While we were in Sacramento, one of the things that we did was an Urban Adventure Quest. UAQ offers quests in over 50 cities. Each quest typically costs $49 and takes about 2-3 hours to complete.
Disclosure: I was given a coupon code for a free run of the Urban Adventure Quest in Sacramento, though Urban Adventure Quest did not have any say or input on the content of this Urban Adventure Quest review
How to play the Urban Adventure Quest
When I was explaining Urban Adventure Quest to people, I described it as a bit like The Amazing Race. After completing one of the quests, I think that is not quite right as there are not any physical challenges or gross things to eat. You play the Urban Adventure Quest on your own time and at your own pace.
There are a series of questions and directions that take you over a walking course of a few miles. Typically you will walk a block or two, then answer a question about a landmark that you pass.
There are both Location hints and Answer hints, but using either of those will reduce your score.
To buy a quest, you click “PURCHASE IT” and enter in your information. Then when you are ready, go back to their website, login and choose “PLAY IT”. Only one person can be in charge and answering questions, but others with smart phones can follow along in read-only mode. It’s recommended that the teams be no more than 4 or so players because too many players makes the quest too easy.
We did the quest with our family of 8, and I will say that it probably was too much for younger kids. I would recommend it for ages about 10 and up. Younger kids can come along but they won’t be much help and depending on their physical tolerance, may be wiped out by the journey. We walked a little over 3 miles total on our Sacramento quest.
Urban Adventure Quest review – Sacramento
There are around 50 different cities / quests, and I would imagine that they are fairly similar. I’ll give a (spoiler free) review of the Urban Adventure Quest Sacramento. You start off near the State Capitol building and generally walk west before ending in Old Sac (as the locals call it). We parked on 16th Ave between N Street and Capitol Ave. There are parking meters that are the “2 and up” variety, meaning that the rates go up after 2 hours. We put in 2 1/2 hours which was JUST barely enough time (i.e. I had to run the final 1/4 mile to get back to the cars before the meters ran out) and cost us $4.25 (times two)
I found the directions to be straightforward, and the clues were fairly easy to solve, even for kids. There was one clue that I felt was a bit misleading (though I’d want to re-read the clue again before passing final judgment). One part of the quest had us going into the State Capitol building and the doors they had us go in were locked. Rather than detour around, we were able to solve the clues with a little guesswork and a little Internet help. One of the aforementioned clues involved California’s COUNTIES which I mean c’mon – could there be a better clue for me!?!!? 😀
There were also a couple of different bonus “clues” where you could get additional points for promising that you’d post pictures on social media during or after the quest completion, though there’s no verification of that. Here is a shot of us after finishing up the Urban Adventure Quest
After we completed, I checked out the leaderboard to see that I ended up in 5th over the past 30 days (out of 29 total completions for the Sacramento Urban Adventure Quest in the past 30 days). I believe I was docked 5 points for taking 2 guesses on one of the questions, though I see in the all time leaderboard that a score of 570 is possible, so I’m not sure what else I missed out on.
We were 109th out of 775 all time finishers of the Sacramento quest as well, not that I’m competitive at all :-).
One fairly frustrating thing is that once you end the quest, you have to walk back to the starting place (where you likely parked your car). I will say that UAQ does tell you where the start and ending places are, so if you wanted to be more strategic about your parking options, you could (we didn’t)
Urban Adventure Quest coupon / discount and promo code
The regular price for a Quest is $49, though there are discounts for military, school groups and larger groups. I reached out to the folks at Urban Adventure Quest and they gave me a coupon code that anyone could use – enter promo code Pointswithacrew as an Urban Adventure Quest coupon to get 20% off the regular price.
Have you ever done an Urban Adventure Quest? What did you think?
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
I just had friends visiting Portland for the first time and did the adventure quest. We had a great time. There were several scavenger hunts on Groupon. Some charged by the number of people in your group. One other company had a time limit. We did ours at our own pace which was great. The scavenger hunt took us to the Portland food trucks where we had lunch before continuing on. I would recommend this for a fun time.