When Puzzled Zombies Attack (aka BANG 19)
A couple days ago, Team Goldfish, aka Golden Golems and Mystic Fish, brought Liboncatipu's SNAP vision to the Bay Area. Many thanks to all three teams for putting it on and all the hard work they put into it!
This was my second time captaining The Smoldering YAK. Although our roster wasn't confirmed until 8:30am day of, we ended up with all of the original YAK members except Matthew. Linda's Eric had had a documentary shoot with Stephen Baldwin that got cancelled due to weather, so he was able to meet us in Berkeley to be our fifth. The GNU had other roster problems, with two of their members being unable to make it as of Friday afternoon; however, I got them their final member, William, by Friday night.
(What few pictures I took of UDC are here.)
Zombie Horror Picture Show
I was impressed with the production values of the first puzzle. Whoever designed it went to a lot of trouble to animate the letter "Z" attacking a bunch of other letters through sixteen security cams. It was definitely a cool way to start a BANG and kind of put the "night" element back in the BANG, if only briefly and at the wrong time.
There were a few drawbacks to the clue, though: We pretty much had the right idea from the start, but it took us quite a while to keep track of all the information going on in sixteen screens simultaneously. It didn't help that three of the left-hand cams were so dark it was practically impossible to tell what was going on. And it was definitely a challenge to keep track of which letters went into which cubical in the upper-right hand cam. We were so packed in that it often seemed like we were bouncing ideas off of the team behind us: "Look the 'I' is getting killed now." "No no, it's a 'T'."
Finally, we took Andrea's idea of dividing the cams into quadrants, having one team member watch a quadrant, and then simply saying when a letter got killed, while I wrote them down. Even after that it still took us several times to get it done right.
Zombies in the Underground
I have to admit I'm not especially fond of clues requiring large amounts of data collection within a small space. In the Downtown Berkeley BART station, the space to collect from was exceedingly small: The BART schedule pamphlet. Luckily, Eric and Andrea were really into it and speedily got the data out; meanwhile, Linda and Lori worked on the longest zombie trip. That left me as ideas man, trying to figure out how to pull it all together.
I had many ideas, but none seemed to work. We ended up taking a hint, which told to basically concentrate on the simplest of my theories. Someone spotted we were using the wrong data (i.e. the station names as they were called out instead of those on the clue sheet), corrected, solved, and moved on.
It's somewhat ironic that I made a mistake on the second puzzle very similar to the mistake I made on the second puzzle of BANG 16. To wit: I tried an idea and the data came out as "UNDPAB". That almost looks like "UNDEAD", I thought. But since it wasn't, I ended up discarding the right idea.
Ghostbustin' Under a T-Rex
Our next clue took place on campus. Lucky for us, Linda was a graduate of UC Berkeley and knew exactly where the building we were going to was. The clue consisted of 8 mini-logic puzzles that were used to solve a nonogram. Even though most of my team hadn't had much experience with the mini-logics, I had tested nonoriddles on them thoroughly enough that they at least knew how to do the nonogram. Specifically, Andrea was all over it, being able to complete it when we only had three or four of the mini-logics solved. She was telling us what the answers to the other ones were before we could complete them.
Brainless Chess
The next one was done before I knew it. Linda took down the information from the follow-the-zombie's-infectious path while I took advantage of the nearby restrooms. When I came out, Eric had sketched out what Linda told him to and it looked like "FEED". Larry, manning the site, gave me one of those "You're so close but I can't tell you that" expressions, so we went back, re-drew the paths, and came up with "FLEE". Larry was then fairly strict in interpreting the "write the answer on the solution sheet and show it to the staffer" portion of the rules, but we were out quickly after that.
