How To Create a Treasure Hunt Game With Your iPhone and NFC Tags

With a few NFC tags you can create a treasure hunt game that others can play. Put clues on a fre website and link the tags to each page. Design your own game for your kids, students, friends or family.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to show you how to make a NFC Treasure Hunt Game with your iPhone.
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So one of the problems with using mobile technology like iPhones all the time is people tend to stay inside, tend to be staring at their screens and all of that. But you can actually use your iPhone to get outdoors more.  One of the ways to do that is to create a treasure hunt game for friends or family to play. You could do that using these little NFC tags. You could put data on these. Data that represents a webpage and when somebody pulls their iPhone to it it actually brings up that webpage. By using a simple little app on your iPhone you could write to these tags and use that to create a treasure hunt by placing these in various places and people have to follow clues to get from one to the other until they find a treasure. Now you could buy these at Amazon. They're really cheap. Here are the ones that I bought. They're nothing particularly special. There are tons of different ones out there. Quality varies how well they work and the features they have. So it may be the kind of thing where you can pick one and sometimes I hear of people getting them and they just don't work. But they only cost a few bucks so you just order a different one. Sometimes they're stickers. Sometimes they're little plastic disks which may be more durable outside but you would have to maybe get some double sided tape to stick to something. As for an iPhone you definitely need an iPhone 11 or 12 or newer to be able to write to these tags. However, reading from them should work on  many more models of iPhone and also Android phones as well. You definitely want to test it out with the phone model that somebody is going to be using to play the game to make sure it works and, of course, make sure you've got 11 or 12 or newer in order to create the game in the first place. 
So here I've created the clues for each stop in the treasure hunt. Now I want to put these on the web somewhere. So I need to create a website or at least a series of webpages. Now if you have a website and you can stash these pages somewhere then great. Otherwise you may want to find a free solution. For instance, I'm going to use Goggle sites here, so sites.goggle.com. If you have a gmail or YouTube account or whatever you've got a Goggle account so you have Goggle Sites and you could just put a bunch of free webpages up there. Each one is going to hold a different clue. For instance, here's my first clue. It's going to give a little introduction and it's going to give directions to how to find the first NFC tag. So I'm going to copy that. Then here at sites.goggle.com I'm going to create a new site, I'll just choose blank here as the template, and then I'll call this site Treasure Hunt. So here we'll go Themes here. So I'll just go with this basic one here and change the Header type to Title Only like that. I'll put a title here like Treasure Hunt. Then what we want to do here below is add the text. 
So you insert a text box like that and we'll paste in the text. Now it's pretty boring like that so let's center it and maybe make it bold and bigger font and maybe we can change the text type to something that looks a little bit more like an adventure. Maybe something with a more adventurous name. Here we go. Do bold. Then we've got a simple webpage here that somebody can look at. Now we're going to go and create another page here. So we'll do Pages and we'll add a new page. We'll call this Clue 2. Done. I'll put Treasure Hunt: Clue 2. Then I will add text box. I'll grab my second clue there and paste that in. We can go between these pages here to make corrections and do things like that. One of the things we want to do here is notice how Clue 2 appears in Navigation. We want to go for Clue 2, select that, and say Hide from Navigation so you can't just jump to Clue 2. So I'm going to create the other pages for this by adding additional pages here.
So now I've got all five pages here so far, of course. Your treasure hunt will go on until the treasure is found. So now I want to publish and I could always make changes later on. I can give it a name. So it's going to have to be something unique. Treasure Hunt is not going to work. I'm sure that's already been used. So I can name this, you know, MacMost Treasure Hunt like that. Then probably request search engines not look at the site. Publish. Now when I'm on a page here I can click here and get the link. So you could see this is slash home. This one here, if I go to Clue 2, the link is Clue and then a dash instead of a space 2. So it's pretty easy to know these URLs. 
Now that the site is created I can go and create the tags. Now I have to write to these little white tags. So I'm going to get an app to do that. The app I'm going to use is one called NFC Tools. It's one I've used before. It's free. There are some more advanced features but you only need the free stuff here. After you get this from the App Store it is a very simple to use tool. All you need to do is go to right mode, so I'm going to tap the right button there and I'm going to add a record. The only type of record that makes any sense to use is URL. Now URL will then take you to a webpage. Now why not use text? Well, iPhones don't automatically recognize text. So if you put your iPhone against an NFC tag that has some text in it, it won't automatically show up. You can use an app like this to read the tag but it won't happen automatically. The URL will. You'll see that in action in a minute.   
So I'm going to go to URL and I'm going to enter the URL. Now to make sure I get it right I'm going to go to the browser first and try using the URL to make sure it comes up. So you could see here I'm going to:
 sites.goggle.com/view/macmost-treasure-hunt/home
I typed it right. Great!  It takes us to that first page there. So now I can copy that URL. I can paste it in. So I'll Paste. Now I want to go back and check here at the beginning. Sure enough it does actually put the https there. So I want to get rid of that because it's already going to put that. There you can see it at the top. So now it should go to the right place. So we'll do Okay. You can see this is what the tag will be written out as. Now I'm going to take the tag and I'm going to tap the right. I'm going to write to this first tag. You can see it says it wrote to it. 
So now when I go and read from it, I'm just on the regular home screen on my iPhone just like somebody playing my Treasure Hunt game would be doing and they're going to take this tag and they're going to move their iPhone against it and you can see it comes up, Open sites.goggle.com. Okay. Tap that and you could see it loads that page. So it works. Somebody finds this tag and puts an iPhone or an Android phone against it. It should allow them to view this webpage. So now all I need to do is do the other five tags. Most of the time you can write on these so you're going to want to write say a number, the number of the clue, or maybe something else to remind you which one is which so you don't get them confused. You can use a little sharpie or something to write on it and that way you've got all of the URLs on each of the different tags. Test them out with your iPhone and then you can go to the location of your Treasure Hunt Game and put all of the tags there. 
Now, of course, the first one you may not even want to put on a tag. You may want to send that home URL to the person playing in the Messages app. So in other words they're ready to play. They're at home or wherever they are. They've gathered together. You send them a URL with that first clue and they have to figure it out. But the other clues you are going to want to put on these tags and put them in the proper places. Of course, you want to take into account how hard or easy the tags are to find. Whether other people may find them and scratch them off or damage them or something like that. This works best in more remote small town type of area. I'm going it in a big city park so I don't know if each one of these will actually be around if I set this game up a little bit too early and somebody else sees the little white tags. 
So in my treasure hunt game I first asked the players to look for the Denver Camarasaurus in the eye, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right, but you can probably guess that's a dinosaur.So what's a dinosaur doing in Denver. But if you look up that, Denver Camarasaurus you'll find that there is one. It's a statue of a camarasaurus outside the Denver Nature and Science Museum. So if you go out there there's a nice parking lot there and you can, you know, find where this thing is. It's sticking its head up out of a parking garage and a lot of people, once they look this up online will be like oh yeah, that thing. I know what that is. If you walk over to it then there's the tag right there on the railing. It's not down below. You have to look it in the eye. So it's above and easy to find. Then you turn toward the lake. Easy enough to figure that out. You walk towards it and if you walk towards it there is a big field. Can't miss that. Then there's this branch that definitely looks like a sitting branch. You could see and the second clue is hidden right there. Then the next clue tells you to go around the lake to the south. So you don't want to go to the north side of the lake but the south side and it's a little harder to figure out because it is looking for children hoping to find a prince. So eventually you find a statue of some kids looking at some frogs. Okay, a little fairy tale reference there. You'll find the clue near the frogs. There it is. Now the pavilion is a big landmark here and you could see it clearly from the statue with the kids. So you want to go behind it. You walk behind it and the sun points to the next clue at noon. If you look around there you'll find a sundial. Ah, so the sun points to the next clue at noon means it's sitting at twelve o'clock on the sundial. There it is. Then it asks for a Scottish poet. Now if you look around you'll find a statue. You could see it right from that sundial. If you walk up to that statue you'll see it's the famous Robert Burns, Scottish poet. You could also substitute a piece of Burns' poetry here and then they would have to look that up and find it's from Robert Burns, figure out there's a statue of burns in the park and it's really close to where they are now. Then go up to it and see the tag there. 
So each one kind of presents a little bit of a different kind of challenge. You have to use your brains a little bit more than just giving a location. Then you keep going on and on from there until you end up at a spot safe enough to maybe deposit a little treasure that they could find instead of a tag or perhaps a tag sitting on top of a treasure that gives them a message telling them about it. Now this is already a little bit educational because you've already learned a little bit about a dinosaur. But maybe you also get a link to learn more about the dinosaur or maybe the next clue has something to do with some characteristic of the dinosaur that you have to read and learn about it. You could put a little bit of information about Burns, for instance. Lots of different things that you could do to make it not just a little bit of an adventure but also an educational experience. You could have lots of fun with it and you could also put hints. There's nothing to prevent you from putting more pages up there. Pages not triggered by the tags but that are links to hints with every clue. So you get the clue say looking for the Scottish poet and there's a link there for a hint that goes to another page that maybe gives you more information or even shows you a map if they really can't figure out where the next clue is leading them to.
So that's how you do NFC Treasure Hunt. It's basically the same thing as if you would leave notes at every place except that some random person coming by isn't going to be able to read it. They probably won't recognize it as a NFC tag and won't try to read that with their phone. So it's a little bit more hidden. You could also include all sorts of multimedia in the webpages. You could put images or diagrams or video clips on those webpages to make it even more interesting than you would get with a handwritten note. So I hope this gives you some ideas and you can use this to make a cheap and easy fun game for your kids or your siblings or your students or for your friends just to enjoy being outdoors while still using the technology of the iPhone and these NFC tags.

