When will I hunt again?

2009 was an amazingly full year of puzzle hunts. It seemed like there was one practically every month. It. Was. Awesome. I look at the upcoming events section of The Smoking GNU website, and apart from DASH 2, all I see is a lot of To Be Determined (TBD). Still, it looks like we could have three BANGs and maybe even two Games in 2010. And that's not counting the other events (Shinteki Decathlon, MUMS, CiSRA, etc.) that will hopefully/probably happen.

I just read today that there's an RIT CS Puzzle Hunt in the middle of March, and that any team can participate, although the final part requires a live team on campus. Only thing is, it's short (about four hours). I'll have to check out some past puzzles when I have a chance; it could be fun.

But I'm really in the mood to get out, stretch my legs, and puzzle while walking around somewhere. I'm even more eager to pile into a van with some great people and spend thirty-some odd hours driving around solving. But if I'm able to host DASH 2 in Santa Rosa (as I hope to), I have no definitive events to look forward to playing in.

I reread my Ghost Patrol memories today, and I really miss playing in a Game. I've only played in three, but damn if they aren't addictive! There wasn't one in 2009, the first time maybe since they started that there hasn't been a Game during a year. It's very easy to complain, though; much much harder to do something about and put one on. The Smoking GNU hopes to put one on eventually, but given our schedule, the earliest would probably 2012. If the world's still around, that is.

BANG 25 Writeup Addendum

Jonathan rarely reads my writeups. On the occasion he does, he often complains about their accuracy. I think he said at one point that they maybe averaged being 90% accurate. Given the limitations of human memory (especially mine), I'm almost surprised it's that high. I comfort myself that, like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when I'm inaccurate, at least I'm definitely inaccurate.

Some of the inaccuracy may simply occur because I don't have a full team point of view. For example, Jonathan pointed out to me that he was already doing prime factorization on the Math Class puzzle when Given said "Prime factorization?" He had seen the puzzle before and knew exactly what to do. Given, therefore, was just explaining what he saw Jonathan doing. Since I hadn't seen Jonathan start writing down factors at that point, from my point of view it looked like Given had had the aha.

Another one was where the P.E. clue. Rob was talking about how each of the baseball positions also had an innate ordering. Jonathan had apparently just mentioned seeing a similar puzzle that used that ordering before and asked if anybody knew what the ordering was. Rob was giving it to him. I had arrived late to the table, though, so again, from my point of view it looked like Rob had had the key insight.

I hate to rob anybody of credit for having a major insight into a puzzle. The truth is, though, that Jonathan, Eric Prestemon (when he plays with us) and to a lesser extent myself, usually have a majority of them. This may simply be because we've had more experience than the rest of our team and it doesn't hurt that Jonathan and Eric have really quick minds. I also don't mean to diminish from other team members' contributions either; they all have invaluable insights and are never lacking when it comes to making our team competitive.

In the end, my goal is not necessarily to provide an accurate reporting of what went on for any given puzzle event, but instead to preserve my memories, flawed as they may be, before they fade from my head completely.

BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part Three

(Part 1 and Part 2)

Clue Eight - A Quick Exercise

I went and grabbed some water that GC was kind enough to provide as Given, Rob, William, and Jonathan sat down to solve our next puzzle. It had a list of people you would never expect to play baseball, their position, and batting order. My teammates were already matching player names to capital cities of states (Abraham Lincoln = NEBRASKA). I grabbed my almanac to help verify data. What to do with a list of states, then? Rob, our sports expert, astutely pointed out that baseball positions have an implicit numbering. "Really?" was the basic response of the rest of the team. Rob wrote down the numbers and, indexing them into state names revealing CT CAPITAL, giving HARTFORD as our answer. It was over so quickly, I felt like I had barely seen the puzzle.

