Hint Toad's Scavenger Hunt: The Mystery of Forgotten Isle - Lounge

Hint Toad: Hello Brave explorers! We have gathered the greatest minds from across the globe to help crack the mystery of Forgotten Isle. I, Hint Toad will be your guide for the duration of this expedition!

- This is a puzzle solving game based on the game Super Mario Odyssey. The main puzzles in this game are custom Hint Arts that I have made.
- The Hint Arts will point to real locations in the game Super Mario Odyssey. So please have the game handy as it will be crucial to playing this game.

- All players will be randomly divided into two equal teams. When the game starts, your team will be given one of seven Hint Arts. To submit a solution, you must post in your team's group chat a picture of Mario standing on the location you think the Hint Art is pointing to. If you are correct, your team will move on to the next Hint Art. If you are wrong you must try again. I will be periodically checking the forum at least 3 times a day for submissions. And will attend to submissions in the order they were posted. I will also be giving team progression updates in the game thread.

- Whichever team solves all of the Hint Arts first is declared the winner!

- Each team can spend a total of three Helper Hints for the entire game. Helper Hints will give you a more specific clue of where the Hint Art is pointing to. (Like Kingdom location, map coordinates) Use them wisely! You will be given precise instructions on how to spend a Helper Hint in your team's group chat.

- Please do not share information regarding Hint Art with players outside your team or in any of the main threads. Please discuss the puzzles only in your team's group chat.
- This game will not heavily rely on player interactions like KGs but is mainly a puzzle solving game, so you don't have to roleplay if you don't want to.
- Activity is not mandatory but it will hurt your team if you do not engage in puzzle solving.
- Finally, please be respectful to all players and have fun!

Sign-ups are open! There is no player cap to this game! Please reply in bold that you want to play! We will start the following Monday after Easter. Apr 6, 2026 at 8:00 PM Please read all the rules before signing up.


This is my first game I've ever hosted here so I'm open to suggestions. And if you have any questions, let me know!

Current Players:
1. Boo1268
2. Hooded Pitohui
3. Waluigi Time
4. Yoshi the SSM
5. Ninja Squid
6. Ninelevendo
7. Lakituthequick
8. Salmancer
9. Goombuigi

Let's do the Odyssey.

Yoshi: "Yoshi!" (I would like to sign up!)

@Lakituthequick
@Tom Lizard
@Salmancer
@Revin
@Toadettefan
@Sparks
@Power Flotzo
Juts a reminder, signups will close in 2 days!

Polishing butt! (Wait, we don't have to Ground Pound?)

Just a couple of hours left! Sign ups will close soon! Apr 6, 2026 at 8:00 PM

Sign ups are closed! Game thread here: https://www.marioboards.com/threads/48930/

Thanks for playing everyone! This was my first game I've ever hosted and it's a totally new kind of game that I haven't seen before. I'll share my thoughts on how I think it went. I think maybe I should have waited for everyone get ready for the game before posting the first Hint Art. Team Hint Toad had a massive advantage just because they started immediately on solving the puzzles. Helper Hints weren't used at all so maybe they're not necessary. One other thing is that I think the game would have worked better if everyone was on the same team, kind of like an escape room. What do you guys think?

I liked the split teams, myself. The two-team format still allows for cooperation and coordination, without making the groups so large that there are folks left doing nothing because everyone else solves before they can appear. I don't know that it necessarily needs to be competitive. It might be easier for folks spread across different availability schedules if it weren't competitive, actually, and if each team was just focused on getting to the end at their own pace. It makes it easier to accommodate the vastly different schedules of forum users, and prevents a scenario where a team is down so much that they feel demoralized.

If anyone were to run another competitive iteration, I would highly recommend giving both/all teams art in the same order.

And competitively or not, I think it would be wise to do a timezone check or general availability check during sign-ups. These small teams are pretty nice for coordination... if everyone is in similar timezones/available at similar times. I could see it being a drag if folks were missing each other by hours.

And of course, I want to emphasize that I had a good time overall. This is a pretty strong concept and neat evolution of some Hint Art-based games we've had in the past. There's potential here with a little refinement. (Shout out to my teammates as well, who all did excellent work while I struggled to remember the details of Odyssey after like three years without playing it.)

Back in 2018 I ran a similar event called Hint Hunt, also for SMO. The key difference was that there were no teams, so every player had a chance to tackle each hint without someone else grabbing it first.

Each round gave players 2 weeks to solve as many Hints as they could, with points for correct and partially correct answers, as well as a bonus point for being the first to solve.

I wonder if making it team-based and announcing when a hint has already been solved prevents individual players from engaging with what you've created here? It seemed like this game ended super quick.

These Hint Arts you've made look solid and I appreciate the effort to make them look in line with the official stuff. I like how you've evolved the format but hope you give your own puzzles more time to shine in the future, as I personally would have loved to have sat down with these over a week or so to solve them in my own time.

TPG said:

Back in 2018 I ran a similar event called Hint Hunt, also for SMO. The key difference was that there were no teams, so every player had a chance to tackle each hint without someone else grabbing it first.

