Inside the outrageous scavenger hunt at Disneyland

Their mission: to ride as many rides in Disneyland as humanly possible in a single day.  

It’s called the Gumball Rally, named and modeled after the annual 3,000-mile road race that takes participants all over the world. In this version, the rally takes people all over the lands: Adventureland, Fantasyland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, even to the Galaxy’s Edge. 

Unlike the real Gumball Rally, where there are no rules (and no real attention paid to laws, as evidenced by the many drivers who have crashed or had their licenses revoked), there are a lot of rules for the Disneyland Gumball Rally. And they’re all designed to level the playing field. You may think your vast knowledge of Disney history might be an advantage, or your hundreds of times riding your single favorite ride, or your tried-and-true ability to estimate a ride’s actual wait time based on its posted wait time. You’re wrong. Not a single one of those things will help you win the game.

In fact, you can’t even use the tools Disney gives you to have a better park experience. The not-so-subtle nod to an “evil genie” in the storyline for the game is a reference to Genie Plus, the new paid FastPass system that adds a substantial cost to a park day and an even-more-substantial increase in standby ride queue wait times if you opt not to pay. (The less-than-warm reaction from the roomful of Disney lovers is a common sentiment among those who miss the formerly free FastPasses.) 

For the race, you’re not only barred from using Genie Plus, you’re barred from using your smartphone for any purpose whatsoever. These contestants can’t so much as use the Disneyland app to check a wait time, or to place a mobile order for food (not that, if you want to win, you would waste time doing that). 

“We had a dad and son from San Diego play one year … and they were shocked that they won,” Sage told me later, as we’re sitting in Fantasia Gardens, the dining area in Fantasyland built on the dock that was once the launch for the Motor Boat Cruise ride. “I asked him what his strategy was, and he said, ‘No food, no bathroom breaks.’” 

Some people who take the race very seriously will go so far as to ban their team from stopping to eat, opting instead to pack snacks and water and only eat them while they’re waiting for rides. After the race, when contestants reconvened at the Anaheim Hotel to turn in their score cards and wait for the results, I spoke to a mother-daughter team, Faith and Makenna, who called themselves “Oo-De-Lally” after their favorite song in Disney’s “Robin Hood,” which, the teenage Makenna said, “is all about having a wonderful day.” 

She had asked for tickets to the rally — the team’s fourth time playing — as her Christmas gift. So were they in it just for the fun of a “wonderful day,” I asked, or were they in it to win? “Yes,” they said simultaneously, both women’s eyes opening wide with excitement over the competition. “We just want to place one year,” Faith said. “That’s our goal. I want one medal. I don’t care what number it has on it.”

“We’re in it for the experience,” Makenna said, “but we’re kind of competitive people, too.” But did they let themselves stop at all? “We were running out of water,” Faith said. The February day of this year’s race, I should mention, was a scorching 90 degrees. “So we got two bottles. That was it.”

“It’s not even mind over matter,” she added. “It’s rally book over matter.”

Here’s how the game works: In the morning, your team gets a rally book, filled with questions you have to answer to prove you went on the ride. You do as many rides as you can together — you can’t even break away from your team to use the bathroom, they have to come with you and wait outside — and answer as many questions as you can. In the afternoon, you swap out for your second rally book and start over.

“All of this year’s questions were written by Jungle Cruise skippers,” Sage said in the morning when he was explaining the rules to the group, “so you’re going to have to suffer some really bad jokes.” 

The questions were not, in fact, written by real skippers, what Disneyland calls the cast members who run the boats on Jungle Cruise. The event isn’t sponsored or run by Disneyland, though they do cooperate and give a kind of unofficial sanction. The skipper schtick was just this year’s theme, which was a Jungle Cruise-inspired “Gumball Rally 2022: The Return to Civilization,” a nod to last year’s event being canceled because of Disneyland’s pandemic closure. 

Remember how I said knowing a lot about Disney wouldn’t help you win? I learned that the hard way when I opened the rally book, assuming I would know at least a few of the answers without having to ride something like Haunted Mansion, which I’ve been on hundreds of times. My ego was quickly swatted down by this stumper: “A LIVE-ly concert is about to begin. It’s going to be a HOOT! Just past the Gravekeeper, on the left side of the entrance into the graveyard, find this BONE-a-fide group of musicians. But just how many owls are perched above in the tree?”

Other questions were about how many snakes hold up the ceiling on a specific point on Indiana Jones Adventure, the pattern of lights on the control room on Space Mountain, the number of bulbs around the screen in the Main Street Cinema, the time on Big Ben in Peter Pan’s Flight. 

The questions, Sage said, are specifically designed to pick out details on rides that you would only catch if you were looking for them, and that aren’t likely to show up in ride-through videos on the internet. Guessing at answers in the hopes that you’ll get lucky and get credit for an attraction you didn’t ride isn’t a good strategy, either. While you aren’t penalized for leaving a question blank, you’re deducted a point if you write down an incorrect answer. When the team was writing this year’s game, Sage said, “we’d ride through once with video, and then write a question, and then look at the video to see if you could easily find the answer.” 

If they did, he said, “we wouldn’t use the question because we didn’t want people to go to YouTube and find all the answers.” In addition to that safeguard, there was another in place: nearly 100 “spotters” roaming the park incognito, watching out for teams who were using their phones or breaking other rules, like splitting up teams to ride more than one ride at a time. In the game, you have to be in the same vicinity all the time.

As I walked the park that day, I saw Gumball teams everywhere. Some were easy to spot — like the couple in matching neon yellow tutus — and some I ran into in line, or on rides. As I was boarding the Disneyland Railroad, I encountered Arik and Elizabeth, a 20-something couple whose team name was “Dole Whip it Good” and whose custom shirts had Devo-inspired pineapple treats on them. They traveled from Nevada for the event, which Arik had participated in six other times with his family. This time, he brought his girlfriend to compete.  

His strategy, he said, was to not have a strategy. “You just go with the flow because that’s the thing with Disney,” he said. “You never really know what’s going to happen.” Ride breakdowns are increasingly common right now, and rides like Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance were down for most of the day. That day, his strategy worked. The couple won fifth place.

Beyond the people who strategized in advance or who drew on years of past experience, there were people whose version of taking the game seriously meant going all-in on costumes and props. The team “Lost Oar Found, All Paddles No Raft,” comprising Kallen, her husband, Jason, and her brother Taylor, were decked out in tiki shirts, pith helmets with Mickey ears affixed and jungle gear bags with their team name emblazoned on them. They had traveled in from San Jose and Portland, respectively, and didn’t place at the end, but did win “best team name.”

At 9 p.m., 13 hours into the day, it was time for the prizes. There were superlatives handed out for things like the best team logo and cutest couple, which, it turns out, was a bogus category Sage had set up so a man could propose to his girlfriend when they went up to collect their prize. The whole crowd cheered and clapped for minutes on end when she accepted. 

“For me, it’s the family aspect,” said Michele King, Sage’s longtime planning partner in the event. “It’s the people who come down. It’s very rare you get to create a day of joy for people, and we actually get to do that.”