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T-hunts.com is the brainchild of Alexandra Fiona Dixon.
Born in England,
she moved to California
with her Polish-born father and Irish-born mother when she was four years
old, so her father could earn a PhD in Mathematics at UC Berkeley. Later,
the family moved across the Bay to San
Francisco. Except for a stint at Yale University
(from which she graduated with honors) and a year-long sabbatical in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
she has lived in San Francisco
ever since.
During the mid 1980's, Alexandra was President of the Ivy Club of San Francisco, a
social consortium of the alumni clubs of the Ivy League and Seven Sisters
colleges. During this time she produced two wildly successful treasure
hunts for the Ivy Club. Though she did not produce another treasure hunt
for over a decade after that, the seeds were sown...
Alexandra has been playing in treasure hunts most of her adult life,
and firmly believes that the best treasure hunts are written by people
who play in treasure hunts!
Her team has won the Masters division of the Chinese New Year's
Treasure Hunt twice, has finished in second place several times, and won
the Masters division of the first (and so far only) Secrets of SOMA
Treasure Hunt.
Alexandra also did well playing in the (now sadly defunct) nationwide
Urban Challenge game, qualifying for the national championships three
times by finishing in the top 10 in each city in which she played; her
team always started in the first group of teams based on their score in
the trivia challenge.
San Francisco 2003
6th place with teammate Kim Woolley
New Orleans Nationals 2003
36th place with teammate Kim Woolley
San Francisco 2004
9th place with teammate Eric Prestemon
Saint Louis 2004
8th place with teammate IdaRose Sylvester
Alexandra is also captain of Team Mystic Fish, which plays in the
ultra-intense Stanford game; she has been known to travel as far away as New York City to
play in a game!
"The Game" on Wikipedia
( scroll down for San Francisco
area games - Alexandra has played in almost all of them!)
In 1999 Alexandra won a nationwide treasure hunt sponsored by Forbes
magazine, beating out two thousand other registered participants
competing to find a treasure chest buried somewhere in the continental
United States. The chest contained a certificate for $10,000 worth of 22K
American Eagle gold coins. 2007 value? $26,000!
Forbes nationwide treasure hunt
NewsHerald.com Article
Alexandra waited until after Forbes gave her the coins, then told them
why their existing game design would never result in the photo op they
wanted, with hundreds of people madly digging for treasure. They were
intrigued, and asked her to write up a proposal to produce their next
treasure hunt; she did, but she not only never
heard back from them, they never produced another treasure hunt!
Inspired by this experience, and remembering how much fun it was to
produce the Ivy Club treasure hunts a decade earlier, Alexandra decided
on the spot to begin producing treasure hunts in the San Francisco Bay
Area.
She then approached YABA, the Young Alumni of the Bay Area, a group
that was the conceptual, if not literal, successor
to the Ivy Club from years earlier. YABA agreed to promote a treasure
hunt if she would write the clues. Thus, in 1999 the YABA Treasure Hunt
was born. It quickly grew from 85 participants that year to over 320
participants in subsequent years, and became the biggest summer treasure
hunt in the Bay Area.
In 2001, Alexandra decided to produce a day-long game in which the
participating teams would write the clues, but at a tougher level than
the YABA clues, catering more to Stanford gamers. BATH1 was held that
year. BATH2 followed in 2003, and most recently, BATH3, an ambitious
undertaking lasting an entire weekend, took place in June of 2007.
BATH3
Along the way, Alexandra appeared on Jeopardy on St. Patrick's Day
2000, placing second to the ultimate Tournament of Champions winner Robin
Carroll in Robin's fifth and final regular-season game.
Alexandra and Alex Trebek
(both wearing too much pancake makeup)
All five of Robin's regular season games were "runaway" games,
meaning she had more than twice as much money as her nearest competitor
going into Final Jeopardy and could not be caught no matter how large her
opponents' wagers. No previous or subsequent Jeopardy champion has ever
won five runaway games in a row! Thus, Alexandra became a footnote
(=roadkill) in Jeopardy history.
Robin then went on to win the Tournament of Champions, and then the
International Tournament of Champions, racking up $214,100 in cash
winnings, plus a Chevy Tahoe.
Serendipitously, since Alexandra's show aired on St. Patrick's Day
2000, she won a trip for two to Ireland, and was able to take
her mother back to her home country to visit her two brothers' families,
including 12 of Alexandra's 13 first cousins.
Most recently, Alexandra has written a game for a researcher's
convention, and has co-produced some events with drclue.com, including a
safari game for the Wesco trade show, and a treasure hunt segment for the
Hyatt Ultimate Adventure Challenge.
drclue.com
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