Luckless in BANG XX
The first mistake we made at twentieth BANG was to park near the end location instead of the start. The second was that, in walking from the our parking spot to the start location, we didn't listen to the GPS which was trying to nicely plot us around Telegraph Hill; instead, we went over it. The third mistake would only make itself clear later on.
Given, Andrea, and I — our usual puzzle-adventure game band — had decided to try our luck in XX-Rated's BANG XX without our normal captain. So the three of us ended up at Levi's Plaza Park in the Embarcadero on that Sunday evening. The first things I did was to pay Rich some money. He seemed surprised, so it was worth it. The next thing was to notice during registration that Jan, usually of coed astronomy, was part of GC. The joy of joining the female sisterhood? I wondered. Two BANGs later, I'd find out.
Eventually, Rachel stood up upon a wall and got everyone's attention. Rules were spelled out, information given, and commencement signaled. We went down to some steps a little ways away from everyone, unrolled our scroll and starting working on the first puzzle. A limerick would describe in a silly way a town in Ireland with a silly name (e.g. Kilmacow, Limerick, Ballinrobe, etc.). Andrea and I were working out the limericks while Given was busy connecting them on the map provided. This hypothesis proved fruitless when nothing interesting was drawn and it didn't take into account the numbered limerick on the map itself.
Eventually, we started measuring and converting the inches to scale. It gave us interesting alphanumeric-ranged numbers, up until the line between Blarney and Leggs gave us a 28. That was fine, though: 28 fell between the 1 and 29 ranges on the map's limerick. Now if only we could figure out what the 1 and 29 meant. Before I could give it much though, Given pointed out that there were 29 letters in the last line, which was right next to the "29". "Okay, but how do we use that with the '1' at the top?" I asked.
We spent too much time down that thought, instead of realizing that there was no tricky aha way of making it work. Eventually, we took a hint, found out that the numbers referred to the word count, solved it, and moved on.
Darkness had fallen and I was just beginning to notice that although we had dressed appropriately for a very cold Santa Rosa night, it wasn't appropriate enough for a very cold San Francisco night. Our third mistake was making itself known.
Our second clue was down the street where we were given chocolates coins wrapped in gold foil, all inside a bag with a reverse rainbow (blue on the top, red on the bottom). Nothing was unique about the coins so I bit into one (against Andrea's desire to preserve the clue), expecting a flavor, but getting a color instead. So we set about finding all the colors. Fairly quickly, we hit upon indexing the number of coins per color into the color name and then taking them in reverse color order. Gave us a burst of confidence as we headed...
...up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower. Many other teams were on this exodus with us and we were constantly passing and repassing each other as rests stops were taken. Two things became clear, though:
We should have taken the GPS's advice about walking around Telegraph Hill instead of exhausting ourselves going over it to get to Levi's Plaza Park
We were slowly falling behind the general tide of the crowd.
(In preparation for this BANG, I had been training some on our elevated treadmill, having been warned of having to walk up San Francisco hills. Unfortunately, I wasn't prepared for stairs. I heard later that one team drove up to Coit Tower and another team simply skipped the clue altogether. Considering what happened, we should have skipped it too.)
Up and up, we continued. Given, who had started strong, was beginning to fall behind. Andrea had slowed down to my pace. I wasn't doing terrible, but still needed an occasional breather. The tower went out of sight for a while and when it came back into view, it was closer than ever. Soon, we ran across the Judean's People Front and sometimes teammate Eric Prestemon, solving.
Finally, we got to the top. And by "we", I mean Andrea and I. We wouldn't see Given for over five minutes. So the two of us picked up the clue
and were looking it over when Given staggered up to us and collapsed dramatically and spread-eagle on the sidewalk. "Just let me die here," he groaned.
The clue consisted of a leprechaun describing what he thought various clouds in the sky looked like. The obvious connection was with the Lucky Charms box we'd been given at the beginning and that the shapes were the different marshmallows. How we used that was impossible to say: The box didn't have an exhaustive list of the different shapes, so I opened it up and we started trying to assign different cloud descriptions to different marshmallows. Some of them were pretty darned ambiguous in our estimation, and even when we had what we thought was a near complete list, we had no idea what to do with it.
Great frustration set in. On top of that, the warmth we had gained from our exercise in stair climbing was wearing off and the cold, cutting wind was really beginning to bite into our mental prowess (whatever amount we'd had to begin with anyway). So we eventually agreed to a second hint. Just as Andrea was finishing reading the hint, I began to notice that the cover of the box was starting to peel off! XX-Rated had done an excellent job on putting a fake cover on the cereal box. Fooled us completely. Using only the marshmallows on their customized cover, we completed the puzzle pretty quickly.
