How to Play
Read this page first. It is short, and everything after it will make sense once you have.
The short version
Pick a treasure. Read its story. Make choices. Roll the die when the book tells you to. Follow the path to the end and find the code. Write the code down, and enter it on this site whenever you are ready. Do that ten times, one treasure at a time, in any order you like, and you have found them all. The ten fastest total times share the prize pool. That is the whole game. Everything below is the detail.
What this book is
This is a solo gamebook. You are the treasure hunter. There are ten treasures to find, each one a legend people have chased for years, some for centuries. For each treasure, you will read, think, choose, and sometimes roll a die. The book does not tell you a story. You play one.
You do not need anyone else to play. You do not need to keep notes. Everything you need is in the book, except the two things listed below.
What you need
- A six-sided die. One is enough. No die handy? Ask a voice assistant to “pick a random number between 1 and 6,” or simply choose a number yourself. No number is always good or always bad, so picking one works just as well as rolling.
- Something to write on. A scrap of paper will do. You will need it for the codes.
How a hunt works
Every hunt begins in the club, at the wall. The wall holds the ten legends. Pick one. The club will lay out its books for you. Read them. They disagree with each other, and the disagreements matter.
Then choose a path and follow it. Read each passage. When the book offers you a choice, pick one. When the book tells you to roll, roll the die and follow the result.
Follow the links. Do not page forward or back through the book. The pages are shuffled, so paging will land you far from your path, in a scene you have not earned and a hunt that is not yours. If you page by accident, hit the back button (or forward, if you paged back) immediately, before you read anything, to return to where you were.
Choices are agency. Rolls are fate. A choice is yours to make. A roll is the world answering. Neither one is a trick, but neither one is safe, either.
Each hunt ends one of two ways: you find the treasure, or you find out the path you chose was not the right one. Both endings teach you something. If a path was wrong, the book will tell you so, plainly. Go back to the wall and try another.
Play in any order
The ten treasures are independent. There is no first treasure and no last one. Start with whichever legend calls to you: Oak Island, El Dorado, the Amber Room, any of them. Skip around. Each hunt is self-contained: it begins at the wall, it ends with a code, and it does not depend on any other hunt. Your Wall on this site tracks all ten separately, so you can leave one half-finished, go chase another, and come back whenever you like. The book lists the treasures 1 to 10 because a book has to list them somehow. That is not the order you must play them in.
If you die
You will die in this book. Probably more than once. That is part of the hunt, not a failure.
When you die, you wake in the chair by the fire in the club, as if from a dream. Then you go back to the wall and try again. Death is not the end. It is a door back to the start of the hunt. Dying does not erase anything you have earned.
The codes
Every path in this book, right or wrong, ends with a code word. The code word is shown as a picture on its own page. It cannot be copied or searched. Read it off the page.
Write each code down, exactly as shown, and keep the list safe. A code that is almost right is not right. Codes you have earned stay earned: if you die on a later hunt, your earlier codes are not lost. Death takes the hunt, not the list.
A code from a wrong path will not count. You will know when you have found a treasure; the book tells you, plainly, in the moment.
When to enter your codes is your call. You can enter each code as soon as you find it, or play on and enter codes later. Entering right away tells you at once whether you truly found that treasure. But your clock starts with your first code entry, and every entry is followed by a wait (24 hours after a right code, 6 hours after a wrong one), so plan when you start.
The finale
When you have found all ten treasures, a final door opens in the club. The book trusts you on this: go through it only when you have truly found all ten. It is an honor system. The door is the reward for the hunt, and the hunt is only worth it if it is honest.
How to enter the hunt
- Register on this site. Your clock does not start when you register.
- New accounts wait 3 days before they can enter their first code.
- On the Validate page, choose a treasure and enter the code you found for it. The site shows you what you typed and asks you to confirm before anything counts.
- After a correct code you can enter your next code in 24 hours. After a wrong code you can try again in 6 hours.
- Your clock starts with your first code, right or wrong, and stops at your tenth correct code. The ten lowest total times share the prize pool.