Early adventurers braved unknown lands armed with little more than all-terrain horses, a coal-burning GPS, and flat-screen TVs used for bartering with local natives. Revel in the convenience of modern swashbuckling with today's Groupon: for $10, you get two tickets to the DC: The Game interactive tour from Stray Boots (up to a $24 value).

DC: The Game sets amateur sleuths and enthusiastic sightseers loose on an exhilarating knowledge-fueled undertaking guided by text-message clues, trivia, and riddles. Players can choose to explore any one of the game's three zones, including historic Georgetown, where players follow their embedded mind maps past bars frequented by Frank Sinatra, Richard Nixon, and legions of Francis Scott Key impersonators. Alternatively, the Smithsonian Art Adventure sends pairs through the twists, turns, and tunnels of five museums, coddling corneas with prized works at the National Gallery and keeping minds up to date with a crash course in contemporary art at the Hirshhorn Museum. Or delve into the diverse Penn Quarter & Chinatown tour, on which explorers can pass under the Chinatown gate, pay respects to President Lincoln outside of Ford's Theatre, and attempt to decode Soviet crossword puzzles at the International Spy Museum.

While at least one player on the team will need a U.S. cell phone and plan to receive clues, none of the self-guided tours require previous knowledge of the city, and most zones take two to three hours to finish. Adventurers play at their own pace, allowing them to spend more time learning about the city, gawking at the many attractions along the way, or photographing vibrantly colored fire hydrants for aqua-centric scrapbooks.

DC: The Game can be played with any U.S. cell phone and plan. Normal text-message rates apply.

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