Portland, Maine Madness Scavenger Hunt

They did an awesome job creating an experience virtually! This is a great way to check out Portland in a lowkey manner!!!

We had a blast! Great way to do something active, learn more about our city, and have a lot of laughs. We enjoyed it so much that we decided to try one in a city we’re traveling to next month as well!

While we loved the concept of doing a scavenger hunt through Portland to see the sites, this experience under delivered. We knew there wouldn’t be anyone physically with us but had anticipated more interaction as we went from spot to spot. Instead, we were sent a pdf doc via canva (???) a few minutes before the game started, which contained all of the missions together. We were instructed to snap pics via WhatsApp as we completed a task. It was a pain to keep going back and forth between WhatsApp and canvas to navigate the game—why not make it like a real scavenger hunt and sent us one clue at a time? When we sent a pic, we received very generic responses like “good job” or an emoji, which made us wonder if it was just a bot replying to us. We were told the missions were in geographical order but they weren’t, so we were zig zagging back and forth throughout the town. We liked the exercise, but it seemed pretty disorganized. The missions themselves were mid. In one location, we were told to find the cat that resides there only to learn that this cat died 4 years ago-has this thing been updated?! Another location was closed when we arrived. We didn’t receive any background info about what we were looking for so we didn’t really learn anything about the city along the way. After 2 hours, the “game” sort of ended. The bot host congratulated us on earning 5 million points and then asked if we’d like to leave a tip. Wha?! After spending $100 for a family of four to read through a slide deck of half-assed missions, the only tip I would leave is — you can do better. We still managed to have a good time because it’s vacation and we made the very most of it. We celebrated earning our millions of points with a tasty lobster roll.