Carmen San Diego Mystery Heist Birthday Party

I hosted this party four years ago and figured I should document the clues and game play before I forget something. 

Supplies:

My Passport Sticker Books (12)

Cryptex

3 Digit Custom Combination Lock (1) 

Four Digit Custom Combination Lock (3)

World Party Favor Boxes (12)

Safari Around the World TOOB

Safari WorldLandmarks TOOB

International Travel Posters

 
Large Suitcase with Outer Pocket (Generic)

Backpack (Generic)

Ping Pong Eyeball or another "eye" object like an Egyptian Eye of Horus charm etc.

Object or picture depicting "Full" I crafted a fuel gauge with a 2 oz metal tin and a red tooth pick

Tow Truck Toy/Picture

Hershey Chocolate Bar (in half) only showing the letters HER

The Invitation

Back before I had two young kids.... Every bit of care was given to customizing the travel ticket, from the departure airport code to the arrival city. I picked Rome because I had reserved the party room at a pizza place since it fit the international theme.  The corners were rounded with a circle punch and I even switched out my regular scoring blade for a perforated one to make it truly a tear off ticket. In the present day...  I would feel pretty proud of myself if I remember to tell my husband what I want for my birthday in time for him to order it from Amazon Prime and have it delivered by my actual birth date. 

Blank for your own use! 

Passport books:

Each page was meticulously thought out and I took special care to match the pictures and clues with the stickers. The clues must be placed in order. In hindsight, I needed to make the capital letters more pronounced as it was not clear that the capital letters spell out a message. Also, it is best to try to make sure each book is identical so guests don’t think that the differences are clues. The passport books were placed on each chair 

This was the message inside the front cover. Why does ermine frosting matter? It doesn’t, it's only my personal favorite. 

I removed the sticker insert from the middle of the book and glued in a second message:

Tip #1: The passport book scripts say:  WEST TO EAST, but this wasn't obvious how I originally printed them with just the capital letters in bold, so if I did it again, I would use the larger capital font version below: 

·      Walked through the largest museum in the world

·      Explored the world’s deepest blue hole 

·      St. Paul's cathedral

·      Took a trip up the Yangtze river and visited the Terracotta Warriors

·      There’s a caribou on the quarter and beaver on the nickel 

·      Over half of the world’s cork is produced here 

·      Europe’s most populated city is Moscow 

·      Ancient Theater of Epidaurus 

·      Saw the Neuschwanstein Castle and Bradenburg Gate 

·      Three vertical stripes and a picture of an eagle eating a snake on their flag

Next, I taped the cipher below to the back of the Pisa/Italy poster with a corner of the cipher visibly poking out as a clue.  The other posters were taped up for decorations. 

Tip #2 Use cardstock with a pattern or picture to make it easier to know which direction faces up, not solid black. 

Tip #3 : For personal use, cut out the " 's  and not the "i" in the space for the name. 

The cipher reveals the message:  the weight is the answer. 

The landmark figurine Buddha of Lantau/The Big Buddha was placed in the outer pocket of the suitcase. The suitcase was locked with the smaller three digit combination lock.  The figurine is goldish so it was a little confusing because some of the guests were mistaking it for the Golden Buddha in Bangkok. They eventually figured out the mix up. 

weight is 250 Tons

The weight ( #250)  is the code which opens the three-digit lock on suitcase. Inside the suitcase I had the backpack (more on what's in it later), the dozen world boxes, and this clue:

Sometimes when you’re puzzled it’s best to retrace your steps from the beginning.

(This was a hint for them to go back through their passports and to decipher the message WEST TO EAST.)

World Boxes

Landmarks have color-coded numbers.

Each box had a map that fit in the bottom of the box identifying the famous landmark. (I did not use all of the landmarks, only the ones listed below.)  On the back of each map, I wrote the latitude and longitude of the landmark for faster reference.

 Originally, I had the boxes numbered on the bottom, but these were easy to mix up once the maps were removed. If I did it again, I would number the landmarks (as pictured) instead of the bottom of the box. 

Sample numeric code from West to East: 201703182021

2 Easter Island: 27.1130 S, 109.3496 W

0  Mount Rushmore: 43.8791 N, 103.4591 W

1  Temple of the Inscriptions: 17.4836 N, 92.0470 W

7  Statue of Liberty: 40.6892 N, 74.0445 W

0  Stonehenge: 51.1789 N, 1.8262 W

3  Big Ben: 51.5007 N, 0.1246 W

1  Arc de Triomphe: 48.8738 N, 2.2950 E

8  Leaning Tower of Pisa: 43.7230, 10.3966 E

2  Colosseum: 41.8902 N, 12.4922 E

0  Parthenon: 37.9715 N, 23.7267 E

2  Great Sphinx of Giza:  29.9753 N, 31.1376 E

1  Great Wall of China:  40.4319 N, 116.5704 E

The more random the code the better, especially if they're color-coded as this makes it easier for the guests to group the numbers in fours and guess the code instead of figure it out. It's okay to do all black numbers but then it might be hard to know which code goes with which lock. 

The Backpack

The backpack had the three, four-digit combination locks on the zipper to keep it closed. If I had more lockable containers, I suppose I could have done a box within a box within a box etc... When the backpack was opened, inside was the Hershey bar, tow truck, eye ball, fuel gauge, and cryptex. 

The elements together represented the words “Eye-Full/Fuel-Tow-Her” (Eiffel Tower) obeying a loose phonetic similarity scheme.

