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.