The Road Rally that Ken and I put on was an amazing success. We had tons of fun planning it and we had even more fun on the day it happened. Everyone had a great time and we got lots of compliments! Some of the participants are now interested in putting on their own road rally, so this page is my set of tips about "putting on a road rally". It's not a "how to" (yet), but it's a list of things you'll want to know.
- Secrecy
While planning a road rally you have to remember to keep your mouth
shut. This may mean anything from remembering not to tell someone where
you ate lunch today (because you were out scoping a clue site and they
may wonder why you were eating at that burrito place on El Camino in Santa
Clara when you always go to the one on...um...El Camino in Palo Alto) to
remembering not to exclaim "Hey! Look at that neat landmark! Wouldn't that
make a great road rally cl-- oops never mind." when you see something interesting
outside the car window.
- Accounting
If you are planning not to lose money on your event, remember to save
all your receipts. This is very important if you are doing this with other
people. It'll be nice if you all can be reimbursed for expenses, and it'll
be nice to remember who paid for what. We're still working on that one
ourselves. It's OK to charge people a fee for participating, especially
if you are spending a lot of money on props. Depending on your road rally
"style", you will very likely spend money on photocopying, envelopes, maybe
plastic baggies. We planned to break even on ours and use any extra money
for drinks at the party afterwards.
- Party Afterwards
Some kind of gathering afterwards is MANDATORY. This is where everyone
can trade stories, watch stragglers arrive, and tell you how WONDERFUL
it was (or throw you in the pool). It's a great time to see people who
otherwise would only mingle amongst "their own kind" at parties trade laughs
with everyone because they all have something in common. They survived!
- Level of Difficulty
Repeat after me: "Who is my audience?". Answer this question, stick
to your answer, and your planning will be a lot easier. We decided that
we wanted to appeal to a broad audience (in other words we didn't want
to make our rally too "technically geeky") and designed our clues accordingly.
This became the guideline for a lot of decisions that we needed to make
about how hard our puzzles were. If you want to use a bit-shifting binary-hexadecimal
number conversion utilizing twos complement arithmetic, go right ahead,
but you'll be committing yourself to a certain type of audience. It's not
that something like that may be hard for certain people, it's more important
to remember that it may not be much FUN. Always remember: your participants
should have FUN. You can design an entire rally for people who think mathematics
is FUN, but make sure you solicit the right participants or you will have
some very unhappy folks. For best results in making it appealing to everyone,
use a variety of clues and encourage people to make teams with a good mix
of people. But don't depend too much on specific knowledge unless you have
a specific audience in mind. The best clues can be researched and solved
by anyone with creative problem solving skills. It will be hard to determine
what people will find difficult. You will be surprised at what people have
trouble with. Something that is obvious to you (because you thought of
it!) may not be obvious to other people. Try to think like someone who
is the opposite of you (if that's part of your audience). Having a partner
helps a lot with this aspect (Ken and I were an excellent team since we
problem solve very differently and have different knowledge bases).