Clue Nine - Our Genetic Malfunction

Our next puzzle was near tennis courts, so we grabbed some seats to sit and solve. I heard some visitors behind us remark that they sometimes used these courts for competitions and would move bleachers over the first and third court (I guess they were talking about the Bank of the West Classic?). I always find it neat to solve in a place with history or uniqueness. I think sometimes how neat it would be to get teams into baseball or football stadiums to solve, but that would probably require more money than would be worth it.

Anyway, this was a cool puzzle. It had a lot of stuff to play with: A bunch of double-sided multi-colored tags with a single letter and a curved edge, a wooden dowel, and a set of six rhomboids with IN on one side and OUT on the other with crossword clues. I had a brief thought that the IN and OUT referred to the tennis, but nothing about the puzzle spoke to that idea. In fact, some other details and the class name (biology) led us in a different direction.

The letters on the multi-colored tags were all A, C, G, and T, all DNA codes. The holes in them fit the dowel. The answers to each of the crossword clues was two letters long, also of using DNA letters. Jonathan wanted to build a double-helix, but how? We spent nearly a half hour trying to figure out how to do it. One thing did become clear, though: Getting only two hours of sleep and then having to wake up early enough in order to drive three hours to Stanford was beginning to take its toll on Jonathan. Rob and William were trying to explain some of their ideas to him and they just didn't seem to sink in or make sense in his mind.

We used the crossword clues to build a circular chain (AT -> TC -> CT, etc.), with the IN side facing in and the OUT side facing out. Something felt wrong about it, though, as two tags ended in A and two ended in T, making multiple chains possible. Eventually, a configuration worked. We put all of the tags on the dowel and put them in the center of our circle. Semaphore was mentioned and we tried to line up all the tags so that one of each color was showing and in a semaphore position. It wasn't working and besides we had no orientation for north even if it did. William or Rob (or both) mentioned that the rounded ends were there for a reason, but we couldn't figure out how to work them in. As time was running out for our bonus, I suggested we go confirm our data. Balancing our little model precariously, we took it to a staffer, who said it wasn't the right configuration.

Back in the courts, we took it apart and tried to start again. William (I think) explained that he wanted to connect the rounded end of the tags to the angled end of the rhomboids. William started putting them together, the rest of us caught on and we all started building. I was in charge of handing out strips of tape. The idea was working and we started getting twisty levels that looked like... "I knew it was supposed to be a double-helix," exclaimed Jonathan. And not only that, one of the tags had UP written on it and each color was paired. Semaphore for sure. It spelled out NATURE.

Just in time too: We didn't get our bonus, but did get full marks. And even though we didn't do the greatest, it was my favorite clue for the game.

Clue Ten, Eleven, and Twelve - Go Speed Solvers!

We were all itching to see if our position had changed and pestered Jonathan and Rob to see if we had moved up any in the standings. Although the P.E. clue had moved us close to the top ten, the Biology clue hadn't moved us either way. Some teams were finished, locking in their score. Trying to beat the Judean People's Front and win for once in our good-natured rivalry with Eric was clearly out of reach now. "We can beat Blood and Bones," Jonathan said confidently. "We just need more solves like P.E."

So we kicked it into high gear. The next three puzzles took us about a half-hour to solve, which for us is pretty fast. The tenth clue dealt with descriptions of movies that were actually two titles combined ("Can't Buy Me Love Actually") and the common word in the title fed into an acrostic. Fairly straight forward and a fun team solve.

The next one had cryptic clues that fed into a letter drop chart. My practice using Kelger's Kryptics (for junior high school) had certainly paid off, as these once alien and confusing clues fell one after the other. The letter drop helped clue us in on the idea that each solution was paired to make an oxymoron. The hidden cryptic within the oxymorons gave us ACT so the answer was NATURALLY. Again, lots of fun mini-ahas.

And for the final regular clue, we were given a bunch cards, each with a questions about naming cities on it. Half the cards in different foreign languages, but seemed to be the same questions. On the back of each card was a twelve-pointed star, with a circle at each point. We started filling the circles with city names matching the question. The highlighted circles indicated which letter of the city name to use, but only on the English cards. We anagrammed the letters into FESTIVAL. As we walked away, I figured out there was an ordering mechanism using the cards with foreign languages.

