Shinteki Decathlon 4 - Part II
Okay, the heat wave's over, my laptop is no longer resetting every five minutes, and Natalie's asleep...
(I should note that since my last Shinteki post, the results have been posted and my theory that not going back to the van to use the computer to aid in solving Teamwork cost us was correct: Our solve time was almost fifteen minutes longer than the average time of teams that finished all ten puzzles.)
So, having finished the bonus for Enigma, we were about to arrive at the location for Manipulation, some park whose name I can't remember (when not navigating, I have a tendency not to pay attention to any directions or location names). We knew from the crossword bonus that we'd have to find a plaque, and we discussed the best ways to view the plaque without alerting other teams as to its location. Invisiblility cloaks were not mentioned.
We got lost trying to find the rose garden, since we were trying to follow the map Sam had photographed on his iPhone instead of looking through the trees and spotting the roses. We eventually made it, though, but only after running into someone from Team Shark Bait and asking whether Midnight Madness or Finding Nemo had been the inspiration for the team name (neither, she thought) and a brief stopover at the Chinese Culture Garden for a look at Confucius.
At the small, circular rose garden we met the staffers and I thought it was great that their kids were helping, wondering about my daughter being in the same position a few years from now.
After a few compliments from the staffers on our team name and ability to all fall down after ring-around-the-rosie, we got to work on the Jenga puzzle. We quickly decided that solving a balance puzzle on a rickety picnic table with a stiff wind wasn't the greatest idea, so we layed out each of the layers on the table separtely and proceeded to follow the instructions. When done, the layout on the table looked like an equation (1 - 11 = 1, for example) and we tried to figure out what it meant until I mentioned that we were trying to solve a three-dimensional puzzle two-dimensionally. We stacked the layers and somebody realized we did it wrong. So we did it again, this time with two oversites for the person reading the instructions. Eric, who had thought that the top of our first tower looked remarkably like a "Y", noticed that the bottom of the new tower looked like "OO", so he entered "YAHOO" as the answer.
Personally, I thought the bonus was more interesting that the main puzzle (though I always love a puzzle I can get my hands on). We found the Plane Tree plaque, studied it, and photographed it. Our inital thoughts led nowhere and another team had arrived, so we went back to the van. Using the "MOS" hint, we scoured the plaque to guess which month abbreviation came next. We found JAN, FEBe, MARgaret, APRIL MAY, and JASON (July through November), so our inital answer was "December". There was no name that began with DEC, so we were about to be stuck when Jonathan noticed that Jan, Febe, and Margaret were already in the crossword. So we that we entered the next name, "April May".
We were just pulling in for for the A.I.M. puzzle as we finished the bonus and were treated to a giant See-N-Say, complete with banjo and fiddle players (a touch I was especially fond of). Correct answers to trivia questions got us a chance to position the arrow and "pull the string" by shouting (rather badly) "Yeeeeehaw!"
I figured growing up on a ranch would give me a little edge, but the team that was there left after one or two more spins. One of the trivia questions had to do with which of the animals on the board was native to North America. I correctly answered "turkey". A little later, a question had to do with which of the domestic animals was not mentioned in the Bible. Seemed obvious to me that since no animal (or food) native to North America could have been in the Bible, I answered turkey again (remind you of any infamous game show moment?), but was wrong. Apparently despite the Israelites staying with the Egyptians for a couple hundred years and the fact that I had a turkey for a pet as a kid, there's no mention of cats in the Bible and a turkey isn't considered domestic.
With each spin, Brett gave us an animal and a sound, both completely different and completely unrelated to the location of the arrow. It was fairly obvious that we were dealing with a semaphore encoding, and as we walked back to the van, everyone on the team apart from me (curse of the Shinteki newbie?) realized the A.I.M. was using the arrow as the 12:00 position. The message, "I MAY HOWL", caused Eric, Sam, and myself to immediately cry "wolf", but Jonathan figured very few wolves were found on the farm and went with "dog" instead.
Arriving back at the van, we started on the bonus, which for some reason we thought was the "EIEIO" clue. It seemed implied that those five letters were the only data we needed (although I thought some of the wording indicated that it was more important to pay attention to the sound the different animals made as opposed to their common names), so Jonathan and worked on different theories.
EIEIO ended our string of bonus solves. After the game, we talked with Peter from Briny Deep to get some insight into the bonuses we could not solve and found out they had ended up using decryption software. Wish we had thought of that.