There was grumbling as we headed down to the next clue: Complaints about the wind, complaints about being stuck on the clue, and complaints about the climb. I thought back a few weeks ago to something I had jokingly described to Jonathan as "Scott's Law", which ran along the lines of "The quality of a puzzle must at minimum match the effort used to attain it", as well its corollary "A great site deserves a great clue." For some strange reason, I think this puzzle ended up becoming our least-liked of the hunt.
Since we had some time in getting to the next site, I decided call Jonathan and let him know about our bleak state during the only BANG he's missed since he started playing. "We've had two hints on three clues and there's only an hour to go," I admitted to him. He expressed, for lack of a better word, his condolences, but went on to say, "It's okay, really, you can take the remain four clues at fifteen minutes each and still maybe even have time to solve the meta!" One thing I have to say I admire in our usual captain is his optimism in the face of despair and his ability to encourage his team.
We arrived at Washington Square Park and that optimism fell apart: Our team was to be divided in two and we had to communicate different parts of the clue to each other. So much, I thought, for a speedy solve.
I ran off to one side and hurriedly writing down descriptions of six different horseshoe layouts and sending them via messenger to Andrea and Given. Sadly, I'm not that fast a hand-writer, so it seemed to take forever to get them sent (and get the messenger's attention). Even more sadly, I didn't notice until the fourth or fifth description that each picture was outlined with a different color. That would have made a huge different, since I was betting that my temporarily isolated teammembers would have to be matching up my descriptions with something and the color would give them which one.
My suspicions proved true not too much longer when enough time had passed (a half-hour?) and I was allowed to rejoin my team. They were setting up actual (plastic) horseshoes based on my descriptions
and had a set of viewing guides. Since they didn't know which viewing guide matched which horseshoe setup, no progress had been made. With both sets of information joined, we were able to recognize enough letters formed by the layouts to get the solution.
It was now fifteen minutes away from the end of the hunt. But we got a little lost on the way to the next site and arrived at five till ten. "We know the next clue is the one that costs seven dollars," Andrea pointed out, "and there's not enough time to solve it. Let's just save ourselves some money and head to the end location." I think how readily Given and I agreed with her says something about our state of mind at the time.
We turned in our envelopes at an Irish pub with an Indian interior. Hearing from GC (studiously busy counting envelopes, a task I did not envy them in) that we'd be able to get a copy of the clues we'd missed in a bit, we hung around... but soon the realization that the work week was fast approaching led us to bid goodbye to BANG XX.
A few nights later, Andrea, Given, and I gathered again, printed out the four clues we missed, and solved them in a little over an hour. And we had a great (warm) time doing it.
I want to thank XX-Rated for putting together and hosting their BANG. They put a lot of effort into it and had great puzzles. The fact that we didn't have a so good a time I think is a reflection on our own mistakes.
Given, Andrea, and I — our usual puzzle-adventure game band — had decided to try our luck in XX-Rated's BANG XX without our normal captain. So the three of us ended up at Levi's Plaza Park in the Embarcadero on that Sunday evening. The first things I did was to pay Rich some money. He seemed surprised, so it was worth it. The next thing was to notice during registration that Jan, usually of coed astronomy, was part of GC. The joy of joining the female sisterhood? I wondered. Two BANGs later, I'd find out.
Eventually, Rachel stood up upon a wall and got everyone's attention. Rules were spelled out, information given, and commencement signaled. We went down to some steps a little ways away from everyone, unrolled our scroll and starting working on the first puzzle. A limerick would describe in a silly way a town in Ireland with a silly name (e.g. Kilmacow, Limerick, Ballinrobe, etc.). Andrea and I were working out the limericks while Given was busy connecting them on the map provided. This hypothesis proved fruitless when nothing interesting was drawn and it didn't take into account the numbered limerick on the map itself.Eventually, we started measuring and converting the inches to scale. It gave us interesting alphanumeric-ranged numbers, up until the line between Blarney and Leggs gave us a 28. That was fine, though: 28 fell between the 1 and 29 ranges on the map's limerick. Now if only we could figure out what the 1 and 29 meant. Before I could give it much though, Given pointed out that there were 29 letters in the last line, which was right next to the "29". "Okay, but how do we use that with the '1' at the top?" I asked.
We spent too much time down that thought, instead of realizing that there was no tricky aha way of making it work. Eventually, we took a hint, found out that the numbers referred to the word count, solved it, and moved on.
Darkness had fallen and I was just beginning to notice that although we had dressed appropriately for a very cold Santa Rosa night, it wasn't appropriate enough for a very cold San Francisco night. Our third mistake was making itself known.
Our second clue was down the street where we were given chocolates coins wrapped in gold foil, all inside a bag with a reverse rainbow (blue on the top, red on the bottom). Nothing was unique about the coins so I bit into one (against Andrea's desire to preserve the clue), expecting a flavor, but getting a color instead. So we set about finding all the colors. Fairly quickly, we hit upon indexing the number of coins per color into the color name and then taking them in reverse color order. Gave us a burst of confidence as we headed...
