Rutgers Discovery - A Puzzling Adventure

What you can find?

Madness has descended upon a family burdened with decades upon decades of Rutgers historical trivia! Can you find solutions to the puzzles plaguing the Poole family since the end of the twentieth century and take off on a voyage of discovery to bring Rutgers' special sites into the twenty-first century?

About the Event
SAS’s CIRC with the Rutgers 250 Office is running a puzzle room/scavenger hunt to celebrate RU’s anniversary. Teams of 3-5 people can register for a time slot on Rutgers Day to play “Rutgers Discovery” at the Douglass Student Center. The Discovery puzzle room generates a unique set of scavenger hunt clues for each team - taking them exploring across the four New Brunswick campuses. Prizes will be awarded for the fastest teams and the funniest photos! Teams of faculty, staff, and students encouraged!

Where: Douglass Student Center (Address/Directions)

When: Rutgers Day - April 29, 2017

How to Sign Up:  CLOSED

Rules: 

What are the basic rules of the puzzle room? — Your team of three to five players will have access to the puzzle room in the Douglass Student Center for thirty minutes. The players will need to find the clues and combine them with analytical skills to solve the puzzles. At the end of the thirty minutes your team submits their answers to only four puzzles, so choose the ones you think you solved correctly!

What are the basic rules of the scavenger hunt? — Based on how well your team did in the puzzle room, our algorithm will assign your team a custom set of four scavenger hunt clues. You will need to solve the clues, go to those locations on the four Rutgers New Brunswick campuses, take a picture of the team at that location, and tweet your picture and team code with #ru250scavengers to submit your answers. Better pictures makes a better entry and our judges panel will meet on May 1rst to award the prizes for funniest pictures and the fastest scavenger hunt finish.

Are there prizes? — Yes! The prize list is as follows:

• Copies of Rutgers: A 250^th Anniversary Portrait for each member of the team that finishes the scavenger hunt fastest and the team that tweets the most funniest pictures.
• Additional prizes such as Rutgers 250 pins, T-shirts, and tote bags will be available for teams with great RU spirit in their scavenger hunt pictures!

Is this activity good for families/younger kids? Is it scary? — We’ve worked hard to keep the puzzles G- or (at worst) PG-rated and would appreciate it if teams keep the tweeted pictures PG-rated as well. This is not really an escape room where you’re locked into the room and it’s about as scary as someone’s basement. That being said, if you have claustrophobia, there are no windows in the puzzle room and you may want to think about how well you'll fare in that situation before signing up.

Additional items of note? — We only have a limited number of puzzle room slots for teams, so please be sure to arrive at the Douglass Student Center on time! The game master will have to forfeit the slot for teams that are more than ten minutes late. 

The objects inside the puzzle rooms are not rare antiques, but they are also fragile, so please use common sense with manipulating them. Specifically, please don’t attempt to use force on anything in the puzzle room to make it open.

The clues are placed in places that are easy-to-reach by humans. While it would have been cool to have secret passageways or trapdoors to discover, this is the Douglass Student Center, not the Haunted Mansion, so use common sense here as well.

You will be asked to put all cellular devices in a lockbox held by the game-master for the duration of the puzzle room. Your devices will be returned to you immediately once the answers for the puzzle room are submitted.

While we do admire thinking outside the box to win, please understand that you’re competing at your own risk! Don’t do anything foolish or illegal to move more quickly between the campuses to get to the scavenger hunt locations.

Last, but not least, all decisions of the judges and game masters at the puzzle room are final!