Saturday afternoon
You installed a phone system this morning. Here is how the family finds out what it does without anybody reading a runbook.
The house phone rings. Dad is calling from the driveway, and his name is on the little screen, because he is on the list. “Answer it in the kitchen,” he says, and hangs up. On the kitchen table there is an envelope.
How many chairs are there at the table where this family eats? Six. She dials *6 and then 6, and the phone speaks to her in her father’s voice: take this phone to the theater, call 101, and ask for the password. Say please.
Her brother is in the theater with the other handset. He has the password and will not say it until she calls him on the phone, which is the rule, and which is the point. Under a seat, another envelope: everyone dial 600. Three handsets land in the same bridge and they say the password together, badly, and laugh.
The next clue sends her to call Grandma, who is a name on the screen now and who has been briefed. Grandma knows how many stairs there are. At the top of the stairs there is an envelope that asks her to count them anyway. *6, fourteen. Her father’s voice again: you have won. Dial 500 and tell the whole house.
Every phone in the house answers itself on speaker at once, and she tells the whole house. At dinner there is an envelope under her plate. The prize is extra rice.
Every rung of the verification ladder — inbound, the allow-list, handset to handset, the conference bridge, an outside call, paging — got exercised by a child holding a cordless handset. The operator learned the same things a terminal would have told them, and the family learned the phone.
There is no game engine. The mechanism is four commented-out lines of dialplan: *6 followed by a number plays the greeting of the mailbox with that number. A parent records each clue as a greeting from any handset. A wrong answer is a mailbox with no greeting, and the phone says so. Progress lives in the envelopes, which is where a scavenger hunt keeps it anyway.
The kit ships no audio. Every family records its own clues, in its own voices, because the clue that sends a child to the theater should sound like the person who hid it there.
Children never hold a credential. The answers are counts of things in the house, never a PIN and never a password the phone really uses. A player only ever dials *6 and a number.
extensions.conf and add a mailbox per clue, named for its answer.*97, the mailbox, its PIN, 0, 1.The full guide isdocs/HUNT.md, and the printable cards aredocs/hunt/cards.md(CC BY-SA 4.0, archetypes only, blanks for your own).