Treasure Hunt – Location Guessing Game

Play Treasure Hunt, a location-guessing game where you find hidden treasure on a grid. Use distance hints to narrow down the treasure's location.

How to play

1. Click a cell on the grid to guess
2. Read the distance hint that comes back
3. Use the hints to close in, and track how many guesses it takes

Guessing well

Random clicking works eventually. Deduction works faster, and the game is really a lesson in one idea: each guess should cut the remaining possibilities roughly in half.

Open near the middle rather than in a corner. A central guess gives a distance reading that rules out large regions in every direction, while a corner guess mostly tells you about one quadrant.

After that, treat each hint as a ring of possible positions and pick your next guess where two rings overlap. Two well-chosen readings usually narrow a grid to a handful of candidates, and a third settles it. Guessing adjacent to your last click wastes the reading, because a neighbouring square tells you almost the same thing.

In the classroom

It teaches coordinates, distance and elimination without any of those words appearing on screen, and the guess counter turns it into a self-scoring challenge — beat your own number rather than someone else's. Larger grids raise the difficulty without changing the rules, so one game covers a range of ages.

Played as a class, it works well on a projector with students proposing the next guess and having to justify it, which forces the reasoning into the open.

For related puzzles, try Number Slide, Tile Fitter, or Sudoku.