Great Kids Game for $2.99

My wife was away for a few days and I was trying to keep the kids amused. They woke up in the morning and wanted to play spys so they dressed up and were running around the house `being sneaky`. I thought up an exciting night game that I thought they would like I called spy hunt and the best part is it only costs $2.99. The whole game took about half an hour to set up, about 1 hour to do it with the kids and I used 48 tacks (i took two out previously for another project)

Please check out my other instructables and I also have a diy podcast called mechanicalmashup.tv

I recently bought some `fire tacks` for setting up night time geo-caches. Hunters apparently use these to mark trails they will be traveling on at night. If you shine a flashlight on them they are highly reflective and they can be seen from a long way away. So I picked up a box of 50 from a hunting supply store for $2.99. They come in white, orange and brown.

The brown ones are very camouflaged and are hard to see in the daylight so are less likely to go missing, but do not shine very far at night.

The white ones are super bright but people get curious when they see a white circle so they can disappear, but man can you see them at night.

I chose the orange as a happy medium.

I set a trail down my street and through a small wooded area into a school yard. I tried to set the tacks in a way that they were not too far apart but you could only see the next one (not several in a row) To let the kids know they had arrived at the end I made a smiley face with the tacks. Because I had a few left over I made a frowny face at the bottom of my driveway as a start. I told the kids what we were going to do early in the day to build excitement and I told them that they were going to get to stay up late which they were thrilled about too.

I called the game spy hunt because I told the kids that no one else knew about the secret trail and it would be impossible to find unless you knew to use a flashlight. They put their `spy clothes`back on and we started the game.

Each kid got to use the flashlight to find 3 tacks and then had to hand it to the other for their turn finding 3.

I only allowed 1 flashlight because I figured it would make them work as more of a team and the older one couldn`t just run ahead.

As they found the tacks, I removed them from the trees and fences they were on and dropped them back into the box. This way, no one could `follow us`. I had to coax my smallest kid a few times to point the flashlight the right direction but other than that everything went smooth and the kids had a blast. They can`t wait for me to do it again. The end of the video shows the tacks working well.