The Ghost Patrol Playtest - Part 2

(Part 1, Part 3, Part 4)

Ghost Three – The Pirate of Presidio

Getting to our next site of our new ghost proved to be a challenge in and of itself. While we knew that our location was across the street from a sports shop, the sports shop turned out to be on a street that occurs more than once in San Francisco, thus confusing our GPS system, and thereby us. Eventually, we found the right street with some help from David, and parts of it looked very familiar: Jonathan and I spotted at least two clue locations from BANG 18.

We parked it front of the sports shop and headed across Crissy Field to find a treasure chest and several markers in the sand. GC informed us that we needed to blindfold two members and have the other two direct them to the various markers to dig up whatever treasure therein lay. Given and Jonathan volunteered to be blindfolded. Eric controlled Jonathan and I controlled Given. Given was interesting, since apparently a “giant step” is one foot in front of the other, where a tiny step is inching along. Jonathan's giant step was a full stride and could explain to some degree why they ended up winning the unofficial in-team competition.

Each site contained a buried box with a washer and a word written on it. We figured pretty quickly, as There Be Dragons started to arrive, that each of the objects in the large treasure box to the side contained in the words on each washer, with an extra letter. Before we headed off, though, GC mentioned to us that the next clue location might need a hint to find due to the limitations of GPS. “Under bridge” were the two words she gave us, so I immediately thought our next stop was the Pet Cemetery we had visited for the Perplexcity Live event two years ago.

The SHaRC took us along the shore towards the Golden Gate Bridge. We came to a point, though, where a military-looking building had a crossarm down across the road and nobody manning the station. So we turned back and began an adventure in finding roads that might go under the bridge. We nearly ended up going over the GGB, but luckily we were able to spot our problem before the Vista exit. Having given up on the Pet Cemetery idea, we were thinking that our location was possibly near the road that ran under the bridge, connecting the two Vista stops. No luck, but walking around the Vista, we kept following the SHaRC until we came to the edge of a cliff. It said we still had a few hundred feet to go, though. Looking down, we spotted Fort Point, which, had that crossarm been up, we would have reached twenty-seven minutes earlier.

Finally arriving at Fort Point, we got a CD, but were told because we arrived so late that we only had about fifteen minutes to work on the clue. We were somewhat disheartened by that and by the fact that it was a musical clue, our Achilles heel. Jonathan spurred us on with a rousing “We can do this!” so we set to listening. A joyful Irish pub song started coming out of the speakers. Three voices sang, each in a different range. Figuring we needed to figure out which was was singing which part of the song, we tried to figure out which was which. And tried. And tried. And pretty much failed. At some point, Jonathan started wondering if there might be stereo channel encoding, a la Midnight Madness, but Windows Vista's ability to adjust channel levels was strangely hidden (at least compared to XP's) and it took some time to find the right controls. Sure enough, there was, lending another complexity to gathering the data. The conclusion, thus, was that it was a braille encoding (“One of the more brilliant braille encodings I've seen,” Jonathan opined at a later point). With our fifteen minutes all but gone and still finding it very difficult to discern between the two higher pitched voices, we allowed ourselves to be skipped and sent to the next location.

Our next location was the Pet Cemetery.

One team was finishing up and the other was about half-way through at the site when we pulled up, showing again that our puzzle-solving times are severely hampered by our (in)ability to drive between locations. The sun was setting but there was still enough light to not require flashlights. We were handed a bunch of faux Polaroids with names blurred by ghostly vapors and saw a bunch of numbered flags inside the graveyard. I was looking forward to seeing Malarky again, but alas, I didn't see his headstone (headboard?) anywhere.

As the other team left, we began gathering the pet name, flag number, and flag color associated with each photo. A few were a little challenging to find, but we had no specific search pattern apart from “Here, you take these photos and see if you find them.” We went back into the van after that and Jonathan typed the data into a spreadsheet. I sat with him on the back bench while Given went over the data that Eric had written down. Were there instructions to group the names or did it come to us? Regardless, we saw that “King” and “Queen” were likely groups, and thought that “Duke” and “Baron” would also fit nicely in that category. Figuring four to a category, we ran into problems and thus many discussions of how to fit name “X” into category “Y” when it clearly didn't fit, despite being the only one left over. Eventually, because of the colors and being the only way to sort some of them, we settled on pairs and soon solved it.

While we had been solving at the Pet Cemetery, darkness had fallen. We followed the SHaRC to the beach and down a stretch of path near some old structures that may have been buildings at some point. At the far end, we met GC who told us the clue we were actually headed for was unavailable (was it the sand dollar clue?) and directed us to the structures. Along a circular platform were a series of shells each with a strip of paper on it. Jenn told us they planned to have actual sounds coming from the shells instead of those described on the paper strips. So we grabbed them all along with a treasure map and headed back to the van, GC Jenn (and companion) accompanying us.

