A week before the holidays started, a bunch of engineering comrades and I set off on an adventure of epic proportions. We would play hide and seek… in the university.

Clearly, this is an awesome feat at any university, and practically impossible without any well-defined rules. So we brainstormed, and eventually came up with a decent few. While it is still a game in the process of being debugged, I guess you could call the following set of rules part of the v1.0 beta stage:

  1. There must be at least two teams each containing at least 1 person. Just putting it out there that two teams of many people is probably the best way to play.
  2. Each team must have at least one means of instantaneous communication with the other teams, whether this be via SMS, phone call, social networking, etc.
  3. One team must be elected or volunteer to be seekers, the other teams are hiders and must get out of sight as soon as the seekers are determined.
  4. The seekers must wait at least 5 minutes for the hiders to hide in some area of the university/park/typically huge  (but still familiar) area they are using as a play zone. No one is allowed to breach the boundaries of the play zone, they are only allowed to stay within it. After the 5 minutes are up, the seekers may begin hunting down the hiders.
  5. The hiders, upon settling on a location, MUST in some form indicate to the seekers through their means of communication where they are in a cryptic form, most notably a riddle. They must then stay in this location for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, they can go to a different location and repeat this step.
  6. The seekers must use the riddle to figure out where the hiders are located, find them, and without their knowing get a clear photograph taken of them in their location. This photograph must be sent to them through the preferred form of communication. The photo must be clear! If it is blurry for some reason (eg, motion blur) or the photo is of the other team running away, then it doesn’t count!
  7. If the hiders make eye contact with the seekers, they are permitted to immediately run away and find a different hiding place. The rules then repeat from 5.
  8. If a clear photograph is taken and successfully sent to the hiders, the game must immediately end in the case of two teams and restarted from 3, merely swapping roles rather than going through another decision process. If there are multiple teams, the found hiders become the seekers and the seekers that found the hiders that became seekers become hiders. The other hiders must be alerted of the change and the game restarts from 5, and all the other rules before 5 (eg, no breaching of the play-zone boundaries) still apply.
  9. The game ends when you get tired of it.
  10. Have fun. Don’t cheat.
Enjoy, friends!