The wand (which looks rather like a Harry Potter wand -- a length of fairly good quality plastic molded with swirls and knots to look like a carved bit of wood) is no ordinary wand -- it has some sort of technological thingy in it. I'm guessing that it is a form of Radio Frequency IDentification - RFID, which I have worked with a little in my engineering past, but the wikipedia entry says it is Infrared technology...which I doubt, because that doesn't allow storage of data. Whatever technology it is, it allows data to be stored in the wand interactively. This means, each wand gets waved at a sensor near the cash register, thereby "naming" it whatever the player prefers ("Magi Girl-Child Fairie" was the name of our wand).Not all Great Wolf Lodges have a MagiQuest, and there are MagicQuest installations not in Great Wolf Lodges (e.g., in Japan, southern California and Maryland). The Grand Mound, Washington, version allows you to go on nine "Quests", which are scavenger hunts for specific items, and build up gold, "runes" (the treasure at the end of each quest) and experience points to prepare you for the "Adventures" you can do later. A monitor in the area where you purchase the wands constantly displays the high scores of the players for gold collected, quests completed, Adventures won, for the day, the week, the month and the year. I assume the names on the display at our Lodge were only from that installation.
The way it plays is this: Three Trees "grow" around the lobby area. Wave your wand at the tree, and a tv-like display in the middle of the tree recognizes you by name ("Greetings, Magi Girl-Child Fairie") and displays the information specific to your play (your gold, number of runes, and experience). After checking your overall status, you select a new game (such as the "Enchant Creature Rune Quest"), and a wizard, in full Dumbledore regalia, appears on-screen and explains the quest. He rattles off a rhyming clue for the scavenger hunt, and, when appropriate, congratulates you on your progress. After you complete the quest (or adventure) you return to the tree and check-in again, get credit for the quest, and select a new one.
Three hide in chests in the woods overgrown,/
The fourth in the portrait of a forest with a stone./
Once you've found all and to the Pixie returned,/
Claim the reward which you've certainly earned.
The fourth in the portrait of a forest with a stone./
Once you've found all and to the Pixie returned,/
Claim the reward which you've certainly earned.
This particular quest, for instance, required that we find three specific chests (out of 10), and wave the wand at each. Some of the chests won't open until you have reached "Master Magi" status (i.e., completed all the quests), but others open every time. You are granted 50 pieces of gold, and if you've opened the chests correct for this specific quest, they say something funny and rhyming about how you are doing so well. One chest, for instance, had an Attitude: if you wanded it multiple times, a grouchy voice would say, "You've been here before! Don't waste my time and yours!" (or wtte). Girl-Child would wand it every time we passed, and retort it some attitude back, wagging her finger scoldingly (along the lines of "So's your old man").
We also had to find one specific framed picture, among, say, twenty spread across five floors (we got a good amount of exercise walking up and down the stairs). Lastly, we went to a room on the second floor where a floor-to-ceiling electronic display shows a video of a Tinkerbell-like pixie flitting from flower to flower in a garden. When you wave your wand at the display, you capture her attention and she rewards you with a "rune". All the gold you collect and the runes (which look like old Viking runes stamped on a piece of pewter) are displayed electronically (i.e., you don't actually carry anything but the wand).
Girl-Child and I completed all the quests (a little bit of the family compulsivity gene showed up in Girl-Child, who insisted upon not splashing in the pool on our last morning, in order to finish); but then we failed dismally on the first Adventure, defeating the Red Dragon. One nice thing about the game is that we can continue from where we are now, whenever we return to the Lodge. We might even be able to take the wand to another installation and play a game there.
All in all, it was great fun, and fun to work out the clever design of the game. Children from 5 - 15 were playing, all at levels appropriate to their ages. Which is to say, the littlest ones just waved the wand at things to get the funny response (there were even talking chipmunks in one of the restaurants); children of Girl-Child's age could find all the items; and children older (10-15, or older helpers such as me) could take on the Adventures. The Red Dragon Adventure seemed exponentially more difficult than the Quests, requiring us to figure out how to "cast a spell" with the wand, and to solve logic puzzles, as well as (from what I could tell watching others) timing one's wand waves specifically. The Red Dragon itself was a wall-sized interactive video of a dragon sleeping -- or roaring flamefully at you -- in a room tucked in a corner on the second floor of the hotel. We ran into one sweet-faced teenager who informed us he had defeated the Red Dragon five times by this, only his third, day at the Lodge. He offered to help us with anything we needed, raising his knee to show, pinned to the lower leg of his shorts, an official-looking badge labeling him a Questmaster.
The drawback to the game, and to the Great Wolf Lodge in general, was simply that there were too many people. The Trees, and the major collection points, such as the Pixie or the Red Dragon, had lines of children at all times. (The game is restricted to Waking Hours, that is 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. so there's no cheating in the night -- and so people keep to the Quiet Hour rules of the family-oriented hotel.) The items respond to a wand wave, but with six children fidgeting in front of a Tree, it couldn't tell which wand was first in line, so often the calmer children (such as Girl-Child and I) had to allow a few wilder kids to cut in front of us. (A few of the older kids took advantage of this, waving their wands as they ran up to the items, despite the line of smaller children already standing there.)
The Adventure of the Red Dragon, for instance, required us to stand outside the little Dragon room for 15-20 minutes while other children tried to defeat it. This was good for me, who was watching them and trying to figure out what they were doing (a complicated set of waving the wand at a subset of 12 "runes" set in a podium, in a specific order, and then, at times, waving at different corners of the Dragon screen), and wondering how the heck we were supposed to have figured that out. Because, with a line of 10 children behind us by the time we got into the Red Dragon room, we had one chance to try our shot (and lose), before standing at the back of the line again. (Which we didn't -- instead we checked out of the hotel and went home.)
1 comment:
Sounds cool.
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