An email I sent about the 2024 Brown Egg Hunt

Re: Greetings
Apr 8, 2024, 9:46 PM

Hello!

Good to hear from you! Sorry for the late reply, it’s been a busy few days. I also have a lot of thoughts about Egg Hunt and I want to see it learn and grow over time. Despite the fact that I have a lot of work to do this evening, this will probably end up being a fairly detailed write-up.

A lot of this might seem predominantly negative. Let me head off by saying that I absolutely loved doing Hunt this year, and I’m stoked that it happens each year. The production value with the eggs was off the charts. Also, the different comments going up on the website was very fun.

Onwards.

Firstly, to answer the question of: If you all were to have run the Egg Hunt…

I’m involved in running Brown Puzzlehunt, which is (in many ways) a different format, but shares a lot of similarities with both audience and core values. I think we both care about making an event which leaves a mark on campus. I think we both want to reward curiosity, ingenuity, and (for want of a better word) worldliness. There are many paths to the same thing, and I think Egg Hunt can differentiate itself by creating a significantly different experience, but you should look at how other similar events - Birbs, Brown Puzzlehunt, etc. - approach doing these things. Then you should either steal aspects, or intentionally diverge the event from that. I’ll talk a little bit more at the end about what you might be able to do with this.

1. Advertising.

Currently Egg Hunt does very little advertising. You put up posters the night before. That’s it. From that you got, I think, somewhere between a dozen and two dozen people involved.

To be clear: you can do much, much better than this. There are people I talked to interested in Egg Hunt who did not know it was happening. There are people who would love to do Egg Hunt who probably have never even heard of it. Your job, in advertising, is to reach those people; and in order to reach those people, you need to advertise more widely, for longer, in more places.

People should know, ahead of time, that Egg Hunt is happening. (This is not a guarantee in the minds of your audience: students run events and then fail to do them the next year all the time.) They should know (roughly) when eggs are going to start appearing in places. In fact I would almost recommend slowing everything down. Start advertising before the mini-eggs come out. Have a full day of mini-egg finding before the Golden Eggs drop. Maybe even do multiple waves of mini-egg replenishes. This will increase manpower requirements but it will be worth it for your outreach. Golden Egg day should be marked on people’s calendars.

You should shill on Dear Blueno and Sidechat.

I noticed your posters didn’t have the website url on them. This is a bad thing. You want people checking out your website, making a mental note to start searching for mini-eggs. Since most people who get involved won’t find Golden Eggs, finding mini-eggs needs to be rewarding; in order for that to be the case, people need to know that they exist before they find any. Especially since your mini-egg placement will necessarily need to be selective across campus.

I noticed that, if people came to your website before Friday, it didn’t have any info on it. This is a bad thing. People should know, more or less, what to expect from the event before they make a commitment to participate in it. This may rankle your sensibilities, but believe me, people are fickle. I am fickle! If I had opened an unknown website and it told me to come back tomorrow, I probably won’t get up early in the morning (and 11am is early in the morning for a lot of Brown students) to check it out. I’m checking it out, maybe, in the afternoon once all my classes are done, and by then the Hunt is already over. So you should note when the hunt starts the night before it does at the very least. I would suggest much further out than that.

I understand the desire for secrecy, but secrecy doesn’t really increase the coolness factor for the people doing the Hunt. You know what does? Having more participants. It makes the event feel like something Serious, something Of The Moment. And the only way to have more participants is to up your advertising significantly.

2. Timing.

I talked a little bit about this above. Here’s my advice: slow everything down. This year you put out the eggs on Thursday night, then the hunt ran on Friday. When, exactly, are people supposed to find mini-eggs?

You may have heard that someone found the book the night before the hunt began. To be clear: that was my crew. I am of the opinion that, when you put out clues pointing to a location, there should be something at that location. When we worked out the location and went to the book, and there was nothing there, we saw the seams of the event. We saw the strings of the puppet! From one puzzle-creator to another: you want to avoid a moment like this at all costs.

This was later justified as “the Hunt won’t start until 11am”: but remember that, at that point, we had no idea when the Hunt was supposed to “start”. (The website didn’t say anything, remember?) So, from our perspective, we did a clever thing, went to a place expecting to be rewarded for our cleverness, and then found nothing. Actually, my first thought was that someone had beaten us there, and had stolen the clue.

I think the intent was that people would farm mini-eggs during the Hunt, and then go for the clue, as a trade-off for searching for Golden Eggs. (You don’t spend time searching for the big’uns, but you get some clues that might help finding other ones easier. An interesting trade-off.) I know of only one other group that found the clues there, though, and I think that’s because as soon as the Golden Egg photos dropped, the mini ones were almost completely disregarded. Slowing down the pace for mini-egg drops would help a lot with this. So would leaving out the clues for longer.

3. People.

Treat your workers nicely. (And, yes, I know there are workers.) If you already treat them nicely… treat them even nicer than that.

4. Format. (Including but not limited to: Riddles, Photographs, Trails, etc.)

One of my favourite things about Egg Hunt is the riddles. Riddles are what differentiate you from Birbs; what turns this from a “oh! I recognise the back door of Kassar!” to a “oh! I’m clever, because I worked out XYZ!”. Recognising a drainpipe doesn’t make you feel smart; working out a riddle does. Eggs 8 and 9 were my favourite to find, and that’s because we had the riddles to lead us there.

Puzzlehunt runs on long, continuous chains of clever a-has. Birbs runs on adrenaline. I think Egg Hunt will work best in middle-distance; riddles which give you the locations, and photos which give you exacter positions (but that don’t reveal the overall locations, just narrow down where exactly they’re hidden once you arrive there). I kept expecting more riddles to turn up. They never did. I recommend you bring back the riddles.

Suggestion from a friend: riddles which reveal line by line over time. Imagine solving a riddle based only on the first line! That would be a rewarding experience. That would make me feel damn clever.

The mini-eggs leading to riddles were fun. I think you can play more with this; but if you are going to do that, then you need to fix the pacing with mini-eggs. And leave the riddles there as soon as the mini-eggs go out. See above.

Dropping Egg 1 all at once at the start, and Egg 12 all at once at the end, were fun ideas. Very similar to Birbs, so don’t pull the trick too often. But it lends a nice pacing to the event; a sense of opening momentum and closing finality. And the Egg 12 photo was absolutely genius. (Finding Egg 12, for us, marked a satisfying end to our search. We were pretty tired by that point.)

~~

Those are just some thoughts. I think you should generally think about what kind of event you want Egg Hunt to be, and then how you can best make the Hunt into that thing. You have stiff competition with Birbs and Puzzlehunt. I think you can learn from both; but I also think you should look to differentiate yourself, and continue to play by your own rules.

Thanks for the Egg Hunt! We had a lot of fun.

Thomas