Here is a short video for those of you who hate reading through ‘How it works’ pages and/or FAQs …. this covers the basics. Try one of our existing 7 trails….
…. and we will push on and get Melbourne & Adelaide finished.
The Rocks is an area to the Western side of Circular Quay, very much a tourist attraction nowadays but it’s had its share of trouble in the past, not least in the reign of a gang known as the Rocks Push – you should be ok now though as that was in the 1870s – nowadays the big cruise ships stop there.
Our Trixity trail around The Rocks area (imaginatively called Discover Sydney – The Rocks) is perfect for anyone who wants to spend 2-3 hours exploring and also testing their mental ability. Some of the clues on this trail are amongst my favourites, beware though, you do seem to spend most of your time walking uphill but it’s worth it for the views.
Another reason for choosing this trail if you’re exploring Sydney is that there seems to be an inordinate number of clues in pubs – it’s a good job you can stop the clock after every clue on all of our trails – so you can ensure you stay hydrated.
Brisbane, the River City, BrisVegas, the capital of Queensland and the third most populous city in Australia …. and one of our favourites. As it’s only an hour’s drive away from us this was one of the easier cities for us to create our Trixity trails in, so far, we have two ….
Although it only has about half the population of Sydney, Brisbane gets a huge number of visitors with around 11 million people coming to the South Bank parklands annually – that’s a lot of people wanting to explore Brisbane and hopefully we can help them with one of our trails.
As usual, the first task when setting up the trails was lots of research and even more slogging around on foot – this was in the days before the proliferation of electric scooters which now either enhance your exploring ability or are a H&S menace, depending on your viewpoint.
One of the lightbulb moments for us was finding the free ferry (Brisbane City Hopper) which runs from North Quay to Sydney street (8 stops in total), 7 days a week, every 30 minutes – it’s an excellent way to get around the city and we had to include a short trip on it in each of our trails, just for a stop or two.
With the beauty of South Bank, numerous museums and art galleries, a man-made beach, hundreds of restaurants, bars, cafes and a wonderful sub-tropical climate Brisbane is a wonderful place to take the challenge of a Trixity trail.
Welcome to the Trixity blog. In the different posts you will find updates and news on all of our trails and some behind-the-scenes information on how we set our trails up, the work that goes into them and the problems we’ve had to overcome along the way.
At the time of writing this post (Sept 2019) we have 7 trails in operation….
Discover Melbourne and Discover Adelaide are due next, each with at least two trails …. Perth, you may have to wait a little longer but we’ll get to you. The plan is to Discover the whole of Australia – but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The idea of Trixity is simple. We have set up a number of device-led trails around some of Australia’s biggest cities which you solve a series of clues whilst you discover the city. It has taken us over a year to perfect our trails and we are due to launch in September 2019. Keep an eye on our blog for further news.
Whilst we are a small company we have had a great deal of people working with and for us, some paid, others out of the goodness of their hearts and it goes without saying we couldn’t have done it without them. Here are a few of the great and the good who deserve a name-check.
First of all, thanks to Gold Coast Websites (especially Stuart & Matt) for all of their great work in bringing our germ of an idea to fruition, they are not only skilled coders but very patient and responsive to our (ever-changing) requirements.
Once we had a working idea we had to test the living daylights out of it, and that was proving slow-going and also caused other technical issues. That’s when friends of Tracy’s came to the rescue, a huge thank you to Vidya and Suraj who spent 2-3 weeks doing some automated testing for us which meant they did 2000+ tests in the time it was taking us to do 20 …. badly! With their help we’ve managed to iron out all of the wrinkles and we’re ready to launch.
Team-building & bespoke trails
There is already some information in our FAQs about team-building but in short, yes we do – we’ll even help streamline the ordering process and email the info to you to help out. We have had thoughts on creating trails for various other activities, pub crawls, hen’s parties etc. as well as creating bespoke trails for museums, art galleries etc …. if you think we can help then please give us a call. We think a Trixity trail would be an excellent team-building exercise.
The trails on the G.C. were the first two to be created, mainly because that’s where we live. After doing our research and walking the streets until we thought we’d captured everything of interest for both locals and tourists we decided on two Trixity trails, Discover Surfers Paradise and Discover Broadbeach.
