Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, and can become your landmarks

This week's Snoutcast is a conversation with Rich Bragg about traveling to play in puzzlehunts. Rich talks about the feeling he gets when playing a game in an unfamiliar city: it's as if the city was constructed just for the game, like it's a game board. And when I was listening to that, I thought Huh, what a weirdo. I don't feel like that at all. My mental map of places is organized much more sensibly: by restaurants. But then I thought about it some more. And Rich isn't a weirdo. Rich is right.

Puzzlehunts are everywhere, and brought me to places I hadn't been to before. Even when I haven't explicitly traveled to play in games, the Bay Area van games have introduced me to places. Consider that walk I took on Sunday, the one I posted those photos of. Of those 25 photos, four of them are places that I associate with puzzlehunts and puzzlehunt-related activities. (The SF Zoo parking lot is a stretch, but I'm sure I've spent more time there in post-GC-Summit conversations than I have in, you know, the usual car-logistical parking lot activities.)

I probably still navigate most of San Francisco by thinking about restaurants. But Pacifica? In Pacifica, I don't know restaurants. But I remember that pier where we picked up that bait puzzle for the Aquarius recap. And I remember where that "pirate treasure" was buried for Pirate BATH. In my mental map, Pacifica is a place where puzzlehunts happen. And I'm pretty sure that weird-looking statue at the end of Rockaway Beach Ave is trying to tell me something in semaphore if only I could see it from the right angle.