Flea Market Challenge – Turn a Visit Into an Exciting Game

Are you a born explorer? Do you like to go treasure hunting? And do you like to test your knowledge? Then we have just the thing for you: the flea market challenge for discoverers!

This Is What You Need for the Flea Market Challenge

To unearth precious treasures and experience exciting adventures, you don’t need to captain a ship. Just check the next dates for a flea market near you, invite your friends and off you go: Set sail and set sail into the sea of flea markets! The most important thing is to have fun discovering! And there’s a lot to discover at flea markets: old books, wonderfully kitschy furniture or records you’ve been looking for for ages.

But we have come up with a very special challenge with fun search tasks and quizzes on the theme of Great Explorers! You can play this challenge with as many explorers as you like – we have found that it is most fun with several small teams (2-4 players per team), which are safely navigated through the hustle and bustle of the flea market by a captain.

Ideal is to make sure that shy and extroverted explorers form pairs. Of course, at the beginning you can exclude tasks where you have to talk to strangers – but even the greatest explorers had to face great challenges and grew with them to true greatness. You need:

Each 1 printout of the questions for the challenge and flea market challenge solutions per team
Your smartphones (at least 1 per team)
1 pen per team

At some point we got a kick out of marking the “captain” of each crew with a cap. Depending on how much you enjoy role-playing games, you can of course turn this challenge into a terrific fantasy game.

The Explorer Challenge: Find the Treasure at the Flea Market

On your quest to find the treasure, you’ll have to navigate around some rocky question cliffs, sail through disagreement storms in one piece, and open, curious eyes will be rewarded. Find the coolest and funniest items at the flea market and test your knowledge of the greatest explorers of all time! The question catalogue gives you your route. You solve the tasks and questions in order.

Whenever you have completed a task, your archivist has the task of taking a photo of the corresponding object as proof, or of writing down the answer. The captain will then give instructions for the next course and you will sail on to the next task. If your crew consists of more than two members (captain and archivist), additional roles are added. But more about that later!

Are You Captain or Archivist?

Each crew chooses its captain at the beginning. Think carefully about what you think makes a good captain, as he or she will be responsible for his or her crew during the challenge and will make the deciding decision in the event of discord or disagreement. On board your frigate (i.e. during the Challenge): what the captain says is the law! During the challenge, the crew always has the possibility to call for mutiny: if your captain does not include you in his decisions or is a despot, then simply depose him by majority vote and elect a new captain.

The captain now distributes the competences on board your ship with your consent. He decides who will be the archivist and record your progress with photos and, if necessary, notes. Each crew must consist of at least one captain and one archivist. Other roles are: The Explorer, The Helmsman, The Knower, The Phantast, etc.

Important Preparations Before the Start of the Flea Market Challenge

Make sure that each team is the same size. If your ship’s crew spontaneously made their own rules or have special requests, the captains must now bring these forward. Clarify from the beginning if it is allowed to skip some tasks or questions and lift the treasure before. We always decide that in principle all tasks and questions must be fulfilled – no matter how! After all, the special attraction of this game is its creative potential. Since an important part of the challenge consists of knowledge tests and quiz questions, we decide whether and when we are allowed to use the internet. We generally play our challenges without “cheating” on the internet, as it is explicitly not about who can google the right answers the fastest.

Teament decisions are required and you will notice: sometimes creative solutions are rewarded even if they are not historically correct! But if you are not guessers, you can, for example, decide on three Google jokers or decide that after 2-5 minutes you can use your smartphone. Arrange a meeting point at the beginning where you will gather when your challenge is over. We usually take a picnic blanket with us or choose a snack bar with seating as a meeting place. Each archivist receives the printed instructions for the treasure hunt and your challenge finally starts!

Variation by additional crew members

The explorer: The legendary ship voyages always have an explorer on board. He is characterised by the fact that he wants to get to the bottom of everything. If you have researchers in your teams, then the researcher must sign off on all tasks/questions that you have really got to the heart of the matter and that his urge to research is satisfied.
The helmsman: He sets the direction. The helmsman guides you during your journey together and makes sure you stay on the right course. At some key points in the challenge, you will have to decide which direction to take. The helmsman is the only one who can veto the captain’s instructions.
The Knower: Who is the cleverest mind and greatest puzzler among you? The knower! He is the one you rely on when you are unsure of a solution. If you decide at the beginning that you have 3 Google jokers at your disposal or even consult the internet after 2-5 minutes, then the knower is the man for it! Only he is responsible for this task!
The Phantast: No treasure hunt is complete without a Phantast. He thinks up rule changes and is the creative mind of your crew. The higher up in the clouds he floats, the better the fantasist performs his task. He gets to decide whether a fantastic solution is a better choice than a true solution and opens your worlds to imaginative solutions.

After the Flea Market Challenge: Which Crew Will Bag the Big Treasure?

This challenge is not about speed. So the winner is not automatically the first person to solve all the tasks and questions at the flea market and arrive at the meeting point. As with most of our challenges and games, it’s not about winning but about playing, puzzling together, developing solutions and having a lot of fun coming up with special solutions. My best friend and I are always the last to finish the challenge. Nevertheless, we are the most feared opponents among our friends and, out of fairness, have been playing in different crews for a while.

Make yourselves comfortable and go through your solutions together. Compare your treasures from the flea market and decide together whether you agree that the task/question was solved correctly. Each archivist marks wrong solutions or unsolved tasks with one line per wrong solution. Creative and original ideas and solutions are rewarded with a star – the archivist also records these. When counting, stars and dashes are counted against each other: you can cross out one dash for each star. The winner is the crew with the fewest lines.

The Longed-for Treasure for the Best Crew

In our circle of friends, this challenge has become an absolute favourite. This is not only because we all love visiting flea markets. Already during the pilot test, we spontaneously decided that a winner’s trophy would be an incentive for the crews. Our treasures so far have been as follows:

1. Explorers’ Binge: The winning team gets a rum or drink flat rate from the others and is allowed to behave like a bunch of undisciplined pirates for one evening and be served by the others.

2. Discoverer feast: The winning team gets a feast with the theme “Discoverer” from the others. We usually decide the date on the spot.

3. A real treasure: The others think about a winning prize together and get it right on the spot at the flea market.

Here you can find the questions for the flea market challenge and the solutions as a free download!

Questions for the Challenge

Flea Market Challenge Solutions

Flea-Market Finds & How to Restore Them

Atkins, Caroline (Author)

51,95 EUR

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