Part III soon.
(I should note that since my last Shinteki post, the results have been posted and my theory that not going back to the van to use the computer to aid in solving Teamwork cost us was correct: Our solve time was almost fifteen minutes longer than the average time of teams that finished all ten puzzles.)
So, having finished the bonus for Enigma, we were about to arrive at the location for Manipulation, some park whose name I can't remember (when not navigating, I have a tendency not to pay attention to any directions or location names). We knew from the crossword bonus that we'd have to find a plaque, and we discussed the best ways to view the plaque without alerting other teams as to its location. Invisiblility cloaks were not mentioned.
We got lost trying to find the rose garden, since we were trying to follow the map Sam had photographed on his iPhone instead of looking through the trees and spotting the roses. We eventually made it, though, but only after running into someone from Team Shark Bait and asking whether Midnight Madness or Finding Nemo had been the inspiration for the team name (neither, she thought) and a brief stopover at the Chinese Culture Garden for a look at Confucius.
At the small, circular rose garden we met the staffers and I thought it was great that their kids were helping, wondering about my daughter being in the same position a few years from now.
After a few compliments from the staffers on our team name and ability to all fall down after ring-around-the-rosie, we got to work on the Jenga puzzle. We quickly decided that solving a balance puzzle on a rickety picnic table with a stiff wind wasn't the greatest idea, so we layed out each of the layers on the table separtely and proceeded to follow the instructions. When done, the layout on the table looked like an equation (1 - 11 = 1, for example) and we tried to figure out what it meant until I mentioned that we were trying to solve a three-dimensional puzzle two-dimensionally. We stacked the layers and somebody realized we did it wrong. So we did it again, this time with two oversites for the person reading the instructions. Eric, who had thought that the top of our first tower looked remarkably like a "Y", noticed that the bottom of the new tower looked like "OO", so he entered "YAHOO" as the answer.
Personally, I thought the bonus was more interesting that the main puzzle (though I always love a puzzle I can get my hands on). We found the Plane Tree plaque, studied it, and photographed it. Our inital thoughts led nowhere and another team had arrived, so we went back to the van. Using the "MOS" hint, we scoured the plaque to guess which month abbreviation came next. We found JAN, FEBe, MARgaret, APRIL MAY, and JASON (July through November), so our inital answer was "December". There was no name that began with DEC, so we were about to be stuck when Jonathan noticed that Jan, Febe, and Margaret were already in the crossword. So we that we entered the next name, "April May".
We were just pulling in for for the A.I.M. puzzle as we finished the bonus and were treated to a giant See-N-Say, complete with banjo and fiddle players (a touch I was especially fond of). Correct answers to trivia questions got us a chance to position the arrow and "pull the string" by shouting (rather badly) "Yeeeeehaw!"
I figured growing up on a ranch would give me a little edge, but the team that was there left after one or two more spins. One of the trivia questions had to do with which of the animals on the board was native to North America. I correctly answered "turkey". A little later, a question had to do with which of the domestic animals was not mentioned in the Bible. Seemed obvious to me that since no animal (or food) native to North America could have been in the Bible, I answered turkey again (remind you of any infamous game show moment?), but was wrong. Apparently despite the Israelites staying with the Egyptians for a couple hundred years and the fact that I had a turkey for a pet as a kid, there's no mention of cats in the Bible and a turkey isn't considered domestic.
With each spin, Brett gave us an animal and a sound, both completely different and completely unrelated to the location of the arrow. It was fairly obvious that we were dealing with a semaphore encoding, and as we walked back to the van, everyone on the team apart from me (curse of the Shinteki newbie?) realized the A.I.M. was using the arrow as the 12:00 position. The message, "I MAY HOWL", caused Eric, Sam, and myself to immediately cry "wolf", but Jonathan figured very few wolves were found on the farm and went with "dog" instead.
Arriving back at the van, we started on the bonus, which for some reason we thought was the "EIEIO" clue. It seemed implied that those five letters were the only data we needed (although I thought some of the wording indicated that it was more important to pay attention to the sound the different animals made as opposed to their common names), so Jonathan and worked on different theories.
EIEIO ended our string of bonus solves. After the game, we talked with Peter from Briny Deep to get some insight into the bonuses we could not solve and found out they had ended up using decryption software. Wish we had thought of that.
Part III soon.
Labels: shinteki 4, wrapup
posted by Skott at 8:11 AM
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