Clue Thirteen - Meta Homework

As we came round to the campus eatery again, we were excited about our chances. A quick solve on this meta and we could maybe place ahead of Blood and Bones. A really quick solve and we might be able to overtake Mystic Fish. CRANEA, then in fifth place, was out of reach though.

After the past few puzzles, we felt like could take the meta no problem. We sat down at the same table we'd had lunch at and looked looked at our clue: A bunch of strips of paper with different mini-clues on them. Some of the more obvious ones indicated that they were directly related to the the previous clues we'd just solved. At first, I thought they would use the same solving mechanism, but it became clear that wasn't exactly the case. For example, one read "If you get to me, it means you've almost had sex... but not quite." 3rd base, right? And the third baseman in the P.E. clue was Abraham Lincoln.

With only a couple of answers like that, it became clear we're dealing with presidents. "I wasn't first, but today I was." referred to the example clue (McKinley), so even that was being used. We had a hard time matching one of them to a clue, though. It was orientated vertically instead of horizontally. Jonathan then asked us to count the strips... there were fourteen. So that must mean the extra strip was our extraction method: It had thirteen numbers on it, so they must mean indexes.

But in what order? Presidents had an innate ordering, so we went with that and began to get something, along the lines of LEAF of ???ADA??. At that point, for reasons I can't remember, I went inside the cafe to look at the pictures of presidents on the wall. While I was in there, though, the thought struck me, "What if it's LEAF of CANADA?" That would make the answer MAPLE. I went back out and pitched my idea, but Jonathan had been figuring the answer would be a president or president related. Finally, a few more letters fell into place, confirming my idea, and we did enter MAPLE.

Epilogue

We had time left after finishing. Some of our team grabbed some much needed food. Teams that had already finished and were still hanging around were in a social mood, so we talked with a bunch of them.

The one thing about talking with Jonathan is that his passion for puzzles comes out clearly. He's read so many writeups and puzzles that he can talk on so many subjects as if he was there, even if it was an event he never played in. I know on more than one occasion I saw people's eyes almost begin to glaze over. I know mine did and from time to time I went back to my eating team, just to talk about non-puzzle things.

The game ended. Bob got up to give his talk about the game and announced the rankings.

The rankings revealed something we didn't know: coed astronomy and CRANEA had voluntarily disqualified themselves in order to play with an oversized team. This put us in fifth! Prizes were still left when our team was called, so I walked away with a darn good bottle of wine. Blood and Bones came in behind us and started looking over the prizes. Our contribution, Guitar Hero 3 (with guitar), had yet to be taken. Rich Bragg said it was probably the most expensive prize he'd seen in a BANG, but it showed just how unpopular the PS3 was that nobody had taken it. He kind of talked Matt into getting it, even though he didn't have a system. "I always meant to buy one," Matt mentioned, looking over the box. "Now you'll have a good excuse to get it!" Rich laughed.

We stayed around talking with people until it was nearly dark and then headed home. It had been a good day.

BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part Two

(Part 1)

Clue Four - Handwriting Analysis

Eliminating travel time from scoring consideration had some side benefits: We could grab food and/or take care of other things before requesting the puzzle. That way our team isn't discombobulated and split up doing several different things instead of all of us working on the puzzle. Since our next clue was at a campus eatery, we went ahead and got lunch orders taken care of, then sat down as a team to solve.

The clue explained about being borrowed notes from a friend with bad handwriting. The paper contained a typewritten interpretation of those notes and it was up to us to understand them. They went along the lines of "The E is L at 0 DL" and "There are 4 C in a HH", so we needed to reconstruct the sentence with words for each capital letter. One of the more obvious ones was "9 I in a BG", which meant "9 innings in a baseball game". It was pretty fun as we worked on getting all forty-five notes deciphered; there are lots of mini-ahas and good of team solving.

