This year’s Bios party wasn’t (at least from the viewpoint of our psychedelic decorations crew Vytvarny Krouzek Ctverecek) as hectic and full of work as previous years, and so I used the time to prepare a slightly different kind of project.
The party was in the middle of beautiful woods, but most people tend to spend the whole day around the camp, drinking beer and socializing. Not that there’s something bad about it, I just thought they could like a change. So I prepared a game, a “treasure hunt”, like those played in summer camps for kids. The goal was to introduce a story, which would engage people a bit and give them a challenge, and take them for a walk. I also wanted the story to help with a proper set & setting for the night, so it’s in my favorite “psy-fi” (psychedelic fiction :) style.
Only a fragment of people went for the walk – I knew about 6 groups, but perhaps a few more went too. But this was expected, and I was curious whether someone would like the idea at all. The reactions were “OK” to “very good”, just one team complained that the “walk” was actually quite long (about 2 hours) and not trivial – however, that was the point, and it seems that I managed to strike the balance quite well – it wasn’t too easy, but it wasn’t hard either. Most of the game was about following colored-paper marks, and I was pleased when I was told that it was quite possible to use intuition to find the next mark.
The story itself was composed of two parts. First, there were messages and comments left by someone, who went ahead of the players. The second part was information, leaking from the “Information Artifact”, which advanced the story itself.
First comment was available in the camp, together with the key to first cypher, which was placed on a rock above the camp valley and contained first part of the actual story.
Those are the messages as you would meet them on the way. By the way, if anyone has photos from the game, please let me know.