For the third scavenger hunt, I wanted to more faithfully recreate the Marauders Map as seen in the movie, but based on our house. This is still my favorite scavenger hunt and set the bar for every scavenger hunt I’ve done since. I liked it so much, I made a text adventure version of the game that you can play at 44westwind.com. You can even use an interactive version of the map to find the snitches and solve the final clue.

Opening the box reveals a folded up Marauder’s Map:

The natural step is to open it all out, but that does not make a lot of sense:

The first puzzle is to figure out that you need to open the map one section at a time, both left and right. If you do, the first ‘page’ is the grounds.

(Note the little ‘44 Westwind’ version of Hogwarts in the middle.)

The second ‘page’ is the front yard:

The third ‘page’ is the Great Room, where the Christmas tree would have been. The strange amoeba shape in the middle with House Elves Only is the kitchen counter, the Floo Network is the pizza oven, and the Cauldron Cupboard is the pantry (which we call the larder).

The fourth ‘page’ is our daughter’s room, where the Room of Requirement is a secret closet.

The fifth and final ‘page’ is the downstairs, where my office and bar is. The area with Grindylow is an aquarium.

If you pull apart the two flaps with Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry on them, you find an empty windrose - that is, a star with sixteen points, one for each compass direction. The N with the arrow pointing up was supposed to indicate that.

On the top is a riddle:

Four snitches hold the secret
    to where your treasure is hid.
Four winds blew them far away,
    and through the house they have slid.
The map you hold will help you,
    if you search it like a grid.
Assemble the clues below
    and always be intrepid!

and the bottom has clues:

A stern north-northeaster blew your first clue up-and-away to hide.
Your second followed a strong southwester, hungry for adventure.
Eight dragons guard your third, just south of southeast.
The fourth escaped outside, following this house’s namesake, the west wind.

If you fold this flap back, you will find the super secret, extra advice. This is really only helpful if you already know both Harry Potter and the house - fortunately my daughter did!

North-northeast
You might need to ask Neville’s help, he really gets it.

Southwest
Dobby would tell you to tickle a pear.

South-southeast
Fred and George point to someone ‘Pacing in his study’.

West
Mrs. Weasely likes to listen to Celestina Warbeck for inspiration.

Aside from the riddle, the clues and the advice, there are a number of tells to help you out. As you might guess, each section of the map has one snitch. The advice tells you where that wind would blow things to (e.g. Neville really ‘got’ the room of requirement, so the North-northeast snitch was blown into my daughter’s secret closet - marked “Room of Requirement”). The other tell is that I put little snitch icons in each section in the approximate location where they could be found (so for example, one snitch is in the Floo Network)

Bouncing around the house and even going outside, you finally locate all four snitches. Note that each snitch has an abbreviation of a compass direction with an arrow and that the edges of the stars have letters, though those do not mean very much by themselves.

Putting all four snitches into the windrose - with the arrows pointing to the correct compass direction, reveals the final clue:

Seek illumination in the restricted section of the library

Following this clue takes you to the secret bookshelf upon which is the book of illumination:

Inside the book is a thin strip of paper with a phone number. When you call the number, you hear a ringing phone in the house. Following the sound (and redialing if you take too long), you find your first iPhone.

Merry Christmas!

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Behind the scenes

Designing the map

The first challenge was how to layout the map? LittleFallingStar posted a scan and breakdown of the Noble Collections replica, which was very helpful. The issue is that the right and the left sections do not really mesh except for the innermost pages showing the grounds and the map is far too large. I needed to be able to print this on 8.5 x 11” paper. It took longer than I’d like to admit to come up with having each section of the house be matching left and right sections (so four quarters). That was also nice as it meant that I could use almost a full page for each section, reserving the edges for gluing to the next section. You can see this assembly process in the 2019 - Christmas Chess hunt.

Building the house

The cover of the original Marauder’s map (by MinaLima) shows a 2-point projection of Hogwarts rendered as a medieval fort. I wanted to make a similar version, but of our house, and as I’m clearly masochistic, using SVG.

As it should be clear, I am not an artist, and our house is a lot less castle-like. I hit upon the idea of taking each side of our (also not square) house, looking at the elevations from the blueprints. The front and side would be the two front-facing sections and the back and other side would be reversed to be the back-facing ones. Confusing I realize.

Here is my extremely poor line drawing:

The windrose

The other big challenge was what to do for the clues - I was looking for something other than a random collection of plot coupons. Ideally, I wanted it to not matter when you found each item but would need them all to move forward. The fifth Harry Potter movie, we see Harry looking at the map with a beautiful compass rose in it and I thought you could split the sixteen compass points into four four-pointed stars and fold them together. Each star would only have part of the clue and maybe we could arrange it to not matter what order you found and put in the star. And maybe I could make it in SVG!

(The text around the circle uses the Lumos font and so some substitution may appear.)