Walking Scavenger Hunt Ideas for Adults

Somebody always prints the list. Twenty items, nice typography, free download: fire hydrant, mailbox, picket fence, squirrel, something red. You set off, tick four of them in the first two hundred metres, and then walk for half an hour finding nothing at all, because the other sixteen were written for a suburb that looks nothing like where you live.

The scavenger hunt is not the problem. The list is. And fixing it comes down to one change in how the list is written, which is what most of this post is about. The example lists are further down, and they are more useful once the rule makes sense.

Hunt categories, not objects

Almost every walking scavenger hunt you can download is a list of objects. A red door. A cat in a window. A church.

Object lists have two failure modes, and both end the walk early. If the object is common where you are, you find it in the first minute and it was worth nothing. If it does not exist where you are, you can walk all afternoon and never tick it, which feels like losing rather than like playing.

Swap the objects for categories and both problems go away:

• Something older than you are
• A door painted a colour you would not have chosen
• A repair somebody clearly did themselves
• A plant growing where nobody planted it
• The oldest date written anywhere on a building
• A sign for a business that no longer exists
• Something that was obviously expensive once

Every one of those exists on almost any street in almost any country, and none of them can be found without actually looking. That is the entire difference. An object list is a lookup: you scan for a shape you already hold in your head. A category is a judgement call, and a judgement call makes you lift your head, slow down, and consider the street in front of you.

It is also why category lists survive being used twice. Once you have found the red door, the red door is found. "Something older than you are" has a different answer on every walk you will ever take.

Aim for one find every five to ten minutes

The second thing nobody writes down: a hunt has a difficulty setting, and the setting is the rate.

Too easy and it is not a game, it is a stroll with paperwork. You clear the list in eight minutes and the walk you actually wanted never happens. Too hard and you stop caring around item three, which is worse, because the whole point was to be out for an hour.

The rate that works for most people is roughly one find every five to ten minutes. For a forty-five minute walk that means five to eight items, not twenty. Short lists feel wrong when you write them and exactly right when you walk them.

When you get it wrong, adjust the list rather than the walk. Anything you tick in the first hundred metres gets replaced by a harder version of itself: "a bicycle" becomes "a bicycle that has clearly not moved in a year".

Let the list choose the route

This is the part that turns a scavenger hunt from a novelty into something worth doing repeatedly.

Every downloadable list quietly assumes you walk your usual loop and tick things off as they appear. Reverse it. Write a list your usual loop cannot satisfy, and the list stops being decoration and becomes a set of instructions.

Three ways to do that on purpose:

• Name something your streets do not have. A canal, a flight of more than twenty steps, a building over four storeys, a road sign pointing somewhere you have never been. Now you have to work out where that is and go there.
• Add a distance constraint. "Three of these, none of them within sight of a street you have walked this week."
• Add a turn rule. At every junction where you genuinely do not know what is down there, go down there. The list is the excuse, and the turn rule is the thing that actually moves you.

Done properly, an hour of this puts you on four or five streets you have lived near for years and never once walked. That happens more reliably than it has any right to, and it is most of the reason walking without a destination works at all. The hunt just gives the aimlessness a scoreboard.

The anywhere list

Written to work in a city, a suburb or a village, and in most countries. Pick five to eight, not all fifteen.

1. Something older than you are
2. A door painted a colour you would not have chosen
3. A repair somebody clearly did themselves
4. The oldest date written anywhere on a building
5. A sign for a business that no longer exists
6. A plant growing somewhere nobody planted it
7. Two buildings from obviously different centuries, touching
8. Something with your own initials on it
9. A shortcut you did not know was there
10. Somebody else's name, written in wet concrete
11. A window you would happily look out of every day
12. Something that has been fixed with the wrong colour
13. The smallest front garden you can find
14. A view that would not fit in a photograph
15. Something that makes you wonder who decided that

Number fifteen is the sleeper. It has a hit rate of about one per twenty minutes in any town on earth, and it produces the best arguments.

Lists for where you actually live

Dense city. Look up, because everything interesting in a city is above head height and nobody ever sees it. A carved face, a date stone, a ghost sign painted on brick, a building whose top three floors were obviously added later, a street name that describes a trade nobody does any more, a doorway too grand for what is behind it now.

Suburb or small town. The material is domestic, so hunt for decisions rather than objects. The most ambitious hedge on the street, a garden ornament you cannot explain, two identical houses that have diverged completely, a basketball hoop nobody has used in a decade, a car that has become part of the landscaping, a letterbox somebody built themselves.

Village or out on the lanes. Fewer things, so widen the categories and stretch the distance. Something with a date before 1900, evidence of an animal you did not see, a footpath sign pointing at what looks like nothing, a gate that no longer has a fence, the highest point you can reach in thirty minutes, water moving in any form.

Doing it with kids

Same principle, smaller categories and a much shorter list. Four items is plenty, and they should be findable at child eye level, which is a genuinely different street from the one you are looking at. Something smaller than your thumb, a number bigger than one hundred, something that makes a noise when you touch it, an animal that is not a bird.

The rate matters more with kids, not less. Four items across twenty minutes keeps a five year old walking. Twelve items produces a child being carried home.

Scoring, if you want it to be a competition

The hunt works fine unscored. If you want a proper game out of it, the versions that hold up:

• Points by difficulty. Everyone writes the list together, then assigns one, three or five points per item before anybody leaves. Arguing about the scoring is half the fun and takes four minutes.
• A time limit instead of a finish line. Ninety minutes, back at the same café, most points wins. This is much better than "first to finish", because it rewards covering ground rather than rushing.
• Photo proof, one photo per item. Not for policing, but because the photos are the reason anybody remembers the walk two months later.
• Two teams, one list, opposite directions. Same list, one team goes clockwise, one anticlockwise. You meet in the middle and immediately discover you interpreted half the items differently.
• The steal rule. If both teams found the same thing for an item, neither scores. It pushes everyone away from the obvious answer, which is exactly the behaviour you want.

If you like the competitive version, most of this transfers straight onto a group step target: see the step challenge ideas for the formats that work with people who are not in the same city.

Where an app helps, and where it does not

Straight answer, since this is our blog: Fogbreaker has no scavenger hunt mode. There is no item list in the app, nothing to photograph into it, and no points for finding a red door. Keep the list in your notes app or on the back of an envelope. That has worked for a very long time. If you specifically want the hunt itself run inside software, with team scoring and photo submissions, that is a different category of product and GooseChase or Actionbound do it properly.

What an app is good for is the other half of the game: the board.

Fogbreaker starts with your whole city hidden under fog and clears it only along the streets you have physically walked. So the map afterwards shows the route you took, and, more usefully, all the ground you still have not covered. That turns out to be the best possible way to pick the next hunt. Open the map, find the darkest patch within walking distance, and write the list so it can only be finished over there.

That is the honest version of the overlap. The list makes you look at things. The map decides where you look. If you want the general case rather than the hunt version, exploring a city on foot covers the same move on unfamiliar ground, and the city guessing game is the indoor version for the days you are not going anywhere.

The bottom line

A walking scavenger hunt fails for one reason almost every time: the list was written as a list of objects, for somebody else's street.

Write categories instead of objects, keep it to five to eight of them, and include at least one item your usual route cannot possibly supply. That last one is the whole trick. It means the list has to take you somewhere you have not been, which is the part that was ever going to make the walk memorable.

Then go and argue about whether a drainpipe counts. If you want more ways to stop your usual loop feeling like your usual loop, fifteen ways to make walking fun is the longer list.