Coming of Age at BANG 21, Part 2 of 2

As we left the 21 Dots puzzle site (see Part 1), Jonathan remarked that coed astronomy had left five minutes before us. This was an important fact because we had arrived at pretty much the same time, even walking with them briefly and asking about reason behind Jan's sudden commitment to GCing (scheduling conflicts leading to playtesting leading to aforesaid conflicts disappearing... "Or at least, that's what we told her," japed Justin). There's a running joke on our team that in one event or another we've managed to come in ahead of most teams... except coed astronomy. Thus, their team has become kind of an unofficial barometer as to how we're doing.

Our next clue went quick. While we sat outside some restaurant to solve, Mark and Rob went and grabbed some grub. By the time they got back, we were all but done. Admittedly, they were complaining about a long line, but the word search for anagrams of mixed drinks names wasn't tough. The clues for the anagrams version of the adult drinks weren't helping much and I said we were spending too much time trying to match them up. But Jonathan insisted on filling in the available spaces, just in case it mattered (it didn't). The left over letters gave Jonathan the answer before I had even separated the words in my mind. Of course, I was sitting on the other side of the table and everything was upside-down. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

The corner park that that solution took us to next had a large amount of people gathered around what we assumed was GC. Whatever was happening was blocked from view by those bodies. When we finally got there, we found Wei-Hwa dealing blackjack from a makeshift shoe. Now this looked like like fun.

Sadly, though, there were only a few spots for people to play, and only one person per team. All the spots were filled, so I hopped on a nearby table for some aerial recognizance. Just as I did, a spot opened up and Rob sat down. So I took a quick video and tried to keep the shaki-cam syndrome to a minimum.

Eventually, we had seen all the chips, each with a message, and seen all the cards, each with some letters. The chips told us to only pay attention to the letters prime number cards and to fit them into the pattern "_ _ _ _ _ - _ _ - _ _". The letters that were on the prime cards ("V", "ING", "TE", "T", "UN") obviously did not make a word when fit into the spaces in that order. So we focused on figuring out what the next step actually was. Mostly, we tried rearranging the letters in different patterns to make them fit. Eventually, Rob pulled out his iPhone to run some anagramming software. I was depleted of thought. We were stumped.

We didn't seem to be the only team in that predicament. I saw a few teams just studying their notes, no longer playing blackjack, but not moving on yet. I heard someone call my name and found Kiki of Blood and Booze saying hi. She had been tremendously kind during the MSPH playtest when I had decided to see which would break first, my back or her living room steps. It was good to see her again. I had actually taken her for a puzzle-widow so was surprised to see her in the field. We talked for a little while before I went back to hair pulling with my team.

Rob finally got back to us with the results of the anagram search: VINGT-ET-UN, which was exactly as it was if the letter groups had been written down in order. "Oh!" I said, "That's French for '21'". "Why didn't you say so earlier?" Jonathan fumed at me good-naturedly. "The only reason we keep you on this team is for your knowledge of French!" I protested with the weak excuse of not actually having seen the letters in their proper order; it seemed like our entire team assumed that the order that they were in could not be the answer. The solution seemed anti-climatic; I guess I had assumed some sort of Scrabble-like ban on foreign words. We headed out, and we noted a few teams that we had passed. The fact that they had the answer and just didn't know it didn't seem right.

A lengthy walk took us to the last puzzle before the meta. It didn't seem like much time at all had passed and yet we were nearly done. Hopefully, that meant we were doing pretty good. We arrived, grabbed our clue and lay down on the grass to begin figuring it out. Two sheets of paper presented a series of four numbers that needed the proper arithmetic signs between them to make 21. We split them up, with Jonathan and I working on one, and Given, Rob, and Mark working on the other. Jonathan's fast at math, but I found myself matching his speed (or he slowing down to mine) as I worked from the top of the list and he from the bottom. We started converting to letters and were able to make some good guesses as to what letters, and thus which operations, went in the more difficult ones. It took a bit, but we finally finished and had the message ORONEONEEIGHTTHIRTEEN.