As an alternate, one of my guests guessed THIEF (Tow-Hershey-I/Eye- Empty/Full) following a pattern where each object represented one letter. 

The word PARIS opens the Cryptex and reveals the message: 

 

ask for the “czech” 

The deal I made with the server was to bring out the cake when I asked for the check. This ended up being better than I expected as  one of my guests was really into the mystery and asked the server to bring out the to-go boxes and checks with a super heavy Russian accent.  I'm not sure it could have been better if I'd made the key phrase something ridiculous like, "Bring me your biggest meatball on your smallest plate." As a backup plan,  I could have locked the cake in the car if  they didn't allow outside food and drink in their serving areas and used a license plate number as the next clue. 

Final note on the cake box said:

Let’s be honest, who has room for cake after a pizza buffet—especially Brick Oven’s super delicious dessert pizza? Good job, detectives, until next time

  Carmen Sandiego

Breakfast at Tiffany's Game

While I admittedly enjoy perusing Pinterest for ideas, I often feel guilty because it’s easier to copy someone else’s idea rather than to come up with something new.  Then, even when I do think of something new, I lack the photography skills to make a pinnable post.  Or I start fretting over fair use and copyright laws.

Still, I'd like to give something back, so here's an original game I created for my “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” themed birthday party from a few years ago.  If you want to fill in your name at the top in a photo editing program, I used the various fonts: 

Arabic typesetting

Kunstler script

Monotype Corsiva

Lucida Console

Gemstone images from https://www.jewelry-secrets.com/Blog/diamond-shapes/

Answer Sheet

Answer Key

I modified two bridal shower games from Etsy, which both no longer seem to be available, to create the templates.

 The first was a scattergories game  by TrishaDesignCreation. The second was a purse-scavenger hunt game from ShameronStudios.

I picked 30 out of the 100 different diamond cuts on the website because I was turning thirty. I probably could have stopped at 8 in hindsight because most of my friends couldn't name any cuts besides the basic shapes (square, round, heart, triangle, rectangle.) We still had fun going over the answers together at least.

Laptop Keyboards

When you realize it has been over THREE years since you last blogged and that it is definitely time to say goodbye to your oldest, dearest friend of 10+ years…

Toshiba Satellite

Goodbye, mi amor. You had the perfect keyboard and you were everything I ever wanted in a laptop.  I’m sorry, but Windows no longer supports Vista and the guy at the PC place says it would cost $900 to install all the hardware you’d need to run Windows 7 and even then, you might not last another 2 years. Your battery no longer holds any charge and it’s really frustrating losing so much unsaved work when my toddler trips over the cord or when you go into sleep mode. 

I replaced your DC port three times and your power supply cable twice. I never downloaded any games on you and I never installed anything besides Microsoft Word and Itunes to your 16 GB hard drive.  Thank you, Toshiba Satelite,  for allowing me to backup all my files onto those free SWAG thumb drives my husband brings home from his work conventions, it was really convenient.

I really did everything I could to prolong your life, but I couldn’t find your battery for sale on Ebay and a new battery wouldn’t fix your process freezes and lag which were beginning to get annoyingly frequent.  

Which brings me to the following rant regarding the purchase of my new laptop:

• There seems to be a disturbing trend that all laptop manufacturers are no longer including right and left click buttons beneath their touch pad mouse sensors.   They’re either built in or there is no mouse pad because it’s a touch screen. 

• All laptop manufacturers (or at least 95% of the models on display at Best Buy, Fry’s Electronics, Office Depot, PC World, and the local college bookstores) have done away with island-style keys and switched to a chiclet style keyboard. 

• Laptops with screens larger than 15 inches will invariably have a 10-key keyboard. This sometimes significantly offsets the mouse pad to the left.

• The UP/DOWN directional arrows are half sized or crammed into the space of 3 keys instead of 4.

•  Page Up, Page Down, Home, End are more commonly assigned as Function secondary keys instead of being independent keys.  I only found one other laptop, the HP Folio Elitebook 9740 (almost as old as my Toshiba) that has these keys placed vertically along the far right side.

• Lastly, I will really miss having the delete key in the top right corner.

I will use you, but I will never love you like the Toshiba.

Candy Land

Vintage

Maybe I'm just being too nostalgic, but I was really bummed when I went to buy a copy of CANDY LAND and realized the artwork had been updated. I'm now in a dilemma where I must decide if I want to spend $40 for a vintage version on Ebay or if I should just suck it up and save myself  $30.

New Candy Land

Kiwi Loco, Holiday Parade, 2012

In December 2012, a year and four months before we closed our frozen yogurt store, we participated in ourcity's annual holiday parade. Estimated turn out was 15000+ people out of 70,000 or so in the city. In 2012, we had a simple walking group and handed out 3,000 coupons for 3 oz of free yogurt with an 8 oz purchase. We had an amazing return of 300 coupons.

Last year, we decided we'd do a float. Candy Land seemed like a fun theme since it combined sweets and toys and I knew I could borrow the Princess Lolly costume from someone.

 

Kiwi Loco, Holiday Parade, 2013

I'd printed twice as many coupons using the exact same promotion, format, graphics etc... Out of 6,000 coupons, we had 25 returned. Ouch. Many families later said it was a struggle to buy gifts for their kids and they had to cut back expenses in anticipation of higher health care costs for 2014. I can't say I blame them because when money gets tight, the first thing I'd cut is ice cream too.

Maybe this year I'll get to watch instead of walking for once!