The instructions said we needed to keep track of which class each note was from, and gave us a line-up of the three Tuesday and three Wednesday classes they could be from. So the nine innings one was from P.E. Four chambers in a human heart would be biology. Knowing that the equator is as at 0 degrees latitude would be geography. What would we do with that data in the end? Someone, probably me, suggested that since there were three classes in two columns, maybe it was a Braille encoding? But the lack of delineation between glyphs as well as a note in the flavortext about Tuesday being an "off day" discounted that idea. Instead, binary was noted with each solve.

Which was working pretty well, except that there seemed to be a few that we just couldn't crack. What the heck was "10 P (and 3 T) in C" anyway? So Jonathan started doing either/or checks for them to see what letters would come of it. While he was doing that, the rest of us were able to get some of the remaining. We even forced a few by looking up likely information in the almanac. Soon we had enough to realize the message was simply DO TERNARY.

Ternary is one of Jonathan's favorite encoding methods, since all twenty-six letters are represented by complete set of the first three digits. Having a puzzle solve to a message that tells us to solve it again only this time the right way, is one of my least favorite extractions.

We quickly realized that the position of a note's class in each days lineup (first, second, or third) meant to use zero for the first, one for the second, and two for the third. We still had a couple missing, but I didn't think we needed them now. We got some strange looking letters to start out with: CINWHI. So Jonathan started double-checking them, but they were legit. If this was the correct decoding method, this was the secret message GC was trying to tell us. The next two letters, CH, made it clear, though, that it was "C IN WHICH...", or basically another class note. And the city in which JFK WAS S was DALLAS. It took as about a half hour to get there. Not a superfast solve, obviously, but we still got a twenty point bonus and some important confidence from solving a tricky puzzle without every having been stuck.

And I'm not sure we ever figured out there are ten provinces and three territories in Canada.

Clue Five - Spell-checking Twitter

"Hey, we've moved up a few spaces!" said Jonathan as we walked towards our next mental challenge. It was true: We'd started in the bottom five after the first puzzle, maybe even dropped a place or two after the second, but after the previous two clues we were ranked at 15th. Those bonuses were making a difference and gave us some confidence that we could make up for our earlier blunders.

We received a page of tweets at our next location, all from, amusingly, Tweety Bird. The paper clue was well designed: It was like we were looking directly at the webpage. A Post-It was attached and directed us to look at mispellings, of which there were plenty (it's Tweety Bird, after all). We started counting them, thinking to index in to the tweet, when Jonathan and Rob noticed that the user names of the people Tweety was tweeting at described people with birds in their names: "@gulliverwriter" was SWIFT and the @1stidol was Kelly cLARKson.

The other ones began to fall, sometimes with iPhone help. The only one I figured out was who "@isignbig" was (hanCOCK) and maybe the Walter cronKITE. The first one, @wsvp, seemed incomprehensible until someone realized that it wasn't a Tweety-ized version of RSVP, but referred to Dick cHENey. We then used the misspelling count to index into the bird names to discover HAN SOLO SHIP. Since we were using bird names, we answered simply FALCON.

Clue Six - A Sound Solve

At the Standford Oval, where about a year ago we'd been chased with giant inflatable hammers while trying to determine what had been written on giant inflatable volleyballs (see Snotfart), we found a bunch of people gathered around six white things divided into two rows and spaced a ways apart. Huh, I thought, it kind of looks like a giant Braille pattern. I wondered why so many people were gathered around some of them.

The first white thing we passed looked like a speaker wrapped in a white Glad bag, only no sound was coming out of it. We waited a bit, thinking that something eventually would come, but no. We moved on to the next one and heard a repeating loop. It was Reagan's famous "Tear down this wall" speech, although it sounded like someone was taking a shovel to the wall during the speech. If it was a Braille encoding, which seemed all but a given, using sound to transmit that was kind of a cool idea.

