As I mentioned in the previous post, we always try to play a new game at Halloween. This year, I decided to try out a photo scavenger hunt that you play using your mobile phone. The app is called Scavify and I wanted to share my experience using it in case you want to do a scavenger hunt for an event. |
- Take a picture of yourself in your costume at the start/end of the night
- Take a picture of yourself with the host and hostess
- Find the zombie head and take a picture of you using it to scare someone
- Take a picture of the person who you think has the BEST costume
GPS Check-In: This isn't a feature I could use much during my party but this would be great for a hunt around town where you want people to go to specific places. Since the hunts can run for up to a month, I had also thought about putting bonus tasks in for people who go check out the local haunted houses. I will probably do it next year if we use this app again.
Question & Answer: This type of task is just like trivia. You can enter any question you want and users must input the correct answer to earn the points. Users can guess as many times as they'd like but if they guess wrong it just says "incorrect response". The only thing I don't like about the question and answer is that as the admin, I can't see people's incorrect guesses. for some of them I'd really like to see what all the guesses were. Also, it would be nice if you could make some questions end earlier. For example, I let people guess what our costumes would be but once the party started I didn't want them to be able to get it. The only way I figured out how to do it was to manually go in and revise the question to say "this question has ended" and then change the answer to something totally random like "invalid response". Here are some examples of what I used this year and/or what I might use next year.
- Name the movie that inspired our 2010/2011/2012/2013 costumes (four separate questions)
- What character will Ryan/Ashley be dressed as for this year's party?
- How many paper bats are hung on the wall?
- How many candy corn are in the jar on the table?
QR Code: Using your phone's camera it can scan a QR code. In case you aren't familiar with a QR code, I took a screenshot of the Scavify webpage that you see when you create the QR code task. You type what you want the app users to see and then you type a simple word or phrase and Scavify generates the QR code. You can then save and print this image and use it on whatever you want.
I mentioned a price before...this app is free for all users (people playing your game) and is available for both Android and Apple users. When I signed up you could choose 10 players for $25, 25 players for $50 or 50 players for $75. They had a free trial for just 2 users for 48 hours so you could test out the app and make sure it was what you wanted to use. There were also options for businesses and larger groups. The hunt can be active for up to 30 days but you set the start and end date. You can spend as much time as you want working on the tasks before the hunt goes live. Users install the Scavify app and search for your hunt by name. You can put a password on the app so that no random people sign up for your hunt (since you are paying per user i would recommend this). I just included the password when i notified the users about the hunt/game.
During the game, users can see who has the most points and what they've done to get them (you can turn this off if you don't want them to know). They can also see what pictures other people have taken. It is SOO nice as the administrator that it does all of the scorekeeping for you. At the end of the night I just logged in once and checked who had the highest score and that was it, I knew the winner!
What's even more exciting? After the game is over, you can download all the pictures from the game! From the admin dashboard, when the hunt is over there is a button to click on the bottom right that says "initiate processing". You click that and within a few minutes (or less) it puts up a link that says "download photos" which downloads one zip file containing all the pictures.
Overall this app was really fun and I think we could do a much better job integrating it with our party next year. I hope they keep the same pricing options (or similar) so we can play again next year! My only other suggestion for improvement is that it would be nice if users could also upload ANY pic they take/want into the app - not for points, just so the hosts could have all the event photos in one place. For more information, check out their website at: www.scavify.com
Last but not least, here's a slideshow of the pics taken during the event