...up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower. Many other teams were on this exodus with us and we were constantly passing and repassing each other as rests stops were taken. Two things became clear, though:(In preparation for this BANG, I had been training some on our elevated treadmill, having been warned of having to walk up San Francisco hills. Unfortunately, I wasn't prepared for stairs. I heard later that one team drove up to Coit Tower and another team simply skipped the clue altogether. Considering what happened, we should have skipped it too.)
Up and up, we continued. Given, who had started strong, was beginning to fall behind. Andrea had slowed down to my pace. I wasn't doing terrible, but still needed an occasional breather. The tower went out of sight for a while and when it came back into view, it was closer than ever. Soon, we ran across the Judean's People Front and sometimes teammate Eric Prestemon, solving. Finally, we got to the top. And by "we", I mean Andrea and I. We wouldn't see Given for over five minutes. So the two of us picked up the clue
and were looking it over when Given staggered up to us and collapsed dramatically and spread-eagle on the sidewalk. "Just let me die here," he groaned.The clue consisted of a leprechaun describing what he thought various clouds in the sky looked like. The obvious connection was with the Lucky Charms box we'd been given at the beginning and that the shapes were the different marshmallows. How we used that was impossible to say: The box didn't have an exhaustive list of the different shapes, so I opened it up and we started trying to assign different cloud descriptions to different marshmallows. Some of them were pretty darned ambiguous in our estimation, and even when we had what we thought was a near complete list, we had no idea what to do with it.
Great frustration set in. On top of that, the warmth we had gained from our exercise in stair climbing was wearing off and the cold, cutting wind was really beginning to bite into our mental prowess (whatever amount we'd had to begin with anyway). So we eventually agreed to a second hint. Just as Andrea was finishing reading the hint, I began to notice that the cover of the box was starting to peel off! XX-Rated had done an excellent job on putting a fake cover on the cereal box. Fooled us completely. Using only the marshmallows on their customized cover, we completed the puzzle pretty quickly.
There was grumbling as we headed down to the next clue: Complaints about the wind, complaints about being stuck on the clue, and complaints about the climb. I thought back a few weeks ago to something I had jokingly described to Jonathan as "Scott's Law", which ran along the lines of "The quality of a puzzle must at minimum match the effort used to attain it", as well its corollary "A great site deserves a great clue." For some strange reason, I think this puzzle ended up becoming our least-liked of the hunt.
Since we had some time in getting to the next site, I decided call Jonathan and let him know about our bleak state during the only BANG he's missed since he started playing. "We've had two hints on three clues and there's only an hour to go," I admitted to him. He expressed, for lack of a better word, his condolences, but went on to say, "It's okay, really, you can take the remain four clues at fifteen minutes each and still maybe even have time to solve the meta!" One thing I have to say I admire in our usual captain is his optimism in the face of despair and his ability to encourage his team.
We arrived at Washington Square Park and that optimism fell apart: Our team was to be divided in two and we had to communicate different parts of the clue to each other. So much, I thought, for a speedy solve.I ran off to one side and hurriedly writing down descriptions of six different horseshoe layouts and sending them via messenger to Andrea and Given. Sadly, I'm not that fast a hand-writer, so it seemed to take forever to get them sent (and get the messenger's attention). Even more sadly, I didn't notice until the fourth or fifth description that each picture was outlined with a different color. That would have made a huge different, since I was betting that my temporarily isolated teammembers would have to be matching up my descriptions with something and the color would give them which one.
My suspicions proved true not too much longer when enough time had passed (a half-hour?) and I was allowed to rejoin my team. They were setting up actual (plastic) horseshoes based on my descriptions
and had a set of viewing guides. Since they didn't know which viewing guide matched which horseshoe setup, no progress had been made. With both sets of information joined, we were able to recognize enough letters formed by the layouts to get the solution.It was now fifteen minutes away from the end of the hunt. But we got a little lost on the way to the next site and arrived at five till ten. "We know the next clue is the one that costs seven dollars," Andrea pointed out, "and there's not enough time to solve it. Let's just save ourselves some money and head to the end location." I think how readily Given and I agreed with her says something about our state of mind at the time.
We turned in our envelopes at an Irish pub with an Indian interior. Hearing from GC (studiously busy counting envelopes, a task I did not envy them in) that we'd be able to get a copy of the clues we'd missed in a bit, we hung around... but soon the realization that the work week was fast approaching led us to bid goodbye to BANG XX.A few nights later, Andrea, Given, and I gathered again, printed out the four clues we missed, and solved them in a little over an hour. And we had a great (warm) time doing it.
I want to thank XX-Rated for putting together and hosting their BANG. They put a lot of effort into it and had great puzzles. The fact that we didn't have a so good a time I think is a reflection on our own mistakes.
posted by Skott at 9:48 PM
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