Treasure Hunts – Page 3 – The Dreams of Gerontius

News and Updates for October

2016-10-01 Armchair, News

This is a monthly update of treasure hunt, game and puzzle tidbits.

“Harry Hid It, But Where Is It?” is an armchair treasure hunt with a prize of at least $5000. Harry has hidden his stolen treasure and the challenge is to find where. Entries can be submitted between 1 March and 15 June, 2017.

Clues to the treasure are found in an adventure novel which can be bought for $9.99 as a download or $19.99 for a physical copy. The first five chapters are available for free to check if it’s your sort of thing.

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Merlin Mystery Solution: Part 1

2016-09-30 Merlin Mystery, Solutions

The Merlin Mystery prize wand

Go to the Merlin Mystery Solution Index.

This is Part 1 of my solution to The Merlin Mystery (“MM”) by Jonathan Gunson and Marten Coombe.

This part looks at the structure of the book and the puzzle that the reader is required to solve.

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The Ultimate Quest

2016-09-23 Armchair

The Ultimate Quest

The adage of never judging a book by its cover was never truer than with The Ultimate Quest by William Lynhope. The forest scene daubed in primary colours creates an expectation of something similar on turning the page.

The harsh reality of the interior is 50 pages of unremitting grey text as a grey man meets with a grey lawyer and his blonde assistant. Make it through the story to the clues that supposedly lead to the Holy Grail and you’re rewarded with grey photos of a Michelin road map of France and a copy of The Burlington Magazine. My excitement is barely contained!

Published in 2001, The Ultimate Quest is the search for the Grail. The first person to locate the Grail Keeper and answer his questions three (no, five!) would receive a “priceless” replica of the Grail itself. In 2011, the publishers admitted defeat and closed the competition, never revealing the solution.

The puzzle is a combination of code-breaking and cryptic clues. A little searching on the Internet reveals that nobody has much idea of the solution and the pieces that have been decoded hint at a level of ambiguity that probably renders the puzzle impossible.

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Untitled Bee Book by Kit Williams

2016-09-22 Kit Williams

Untitled Bee Book by Kit Williams

A few years after Masquerade‘s hunt for the golden hare came to an end, Kit Williams produced a new puzzle book featuring a golden bee.

Having learned from experience that inciting people to dig up England wasn’t a wise move, this time the puzzle was a postal competition: work out the title of the book, represent it artistically and mail it in within the 1 year time limit. Kit chose his favourite solution and awarded the prize of a mahogany box containing a titled copy of the book on a special edition of the Terry Wogan show in 1985.

As with Masquerade, the art is gorgeous. Rather than straight paintings, Kit Williams shows off his marquetry skills with beautiful and imaginative frames, set with gems and carvings. Sometimes, as on the cover, the painting itself is only a tiny part of the whole work. Everything is beautifully photographed to show off how 3-dimensional each piece is.

The story is whimsical and timeless, though lacking the quest narrative impact of Masquerade.

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The Merlin Mystery

2016-09-21 Merlin Mystery

Merlin Mystery cover — The Merlin Mystery

The Merlin Mystery by Jonathan Gunson and Marten Coombe was published in 1998.

This was the second armchair treasure hunt book I discovered after Masquerade. Unlike Masquerade, I found it when it was new, just as the three year countdown for solving it started ticking. Of course I bought a copy straight away.

Certainly the book sets its stall pretty plainly, with its gold enlaced cover and its promise of a pot of gold and a garish gold wand for a clever winner. Rather than a buried treasure, the wand was safely locked away in the vaults of the Bank of England and solutions were to be mailed in.

Its astrological and chemical symbols immediately appealed to me and there was some fun to be had spotting patterns and linked figures.

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Masquerade by Kit Williams

2016-09-20 Kit Williams

Masquerade by Kit Williams

“Armchair Treasure Hunts” first came to my attention through the amazing book Masquerade by Kit Williams

Published in 1979, it is a glorious work of art filled with visual and textual puzzles and a sweet fairytale story of unrequited love. The unique (at the time) selling point was that the book contained clues to a golden hare that had been buried somewhere in England. A real-life treasure hunt!

I was maybe 10 years old when I stumbled across my grandfather’s copy and it stuck with me for years afterwards. I used the final words of the book as my email footer all through the late 1990s: “The best of men is only a man at best, and a hare, as everyone knows, is only a hare.”

But I never managed to solve the puzzle and never had the faintest idea where the golden hare might have been buried. It wasn’t until 2005 that I thought to look up the solution on the Internet.

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