"Running around looking for clues with my friends has been a fall activity I did not expect to enjoy this much,” said Samantha Bella, a junior biomedical sciences major and newcomer to the new on-campus scavenger hunt.
Various clues around campus have been set up with the purpose of giving students a chance to indulge in a “secret” anonymous online game throughout the month of October, scattered throughout North Campus from the Student Union to Fronczak Hall.
Forage is a fall-themed, campus-wide interactive scavenger hunt of puzzles with encrypted codes on public bulletin boards.
The puzzles range from easy to hard: the simpler codes can consist of mirrored images and line art, while complexity rises with anagrams and sheet music. Every Tuesday calls for a week-long challenge code updated on the website that is worth more points and requires campus “ball knowledge.”
Once the puzzles are solved and the code is revealed, students can input the code online for in-game currency. As the leaderboard stands with 44 players and counting, each Forage account is associated with a unique fox profile that can be customized with icons and colors redeemed from the website’s store.
G, the creator of the game who requested anonymity to maintain the air of mystery in the name of the Halloween spirit, described the game as “a cool little secret” for people to stumble upon. It was to give students a reason to explore outside of their day-to-day on-campus routine.
“Everyone is on their phone anyway,” he said. “So this gives that screen time a purpose.”
G always loved exploring and finding hidden things on campus, and was fascinated by UB’s nooks and crannies. For example, the tunnel underneath Baldy Hall to Park Hall was an echo chamber that reverberated in its entirety with any amount of auxiliary noise.
It’s not just the Halloween spirit that draws G to the game. This time of semester is when students have exhausted the charm of coming back to school and turn their attention to stressors like midterms, projects or even personal dilemmas that feel more real as the weather gets colder and the sun sets earlier.
G hopes that students will appreciate the welcome distraction and choose to embrace the thrill of the hunt in a conventionally bleak time of the semester,
While G and his collaborators are anonymous, they want to recognize the hard work of the person who helped them develop the theme and clue art of the game: @seevi.art on Instagram.
The features desk can be reached at features@ubspectrum.com.
Photo: Courtesy of Aryan Vali Baharvandi