The thing is, GC David had abandoned us. Earlier he had let us know that he had a date with his girlfriend that night. After some good-natured ribbing — after all, he could have a date any night, but how many chances would he get to watch the Smoking GNU solve puzzles? — we found out that his replacement was to be Jenn. Whereas David was tight-lipped while watching us (pretty much how I figure I would be if and when I would be in his position), not wanting to give anything away, Jenn was much more conversational. She even helped work some puzzles she hadn't seen before, including this one.

Back in the van, we rolled out the map on the drafting table. The 36-point compass with E,S,N, and W in strange positions was there. Recognizing it from the pre-clues, we decided that we had to match the sounds on the paper to locations on the map, find their angle using the protractor (I forget the ingenious name it was given) provided in our kit. Only thing is, we needed a straight edge. “Somebody get me a ruler,” said Jonathan. I reached a hand into my backpack, knowing I had two rulers in there, and groped around until I found one. Pulling it out and slapping it on the table, I was surprised: It wasn't the normal ruler, but the "Rolling Ruler". A look of surprise crossed the team's faces as well, but we settled down to using it.

We all tried sounding things out, much to Jenn's amusement (she eventually said she was going to recommend against the recorded sounds because of how much fun we were having). Emphatic discussions came about as to what the difference between rain and a waterfall was, aurally, and others. You'd think some would have been simple, but pretty much every sound had pros and cons argued for it. We finally settled on a few, with Jenn's input, and started to draw a line between them to prepare for angle measuring (which didn't look like a pretty job since we only had the paper's bottom edge as a baseline), when Eric stopped us. “Look,” he said, “all you need to do is roll the ruler across the paper to the compass. It'll keep the same angle and save a lot of trouble.” We tested his theory and it worked. It made me feel proud, like it was an amazing contribution I'd made, when really all it was was pure chance that I hadn't grabbed the other ruler from my backpack.

Based on the way the pre-clue had worked — i.e.pairs of locations — Jonathan figured the angle between locations one and two would form a word, then three and four, etc. I all-to-briefly argued that it should be the journey, one to two, two to three, etc., but was overruled. We tried our the ruler and our theory and got letters that seemed to work, so we kept going, hoping the ones we weren't sure about wouldn't prevent us from filling in the gaps.

“ATTENTION THE PARK IS NOW CLOSED! PLEASE EXIT IMMEDIATELY!”

A police cruiser had entered the parking lot and was encouraging people to leave, and somehow the tone of voice seemed to imply anyone at the park that late at night was a drug dealer, a pervert, or both. As we got ready to leave

“GET OUT OF THE PARK NOW! IT IS CLOSED!”

...Jenn mentioned that they had permission to use the park late at night on the evening of the actual Game, but not tonight. We finally got in position to drive out and

“LEAVE NOW!”

... found a point just outside the parking lot to solve. Someone mentioned that the police usually weren't this forceful, but that there was a race the next day and they probably wanted to make sure everything was perfect for it.

By this point we had something like “B O D O _ G _”. Hmmm, I remember thinking, it's too bad we don't have some extra letters in there, we could make “BLOOD ORANGE”, but the idea seemed so ridiculous that I kept it to myself (a folly I need to stop). “BODO?G?” didn't seem to be yielding anything close to an answer, so we tried reworking some of the sound locations, but were pretty satisfied with what we had. It was then that Jenn recommended that we try the “journey” method and see if it gave us anything different. It did: We got all of “BLOOD” and didn't need to do the rest; my seemingly wild hunch had proved true, making me feel pretty dumb.

Ghost Four – Clowning Around at the Wharf

Due to constraints, that was the last clue we got for that puzzle and so we never got to capture the ghost. Somehow I missed that bit of information in transit. That explains why, when we arrived at the Museum Mechnique, I thought we were still solving for the pirate instead of immediately SEQing our new ghost. Jenn handed us our puzzle and explained that day of, the small card we got would actually come from the fortune machine. One of our team decided to get a “real” fortune to make the experience more complete. The puzzle seemed to take no time to complete and it wasn't long before Jenn handed us our next puzzle and recommended that we go eat while solving.

That sounded like a great idea and Jonathan was aching for clam chowder in a bread bowl. We found the nearest restaurant that served them, only to find they were out of bread bowls.

Deciding not move, we got out the papers and found that we had to cut out different parts of a Venn diagram, only we had left our scissors back in the van. Oh well, we could do this by hand. It's always interesting the discussions teammates get into during these types of puzzles. For example, we decided that one diagram represented a bald, blue person with a single name. Bald and blue meant it had to be Blue Man Group, but we could not find a way to make them a single name (it turned out that the third category was “musicians”). Once we got it all done, we had six new categories we figured we would make into another Venn diagram. Using tiger, ringleader, Blue Man Group, balloon, rainbow, and Bill Murry, we had difficulty making a good diagram.

