Metro Metro Land’s “Metropolitan Odyssey 2008” commenced on Saturday as planned, and this year the premier urban gaming event took its act to Central Park. So honestly, it wasn’t so much urban gaming as it was “running around in the park” gaming. Which is a little more normal. But still fun.

The Odyssey can be summed up as an all-day scavenger hunt, but that elicits visions of kids dashing around the neighborhood, stuffing trinkets into a bag: an old golf ball, a nickel dated before 1975, a severed finger, etc. In fact, there’s not much actual “scavenging” in the Odyssey.¹ The aim of the hunt is to answer as many questions as you can on a list of about 100—it’s impossible to get them all. The questions direct you toward locations all around the field of play (in this case, of course, sprawling Central Park) and they’re assembled in mostly random order, so organizing the efforts of your four-person team is a major challenge.

The hunt begins around 8:30 in the morning when teams assemble to get information from the Metro Metro brain trust: Bo, Brady, Will, and Tim. You’re not allowed to open your clue packet until 9:00, so teams use the time to greet old friends and intimidate the competition. Teams get extra points for coming in costume, so there are the requisite hipsters in wacky leggings, seemingly a staple of such events. (Seriously, whether it’s a scavenger hunt, marathon, go-kart race, neighborhood parade, whatever, there are always hipsters in wacky leggings.) The weather-oriented group pictured at the beginning of the piece billed themselves as “Scavenge of the Nerds” despite that being my team’s name for three years running. We set our phasers on Destroy.

The 9:00 “go” signal is an envelope-ripping, page-flipping frenzy as teams try to eke out a few minutes’ advantage by digesting the 11-page clue packet as quickly as possible. The deadline at 4:00 always approaches so much faster than you’d like, so every second counts. But these clues don’t go down so easy: Bo, Brady, Will, and Tim use plenty of verbal obfuscation to make the hints harder to scan, e.g.:

Great Grandpa Joe (age 82), Not-So-Great Aunt Mildred (age 62), Bobby and Cheryl (ages 60 and 55, respectively), and their two grandkids Billy and Chrissy (ages 6 and 2) are spending the day at the Central Park Zoo. How much does Bobby have to shell out to get everyone in?

Metro Metro has been at this for a while, and they know how to write a good hunt question. For a nerd, nothing beats that miniature epiphany when you match up the wit and wordplay of a clue with its real-world equivalent. When you finally realize that the “small winged mammal that is accused of a crime it didn’t commit” is a framed bat at Belvedere Castle. It’s like having that inscrutable crossword clue “click” in your mind, yet the tangible nature of the hunt environs adds an extra delight. The seven hours of sprinting and scribbling always drive everyone to exhaustion, but the Eureka moments sustain me.²

The structure of the hunt’s clue sheet is an interesting study in game engineering. The apparent winning strategy, at first glance, to split the team up and have each hunter gather clues in a different section of the park. But this is supposed to be a team event—sticking together is more fun, after all—so the Metro Metro guys discourage loners with clues like this:

Get a picture of all four teammates between 12:15 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. at the spot indicated on the map [Fort Clinton]. You must be on the pedestal, pretending to be a monument to laziness. Our clock [placed by Metro Metro staff] must be visible.

There are 15 such photo clues, along with three “compulsory” photo clues that cause you to lose huge sums of points if you fail to get them. (The clock clue is always one the compulsories, leading everybody to reassemble for a refreshing mid-day check-in.)

It’s a clever concept, but it’s beginning to show its age. Metro Metro has grown infatuated with the photos, as they make a good promotional tool, and they’re fun to look at later in the evening at the “award ceremony.” They’re not as much fun to do, though. There’s virtually zero element of surprise and certainly none of those delicious epiphanies. “Get a photo of your four teammates asleep in a hansom cab,” reads one clue, and so you do, because it’s worth a huge 300 points, but you do it out of a sense of duty rather than whimsy. This year, the photo clues were worth more than 60 percent of all the other clues combined, a phenomenon that turns the “hunt” into more of a checklist.

That said, there are plenty of clues in the packet to keep a hardcore hunter occupied for seven hours, so if you’re not an ultra-competitive ass like me, you can ignore most of the photo tasks and complete the hunt however you’d like. You just won’t have any chance of winning. As a game, the Odyssey has some problems that I hope are addressed in 2009, but as a cheap way to spend a Saturday in May, it’s hard to top.

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1. There are a few “bring backs,” but most of them are refrigerator magnets placed in inconspicuous spots by the Metro Metro guys themselves, and the others are items that are equally available to everybody, like a squashed penny from the Central Park Zoo gift shop. ↑

2. The Central Park hunt suffered a bit in this respect, actually, simply because there were fewer interesting details that made for a good clue. Previous hunts have taken place in the city, where there is an endless supply of old signs, forgotten nooks, and urban ephemera to serve as fodder for good clues. The Metro Metro writers seemed to struggle to find such goodies in the park, making the clues more straightforward and repetitive than usual. ↑