Sometimes it’s fun to be a tourist in your own town. Or sometimes you have no choice, like when you end up playing host to your aunt and uncle from Tuscaloosa. Thankfully, there’s Stray Boots, a mobile tech firm that has developed interactive scavenger hunts using smartphones as “tour guides.” Their games already exist in New York, Las Vegas, LA, San Francisco, Philly, Boston, and Washington DC, and they have several other editions on the way, including Portland. And now there’s Seattle: The Game.
You’ve got three choices of local scavenger hunts: the Pike Place Market tour, the Pioneer Square tour, and the Seattle Art Museum Tour, though for the latter, a separate admission to the museum is required. Each tour takes about two to three hours to complete.
I tried out the Pioneer Square version a couple weekends ago with a group of friends. Basically, you receive challenges and clues by text message, explore the area to find the answers, and learn fun facts about the locations along the way. It’s edutainment! It’s also supereasy: there’s an activation code sent via email, and whenever you’re ready to play, just text that code, and then your phone will do the rest.
There’s riddles, puzzles, photo opps, and trivia questions as you go along the tour route, and your team gets points for every question you answer correctly, so you can compete against another group. The tour takes you places you normally wouldn’t go, like the nautical-themed store Cuttysark, and the great retro sports shop Ebbets Field Flannels. It also made me actually pay attention to the totem poles.
The Game is not quite perfect. My team couldn’t ever find the Occidental Park photo booth that doubles as an art gallery called Gallery 206. Does anyone know if that’s even still there? And the Ask a Seattleite challenge just didn’t work: we had two Seattleites in our group and three 10+ year citizens, and still none of us knew the name for the hotel that was originally at the site of the Sinking Ship parking garage on Yesler. (That’s the Seattle Hotel.) Everyone else walking around were clearly tourists, and a text message telling us to go into the Merchant’s Cafe to harass strangers to help with a smartphone scavenger hunt is just not going to happen. Do you know what city this is?