CategoriesAll - Trixity Trails Explore Brisbane Explore Gold Coast Explore Sydney

What are the clues like on a Trixity trail?

Without trying to scare anyone off, or spoil anyone’s fun, we thought we would give you an idea of what sort of challenges might await you on one of our trails. Each trail has around 16-18 clues and the overall level for each trail is roughly similar, but not all clues are created equally!

The basic principle …. read the question in stages, they are written to help you, not to try and trip you up, we WANT you to succeed – honest. During early testing with friends and family we saw people (so often) read the clue and try to jump to the answer before even getting to the right place! Take your time and make sure …. read the question again, and pass it round so everyone can have a look.

Follow your nose …. some of them are as simple as following instructions i.e., go here, find that, what’s the picture of – that sort of idea, this is the most basic clue, sometimes we just need an easy clue to make sure you get somewhere.

Interpret the text …. the next level of difficulty is along the same line but you will have to interpret what is written to get you to where you need to be. These are probably the most common type of clues – not exactly cryptic, but requiring a certain level of thought (and care!) in working out.

Use your smart device ….there are times when you will have to look things up – unless you are THAT clever! Again – there’s nothing to fear here, we’re not asking you to do a research paper, just look up who a certain person was …. or what a word means.

There may also be a compass direction – head North, or the answer you have is in miles and you have to convert to yards – nothing too difficult, just a little calculation. I would also envisage that your maps app would come in handy from time-to-time.

I suggest the team ‘captain’ controls the questions and the rest of the team are the researchers – but you know your team better than we do.

Roman numerals …. not widely used in our clues but they have made an appearance – again, help is readily available on line so no need to panic.

Anagrams …. ok – for those of you have no idea about anagrams, here are a few to help you out. It’s basically jumbling up the letters of a word (or words) to make different words – which you would have to unscramble to find the answer. These are well-known and very clever anagrams (but not used by us) ….

  • THE EYES = THEY SEE
  • ELEVEN PLUS TWO = TWELVE PLUS ONE
  • DORMITORY = DIRTY ROOM
  • ASTRONOMER = MOON STARER
  • SLOT MACHINES = CASH LOST IN ME

…. again, we don’t use these a lot, but you should be aware they could pop-up.

Shift cipher …. this is rarely used, you certainly wouldn’t get more than one on a trail (if any). This is a code whereby each letter of a word is shifted along in the alphabet to make it appear gibberish e.g. if you shift each letter of the words SHIFT CIPHER one place to the right in the alphabet you get TIJGUDJQIFS.

Julius Caesar used shift ciphers when sending messages, in case they were intercepted by his enemies.

 

Us the Help and/or Hint buttons to give you a little assistance

Help & Hint buttons ….

If you do get stuck, rather than get a question wrong by guessing (10-minute time penalty), use the Help and Hint buttons to give you, well …. a help, and a hint really …. they only have a 5-minute penalty, and they are written to be very helpful.

The ‘Help’ will guide you to the right location, this is usually the first part of the clue. The ‘Hint’ button is generally used more in solving the actual clue, just a little nudge in the right direction.

 

Skip …. when all else fails, or if a clue location is inaccessible for some reason, simply enter ‘Skip’ as your answer and you will be moved on to the next clue. Obviously, abuse of the ‘skip’ function will be detrimental to your sense of self-worth and will keep you awake at night for months to come …. and it’s not what you paid your hard-earned money to do!

So, there you have a little insight into what we have prepared for you, enjoy your trail and have fun discovering the city you live in, work in, play in. Check out more information on the ‘How it Works’ page.

CategoriesAll - Trixity Trails Explore Brisbane Explore Gold Coast Explore Sydney

Trixity launches

It is with great pleasure, a good deal of satisfaction and not a little pride that we are pleased to announce our launch …. just now! After many months of rewriting, fine-tuning and second guessing we are finally ‘there’, or ‘here’, depending on your viewpoint.

