Puzzlehunts

I've recently been introduced to yet another creative and fun educational contest. They are quite common around the US, with competitions for middle schoolers and above. It is pretty much a series of very vague and difficult puzzles that you have to solve. Often, there will be a metapuzzle using the solutions to all the puzzles. There will also be a runaround, where you have to go around the area where it is held to find clues and eventually an object. The one I participated in was held at Stanford and was meant for SF Bay Area High Schoolers. One of the most famous ones is known simply as The Game. It is a souped up version of the PuzzleHunt, where teams of people have to travel around a whole metropolitan area solving vague puzzles leading up to clues. The Game is held at random intervals in Seattle and San Francisco. The organizers often go to extremes to make the Game as fun and hard as possible. Here is the Wikipedia article on the Game. It includes links to official websites and stuff.