Are you smarter than a twelve-year-old?

We thought so, but a weeklong, city-wide scavenger hunt proved otherwise.

Game Genius, a nonprofit based in D.C. that conducts social impact through themed scavenger hunts, kicked off its fifth annual District Hunt on Sept. 30 at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Focused on food and housing, this year’s hunt followed the fictional story of food critic Rib Gourmand’s mysterious disappearance. 

Broken up into three courses — appetizer, main and dessert — each section consisted of a series of clues that must be solved before moving on to the next course. All of the clues were available on Rib Gourmand’s personal website alongside submission portals for the answers to each brain-twisting riddle, themed around ingredients. 

Peter Williamson, the executive director of Game Genius and the designer of the scavenger hunt, said picking an “impact theme” each year allows the group to highlight a variety of nonprofits working in different sectors. This year’s partner organizations were Street Sense Media, D.C. Central Kitchen, FRESHFARM, Miriam’s Kitchen, BreadCoin and Spur Local. 

He said since Game Genius provides information on how to volunteer with the nonprofits they partner with each year, he hopes participants get inspired to support these groups when they wish to donate locally in the future.

“Some people are regulars, they’ve played every year and so they’re here really for a fun, different puzzle,” Williamson said. “People that haven’t heard of us, it’s hopefully an introduction to the nonprofit community.”

He said they built the puzzle for a wide audience who can keep solving clues for however long is feasible for them. He said they tried to balance those who preferred to traverse every last monument and metro stop with others who wished to keep their travel time brief. 

“We try to keep it within a reasonable radius, but we recognize that there are some people who really love big adventurous puzzles, and we want to give them a chance to kind of travel,” Williamson said.

After collecting the scavenger hunt materials from the Game Genius representatives stationed at MLK Library, we hunkered down with some much-needed coffees and breakfast sandwiches from Marianne’s — a D.C. Central Kitchen-run cafe housed in the library — to start solving the first clue.

We started with the clue titled “Wasting Away,” which directed us to go up to the library’s Grand Reading Room on the third floor and find the murder mystery novel “The Tenant” by Katrine Engberg. We swiftly found the book, quietly cheering ourselves on as other visitors read quietly amid the rows of shelves.

Using a list of five rows of three numbers provided in our packet of materials and the corresponding direction of “PAGE : LINE : WORD,” we identified five words from pages of “The Tenant” that formed the sentence “A place flowers were grown.” The directions stated that the answer had to be a six-letter word, so we immediately guessed “garden,” solving our first clue.

Our egos boosted from our successful guess motivated us to stay in the reading room to work through the next riddle “Compound Disinterest.” After locating a tip to “shift two letters” listed in a $10 certificate for FRESHFARM — a D.C.-based food equity nonprofit that partnered with District Hunt — we used a shift cipher, a code in which you shift the alphabet over by a number of letters, to decode a jumble of letters.  

The message sent us to find a ruler who shared a first name with the angriest man in D.C. on the fourth floor of the library, which houses a history of Go-Go music exhibit. Luckily, one of us instantly knew the angriest man in D.C. to be Julius Hobson, because she had previously visited the museum. Hobson was a civil rights activist known for his intensity, including getting the city to take action on its rat problem in the 1960s by caging rats from his own neighborhood and bringing them to Georgetown for wealthy politicians to see. 

We played a game of word association and uncovered the answer to be “CAESAR.” After running around the MLK Library and taking a quick trip to the National Portrait Gallery, we managed to solve an additional three clues, completing the entire appetizer course in just two hours.

After a brief day of relaxation, we set out to complete the main course, a set of challenges focused on the nonprofit partners. Using a copy of a Street Sense newspaper the organizers gave us, we matched a poem about experiencing food insecurity to a series of blanks and exes given in a clue, pulling out a scramble of letters to spell Z-U-C-C-H-I-N-I.

Our hubris from immediately cracking the first code caught up to us after a failed trip to McPherson Square. Tasked to head to McPherson Square and find music on the ground that no one could hear and describe its sound, we uncovered a vibrant chalk drawing of a music tape in the middle of the courtyard. We typed words such as “silent,” “funky” and “mixed” into the clue’s portal on the website but to no avail.

We decided to marinate on that clue and move on to the next: “Visit the closest place where one can go and spend a coin you were given real value; not pretend.” On opening day we received a Breadcoin, a token valued at $2.50 which aims to destigmatize food assistance programs. 

Mistakenly assuming we could spend the coin at the nearest place that accepts them from where we were, we walked to Union Kitchen. On the register, there was a sign declaring they accept Breadcoins, so we searched the shop for anything that could tell us its real value. After not finding any hints, we texted the hotline asking for their help. After a few minutes, we got the reply that we were dreading: we would not find any hints because we were at the wrong place.

After a long, two-mile walk we neared defeat. We managed to solve one more clue using what little street sense we had left. Given a series of five different times, such as 1:38 and 6:07, we used a semaphoric key to crack our hidden message. With the help of the internet for a reference photo of a typical semaphoric key, we were able to match the times to the corresponding letters and spell out L-E-M-O-N, at last completing another clue. 

Despite our failure to figure out what happened to the mysterious chef, the scavenger hunt helped us bounce all around the District, examining how social programs are working to combat housing and food insecurity and all the while exploring parts of the city we’ve never seen before.