A Soggy Poetry Reading
The funny thing about the next clue, which consisted of finding poem titles on plaques scattered on both sides of a city block, was that arriving after a little later worked to teams' advantage. Before entering the jazz club, it was fairly obvious that other teams were studying the plaques and thus were the key to the puzzle. Jonathan told me that The Smoking GNU arrived at the site approximately in third, and they hadn't even seen the plaques coming in. Thus, staring at the clue, they really had no idea what to do. Eventually, they found a clever solution: Googling some of the phrases lead them to a book. Upstairs from the jazz club was a bookstore. Unbeknownst to GC, in the bookstore was the book and it contained a listing of all the poems and their authors. The GNUs didn't even get wet solving it.
We did. We diligently gathered the data — which was spread out enough and interesting enough — and headed back into the club. We transcribed the poems and authors and tried to figure out what to do next. Nothing came to mind. I kept concentrating on the "III" in the title of the poem; it was the only piece of data we hadn't used. How, I thought, would I have designed this clue if had been me? I would have used the "III" to indicate to use the third letter. "Okay, everybody be quiet!" I hushed my compatriots, as there were a lot of other teams around us. They huddled around me protectively as I started scrawling out my theory. It worked like a charm and we got out of there ahead of many teams that were there when we arrived. It was a great moral booster.
Game Store Tactics
We definitely had fun with this one. Clues that can be divvied up among teammates are good at creating a sense of unity and accomplishment. At least for us. The "Interlaced Video" sub-title made it pretty clear to us what to do, as we found common words amongst joined film, song, and TV show names. Which we then did again with the newly interleaved names that the puzzle solved to. I was in the midst of de-interlacing the fourth new title when Eric urgently whispered "It's 'Wild West', let's go!" So we did.
A Zombie Feast
At some sort of children's brain center (my team stole the location information after the hunt, so I can't be more exact than that), we got a bunch of pictures of things zombies had been dining on lately. Looking for a place to sit, we spotted a couch and zoomed to it. We also failed to spot any other teams, which is kind of discomforting. Are we last to arrive? Slightly ahead of the curve? First? (Highly doubtful.)
We set about deciding what each of the pictures were. Andrea was just noticing that most of our identifications contained the letters "B" and "R", which should have lead us in the right direction. Another team arrive and camped out nearby. Sound carried well in that building, so we ended up in a good-natured shushing match with them, with a few bit of very obviously wrong information spoken loudly.
Still having no idea what to do, apart from having to take out letters from each word the pictures identified to leave a specific number of letters left, I wrote down the first word, "RAINBOW", and the second, "BANNISTER", and crossed off what they had in common. This gave us the proper number of letters left and looking closely I realized that the letters I'd crossed off anagrammed into something very thematic as well as something that should have been obvious from our location. (Talking to Jonathan later, he described how the GNU asked themselves, "So what do zombies eat?" and the answer was immediately obvious).
We YAKs were feeling pretty good at that point. We had hit our stride and had zoomed through the last few puzzles. We were on our way to the eighth and final puzzle, confident that we were going to have a decent finish time.
We Fold
In Mel's Diner, it seemed like there were a lot of teams there, so I guess we were middle of the pack or so. The Smoking GNU was there and we stopped by to say hi, noting that they hadn't yet finished the final puzzle. That both gave us hope and dread: Hope that we could pull off a fast solve and end up ahead of some of the teams already there; and dread that if they hadn't solved it by now, how could we get a fast solve?
We found a large enough table and sat down with our colorful clue/newsletter. Again, it consisted of several sub-puzzles that we split up. Andrea and I worked on the crossword, but she seemed to be speeding through the clues faster than I could think. Linda handled the Morse code ("This side up") and Eric and Lori worked on other ones on the back.
I noticed the dashed lines around the clue and figured at some point we'd have to cut it out. I don't know if I had subconsciously spotted other teams making them, but I somehow knew we'd end up folding the paper into an airplane. Thinking that the sub-clues would give us specific directions on how to fold it (I figured all the bull's eyes would line up), we solved them, only to find out that the first two were "AIRPLANE" and "FOLD".