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Create a Treasure Hunt Game With Your iPhone and NFC Tags”

Dana Schwartz

4 years ago

I’d make the URLs a little less easy to guess after seeing the first (not clue-1, clue-2, etc) if possible — maybe some random characters? Kids are too smart these days! And maybe a little harder to find, so they don’t look like defacement that some park ranger or uninvolved “Good Samaritan” might remove. And of course, after the game is done, go back and remove the tags for good measure. Just some thoughts, this is a great idea!

Hapax Legomenon

Nice idea to get the kids out, but a few printed QR codes would waste less resources of our planet...

Gary Rosenzweig

Hapax: Always good to be thinking environmentally. But I don't know if those little NFC stickers use up that many resources. Plus, they are reusable, which printed QR stickers would not be. QR stickers would also attract non-players since most people who would spot them would know what to do. I suppose if you wanted to use zero resources, you could follow the players around and text them the next clue when you saw they arrived at the right spot.

Excellent walkthrough! I wasn't considering making an NFC tag hunt, but this taught me a lot about how to use the tags in general. I want to put them around our apartment for friends who might stay here when we're gone, so they can get tips on how to use various things, etc. I'd also like to use them to trigger certain shortcuts. Anyway, good stuff... many thanks! You clearly put in a lot of effort with your guides. Heading over to your Patreon page now.

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How To Create a Treasure Hunt Game With Your iPhone and NFC Tags

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Create a Treasure Hunt Game With Your iPhone and NFC Tags”

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