Obviously, it was the second half of the message, so Jonathan concentrated on helping the other half of our team. I tried to make sense of the message. I thought of several theories, but by the time I hit upon the one that seemed most likely — having to come up with the operations for those four numbers — the first half of the message had been deciphered: FINDALLFOURSOLUTIONSF. Jonathan and I quickly found the four possibilities and anagrammed them into SIGN.

We were feeling pretty good at this point. We had cruised through the puzzles, hardly being stuck at all. That was all about to change.

Looking at the backup, handwritten log as we arrived at the site for the meta, it looked like we were in about seventh. We didn't see the Judean People's Front, so we figured we were slightly ahead of our sometimes teammate Eric. As we sat down at a picnic table, CRANEA headed out in a hurry (which makes me think our officially recorded arrival time is off). Blood and Booze was there along with a few other teams. We felt good about our position.

There were two parts to the puzzle: Squares and somewhat-triangular quadrilaterals. Two grids were given to us to place them on, so Given and I started work on the squares, while Jonathan, Mark, and Rob worked their quads. Given and I made little progress; it seemed like there were too many possibilities for our minds to handle. I figured that once we had the squares in place, we could use the numbers on the side to index into the solution word each square represented (a little picture was in the corner of each square). Frustrated and unable to go further, my brain began to crash.

Luckily, the quads got completed and the rest of the team used the information they provided to complete the interlocking square puzzle. (I read that at least one other team was able to solve the squares without the quads.) We tried the indexing theory, but it didn't work. We tried other things, but they didn't work either and we kept coming back to the index theory. It just seemed to make the most sense.

Around four o'clock, I began to push for a hint; we'd already been there a half hour. Jonathan argued against it, since we had over an hour before the hunt was over. We finally compromised and agreed to get data verification to make sure our square was correct.

I saw Blood and Booze get up to leave as I walked over and asked GC Thomas Snyder (who I'd met briefly while volunteering for Ghost Patrol) to come take a look at our square. He did and explained that he had only playtested it, but as far as he knew, there was only one way to put the square together correctly. Since our square was together correctly, it must be correct. We thanked him and kept trying to come up with new theories.

Twenty minutes later, we heard "See you, Jonathan!" coming from Eric as he and the Judean People's Front headed towards the finish line. It wasn't long after that that we completely ran out of new ideas and agreed to a hint. Since hints were free after a half hour, there was no penalty. Thomas said he was kind of surprised we hadn't solved it yet and thought a hint was a good idea.

He came over for a second time and we went over the puzzle. After explaining what we'd tried, Thomas nudged us enough so that we realized we had been able to transpose the square. It still worked and was a valid solution, it just didn't work with the index number. So we fixed the square, got the final message SECOND PERSON SINGULAR, which indicated that the solution was YOU.

That experience left a sour taste. It seemed it was no one's fault, nothing could have been done about it, and it was just one of those things. We talked about how if there truly had been only one way to make the square we could have been done thirty minutes earlier. In each subsequent retelling, the length grew by five minutes, until we probably would have been able to solve the puzzle before we had arrived on site.

Somewhat dejected, we headed to the end location. Looking at the standings, we figured without the square snarl we probably would have ended up in 8th, just after Blood and Booze. As it was, we ended up in 14th. Oh well. At least we'd contributed a kick-ass prize: A bottle of wine trapped inside a Don't Break The Bottle wooden puzzle.

In the end, I really appreciate the Burninators putting it on and all the work they put into it. The production values had some very nice touches. I would imagine it was a great introduction to puzzle hunts to new teams and I think it provides a great example for other teams to emulate should they want to put on their hunt. For my own tastes, I would have liked a little more challenge and could have easily done without the problem at the end, but all in all, it was a good BANG.