Easter Egg Hunt 2016.

We’ve always loved Easter egg hunts, but with the girls getting smarter, faster, and more wily every year, we’ve had to make the hunt more… challenging.  Our previous Easter egg hunt had infuriatingly complex rules as to which girl got which color of egg.  But with the girls in middle school now — actual teenagers — I knew that I was going to have to step up my game if I wanted the hunt to last more than just a few minutes.  Inspired by some of my puzzle-crafting Veracode coworkers, I put together our 2016 Easter Egg Hunt.  Here’s how it went.

Step 1. Read the rules.

Once again, Eleanor and Abby were each given a sheet of paper indicating which colors of eggs they should each pick up.   Here are the ‘rules’ they were given for this year’s egg hunt:

After a few false starts, the girls cracked the emoji substitution cypher. Since some symbols like🌀 and 👻  appeared only once on the page, it took some thinking to decode the whole set of color rules, but working together they did it.

Step 2. Find the eggs.

List of colors in hand, they ran outside to start finding the eggs hidden around the back yard.  Each girl found all of their eggs within about ten minutes; finding the eggs themselves isn’t too terribly difficult — which is why we got into all these rules and colors and puzzles in the first place.

Step 3. Open the eggs… and wait, what’s this?

Once back inside, the girls opened the plastic Easter eggs… but wait!  Where’s the loot?!?  Instead of treats or trinkets, each egg held one small, oddly-shaped piece of paper with black and white squares on it: a QR code, cut into puzzle pieces.

Working quickly, the girls each assembled the pieces of their respective QR code puzzles.  One went together easily, the other took some collaboration and a couple of different attempts before it all came together.

Step 4. Follow the clues.

Each girl’s QR code was different, and scanning the re-assembled QR codes led to two different URLs: two different tweets, by two different people (neither was me).  Each tweet had a picture and a big clue about a different location around our house.

Step 5. Victory!

Eleanor dug down into our pile of birdhouses (why we have a pile of birdhouses is a long story for another day), and Abby popped open the lid of the grill.  Each girl found a set of colored ‘crystal’ eggs — filled with sweet, sweet victory loot!

In just under 45 minutes, the girls had cracked a cypher, found the hidden Easter eggs, reassembled the QR code puzzles, and followed the twitter URL picture clues to find their well-deserved treasure.  The chocolate was sweet, but from the looks on their faces, I think the taste of victory was even sweeter.

Now about next year…