Eric the Puzzler puts Keys to Philly on halt and announces a free citywide treasure hunt

For more than a year, Eric the Puzzler has sent Philadelphians into monthly key-finding quests — full of puzzles, local trivia, coordinates, and rewards, called Keys to Philly — with the challenge: “I’ve hidden a key somewhere in Philadelphia. Your mission: find it!”

But, the adventure is coming to a halt for an even more hyper-local quest: a free citywide treasure hunt.

Eric Dale — a.k.a. Eric the Puzzler — says he created the game as a way to make art accessible while bringing attention to the paid scavenger experiences that let him live off his craft. Keys to Philly began as a “free sample.”

“I wanted to give people who might be interested in going out to explore the real world a little mission that will get them intrigued about my other projects,” said Dale, a 32-year-old self-described experience designer.

It took on a life of its own, becoming what he credits as the reason for his social media breakthrough.

For 14 months, his Instagram and TikTok followers eagerly awaited Dale’s one-man show: finding a hiding spot for a “K2P” key, creating a puzzle around it, commissioning local artists’ creations or getting them donated for the rewards, and uploading the clues to social media.

No key lasted more than 48 hours in the wild before a “dissectologist” found the location.

Kristen Footo, 35, found the first key after watching Dale’s video on Instagram. Three clues, including the number of points the Eagles scored in 1960, were all the post gave her to figure out what “39.9[_ _ _][_ _], -75.1[_ _ _ _ _]” meant.

Despite claiming not to be very good at puzzles, Footo cracked the code that day. She made her way from her Fairmount home to South Philly, and found a nickel cylinder key labeled “K2P 1″ pasted to a mosaic piece that would later win her four pieces of art from local artists.

“A random alley in the middle of a small street is not a place I would have walked by, but it was beautiful, full of mosaics,” Footo said. “Even if you don’t find something, you are seeing a different part of the city that you normally don’t see,” she added.

Every puzzle has a different theme; the one for key 13 offered a date, a birthday, and the phrase “Mr. Shaken not Stirred” as clues.

It was solved and claimed within 70 minutes by Mason Wagner, 28, a recent transplant from Indiana. He won a canvas print photo of the Philly skyline taken by Dale.

“I had a mix-up and had to run back and forth trying to find the key. I was worried someone would find it before me,” said Wagner, who discovered “K2P 13″ on a wooden pole’s yellow grid. “It was a lot of fun and a cool way to get to know the city.”

Despite the public love for this project, the South Philadelphia puzzler is hanging the keys — after the last one, K2P 14, was found on Feb. 29 for a free treasure hunt concept.

The treasure hunt will be much harder than Keys to Philly, Dale said.

“It will take you places not even the most seasoned Philadelphians have been to,” Dale said. The prize will be bigger, too: Dale says the treasure hunt’s reward is valued at $1,000, compared to typical prizes worth $5 to $35 for Keys to Philly’s, and it’s both an experience and an object.

To find it, Philadelphians will have to travel around the city looking for answers to his social media hints to know where the next clue is.

As a tease, he gave The Inquirer an example of a type of prompt people can expect but won’t be part of the actual hunt.

Imagine a video where the clips are one or three seconds long. Folks might eventually recognize they represent dots and dashes, Morse code for R-E-E-S-E.

Reese Street is present in several parts of Philly, “so that’s not a very helpful clue,” Dale said. “But, did you know there is also a Morse Street in Philly that just so happens to intersect with Reese?”

The treasure hunt starts Monday and will continue until someone locates the prize. In the meantime, puzzle solvers in need of a side quest can solve Dale’s puzzles at South Philly Mural Escape, Philly Street Art Hunt, the Philadelphia airport, Rittenhouse Square, and the Delaware River Waterfront.