A quarter after 7 p.m. last Friday night, about 20 students pulled out their magnifying glasses and detective hats and started searching for clues around the halls of Westminster.
Westminster Round hosted the event, and brought the board game to life. Before the event, Westminster Round members hid cards with names of literary characters, places and weapons around the rooms of Westminster.
Teams of students had seven minutes in each of the eight rooms to find the cards. Teams could also re-hide cards once they found them and come up with their own team names.
“I’m pretty proud of the one I put in the hand sanitizer dispenser,” junior Lydia Pierson said, a member of the winning team.
Senior Vanessa Henzler said she liked the event because it’s fun to search, find and hide things.
“In elementary school, I was playing hide and seek with my brother and babysitter, and I hid in a shirt rack, behind the shirts,” Henzler said. “I knew at that moment, ‘I’m pretty good at this.’”
Although Henzler’s team didn’t win, the “Sneaky Sleuths” was one of the teams to find the most clues. The team “Mystery Machine” guessed two out of three of the right answers.
This was the fourth annual Literary Live Action Clue, said senior Katie Cunningham, Westminster Round president. There have been small refinements made to the game over the years, like designing and printing nicer clue cards and allowing all teams to move the cards in the rooms. Theming the rooms was also not part of the original game.
Each classroom had an image projected on the screen and music playing that fit a certain theme. One room had the character and music from “The Shining,” while another was decorated as the Room of Requirement from “Harry Potter.”
Cunningham and the rest of the Westminster Round team came up with the names for the characters, weapons and rooms.
“We had one meeting where we just hung out in a classroom [to come up with the names]; everyone just shouts stuff out and we vote on what we want to use,” Cunningham said. “It only took about 30 minutes.”
One character card featured “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan,” the first line of the novel “Ulysses,” which is the focus of a class many English majors are currently taking.
“It’s fun because the stuff that we use is kind of reflective of what people are reading in the department that year,” Cunningham said. “In English we have a lot of events that happen every year, but they’re also fresh because different people are reading different books.”
Students got familiar with the department building as well as the reading list.
“Checking out the computers, the white board, creates a relationship with the space and department and breaks down boundaries,” Cunningham said. “I think when you come back to school [after the event] it makes you feel more comfortable with the spaces.”
