26th Kiwanis Treasure Hunt

The Champion: Crptically Challenged (From left: Alexander Hoh, Darmataksiah Abai, Mohd Razif. Another team member, Andre Teh is not in the picture)

The Kiwanis Treasure Hunt remains elusive to the team Hunters "R" Us, of which I was offered a passenger seat for last Saturday's hunt. Hunters "R" Us, of course, doesn't need any introduction to the Malaysian hunting fraternity. They have won most of the major hunts in recent years. However, for one reason or another, they have never captured the Kiwanis trophy after so many attempts. That, then, was the psychological viewpoint upon which we embarked on the mission first thing last Saturday morning at KBU College Bandar Utama.

I think we tried too hard to win; and that's not such a good thing when there're several difficult questions at the start of the hunt. Because of wanting so much to win, I think we tried too hard to refrain from dropping any of the questions, thus wasting precious time during the earlier leg of the hunt. And we paid dearly towards the last leg when we dropped several "easy" questions due to time pressure. Of course this was not the first time it has happened. All teams have experienced it before, and perhaps all teams are repeating the same mistake over and over again.

VK's argument is that if we kept dropping questions during the earlier part of the hunt, then we would totally erase any chance of winning the hunt. For even if we're able to answer the later questions, what's lost in the earlier leg would be lost for good.

KK, on the other hand, was more inclined to adopt the "if it's tough for us, then it's tough for the rest too" attitude. He was therefore more inclined to drop the tough questions and dedicate the precious minutes on the later, possibly easier and more solvable, questions.

I can agree with VK's argument, but the trouble is where's the limit? How should we decide when to give up on a question? VK had an interesting way to decide how. According to him, as long as the other regular teams're also lingering on the tough questions, then we should be OK. For surely those strong teams can't all be wrong? This I do not agree. As far as I'm concerned, every single one of them may well be wrong, because all of them were fighting for the win, and equally stubborn not to give up on the tough questions. In fact, this was the case last Saturday. The regular teams tried too hard to solve every single question at the expense of having to rush through the last leg of the hunt, hence failing to solve/find some of the answers there.

Having said that, however, in this particular hunt, both VK and KK were justified. We dropped a few questions during the earlier leg of the hunt in spite of investing so much time there. It was to be found later on, during the announcement of the results, that the team Cryptically Challenged (Machines) won the hunt convincingly by dropping only 3 route questions and 1 Crack-a-Pot question. It meant that our team had already lost the pole position long before the halfway point of the hunt. This was because apart from the route questions, we blundered on 1 treasure and both the Crack-a-Pot questions too. It would have been interesting to know if we would have been able to solve the 3 questions in the last leg had we spared say 15 minutes for the task. I think we could and thus maybe deserved a few more rungs higher than the 6th position that we achieved. But I guess it's too late now to cry over spilt milk.

One popular comment among the regular hunters after the hunt was that we were all unfamiliar with the "style" of the CoC. And everyone seemed to say that he "will know what to do next time". I shall discuss the "style" of the CoC in more detail along with some questions in separate posts later.

Generally speaking, however, it's clear that there was a tendency to choose relatively small signboards for this hunt. I'm OK with small signboards, because after all treasure hunts are also about observation skill. I'm not sure, however, if I'm OK with too many of them. And here I'm inclined to agree with VK that perhaps Master Jayaram's style is still one of the best, since he almost always chooses huge signboards for his intended answers. It means that he's man enough to challenge the hunters through his questions, and not through their eyesights.

The other aspect of this year's Kiwanis worth mentioning at this point is the disappointing Crack-a-Pots. I have seen some of the past Crack-a-Pots, and I thought that they were mostly masterpieces, to say the least. This year's Crack-a-Pots pale in comparison to the previous years'. But I will get into more detailed discussions later.

I was also a bit disappointed that the post-hunt dinner on Saturday was just plain dinner, unlike in the previous years where the organiser arranged for some interesting activities such as Bingo and other games.

In the end, Machines won the hunt convincingly, thus proving once again that when it comes to cryptic hunts, they're still untouchable! During the hunt, I felt that the hunt was somewhat too difficult when compared to the previous Kiwanis. But when the results were announced, it seemed that it's not very difficult after all. The top teams scored quite well. However, the results revealed that it was a very tough hunt for the newer teams.

As I said, we ended up 6th. VK and I spent some hours fighting sleepiness talking about our blunders and regretting about what could have been—if only this and if only that; if only... and yes, next year we would know what to do! (yeah right!)