Every kid played Hide-and-Seek growing up.  It was a requisite childhood game.  The concept couldn’t be simpler, and the name said it all; someone hides and then you try to find them.  Well, at some point when we were kids we decided to throw a twist on the game and add a new element, and “Note Hide-and-Seek” was born.

Instead of just trying to find someone who could be hiding anywhere, you had to follow a series of written notes that pointed you to different areas to look.  The final clue would basically tell you where the person was hiding.  (To be clear, you weren’t exactly trying to crack the DaVinci Code here.  A note might say something like “I could go for a glass of milk,” and then you’d find the next note in the refrigerator.   You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to interpret these clues.)

The planning was what took the longest.  From the moment we decided to play a game of Note Hide-and-Seek to the time anyone actually hid would sometimes take a good 45 minutes to an hour as we each planned not just our hiding spot, but also mapped out our path of clues and filled out post-it note after post-it note.  Then, depending on who was going first, you might not even get to put your plan into action until much later.  Hopefully by the time your turn came around you still remembered what you had in mind!

When it was your turn to hide you would designate a room as “the counting room.”  Everyone else (usually the players were me, Val, Josh, and Dad) would wait there while you ran around and hid all of your notes.  Then you would return and tell everyone to count to 30 as well as where to find the first note, and then go hide.  Then the other players would embark in their journey to find each of your notes, and then, ultimately, you.

If you did your planning very carefully you could pull off some tricky maneuvers.  Since you knew the sequence of your notes, you would know exactly where the “seekers” were going to be at any given time.  Let’s say I made my room the “counting room,” and I knew that my first note would send everyone downstairs.  As soon as they were gone I could then go into my room and hide, having the game end where it began.  Or, as long as you were careful, you could continue hiding notes as you went and have the trail double back, re-using rooms the “seekers” had already been in and creating a real feeling of being one step ahead of your pursuers.  It’s like you were the freaking Riddler trying to stay a step ahead of Batman.

As the games went on they got gradually more elaborate, and we would try to find ways to keep it fresh and do things that hadn’t been done before.  A note might refer to a book, and then the next note would be hidden between the pages.  You might have to go outside and get a clue out of the car.  One time I even recorded one of the clues on my taperecorder and then left it out with a note that said “Play Me.”  

Since the last clue would lead you right to where the person was hiding, finding the person wasn’t really the challenge of the game.  The real thrill and the real fun of Note Hide-and-Seek was when you got to put your plan into action, knowing that everyone else would be following the trail that you had set up.