Got DASH Pics, Writeups, or Discussions?

Visit the DASH forum. Links to several cities' photos and a few commentaries are already up. Add your own, or ones you've seen. Start a discussion on things you liked, things to improve, or things you hated. Question about a particular puzzle? Post and you should get an answer quickly.

Now... off to do some blog migration stuff!

Get out and DASH!

The DASH 2: DASH-TV national puzzle hunt is coming up soon, and most cities still have plenty of room available! Both Los Altos and Seattle have, by far, the most signups. But the other cities — Santa Rosa, Davis, Portland, Austin, Boston, New York City, and Washington DC — still have plenty of room and would welcome anyone who wants to play!

I know there have to be more people out there. Sure, I used most of the people I know who are interested in the area to playtest the Santa Rosa edition of DASH, but we can't be the only ones. I'm sure that's true of other cities, too.

Honestly, I just want people in my city to discover the joy of the puzzle hunt. I wish I had found out about them years earlier... and the DASH is one of the best ways to get the word out.

Lookin' for a DASH 2 Team?

It may be too late for people looking to play DASH 2 in Seattle, but if your someone who is in need of a team, or a team that wouldn't mind a few extra bodies, post your request in this thread.

Forum Update: Facebook Login!

So SMF 2.0 with OpenID is still in the RC stage, so I've installed a mod for the Puzzalot forum to allow Facebook users to login. It's a pretty quick process: Just allow the forum access to your Facebook account, decide whether you want it to update your page with forum posts and a few other things (I suggest "Do Not Allow" for those), and then create a user name and password. Takes all of thirty seconds.

BANG 26 - Eaters of the Clues (Part One)

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 Sea

We 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 Bridge

We 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 Mapping

We 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...

I'm sick of "I'm sick of codes"

Every now and then, I come across the phrase "I'm sick of codes" or "We wanted to write an event that didn't use codes at all" or something to that effect. Every time I do, I almost want to shout "Codes are what make puzzle hunts possible! Without them, my favorite participation event would... not... exist." But I'm not the shouting type.

Of course, we're probably using different nomenclatures. To me, a code is any hidden message that requires a transformation in order to be revealed. Combine that with a series of puzzles and you have a puzzle hunt. Take away the code and all you have is a puzzle, which I can get from my daily newspaper.

I'm pretty sure those who are sick of codes mean what I think of as ciphers, messages that require a key to reveal the hidden message. To a certain degree, I can understand that: Certain methodologies become cliche or even a crutch. But those who would scream if they saw another binary, ternary, Morse, or semaphore clue seem to be satisfied if a clue solves to 3 9 16 8 5 18...

Which is a straight alphanumeric substitution cipher.

And they complain about ASCII?

Maybe it's the idea that having to look at a piece of paper in order to figure out the actual meaning is what bothers some people? It's got to be the least fun of completing a ciphered puzzle. And most people have A=1 memorized (except for me: Still working on 11 and often dyslexic with 24 and 25), so decoding alphanumeric isn't as much of a chore. Or maybe it's just the non-novelty of it... but letters, English words, numbers, there's nothing really new about them either.

So in my mind, there are codes and many codes use ciphers. And I'm not sick of either one.

(Note: This psychotic rant was set off by a web page I just came across that's over five years old, and not (to my knowledge) anything I've heard recently or by anyone I know.)

On Puzzle Hunt Forums

People seem to want there to be a puzzle hunt forum where they can gather to post and discuss different issues. However, when there is one, they rarely post. Why? I think it's because there's already one, but spread across the Internet. Instead of new topics, people write blogs. Instead of posts responding to topics, most blogs have a comment section. Instead of stickies announcing important information, there's tweets and Curtis' calendar. It's all very decentralized but provides people with the outlet the need to express their opinions and gather facts. Finding them all may be a bit of a challenge, though.

Temporary forums have popped up for recent Games, which I think is great. The No More Secrets forum had over 100 posts and the Ghost Patrol forum had close to 200. I don't know about Microsoft Puzzle Hunt or the MIT Mystery Hunt; they may have internal forums or lists. There's also the Game list and the BANG list for general discussion.

So what people want from the Puzzalot forum? Apparently, they want it to be there. They want people to post, because everyone loves reading what other people have to say about puzzle hunts. But nobody wants to post there; to do so would take away from a blog post.

And require effort. People (including myself) are lazy and tend to not register or go to the trouble of posting if they don't have to. I would like to provide alternate ways to set up accounts, using logins from, say Facebook or Twitter. I'm concerned abouts security, though, so haven't delved too deeply into those options. Making use of OpenID would be great, but it won't be supported until SMF 2.0, which I don't want to install until the final version is available (it's at Release Candidate 2 right now).

So how to make the Puzzalot forum succeed where others have failed? For one, I think the SMF software is more secure than phpBB, which is the forum that was spammed out of control for both Scott Blomquist and myself... so it should be around as long as there is a puzzalot. This gives it more of a chance to grow.

Towards that goal, here are some things I've set up:

• Boards created for each event and give moderator powers over that board to the organizers (when they register).

So instead of there being a forum setup on a Game's website, there would instead be a link to the board on Puzzalot, where GC would have the same power as they would over their own board.

• A board dedicated to linking to other puzzle- and puzzle hunt-related topics

I will continue to post to with interesting links that I find, regardless whether people post to the board or not. Having other people post links there too would be, of course, awesome.

• Sending out tweets of each new post to the board.

Right now, they're sent out via my Twitter feed, but I may change that to a dedicated account at a later time.

• Using Twitter hashtags

I need to decide which hash-tag is best for the posts. Right now I'm using #puzzleforum, but I'm wondering if #puzzalotforum or #puzzlehuntforum (#phforum?) might be better. And maybe have a separate hash-tag for posts that are simply links (#phlinks?).

• New posts also go out to the RSS feed and Google Buzz.

• Providing announcements of new events and a calendar to keep track of them.

What else is there?

Puzzle Forum Up

Last night at the GC Summit, Scott Blomquist mentioned that he had taken down the puzzlehunters.com forum due to spam abuse. As an alternative, he mentioned maybe using the forum I'd been hosting, though embarrassingly enough, I couldn't remember the address when asked. I got home and found out why: It's been offline for nearly a year. Like Scott B., I'd shut mine down when it began getting spam from Russian advertisers on a daily basis.

So today I installed a new forum at http://forum.puzzalot.com/ if anyone would like to use it. That's a big assumption, though. Someone once pointed out that people only tend to post when there's something big and interesting going on, such as a Game. Since that happens, if we're lucky, once a year, so far teams have set up individual forums after each event. If people like the idea of having an all-encompassing forum, I would love to hear thoughts on how to make it better, organize it best, and retain users.