3rd Annual JHWS Treasure Hunt: Strategies for the final stretch

Hello– I’m jumping in here on the news page to send some info (and encouragement) to our 3rd Annual Treasure Hunt participants.  As a participant in TH1 and TH2, I know that the third week can feel a bit discouraging and frustrating.  More than likely at this point, those working on the hunt are now down to their final 1/3 of the questions–the 1/3 that seem too ambiguous or mostly hopeless.  I know time is short, and frustration leads to thoughts of abandoning the thing entirely.  I hope you will not!  I also know at this point it is easy to forget that you’ve had some fun working on thing– the joy of getting lost in Holmes’s and Watson’s world, and from playing the game with your team members.  I offer a reminder of a few strategies–we saw some of this in the warm-up questions– for working the questions this year:

1) Almost every question has a searchable phrase or word to help you find the answer.  Some are really evident (‘alive and well’); others require a bit more thought, ie: another word for ‘single man’ is ‘bachelor’; ‘three’ could be third or thrice, etc.;

2) Punctuation matters: a lower-case ‘j’ in the word jack; an upper-case ‘Y’ in the word yellow;

3) Be sure to consider the section headings–“The problem has always been not to find but to choose” will mean you are looking for answers concerning the untold tales, as Watson is referencing some of them when he made that statement.

A full 15 days remain to work on the hunt.  Should you find yourself a few answers short on September 1, please submit your answers anyway.  The hunt will be scored on a point system; each question has a point value (i.e.: ‘who’ = 1 pt; ‘who’ and ‘where’ = 2 pts., etc.).  With the exclusion of question #27, there are 156 available points. [ If your answer gets ‘who’ correct but misses ‘where’, you still earn 1 of 2 points.]  Even if you are a few answers short, your total points could still equal High Honors!

Ok, I will stop going on and on.  Thanks for your time and interest.

Your 2015 Treasure Hunt master who fully expects to be cursed profoundly over the next 15 days…

Margie