Great U.S. Treasure Hunt is 4 chapters, but was originally a 10-chapter story, so when Part Two comes out next summer, it will wrap up the story that is started in chapters 1-4. Six more items will be concealed in six more locations…one of those items is already in place.
There have been no clues or hints in this response, so if you are participating in The Great U.S. Treasure Hunt, rest assured that this was just a response to Jenny, and it cannot help you decode any of the chapters. (Not everything has clues; the book stands alone.)
Good luck and have fun!