Eventually, we decided that since a proper Venn diagram has six colors, that each of the objects had to be a color: Blue Man Group, obvious. Tiger, obvious. Ringleader usually wears red pants. We changed the rainbow (an arc in the sky) to sun (a group of arcs in the sky) to get yellow, and decided that the balloon had to be purple, and, stretching even further, that Bill Murry was green (bill=American paper currency=green). Using those as guidelines, we put the diagram together and came up with the idea that the answer had to begin with a “B” (Bill, Blue Man Group, and balloon), be circus related (tiger, balloon, ringmaster), and be a sports team (Suns, Tigers, and the Bills). We started naming sports teams that began with “B”, but none of them were really circus-related, until it hit me: Bears! We were so sure it was right, despite the leaps in logic we made, that disappointed when it didn't work.

We went back and reworked things with our original data. Somehow, Jonathan pulled CLOWN out of it, which apparently the OWL accepted and translated as “Clown Blue”. I never saw that, though, hence my confusion at Rich Bragg's confusion at getting the same answer when I was staffing the site a few weeks later.

The next site the SHaRC took us to was down the wharf to a Ben & Jerry's. There we met a nonoriddle fan (hi catherwood!), although unbeknown to us at the time, who gave us a box of animal crackers. This was a fun puzzle and one that seemed all together too short. We quickly realized that the broken animal cookies each corresponded to a part of their name and were off not to long after that.

A sheaf of paper puzzles was our reward when we arrived at... the heart of Pier 39? I can't say I was exactly paying attention. All I can remember was that it was well lit, we were surrounded by shops, and the place was virtually deserted. Jenn mentioned that we should be careful with the laptop, as some punk had tried to steal Greg's at that exact spot. Luckily, the would-be-thief didn't quite have a good enough hold on it to complete his crime.

We divided up each of the mini-puzzles and I got the one with a circus tent on it and a strangely-metered poem. One of the lines sparked off the idea on how to solve it fairly quickly. Now, I'm more than familiar with the Mad Magazine's Fold-in, but that's not what inspired the idea of folding the A to the B several times over; I'd actually been revisiting The Secrets of the Alchemist Dar the week before the playtest and was expanding on my theory that some of pages needed to be folded. Regardless, I folded into a fan with a picture of a fan and the word “booster” from the poem. Booster confused me until someone, Given or Jenn, pointed out that “booster” was also a type of fan, albeit usually one in a sports connotation.

(David came by to visit us later and asked after the mini. It had been his and was surprised that in one of the previous playtests, no one could solve it. Apparently, they'd never read the proper literature.)

It became apparent shortly afterwards that we were working on a puzzley version of the blind men and elephant fable. “You know,” Jonathan said, “we could look it up on the Internet and fill in the crossword fairly quickly, but I think it'd be more fun to solve it.” So my fan translated into an “ear” in the crossword. I started looking at the other minis to try and help solve. Given was working on a color-by-numbers puzzle that appeared to have a flower, the letter “E”, and a yellow and black zipper, all on some bricked object. It's funny, I thought, that the “E” is on a wall, since that would be “Wall-E”, the Pixar film. To me, it was just a random thought until, with Jenn's nudging that the zipper was a street, we figured out that they were all “wall” objects.

So once again, an unspoken though of mine actually turned out to be the answer. I promised myself I would speak out more often, and I really took that idea to new levels the next day.

With that one solved, we walked further along the pier and spotted a huge cruise ship. As we got closer, Jenn mentioned that next to it was the world's largest sailboat. It was so dark out, we could barely see it. I took a picture of it, but turned out horrible (the version at right is one that someone else took). Apparently, it was up for sale.

On the wooden dock in front of the boat were several wooden cutouts of circus folk with openings for faces. Mustaches had been attached to each one, all in the shape of a letter. GC suggested we should take some tourist pictures. So we did. Some parts of the pictures lit up with the flash and they were all groups of unique numbers. We somewhat assumed that there was one grouping per cutout, but if our theory that the number, say five, indicated that the mustache letter, say “M”, was in that position, then we were missing some. Other teams arrived, so we consulted my camera to see if there was more than one per cutout. It looked like it, so I sprinted back to one of them to verify that the painting was reflective and not just a trick of the light. Verified, we got our answer and our capture valiance.

As we left, we spotted some people taking real tourist pictures with the cutouts.

We walked further down the wharf, captured our ghost, and headed back to the van. Our next assignment, we found out, was back across the bay, in the hotel.

Part three is here...