Scavenger hunts have been popular since the 1930s and are still going strong today. They work just as well for a child's birthday as for a hen party, a team away day or a whole neighbourhood. So why not organise your own?
Quick answer
Organising a public, charity or company hunt? Create a free event page on Billetto to take sign-ups and team payments online.
A scavenger hunt is a game where players or teams race to find, collect or photograph the items on a list before time runs out. The first team to tick off every item, or the team with the most points, wins.
Players often have to solve a series of riddles or clues that point them to where the items are hidden.
A scavenger hunt is different from a treasure hunt. In a treasure hunt, each clue leads to the next and the trail ends at a single prize. In a scavenger hunt, players work through a whole list of items, often in any order they like, and the items themselves are usually funny, random or a little bit awkward to get hold of.
There are many variations of the traditional scavenger hunt. They are popular with every age group, from small children to students and (real) adults.
Quite a bit of planning goes into organising a scavenger hunt, especially if it involves a lot of participants and spans a large area. If you want to get yours off to a solid start, follow these 10 steps.
If you’re planning a big scavenger hunt for the whole community, you might want to use a ticketing platform where people can register their attendance. This will help you keep track of sign ups and teams.
Tip: With Billetto you can create a free event page for your scavenger hunt, take sign-ups or sell tickets, and see every registered participant in one list. Free events cost nothing to run.
A scavenger hunt can take place almost anywhere. Popular locations include the local neighbourhood, a city centre, a park or forest, a beach, a farm, or simply your house and garden for younger children. Walk the area yourself before the day, and check whether you need permission to use it.
Once you know the location for the hunt, it’s time to plan the route you want the participants to take. Make sure there are places to hide the items they’ll be looking for.
Keep it short enough that nobody gets bored. Younger children usually manage 30 to 45 minutes, while teenagers and adults can happily keep going for an hour or two.
Come up with scavenger hunt clues to help your participants find the items on their list. Feel free to get creative and write riddles, rhymes and puzzles that reveal where each item is hidden. A few classic examples to get you started:
For children who can’t read yet, swap the riddles for picture clues.
It’s not always possible to hide the clues in a place where they won’t be found by random people. See if you can recruit neighbours, shop owners or friends to hold on to the clues until the participants arrive.
Once you have the clues and know where to hide them (or whom to hide them with), you can start distributing them around the route you want the participants to follow.
Expect the unexpected. Paper envelopes with clues in them aren’t exactly weatherproof, so seal them in plastic bags and keep some spare copies in case they are stolen or lost. Give every team a phone number they can call if they get stuck.
The participants will be happy to find additional rewards along the way. If your participants are children, you can hide juice or sweets…and maybe an ice box of beer for the adults.
Make sure you lay out the rules for the scavenger hunt before the participants set off to find the items. This is a particularly important step if the scavenger hunt is for children. Agree on:
Letting kids run off by themselves isn’t always a smart idea, so make sure there’s an adult with them. It might also be smart to send a sober chaperone along with any participating adult teams.
There are too many variations for us to list here, but let’s have a look at some of the best scavenger hunt ideas you can use to organise a hunt for your friends, family or colleagues.
Best for: all ages
Each team or participant has to snap a photo of the items on your list instead of collecting them, so nothing needs to be hidden in advance. Try items like a reflection of the whole team, a dog (ask the owner first), something older than everyone in the team, a sign with a spelling mistake, or the team forming a letter of the alphabet.
Best for: teenagers and adults
Same as with a photo scavenger hunt, except with video. Ask teams to recreate a famous film scene, film a 10-second advert for a random object, say a tongue twister three times fast or get the whole team doing a cartwheel.
Best for: remote teams and long-distance friends
A scavenger hunt that takes place online or over a video call. Participants have to find items on the web or race to grab things from around their home, such as the oldest photo on their phone, something they would take to a desert island or a book with a blue cover.
Best for: adults, tourists and team building
A city gives you countless hiding places and landmarks to work with. Send teams to copy the pose of a statue, find the oldest pub in the area, spot a piece of street art, collect a free map from the tourist office or buy something at a market for less than the price of a coffee.
