For the past seven years I've taken part in an (unaffiliated) Georgia Tech Band tradition: Get A Clue.
What is Get A Clue (or GAC, as we in the know call it)? Well, it's a day filled with reckless driving, possible trespassing, and some intellectual pursuits thrown in for the hell of it. I believe the proper term is that it's a "Treasure Hunt" game: Get Clue, Solve, Find Location, Lather, Rinse, Repeat. The trick is that the locations can be anywhere within a 40 mile radius of Georgia Tech campus. Also, it starts at about 9 AM on a Saturday, and you'll be lucky to be done by midnight (this year, we didn't finish till 3 AM).
What do you win? First place gets...
*drumroll please*
To run the game next year!
Second place is "The Real Winners"; they're team smart enough to beat everyone else and also ensure they don't have to run next year's game! It's a coveted position, the running for which causes the accidental first place (no one wants to come in last, even if it is for nothing).
Why do it? It's just great fun. Spend a day with friends driving around the city solving clues. Sure, those friends rarely do it a second year in a row (and those who do forget how long of a Saturday it really is). But once you get going, you wonder why you don't do this everyday? And then once you pass around 11 PM, you remember just how tired you get when you've been solving clues all day and have who-knows-how-many left to go.
The other part of the fun are the yearly themes. I've played it with themes ranging from "Atlanta Zombie Apocalypse" to "Where in Atlanta is Carmen Sandiego?" to even "Corporate Espionage". I stole the image at the top of this post from this year's theme: "CSI: Atlanta", complete with tracking down the notorious "cereal killer". Yes, that's right, all victims were dressed up as cereal mascots, including the hooker ("When they're dead, they're just hookers") in Las Vegas dressed up as a bunny while turning tricks (get it?).
Was returning to Atlanta for a weekend to do this worth my time? Probably not, given how busy I was. Did I enjoy it anyways? Hell yes. And made sure I got to see all my friends and family while there as well. Good trip, will have to do it again next year.
P.S. Talk about Scheduler keeping me on my toes, it keeps reposting this even though I never wrote it...
I just heard about Get a Clue from a Tech alumna over dinner last night. Is there a mailing list or a central website where I can stay up to date? This sounds like a lot of fun and I'd like an opportunity to play next year.
ReplyDeleteI was once mildly involved in creating a central website, though it never happened. Every year gets a new site made by whoever's running it that year. I'll most likely post info about it when it gets around that time again, though that wouldn't be before March-ish 2012.
ReplyDelete