We decided a while ago that we wouldn’t be launching with a fanfare and a lot of razzamatazz but rather we’d simply switch it on and see what happens. Obviously, we will be advertising and hitting social media etc. but we have opted for what the Project Managers out there call a ‘soft launch’ …. but that’s enough of that boring nonsense.

Here’s the important part of the message …. to get things started, for our first month we are offering a 40% discount on our normal price of $55 per team. This means you can purchase any trail for $33 until 14th October …. and then use them at your leisure any time in the future, as our trails do not have an expiry date.

Simply enter trixitylaunch in the promo code box when purchasing one of our existing 7 trails ….

  • Discover Sydney
  • Discover Sydney – Botanic
  • Discover Sydney – The Rocks
  • Discover Brisbane
  • Discover Brisbane – South Bank
  • Discover Gold Coast – Broadbeach
  • Discover Gold Coast – Surfers Paradise

Melbourne and Adelaide will be following close behind but for now these trails are an excellent way to explore Sydney, Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

Trixity Trails – Finding fun

CategoriesAll - Trixity Trails Discover South Bank Explore Brisbane

The ‘Discover South Bank’ trail

One of the two Trixity trails exploring Brisbane, the Discover South Bank trail is a wonderful way to spend 2-3 hours in the cultural heart of Brisbane. Art galleries, museums, restaurants, bars and hidden gems around every corner, no wonder 11 million visitors each year make the journey.

The South Bank parklands were built following World Expo 88. The lovely Arbour, which is 1 km of over 400 curved steel columns creating a walkway covered with bougainvilleas, provides a beautiful shady walkway which you may find helpful at some point in the trail.

The Brisbane sign was originally built for the G20 summit in 2014, it was made out of plywood and was only intended to stand for 4 weeks. In 2015 it was reinforced which is just as well as we reckon if/when you pass it on your Trixity trail there will be people clambering all over it for that must-have holiday snap.

As with all of our trails you can stop the clock every time you enter a correct answer (just don’t request the next clue until you’re ready) which will give you plenty of time to take a dip in the man-made Streets Beach in the picture, well worth it on a hot day.

When you order your trail, you’ll be sent all of the info you require to make the most of the day discovering Brisbane’s South Bank. Here’s a little picture we took at the start point, it doesn’t require a spoiler alert and it won’t help you …. I just thought it was ‘different’. Maybe some of the locals will recognise it?

CategoriesAll - Trixity Trails Explore Brisbane Explore Gold Coast Explore Sydney

Explainer video


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….

  • Discover Sydney
  • Discover Sydney – Botanic
  • Discover Sydney – The Rocks
  • Discover Brisbane
  • Discover Brisbane – South Bank
  • Discover Gold Coast – Broadbeach
  • Discover Gold Coast – Surfers Paradise

…. and we will push on and get Melbourne & Adelaide finished.

CategoriesAll - Trixity Trails Discover Sydney - The Rocks Explore Sydney

Discover Sydney – The Rocks

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.

CategoriesAll - Trixity Trails Discover Brisbane Discover South Bank Explore Brisbane

Explore Brisbane

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 ….

  • Discover Brisbane
  • Discover South Bank

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.

CategoriesAll - Trixity Trails Explore Brisbane Explore Gold Coast Explore Sydney

About Trixity

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 Sydney
  • Discover Sydney – Botanic
  • Discover Sydney – The Rocks
  • Discover Brisbane
  • Discover Brisbane – South Bank
  • Discover Gold Coast – Broadbeach
  • Discover Gold Coast – Surfers Paradise

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.

CategoriesAll - Trixity Trails Discover Broadbeach Discover Surfers Paradise Explore Gold Coast

Discover Gold Coast trails

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.

CategoriesAll - Trixity Trails Explore Brisbane Explore Gold Coast Explore Sydney

Anatomy of a clue

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.

CategoriesAll - Trixity Trails Discover Sydney Discover Sydney - The Rocks Discover Sydney Botanic Explore Sydney

Explore Sydney

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.