Decoding the Hunt: Treasurefix Initial Hunt Review
Have you guys heard about Treasurefix.com yet? It's a new puzzle hunt venture from Nails and Mordecai (aka Mike and Mike). I’ve been really impressed with the energy and high production value that TREASUREFIX is bringing to their early puzzle hunts and am working hard to solve at least 2 of the 3 active ones they have. Their commitment to quality is clear, and it’s exciting to see a new team putting this much effort into community-driven games. Today, I want to take a closer look at their Bonus Hunt: 938172 (is that the actual name?), a clever and layered puzzle that recently wrapped up with five solvers each taking home a $100 prize.
You can find the puzzle and the solution at treasurefix.com
The Puzzle Setup
While I missed the original launch and live community interactions, this review will focus on the puzzle itself and the documented solution. The image, titled "podcast_bonus," ties into one of their podcast episodes and contains all of the necessary information to solve the puzzle within its visual elements.
The image includes:
- A short phrase: "If you add two in the nick of time, it leads here."
- A hint: "(Hint: It’s not in D.C.)"
- Front and back images of a rare $1000 U.S. Treasury Note.
Right away, it’s clear that the goal is to find a specific location, but reaching that answer requires decoding the clues hidden in historical and thematic references.
Solving the Puzzle: A Historical Trail
The Treasury note is authentic and unmodified, which encourages solvers to do some light research into what the note is pointing us to find. With just a few searches, we learn that this note is famously nicknamed the "Grand Watermelon" due to the oversized zeroes on the back.
Digging deeper, we find that the man featured on the note is George Meade, a Civil War general. A visit to his Wikipedia page reveals that he too had a nickname, "Old Snapping Turtle."
This is where the key mechanic kicks in:
- Solvers are meant to find two nicknames (I know I would have stopped at one for a long while), convert them to numbers (using A=1, B=2, etc.), add them together, and then take the modulo 26 to find a single final letter.
- That letter correlates to a Federal Reserve Bank location, ultimately pointing to the correct answer.
While clever, the puzzle hinges on a few abstract leaps that may not be intuitive for the majority of the community—especially the need for two nicknames and the idea of applying a modulo operation to their combined letter values. A single letter being the answer to a multi-step cryptic is really hard to trust and possibly dismissed by many searchers if you didn't know about the reserve codes.
Final Thoughts and Feedback
This was a challenging, well-researched puzzle in a nice little package. That said, I do think this puzzle may have been a bit too difficult for a casual bonus hunt and it missed out on a satisfying "aha" moment that you knew exactly what the puzzle wanted while researching. Personally in my puzzles I use things like fill in the blanks or playfair ciphers to act as aha moments or checkpoints.
The puzzle did require at least one or two hints to move solvers forward within the time frame, and if this was let to run longer it does have a potential risk of brute-force solving if someone narrows in on the idea of Federal Reserve locations (only 12 possible guesses).
For a limited timeframe community-building puzzle, it could have benefitted from a more guided set of clues in the flavor/hint text to keep more solvers engaged and progressing to an answer with nudges. Though as I understand it from Nails, this puzzle was put together late in the process to build awareness of the launches of their bigger puzzles.
My takeaways from this puzzle as I look to solve "Nails in the Kitchen #1" and "We Didn't Start the Word Search" is that TREASUREFIX puzzles will require reading and research to connect historical dots. Additionally, it is important to be aware of the wording and possible double meanings. Finally, don't necessarily expect puzzles to leave a breadcrumb for every leap you will have to make.
That said, I’m excited to see more from Nails and Mordecai at TreasureFix.com. The thought they put into this puzzle is clear, and they’re building something fun with real potential. If you haven’t yet, go check out their hunts and keep an eye on what they do next. This community is only getting stronger with creators like this jumping in.
Learn more about TreasureFix
- Froggy of Este's Quest interviewed them recently on YouTube.
- Jenny at MysteriousWritings has covered them with her 6 Questions series
- Search TreasureFix on your podcast platform of choice
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