In the eleven minute window that was the sign-up period for
BANG XXVI: Viking Conquest, Jonathan was able to grab one of the twenty-five open positions for our team. Our friends/rivals the Judean's People Front were not quite so lucky, so we decided to add
Eric and Laura to our roster. Given then decided to give up his spot to Dan, who had been itching to play since his last outing in BANG 18. Thus our string of not having a repeating roster continued unabated.

Laura ended up not being able to make it, so the remaining four of us joined up in the early morning shade of an oak tree at Mountain View to start out. I had my crappy camera with me, with a promise to myself to take
more pictures after only taking a few during the
DASH a short time before. GC was decked out in Norse horned headgear and there was a strange pile of cloth on the ground. I figured it was a just tablecloth.
Clue One - Hoist the Main Sail
Code Yellow got up and give us the the intro speech. One thing that caught my attention was that hints were free after forty minutes; until then, there was a formula to determine how much a hint was worth. I ignored what it was, figuring my early morning brain would be lucky to handle whatever the first puzzle was, let alone simple algebra. GC then unfurled the first puzzle by pulling on a rope, which lifted the pile of cloth into the air, revealing a sail of red and yellow grids. Definitely a cool beginning.

It kind of had the feeling of semaphore, especially after having worked through part two of DASH 1's meta with its large representation of bi-colored semaphore flags a few weeks earlier. However, some did not look like semaphore flags. The divider might be completely horizontal or vertical. It almost looked like some sort of negative space could be involved. Jonathan asked me to get out the code book we'd been provided with and check the semaphore section; something had triggered a connection in his mind. Sure enough, the colors on the sail were the same that were used in the signal flags depicted in the code book. Now, how did we read them? They weren't just plain semaphore.

Jonathan and Eric worked out the idea that the squares on the sail represented a closeup view of a positioned semaphore flag, or that basically the angle of the line between the two colors would indicated which direction the semaphore flag was actually pointing. Even understanding that, it was still something to work through it. After confirming the first line of data, we split up to different different lines. Dan and I, however, lagged behind our counterparts; we only done two lines by the time Jonathan and Eric finished the remaining four.

Turning in our answer, we received a slip of paper indicating our next location; one of the words was bolded. We figured it'd be used in a meta.
Clue Two - Popsicles by the SeaWe arrived at our next location, grabbed our clue, and sat down by a fountain to solve. It consisted of several Popsicle sticks with numbers, odd markings, and hour-glass shaped colorings of red or blue on them. The numbers on the red side were from one to twelve and we figured that we could arrange them somehow.

Using the hour-glass colorings, we piled them on top of each other in a circular formation so that all the numbers were in order. It revealed the word "SPIRAL".
Keeping that in mind, Jonathan very, very carefully flipped over our Popsicle stick configuration and we tried to figure out what to do with the next part. Reading letters spiraling from the outside in, the first part read DECODE and then was followed by weird symbols and a number after each. "Those look really familiar," I said.

Dan echoed that sentiment as well and tried to look them up on his iPhone. He eventually found that some were Nordic runes, but not all. Jonathan mentioned that if we were supposed to decode runes, they should have been on our code sheet. I mentioned that some looked like mirrored letters, but that didn't reveal anything either. We all looked at them and tried to come up with more theories.
It was one of those situations where new ideas would come, then not work, and eventually we ran out of new ideas. "I'm at a loss," said Jonathan. Eric and I kept studying. I concentrated on trying to make a letter out of each symbol, thinking about how I could make letters from the mirror-image ones if only I just just remove some lines? After a few minutes I realized that I could make the first symbol a T if I removed two lines from it. Two was the number next to the symbol... maybe it was a pattern? I checked the next two, applying the same logic. "Guys," I said, "I've got THE."

I explained my theory and we decoded the rest of it. I love that feeling, finding the hidden logic of what seems like an impossible puzzle.
Clue Three & Four - The Horrible BridgeWe arrived at Stonehenge to received a clue that was basically
Bridges,

only with the circles in different colors instead of the normal black and white. Someone suggested that after we solved the Bridges puzzles, the different colors would indicate distinct letters, with some colors like yellow or white indicating nodes shared by multiple letters. So Jonathan and Eric solved the bridges, while I explained to Dan, who hadn't seen one before, how the puzzle worked. We were done with it pretty quickly and we all helped read the letters in the right order to get our answer.
We avoided a sidewalk seat and instead found a table in front of a restaurant across the street to work on our next clue, which consisted of a bunch of Hagar the Horrible comic strips. Only thing was, the text was all in Nordic Runes. Again, there was the fact that we weren't given the runes in our code sheet.

We also noticed that the title of the strip was also in runes, so we decided to treat it as a cryptogram. We divvied up the strips and started working on them, announcing when we'd deciphered a new rune (or re-deciphered an old one if not paying attention). Eric pointed out that a few of his had words from the NATO phonetic alphabet in them, so we set about concentrating on words that were long enough. We still ended up translating whole strips, though, and got around to ordering them by date. PEANUTS BROWN it read. CHARLIE was our answer, and also a NATO word.
As we walked away, Eric commented that he was impressed that many of the strips were still humorous even though they had to be changed to include the coding. We starting talking about which ones we thought were funny even with code words inserted in them. Eric was particularly curious what the originals were and wondered if adding the NATO words improved them.
Clue Five – Nordic MappingWe arrived at our next site, some open plaza with international flags flying, and were given several of what appeared to be incomplete tri-directional nonograms. They had kind of cryptic clues attached to each one, indicating countries matching the flags.

At first, I was impressed that Code Yellow was able to find a plaza that had the flags they needed; a little while later, I pointed out to Jonathan that they had encased poles in a cement base and got flags to put on them. Jonathan was somewhat amazed; he later told Code Yellow that had we thrown it, teams probably would have only had little flags on toothpicks. We're cheapskates that way.
Solving the cryptics yielded countries that matched the flags, each of which had another third of the nonogram on it. The final third was scattered throughout the plaza and was just a matter of finding the proper nation's name next to it. Some of them had number sections filled in black, some were empty, and some had numbers. (this appears to be a little different than the
SNAP version.)

Jonathan and I tried to figure out what this meant and came to the conclusion that the black one represented empty spaces and the empty spaces could be filled in with data from other thirds. We shared this with the team and, all data collected, sat to solve.
Eric and Dan solved the ones they were working on and it showed shapes of Scandanavian countries that were different than the answer to the cryptic they were on, along with a number. I was having problems solving mine, having to erase it at least three times (I think was getting confused as to the directions some of the numbers indicated). Jonathan, however, was making no real progress. I looked over at his work. “You're missing the final group of numbers,” I pointed out. Dan and Eric told him about the partial nonograms with country names and Jonathan grabbed the data. I finally solved my nonogram, despite the red rubber erasing shavings, about the same time as Jonathan solved his. We chained them together, indexed using the number, and got our answer.
Part two coming (cosmically) soon...
Labels: BANG, BANG XXVI, photos, writeup