Coming of Age at BANG 21, Part 1 of 2

Arriving on time to a puzzle event is not a normal occurance for the Smoking GNU, quite the opposite in fact. However, when Rob, Mark, Given, Jonathan and I set out for BANG 21, the 1.5 hour trip from Santa Rosa to Menlo Park went smoother than expected and we actually showed up a few minutes before registration even opened. As other teams followed, we took it as a good sign that those who had survived BANG 22 were still willing to talk with us.

We got our materials and there was some discussion over the handwritten note included. Since it was a secret message purporting to give us and only us the answers to the first puzzle, it set our minds wandering. "Maybe," Jonathan joked, "they're trying to reward us for hosting the last BANG." Consensus was against this hypothesis, as other teams had similar papers fluttering in the wind. "It's an awful lot of writing to go to for so many notes," I remarked. Being the lazy sort, I probably just would have found a satisfactory handwritten font and printed it in blue.

I got lost trying to find the library (and its restroom) but made it back in time to see Corey from the Burninator's begin the presentation. I held back from joining up with my team, opting to take some pictures from higher ground instead. Corey described the rules, how the answers matched up with a numbered crossword clue, and warned us not to open the tiny envelope except in an emergency (we would later find out the emergency was in case of rain or if the sheriff across the street got wind of what, from their point of view, could be considered a flash mob). He then turned the show over to Wei-Hwa.

And by show, I mean, the first puzzle, based on the quiz show Twenty One. Dressed sharp as the confident game show host, Wei-Hwa began reading the questions, one after the other, as three of his teammates showed boards with the text of the question around the circular fountain. I scribbled down a few answers, waited until the first round was done, and as they began to repeat the questions, I rejoined my team.

Who had, of course, most of the answers down. We worked on filling in the gaps and walked a little ways away so we could concentrate. All the answers to the quiz questions were one letter different than the cheat sheet we'd been given. So we tried using all sorts of different ordering and extraction methods until we finally hit upon the right one. The answer matched one of the crossword clues on the map and we headed off to another part of the park.

We grabbed our second puzzle, consisting of a large amount of laser cut black plastic letters in a sandwich bag and skinny sheet of crossword clues. For solving, we picked one of the few pieces of unclaimed territory: A small bleacher. There was some concern at first that the pieces would fly all over the place in the wind, but they were heavy enough that it didn't matter.

The fact that we took as long as we did on this puzzle is a testament to our second weakness as a team (our first being navigation): Organization. It takes us a few minutes to settle into our location and a few minutes to leave it. Responsibilities for the clue itself are random and half-hazard. Someone takes one part, another person takes another, and it takes a little time for everything to start to mesh.

One example with this puzzle — in which we discovered there were no "U"s (the 21st letter) and the answers to the crossword clues were in alphabetical order — was that the work could be easily divided: Half work from the bottom and half work from the top of the list and meet in the middle. I tried to encourage this but it didn't seem to take hold. Given and I were arranging letters, the "grunt" work I suppose, while the other three were solving. Finally, Jonathan took up arranging letters from the bottom half and we managed to solve the puzzle with the leftover letters.

Corey gave us kind of a sheepish grin at the next site, as the periodic table (prominently displayed on site) had figured into a couple puzzles in BANG 22. I saw Jan's OnLive t-shirt for the cool, newly unveiled product she'd been working on. I idly wondered why she was on GC again, but dismissed the thought as we settled down on the sidewalk to begin working.

A letter cascade accompanies a bunch of cards, all of which say "Like/Unlike [element], I am [description]" with one part a blank to be filled in. For some reason, we treated each card as its own seperate "Guess what I'm thinking of" game, instead of all of them being descriptions of the same element. By the time I did figure that out, we had already completed the letter cascade to get the final element (scandium), so I didn't mention it. Days later, I filled in members of the team as we discussed the puzzles.

Getting the element, though, wasn't the solution, as the index card stated. Instead, it was indexing into the appropriate word, which we had carefully taken note of when we started filling in information. From that point, the solve was quick. Overall, though, the puzzle slowed us down... mostly again due to disorganization. The twenty-one index cards were all over the place, shuffled around, and being answered by different players at different times. Too much overlap, not enough synchronicity.

Our next location gave us my favorite puzzle of the day. In a sheltered alcove, we sat down and started solving. Crossword-style clues on arrows abounded. Spaces to put short answers in a circle containing a single letter also abounded. Answers like "muumuu", "tutu", and "Wii" fitted with the spaces in the M, T, and W circles, quickly leading us to realize the answers consisted of words that only had the single constant plus a single vowel.

We started pointing clue-arrows to answer-circles and taping them together (thank goodness Rob had grabbed a roll before we took off). Hoping to create a single path, we were stymied briefly when that turned out to be impossible. Mark suggested maybe it was a 3D object, like the dome in BATH 4. The configuration would make a great cube, we realized. I suddenly realized that the "What a dark circle in this clue represents" clue didn't refer to the colored circles (duh) but to the large dark circles behind every constanant that for some reason hadn't registered in my mind. Obviously, with the a white cube, each dark circle was a pip! We finished assembly, found the constant on the opposite side of the die for each colored circle and came up with "B_XC_R" (there was nothing opposite the colored squares, hence the blanks) Obviously, it was "BOXCAR". Later, Wei-Hwa told us that each side of the die represented a vowel, so taking the the vowel opposite each square would have filled it in for us. Neat idea, but that part of the solve mechanism would take more effort and time than just mentally filling in vowels, and thus was useless to us.

Part 2 soon.