There’s probably scope for more Gold Coast trails when the time is right but these two do kind of jump off the page especially for visitors, there are bars and restaurants galore and we’ve discovered plenty of interesting spots for you to visit as you explore the Gold Coast.
We think that even the Gold Coast residents would find something new and interesting but for tourists it will be a great way to familiarise themselves with the area. We hope you enjoy the ‘Goldy’ as much as we do, the old saying is true – beautiful one day, perfect the next.
The main thing to remember when setting a good clue is the fact that you are setting it for a whole range of different people and you have to try and strike a balance between presenting a challenge but also allowing the solver to get that satisfaction of solving the clue successfully.
We rewrote clues so often, sometimes adjusting the difficulty or the level of help guiding people to the right location, and hopefully ensuring we give just enough assistance so that the solver can make the final step over the line and earn that feeling of success when they work out the answer.
The ‘Help’ and ‘Hint’ functions were necessary tools to help us with the level of the clue; with these two extra prompts we could make the clues a little more difficult and give an extra nudge if the players were stuck; both come with a 5-minute time penalty though …. it’s only right.
One problem that gave us sleepless nights for the first few months in our planning stage became clear when we had some friends attempt one of our trails when it was finished. On the day they did it they couldn’t access one of the clues – I mean, not that they couldn’t find it, or work it out – they just couldn’t get to it because it was behind scaffolding, so we had to come up with a way of getting around this, enter the SKIP function.
What we did was to make the word ‘Skip’ an acceptable answer to all of our clues i.e. if a situation arose whereby access to the answer was ‘cut off’, or a team just got really stuck then they could skip on to the next question. We considered the possibility that teams could use this to fly round a trail but we figured (hoped?) that people wouldn’t pay their hard-earned money and then not actually take part.
The biggest kick in the teeth though – after you have slaved over a clue for weeks, fine-tuning and rewriting and coming up with a witty, clever, wonderful clue that the solver will enjoy cracking …. then the shop closes down or the art gallery moves the exhibit! Both of these have happened to us on more than one occasion.
In the Pacific Fair shopping mall in Broadbeach there was a store called Smart Ginger for which we had a great clue, we went trail-checking one week to find it was now called Baby Lemonade, so we created a new clue for that …. it closed after 6 months!
The picture here is a perfect example of this issue, it’s from our Discover South Bank trail, a wonderful display at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Brisbane …. which, disappeared before we even launched! I suppose the flip side of this is that the trails will remain fresh, but it keeps us on our toes.
As you can imagine, when setting up three trails in Sydney and living in Queensland there’s a lot of travelling back and forth. Fortunately for us we have friends who live there and have been very helpful in providing us with accommodation and their testing services too.
Obviously, we get dinner whilst we’re there but we couldn’t have done it without them, so thank you Tracy & Blake x. When we’re millionaires we will remember you …. we may not still be in touch, but we’ll remember you! (I’m joking – honest).
On our last trip back, I managed to get quite a good photo out of the window as we left Sydney – not bad considering it was just with my phone.
The other thing about this photo is that I can see parts of all three of our Trixity trails, Discover Sydney, Discover Sydney Botanic & Discover Sydney – The Rocks …. next time you’re in Sydney and you have 2-3 hours spare, give one a try, I promise you it’s a great way to explore Sydney.
One of the three Discover Sydney trails and probably my favourite …. but don’t tell the others. This trail starts in the lovely Darling Harbour area and wends its way through the city – but I shouldn’t tell you too much about which way it goes as I don’t want to spoil the fun as you explore Sydney.
I can tell you that it’s probably the least physically taxing of the three trails so if you were looking for a nice walk without any hilly bits then this is probably the one for you. I think it has a nice combination of the different types of clues that we have set over our different trails, there are some that are purely observational and a handful of ones that need a little extra thought and working out.
We did this trail with some friend of ours who live in Sydney just before we launched. They had the advantage of ‘local knowledge’ so knew where they were heading most of the time – but it was nice to see them ‘trip-up’ on one of the tricky clues (insert evil laugh).
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