Each round gave players 2 weeks to solve as many Hints as they could, with points for correct and partially correct answers, as well as a bonus point for being the first to solve.

I wonder if making it team-based and announcing when a hint has already been solved prevents individual players from engaging with what you've created here? It seemed like this game ended super quick.

These Hint Arts you've made look solid and I appreciate the effort to make them look in line with the official stuff. I like how you've evolved the format but hope you give your own puzzles more time to shine in the future, as I personally would have loved to have sat down with these over a week or so to solve them in my own time.

Click to expand...

I like the idea of everyone solving them at their own pace, and then submitting their findings at the end of the allotted time. The way I set up my game, I had to keep tabs on both teams to see if they had posted a solution. Which was not optimal for when I wasn't available. Your way makes it a lot easier on the host. I'll look more into your game to see how you did it.

I believe it would be a good idea to show off the hint art for spectators, now that the game is over.

Lin Beifong said:

I believe it would be a good idea to show off the hint art for spectators, now that the game is over.

Click to expand...

All Hint Art is posted here. Feel free to take a crack at em'!

I don't know if I would like "here's a bunch of Hint Art, and we'll all check answers at the end of the event". Hint Art tends to be difficult and overthinkable, and its a task only really made manageable by the fact the right answer spits out the Power Moon. So you can't get the right answer, then second guess yourself and whiff. At the same time, open season submissions are demonstrably a big ask for Hint Toad. I think a solution that just about balances things is having each team only be allowed to have one "solution pending approval" and having each team's "solution pending approval" get checked at a specified time each day. (This favors keeping teams on the small side, so that "solution pending approval" can just be "the latest post with "solution" in it and not require a vote on the team's part.)

Salmancer said:

I don't know if I would like "here's a bunch of Hint Art, and we'll all check answers at the end of the event". Hint Art tends to be difficult and overthinkable, and its a task only really made manageable by the fact the right answer spits out the Power Moon. So you can't get the right answer, then second guess yourself and whiff.

Click to expand...

Yes. That was my thought process with designing this game. I wanted it to feel exactly like it does in SMO. Ideally, I would have created a mod with new hint art in it. But of course, that's hard to do. And just not plausible for every player.

I think both Pitohui and TPG hit the nail on the head here. I like the game's concept but the competitive execution was not ideal tbh.

I feel like the structure would have worked a bit better if we had a deadline to solve the puzzle. It's been quite a while since I last played Super Mario Odyssey, so I often found myself unsure of what I was supposed to look for, and trying to solve the puzzle while also trying to be fast really made me grow bored quickly. So, it's a kind of mindset that felt counterproductive with the game's nature I think.

Then, by the end, when the other team was on their final hint, while we were two rounds behind, I felt demoralized and wasn't sure why I kept playing, which made it feel tedious. Puzzle-solving is usually something I enjoy more when I can do it at my own pace without feeling like I need to be faster, so having to do it at that pace felt stressful. I also felt like our team was falling behind, and with the other team way ahead of us, I felt pressured to rush, which made it hard to fully enjoy the game. Then, there's also the fact that I don't have a lot of patience lol so that's mostly on me.

With some more refinements, I think this could turn out into an excellent concept. Aside from that, for your first time hosting a game, I believe you did great, so thank you very much for doing this little game for us, Hint Toad!

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My feedbacks would be:

- The team structure was fun, and I think this could be done again
- Per Pitohui, give the hint art in the same order for everyone
- Have a deadline for each round, which can give us more freedom to explore the game at our own pace, coordinate with everyone in our team, and also allowing everyone a chance to play. (eg: Round 1, here is your hint art, you have until "insert time here" to solve it)

Pito & TPG covered most of the other feedback stuff already, but from the perspective of someone with a 9-5 and who lives in timezone where most users are asleep when I have time to actually play the game, I feel that a real-time event like this doesn't work very well in a forum setting. It gives a massive advantage to whoever is online at the same time as the host, as well as to whoever just generally has more free time to play games than others, as I think was demonstrated with how much faster Team Hint Toad was.

Some other quick points:
- I liked the idea of teams, as it adds a layer of cooperation and makes it easier to deal with harder puzzles that you might get stuck on by yourself.
- However I think teams should probably be limited to two or three people at most, as otherwise you might end up with someone not being able to participate.
- I liked that there was the option of hints if necessary, it stops someone from giving up if they have no idea where the spot is.

That all being said I still had fun with the one hint art I was able to complete, the hint arts themselves were very well done and it was a cool moment when I worked out where it was. Would love to see you take another go at another game like this, probably more similar to the previous Hint Hunt events held in the past.

During the game I was noticing a couple of these previously mentioned problems. So now that I have a better feel for things, I think next time there would definitely be some adjustments. Thank you for all your feedback!

Also just want to say that I was very impressed that Team Hint Toad was able to solve all the puzzles so quickly. It was very fun to watch you guys work together on them. At times, I would worry that I had made some of them a bit too cryptic, but you all managed to pull through. I also saw some similarities between the thought processes of both teams which was quite interesting. Coming from a game developer, this was very useful information! Next time I do this I'm going to make a ton more puzzles!