Some "sparing pairings" indicated they would give us directions on how to traverse the maze, but even after solving all of them, we still had no idea how. We tried many paths but got nowhere.
When we had arrived at Mel's, Alexandra told us some information about what hints she would and wouldn't give. For some reason, I thought that she wouldn't give any hints on the final puzzle, much the same way as in BANG 16. However, one of the YAKs spotted one of the GNUs talking to Alexandra and overheard they were taking a hint. This was not only a sure sign that we could use a hint, but also how tricky the puzzle was.
From Alexandra, we were told to ignore the maze for now and focus on folding the airplane. Now I know several different ways to fold an airplane, including my own custom way (that only does a half-loop before falling to the ground), so I set about trying to line up all the bull's eyes and make an airplane. Eric tried with his copy. We got nowhere fast. Going back, Alexandra handed us a paper showing exactly how to fold it (it was a version of the classic dart). The main problem was none of the bull's eyes were used in the first fold; that was a frustrating development.
Once constructed, the folded airplane revealed a wheel that had "Lucky Charms" marshmallow symbols on it. "Semaphore!" we thought, but no such luck. At least not yet. Kind of taking the hint the wrong way, we thought the wheel would help us decipher the symbols in the maze, not the other way around.
The four o'clock deadline came. It was extended to 4:15.
Around 4:10, Jonathan wondered over and I told him of our continued problems. He set us straight: Solve the maze, then the wheel. However, we couldn't figure out how the "spairing pairings" were supposed to guide us through the maze. With only a couple minutes to go, he told us. I'm not sure we ever would have gotten that, but trying to get your brain to work in rush while your stomach is digesting diner food is not always the best environment for creative thought.
In Summary
We YAKs ended up not doing very well. We could and should have done better. The first two puzzles slowed us down more than they should have. We gained momentum on puzzles three through seven, but hit a brick wall figuring out how to fold an airplane. Not being able to solve that kind of left a sour taste in our mouths.
Or maybe it was just that the ketchup at Mel's Diner was rancid.
This was my second time captaining The Smoldering YAK. Although our roster wasn't confirmed until 8:30am day of, we ended up with all of the original YAK members except Matthew. Linda's Eric had had a documentary shoot with Stephen Baldwin that got cancelled due to weather, so he was able to meet us in Berkeley to be our fifth. The GNU had other roster problems, with two of their members being unable to make it as of Friday afternoon; however, I got them their final member, William, by Friday night.
(What few pictures I took of UDC are here.)
Zombie Horror Picture Show
I was impressed with the production values of the first puzzle. Whoever designed it went to a lot of trouble to animate the letter "Z" attacking a bunch of other letters through sixteen security cams. It was definitely a cool way to start a BANG and kind of put the "night" element back in the BANG, if only briefly and at the wrong time.
There were a few drawbacks to the clue, though: We pretty much had the right idea from the start, but it took us quite a while to keep track of all the information going on in sixteen screens simultaneously. It didn't help that three of the left-hand cams were so dark it was practically impossible to tell what was going on. And it was definitely a challenge to keep track of which letters went into which cubical in the upper-right hand cam. We were so packed in that it often seemed like we were bouncing ideas off of the team behind us: "Look the 'I' is getting killed now." "No no, it's a 'T'."
Finally, we took Andrea's idea of dividing the cams into quadrants, having one team member watch a quadrant, and then simply saying when a letter got killed, while I wrote them down. Even after that it still took us several times to get it done right.
Zombies in the Underground
I have to admit I'm not especially fond of clues requiring large amounts of data collection within a small space. In the Downtown Berkeley BART station, the space to collect from was exceedingly small: The BART schedule pamphlet. Luckily, Eric and Andrea were really into it and speedily got the data out; meanwhile, Linda and Lori worked on the longest zombie trip. That left me as ideas man, trying to figure out how to pull it all together.