Best for: kids and families
Can take place in a forest, on a beach or on a farm…just mind the animals. Ask children to find a pine cone, a feather, a leaf bigger than their hand, something smooth, something that smells nice and five leaves in different colours. Photograph living plants rather than picking them.
Best for: families
Design scavenger hunt riddles and clues that lead to items specific to Christmas, like stockings, stars and baubles. Hide the presents at the end of the trail so the hunt becomes part of the gift.
Best for: kids
The perfect excuse for hiding away all your Easter eggs. Give each child their own colour of egg to find, so everyone ends up with the same number and nobody goes home empty-handed.
Best for: kids, teenagers and party guests
A trick-or-treat themed scavenger hunt, or perhaps a murder mystery? Hide clues in carved pumpkins, ask teams to find something that glows in the dark and finish with a costume reveal. Planning a bigger night? Read our guide on how to host a Halloween party.
Best for: couples
Let your significant other solve riddles that lead them to you. Hide clues at places that mean something to the two of you, like where you first met, and end the trail with dinner or tickets to a show.
Best for: kids
A great activity for children’s birthdays that will keep the kids entertained. Build the hunt around the birthday child’s favourite things, and hide a small prize for every guest at the final spot.
Best for: hen and stag parties
Ideal for making everyone complete silly tasks. Ask the group to collect marriage advice from strangers on video, find someone who shares the groom’s or bride’s name, or recreate the couple’s first photo together.
Best for: adults
Possible bar crawl challenges include getting a bartender’s autograph, finding the bar with the oldest sign and spotting specific graffiti in pub toilets. Include soft drinks on the list and plan the route so nobody needs to drive.
Best for: colleagues and business events
A good networking tool that can spice up an otherwise mundane business event. Mix people from different departments into each team and add tasks like finding someone who speaks three languages or collecting a business card from another industry. It works well at a networking event or on a company retreat.
Turning your hunt into a public event?
City, charity and team building hunts often sell team tickets. With Billetto you can take free sign-ups or sell tickets per team or per player, cap the number of teams and check everyone in at the start line with the Billetto app.
Create your scavenger hunt on Billetto →
Free events cost nothing to run. No subscription or setup fees.
Short on time? Copy one of these lists and adapt it to your group.
Because scavenger hunts are such a popular competition, there are a number of apps that provide ready-made clues, routes and challenges for participants to complete.
Goosechase lets you build your own scavenger hunt out of missions. Teams complete the missions on their phones, and a live leaderboard shows who is in the lead.
Actionbound lets you create your own scavenger hunt for mobile devices. It is used for everything from team building and training to school, campus and museum tours, birthday parties and city races.
Scavify is built for organised groups such as universities, employers, event organisers and tourist destinations, which makes it a good fit for team building and orientation days.
Let’s Roam offers more than 600 app-led city scavenger hunts around the world. It is a great shortcut if you want a ready-made city hunt without writing the clues yourself.
Geocaching calls itself the world’s largest treasure hunt. Players use the app or a GPS device to find hidden containers called caches, sign the logbook and often swap a small item for one of their own.
Running a public or charity scavenger hunt? Create an event page on Billetto, take free registrations or sell team tickets, and use the Billetto app to check teams in at the start line.
In a treasure hunt, players follow a trail of clues that leads to one final prize. In a scavenger hunt, players try to find or photograph every item on a list, usually in any order.
For young children, 30 to 45 minutes is plenty. Teenagers and adults can enjoy a hunt that lasts an hour or two, especially if it covers a city or includes a stop for food and drinks.
Around 8 to 12 clues works well for kids. Adults can handle a longer list of 15 to 25 items, especially if each item is worth a different number of points.
Add a theme, a time limit and a points system, mix easy items with silly challenges that need photos or videos, and finish somewhere with food and drinks where the teams can compare results.
Yes. Community, charity and corporate scavenger hunts often charge per team or per player. With Billetto you can sell tickets or take free sign-ups, and free events cost nothing to run.
Hopefully, you now have all the scavenger hunt ideas you need to put together a serious challenge for the participants.
Pick a theme that goes with your event and make sure to document all the best moments for later.
Happy hunting!
Ready to open registration? Create your scavenger hunt on Billetto, share the link with your teams and let them sign up online.
Create your scavenger hunt on Billetto →
Free events cost nothing to run. No subscription or setup fees.