A Brief History Of Rhyme

I'm posting my post-hunt business here to avoid boring any Mustache readers who just don't give a damn about treasure hunts. And there are several.

First off: I apologize to anyone who didn't have a good time. We (by which I mean Mattson, Pammy, and myself) underestimated both the skill of some of these teams and the vigilance of the Brainerd Police Department's Special Vagrant Task Force, or whatever the 6 cop cars crusing north Brainerd call themselves. We had more clues in the planning stages, but circumstances gradually eliminated them until we were down to a spare 10 clues, enough for a quick, tight hunt. When police interference cut out a couple of clues, things got disappointly short.

Regarding the fee: I realize that the past two hunts have cost $3 and $7 (with pizza). However, it's also important to remember that in both cases, the organizers took a huge loss. We decided that this was a rather silly situation, and $6 is a fair price to pay for a couple hours of entertainment. A night hunt required much more scouting and materials, and with $6 per person we roughly broke even (see JM's math). Tay may be gentlemanly enough to deal with working for dozens of hours and losing a bunch of money, but I feel that we set an appropriate precedent for future hunts, should they come to pass.

Regarding the final standings: John Wilkes Booth arrived at the BHS lot about 5 minutes before Lee Harvey Oswald. Matt Capelle finished his final banana just as the Dain Train started in on his potassium-loading. Roughly 10 minutes later, Leon C showed up, and Mattson decided to hold them for a few minutes so we could have an eating showdown with Sam Walker. In retrospect, this move doesn't make much sense, but it seemed like a great idea at 1 a.m. Ashley Widmark overcame her hatred of both Sprite and bananas to defeat Chris Runyan by a spare 1 yellow fruit.
Here we come upon the first of our issues: who won between these two teams? Leon C arrived there first, but Sam Walker won the eating contest. If we'd have let Chris start when his team arrived and let Ashely start when she arrived a minute later, this would have been much more fair, but we didn't, so it wasn't.
Another issue: Lee Harvey didn't recieve their morse code sheet due to a mix up at the park, so they had a delay while going to get a key from someone's house. Would this have pushed them past John Wilkes Booth? Impossible to tell.
And finally, probably our biggest blunder in respect to finishing order: there was a clue down by the river access past the cemetary. Team Sam Walker spent 15 minutes walking through the dark on a fruitless search for a clue halted by either technical difficulties or a parks and rec worker. We called the halt soon after this. No other team had been to the cemetary yet, and due to the fact that two groups (Sam Walker and Pammy and myself) had been stopped by cops down there already, we decided to cut the clue. Here we made our mistake: we neglected to compensate Sam Walker with a time bonus, or make other teams wait 10-15 minutes when they would have been doing that clue. Realistically, this could have been the difference between first and third place for Sam Walker.

Leon C had some delays as well, but those were both brought largely upon themselves. Climbing a fence on Washington? Going the wrong way down a one way? C'mon guys.

To those who chose not to continue after things got weird: we hope you had a good time, and we are sorry that thing got a little stickier than predicted. To those who kept going and finished: Congrats on finishing. I hope you enjoyed yourselves, sorry if you didn't.

For my thoughts on comparing this hunt to previous hunts, see my second comment here.


Now then: is there any demand for another hunt?