I had many ideas, but none seemed to work. We ended up taking a hint, which told to basically concentrate on the simplest of my theories. Someone spotted we were using the wrong data (i.e. the station names as they were called out instead of those on the clue sheet), corrected, solved, and moved on.It's somewhat ironic that I made a mistake on the second puzzle very similar to the mistake I made on the second puzzle of BANG 16. To wit: I tried an idea and the data came out as "UNDPAB". That almost looks like "UNDEAD", I thought. But since it wasn't, I ended up discarding the right idea.
Ghostbustin' Under a T-Rex
Our next clue took place on campus. Lucky for us, Linda was a graduate of UC Berkeley and knew exactly where the building we were going to was. The clue consisted of 8 mini-logic puzzles that were used to solve a nonogram. Even though most of my team hadn't had much experience with the mini-logics, I had tested nonoriddles on them thoroughly enough that they at least knew how to do the nonogram. Specifically, Andrea was all over it, being able to complete it when we only had three or four of the mini-logics solved. She was telling us what the answers to the other ones were before we could complete them.
Brainless Chess
The next one was done before I knew it. Linda took down the information from the follow-the-zombie's-infectious path while I took advantage of the nearby restrooms. When I came out, Eric had sketched out what Linda told him to and it looked like "FEED". Larry, manning the site, gave me one of those "You're so close but I can't tell you that" expressions, so we went back, re-drew the paths, and came up with "FLEE". Larry was then fairly strict in interpreting the "write the answer on the solution sheet and show it to the staffer" portion of the rules, but we were out quickly after that.
A Soggy Poetry Reading
The funny thing about the next clue, which consisted of finding poem titles on plaques scattered on both sides of a city block, was that arriving after a little later worked to teams' advantage. Before entering the jazz club, it was fairly obvious that other teams were studying the plaques and thus were the key to the puzzle. Jonathan told me that The Smoking GNU arrived at the site approximately in third, and they hadn't even seen the plaques coming in. Thus, staring at the clue, they really had no idea what to do. Eventually, they found a clever solution: Googling some of the phrases lead them to a book. Upstairs from the jazz club was a bookstore. Unbeknownst to GC, in the bookstore was the book and it contained a listing of all the poems and their authors. The GNUs didn't even get wet solving it.
We did. We diligently gathered the data — which was spread out enough and interesting enough — and headed back into the club. We transcribed the poems and authors and tried to figure out what to do next. Nothing came to mind. I kept concentrating on the "III" in the title of the poem; it was the only piece of data we hadn't used. How, I thought, would I have designed this clue if had been me? I would have used the "III" to indicate to use the third letter. "Okay, everybody be quiet!" I hushed my compatriots, as there were a lot of other teams around us. They huddled around me protectively as I started scrawling out my theory. It worked like a charm and we got out of there ahead of many teams that were there when we arrived. It was a great moral booster.Game Store Tactics
We definitely had fun with this one. Clues that can be divvied up among teammates are good at creating a sense of unity and accomplishment. At least for us. The "Interlaced Video" sub-title made it pretty clear to us what to do, as we found common words amongst joined film, song, and TV show names. Which we then did again with the newly interleaved names that the puzzle solved to. I was in the midst of de-interlacing the fourth new title when Eric urgently whispered "It's 'Wild West', let's go!" So we did.A Zombie Feast
At some sort of children's brain center (my team stole the location information after the hunt, so I can't be more exact than that), we got a bunch of pictures of things zombies had been dining on lately. Looking for a place to sit, we spotted a couch and zoomed to it. We also failed to spot any other teams, which is kind of discomforting. Are we last to arrive? Slightly ahead of the curve? First? (Highly doubtful.)
We set about deciding what each of the pictures were. Andrea was just noticing that most of our identifications contained the letters "B" and "R", which should have lead us in the right direction. Another team arrive and camped out nearby. Sound carried well in that building, so we ended up in a good-natured shushing match with them, with a few bit of very obviously wrong information spoken loudly.
