NextClue
A treasure hunt that uses the whole campus as its board — and every answer is a place you have to stand in.
A sentence, and no map pin.
You get a line of text. Not a marker, not an arrow, not a distance. Working out which corner of campus it names is the first half of the puzzle, and it happens before anyone stands up.
Real coordinates. Real weather.
Every site is a genuine latitude and longitude on a map that pans and zooms like any other. The hunt happens at walking pace, outdoors, in a place you thought you already knew.
Checked on the server, always.
The answer never reaches your browser — not in the page source, not in a network response, not anywhere the curious can look. Stuck teams can buy a hint with points, and the whole team sees who opened it.
The story moves when you do.
Clear a chapter and the next one opens, with the story that goes with it. There is no schedule and no organiser flipping a switch — the event advances because your team advanced.
You have walked past it a hundred times.
The brass disc set into the paving. The date carved above a door nobody uses. The one tree on the quad that does not match the others. A campus is thick with things that are hiding in the open, and the only reason you have never noticed them is that nobody ever gave you a reason to look.
NextClue is that reason.
2–5
Small enough to argue, large enough to split up.
CLOCK
Start in March, finish in September. The timer is per team.
POINTS
Help is always available and never free. That is the tension.
Orientation events are a slideshow. This is a reason to walk into a building you have no class in.
The best way to learn a place is to need something from it. So NextClue puts the answers in the world instead of on the screen: you cannot finish it from a laptop, and you cannot finish it alone. Five people who have argued their way across a campus together know it — and each other — better than five people who sat through a tour.
Organisers write the clues, drop the sites on a real map, and set what a hint costs. Everything else is the teams.