Night at the (Ayala) Museum 2017

The four moons have aligned and cast a shadow of darkness over the land. The ancient gods have gathered to give the mortals a chance to save their world from destruction. They will open a portal at the Ayala Museum on October 27 and they are calling for brave heroes to go on a quest to save the world!

(snapshot from Ayala Museum's Instagram account) 

That was how the mystery began at our night at the Ayala Museum this year. Instead of being detectives in a whodunit mystery thriller, we were heroes out to save the Philippine-centric world... from what, I wasn't sure because I wasn't listening too closely to the voice-over when the activity started.

What we learned when we started our quest, though, was that we (once again) had to search for clues and puzzles to solve in the four public floors of the museum. And because I was at the museum a few days before this event, the possible locations of the different clues were fresh in my mind. For instance, the location of one of our clues was based on a partial snapshot of a historical scene. When I glimpsed at it, I knew exactly what scene it was (and where it's displayed) because I was looking quite closely at it before. Then there's another clue about decoding ancient script. While the rest of the crowd gathered over the key, I told my teammates to not bother because I had a copy of it with me. Of course they were kind of surprised. .. I took a photo of it because I wanted to write my name in this script. One of the more elegant clues included in our starter pack happened to describe one of my favourite spotted ceramics in the museum... and it happened to be a few metres from the friendly turtle. 

Finding the clues, the riddles, and the puzzles were easy enough because I frequent the museum. But I wasn't good at solving them. And that is where my teammates took over. Their familiarity with Filipino riddles and their spatial intelligence allowed us to move along quite fast. There were bottlenecks here and there because we had to queue up for the chance to solve puzzles under time limitations. But we still completed the tasks in under an hour... much better than our time last year.

Unfortunately, there were other groups much faster than us. We didn't get into the leader board (last year, we placed second). Still, I thought that we fared quite well and deserved the bragging rights reserved for those who saved the world at the eleventh hour.

It was fun. I can't wait to for the next iteration of Midnight at the (Ayala) Museum. Until next year, Mystery Manila and Ayala Museum!