Still having no idea what to do, apart from having to take out letters from each word the pictures identified to leave a specific number of letters left, I wrote down the first word, "RAINBOW", and the second, "BANNISTER", and crossed off what they had in common. This gave us the proper number of letters left and looking closely I realized that the letters I'd crossed off anagrammed into something very thematic as well as something that should have been obvious from our location. (Talking to Jonathan later, he described how the GNU asked themselves, "So what do zombies eat?" and the answer was immediately obvious).We YAKs were feeling pretty good at that point. We had hit our stride and had zoomed through the last few puzzles. We were on our way to the eighth and final puzzle, confident that we were going to have a decent finish time.
We Fold
In Mel's Diner, it seemed like there were a lot of teams there, so I guess we were middle of the pack or so. The Smoking GNU was there and we stopped by to say hi, noting that they hadn't yet finished the final puzzle. That both gave us hope and dread: Hope that we could pull off a fast solve and end up ahead of some of the teams already there; and dread that if they hadn't solved it by now, how could we get a fast solve?
We found a large enough table and sat down with our colorful clue/newsletter. Again, it consisted of several sub-puzzles that we split up. Andrea and I worked on the crossword, but she seemed to be speeding through the clues faster than I could think. Linda handled the Morse code ("This side up") and Eric and Lori worked on other ones on the back.
I noticed the dashed lines around the clue and figured at some point we'd have to cut it out. I don't know if I had subconsciously spotted other teams making them, but I somehow knew we'd end up folding the paper into an airplane. Thinking that the sub-clues would give us specific directions on how to fold it (I figured all the bull's eyes would line up), we solved them, only to find out that the first two were "AIRPLANE" and "FOLD".
Some "sparing pairings" indicated they would give us directions on how to traverse the maze, but even after solving all of them, we still had no idea how. We tried many paths but got nowhere.
When we had arrived at Mel's, Alexandra told us some information about what hints she would and wouldn't give. For some reason, I thought that she wouldn't give any hints on the final puzzle, much the same way as in BANG 16. However, one of the YAKs spotted one of the GNUs talking to Alexandra and overheard they were taking a hint. This was not only a sure sign that we could use a hint, but also how tricky the puzzle was.
From Alexandra, we were told to ignore the maze for now and focus on folding the airplane. Now I know several different ways to fold an airplane, including my own custom way (that only does a half-loop before falling to the ground), so I set about trying to line up all the bull's eyes and make an airplane. Eric tried with his copy. We got nowhere fast. Going back, Alexandra handed us a paper showing exactly how to fold it (it was a version of the classic dart). The main problem was none of the bull's eyes were used in the first fold; that was a frustrating development.
Once constructed, the folded airplane revealed a wheel that had "Lucky Charms" marshmallow symbols on it. "Semaphore!" we thought, but no such luck. At least not yet. Kind of taking the hint the wrong way, we thought the wheel would help us decipher the symbols in the maze, not the other way around.
The four o'clock deadline came. It was extended to 4:15.
Around 4:10, Jonathan wondered over and I told him of our continued problems. He set us straight: Solve the maze, then the wheel. However, we couldn't figure out how the "spairing pairings" were supposed to guide us through the maze. With only a couple minutes to go, he told us. I'm not sure we ever would have gotten that, but trying to get your brain to work in rush while your stomach is digesting diner food is not always the best environment for creative thought.
In Summary
We YAKs ended up not doing very well. We could and should have done better. The first two puzzles slowed us down more than they should have. We gained momentum on puzzles three through seven, but hit a brick wall figuring out how to fold an airplane. Not being able to solve that kind of left a sour taste in our mouths.
Or maybe it was just that the ketchup at Mel's Diner was rancid.
Labels: BANG, BANG 19, pictures, The Smoldering YAK, writeup
posted by Skott at 1:46 PM
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