Rachel's Race Ramblings

Mom and me

I offered to chime in on the blog to provide the perspective of someone who played on a less hardcore level. My mom and I formed a two person team. We both like road trips and we saw this as a road trip with a bit more pizazz. We were in it purely to have fun and spend some time together.

First off, we had a great time and hopefully will be playing again next year with the rest of the family if the guys can get the vacation time off. The fact that we’re already looking forward to next year is probably the best endorsement. Also, I should mention that my 61-year-old mom had never done puzzles before (short of the sample one on the Ravenchase website) and she thoroughly enjoyed herself. Here are some of the other things I really enjoyed.

I inadvertently learned quite a bit about American History. Most of the cities we’d visited, I’d been to at some point (although in some cases it was nearly 2 decades ago). However, the puzzles brought us to new locations and landmarks that I hadn’t seen before. They also made me look at them, read about them and learn more about them than I otherwise would have. :)

Stella!

The puzzles for the most part were quite fun. I loved that we typically got several at once and could then plan out our day as we wanted. Since my mom and I weren’t playing as competitively as some the other two teams, we took some time to see some of the other sites around and enjoy ourselves. 

My s'mores cupcake was delicious, but also huuuuge!

The selection at Crumbs was daunting.

It was nice that there were often two sets of puzzles on a given day. I did not feel the need to solve the second set of puzzles (thought my mother who is more competitive than I am would have liked to) and it was nice to have a sense of completion after finishing one set without the need to do more unless it was desired. I liked that most of the city exploring was done on foot or with public transit. We didn’t have to worry about our stuff in the car or worry about parking in cities we weren’t familiar with.

Taking some time to see the sights in Central Park.

I really liked the audio clues for the drives. Since there was driving between cities, this was great! Plus since many of them were identifying quotes or songs, the driver can join in, too. Most of the clues were paper clues although they almost all interacted with the environment. Given that you’re walking around quite a bit, I can’t really complain about that since I wouldn’t want to be carrying around a whole bunch of junk. They were designed nicely and I liked how they were presented in scrolls. That being said, the skull was super cool and I loved that :) I loved interacting with the real characters. We soon go to recognize people in red and started wondering if everyone wearing a red shirt was part of the race :) But this really added to the immersive nature of it.

This guy was not part of the race but he was there when we picked up the skull so you can see why I thought he might be.

Overall we were happy with the quality. There was the occasional typo in the puzzles although as we were doing them, we quickly learned to recognize what made sense and what didn’t. None of them were OMG-I-was-going-down-the-wrong-path-for-hours type errors. Josh was very responsive for hints. He could be contacted both on the phone and via text so getting hints was not a problem and allowed us to continue moving throughout the day. I like that we had an end location each night and could do our own thing for hotels. We even got to crash at my brother’s in Manhattan for one of the nights. I also liked that we started at 10 am. It gave time to have a nice breakfast and relax in the morning, especially since this was still supposed to be a vacation.

Sadly we didn't have time to catch this . . .

Now that I’ve mentioned all the things that I really enjoyed, in the interest of sharing the full experience, there were a couple of bumps.

• At times my mom and I felt like a second class team. Although we had paid for the full race, we had to miss the first two legs and we didn’t end up doing the last day due a family emergency (everything is okay now, for those curious). I think it’s a great option that teams don’t have to do the entire 7 days which can be overwhelming, especially for n00bs. Not sure if this was because we were more relaxed about the whole thing or because we were the only chicks, but either way it was probably the only disappointing part.
• The guys told us that the first two days had a bit more hand holding in the puzzles. Since we missed those two days, we were jumping into the puzzles without the type of puzzles that Ravenchase usually makes other than the start puzzle. This made us scratch our head at a couple of the answers until the methodology was explained to us. I think it’d be a great option to offer the puzzles throughout the race with the handholding for those (less competitive) teams that want it (though this would obviously disqualify them for the trophy).

As I mentioned, I hope to do this event again next year or whenever it runs again. This was probably the most fun my mom and I have had on a family vacation. I would love to see more teams doing it and can’t stress enough that you don’t have to be super hardcore and competitive to enjoy it. It seems to have had big improvements since the last time it was run so I’m sure it will only continue to get better!