Games

Escape Games - Treasure Hunts

I created, alone or together with friends, a couple of treasure hunts, games, escape games, of educational or 'entertainment only' nature. Here are recent examples:

The most ambitious recent project is the game I designed for the G·EM - Genève Evasion Mathématique, the structure within the University of Geneva dedicated to mathematical outreach.

The game was called Alice au Pays d'Emerveille as a reference to the festival Math'Emerveille, an event organized by the G·EM at the Musée d'histoire des sciences in Geneva, where several mathematicians and outreach specialists interacted with the public around hands-on, visual, magical, impressive and exciting mathematical experiments and games.

For Alice, I designed 21 riddles of various complexities, leading to 3 stacks of 7 cards - each stack representing a difficulty level. The easiest could be played with younger people as the mechanisms there are more direct, while the hardest constitutes a real challenge even for more seasoned enthusiasts.

The goal of the game was three-fold:

First, to get people to work / think / behave 'as mathematicians' but without doing anything mathematical. More precisely, the idea was to have participants experience the joy and frustrations of problem solving, with riddles presented without any precise instruction. Hence, the first step needs to be to get how the whole machinery works. Then, participants have to also learn patience and tenacity, as most mathematical problems cannot be solved on the spot. The game is indeed constructed as something to be played sporadically and by taking one's time. My goal was also to have people share opinions, ask for help, team up and experience the excitment of finally figuring out how things work - exactly as we do in math!
The second goal was to shed more light on female mathematicians: the riddles were inspired (to various degrees) by the life and work of a woman whose work had an impact in maths (and science in general) as well as in their community and time, several of them having also been advocates for women education and rights. Also, the solution of each riddle is a female mathematician. Together with the riddles are provided biographies of all the 21 women who inspired them, allowing participants to get to know better these important and inspiring historical figures, even without solving the riddles (the spoilers end there, as the 21 solutions are given in alphabetical order, so the biographies don't spoil too much of the fun).
Finally, the game also serves as a jonction between the public and the Musée d'histoire des sciences in Geneva, as in order to solve the last riddle of every stack, participants need an element which is part of the permanent collection of the museum.

I was fortunate enough to work with a graphic designer, Joana Mailler, who designed a steampunk Alice in Wonderlands universe that was the perfect fit for the game, as Lewis Carroll was also a mathematician and a riddle enthusiast.

This project was suggested by my friend and co-direct of G·EM, Elise Raphael, and then printed as a physical card game that was distributed to the public during the festival. Exemplaries can be found at G·EM, or at the Musée d'histoire des sciences in Geneva.

A journalist of the Dauphiné Libéré who was passing by, was kind enough to write a paper about it (pdf)

Hint about the riddles can always be asked by sending me an e-mail. I'm happy to help !

The TecDay module "Une enquête mathématique dont VOUS êtes le héros !" pits two competing teams of students whose goal is to find and neutralize a biochemical bomb before it explodes and before the other team reaches it.

In this educational escape game students mainly explore the more 'emotional' aspects of a mathematician (and other scientist)'s job: struggles and doubts when they don't see what they are supposed to do / how things work, or when they deal with their impostor syndrom (the feeling of not being smart enough / good enough to solve a problem), excitement when one starts to see a way through, the adrenaline shot of having solved a part of the problem, the motivation and support of teamwork, the pressure and stress of competition, etc.

During the 75-minutes against-the-clock part, the teams have to solve a variety of problems, allowing them to deal with various parts of mathematics: pure logic, cryptography, classical geometry, combinatorics, optimization, discrete geometry, and number theory. All problems are part of the wider storyline, and arise naturally in the storytelling.
At the end of the module, a 5-10 minutes debrief allows students to reflect on what just happened, and that the everyday life of a mathematician (or another scientist) is not solving very difficult equations, but has strong emotional and social aspects, and covers a wide variety of problems and situations.

This escape game originated from a joint project with Michaël Dougoud, which I then developed alone.

During the 2023 University of Fribourg Explora event, a festival for culture, science and society that takes place every 2 years and designed to make the University's activities available to a wider audience, I constructed a treasure hunt specially designed for a teenagers / young adults audience.

The project was designed in collaboration with members of the University's communication service Unicom: Farida Khali, Ibrahim Nimaga, and Caroline Bruegger (who masterfully gave birth to the graphical and visual elements of the project).

The project, called Who are Samgael & Gore, consisted in a 4-pages magazine, mimicking the University's online magazine "Alma & Georges".
Each part of the magazine corresponded to a particular booth in the whole Explora event, and contained / was a riddle itself. Most of the riddles were too difficult to be solved on the spot, so that the participants needed to first identify the corresponding booth, and then go visit it and in particular, interact with the animators (who had been contacted ahead of time and given the riddle's solution, so they could give / "sell" some hints).
The hunt's hidden goal was to spark interactions between the participants and booths' animators, also by redirecting young participants towards booths that could have been of particular interest.

Solving enough riddles then gave participants hints for the final, super-riddle, allowing them to expose Samgael and Gore's true identities among a panel of suspects.

Among all correct answers, a participant was randomly picked and won a laptop.

My younger brother and my sister-in-law asked me to create a 3-hours treasure hunt for their wedding evening. The deal was simple, yet complicated: a treasure hunt that could be performed at the tables, in teams of 8, over the whole dinner's span, so it had to have a certain difficulty and depth, but also it should only be a red thread during the evening, which would also have several other highlights, and, of course, the dinner's courses themselves.

The resulting project was the following: each table got the same envelope, containing 8 copies of a 4-pages newspaper, as well as a set of 10 pictures, and a geographic map of the region. The hunt's rules were explained on the envelope. Basically, the guests had to associate to each of the 10 pictures a portion of the newspaper (a whole article, or only one paragraph, or several elements across the newspaper, etc). Each of these portions was to lead to a location on the map (either hidden in the text, or to be deduced after some manipulations, or after having solved a riddle, etc). Finally, the readers had to combine the 10 locations in a certain way to find a 5-letters code, that would allow them to open a cryptex located on the main table.

In order for each table to progress as independently as possible, several indices were also included, allowing the contestants to choose their own pace - from a casual exploration using most of the indices to a hardcore, no-help, version.

This project has been created together with my younger sister Laora Jacquemet.

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