The next speaker had more sounds, like a dog barking and cheering that made it obvious that the cheering from the previous speaker hadn't just been about Reagan's speech, but was a separate sound altogether. "I'm thinking each sound represents a single Braille letter," said Jonathan, writing down the sounds. If that was true, it certainly explained why there had been no sound on the first speaker we'd encountered: The lower right Braille spot was rarely used.

We went through each speaker, gathering sounds. What had seemed like a neat idea was starting to become tedious. Eventually, we found our way to the one that everyone had been gathered around before. It had tons of sounds coming out of it, which made sense, since that Braille spot would be used in all but three letters. It was difficult to decipher with twelve sounds intermingled and sometimes sounding the same. GC had kindly provided water and snacks near the speaker to aid in listening. Having a list of all of them also made us realize that we needed to revisit some of the other speakers, as Jonathan, Rob, Given, and William argued about which sounds were which. I heard, "I think this sound is really two different ones," on more than one occasion.

So we went back through all of the speakers and refined our the sound list. I say "we", but I was content to watch the rest of the team do it. I wasn't that interested in fine data delineation and besides, apparently I wasn't all that good at it. In the end, the Braille spelled out ROCK PAPER AND. We put in SCISSORS for the solve.

Clue Seven - Meta Deja Vu

I walked alongside Jonathan as we headed to our next clue. "That didn't seem all that challenging," I remarked. "Not really a puzzle at all: We all knew it was Braille from the outset and the rest was just data gathering."

"Maybe," he responded, "but we've got a lot of experience now. If it had been our first BANG, we probably would have thought it was pretty challenging puzzle and really enjoyed the Braille-as-sound aha." He considered. "Well, maybe not. Still, it was kind of a cool setup."

We arrived at our next location, grabbed a picnic table and had a quick break before retrieving our clue. It had two pages worth of trivia and fill in the blanks, so we divvied up, with one half of our team working on each page. Only after solving a few, Jonathan and I noticed something, probably due to the meta for BANG 22 that we'd written as it had used a similar mechanism to this puzzle. What we noticed was that WHEREFORE, UNTO, and SEVENTH, all had a phonetic number in them. The puzzle indicated to take one letter from the word, so we used the phonetic number to index into the word (UNTO -> N).

There were some gray boxes, though, that weren't connected to any of the trivia answers. When we had GR_NESS filled in, though, Jonathan had the great idea of putting numbers back in, and then using that number to extract a letter again. This got us more words with missing letters, so we had to do it again, until we finally got UTENSIL OR TUNING BLANK. Our answer, FORK, allowed us to move on.

Concluded in part 3.

BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part One

Prologue: Eye on the Prize

A week or so before BANG 25: Back to School, I stood in Kmart's electronic division and gave Jonathan a call. I explained to him where I was and that I had found a candidate for our prize to bring to the event. "It's Guitar Hero 3 with guitar for the PS3," I told him, "only instead of being $70, they've discounted it to [BANG prize level]."

He did not believe me. I spent fifteen minutes trying to convince him that I wasn't mistaken, lying, or just confused, before he looked up the ad for it on the Internet and was finally convinced. "Go ahead and get it for the prize," he told me, "and for that price, buy me one too."

Clue Zero: We Cheat

With Rob — practically a core member now — and William joining Jonathan, Given, and me, we arrived at Stanford for the fourth time (No More Secrets, Midnight Madness, and a GC Conference were my previous visits). It was beautiful weather, a perfect day for a hunt. We gathered around Bob of Team Longshots, who I was thinking I'd met during the MSPH 123 playtest, only he was wearing a cap at the time so I wasn't sure.

As a blimp floated by overhead (and me having one of those "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" moments), the standard Reading of the Rules commenced. As the BANG's title suggested, we would be revisiting different school subjects and experiences today. We would be graded on each puzzle. The neat thing, though, was that a web app was to be used for answer submission and live team rankings. To make sure everyone was able to use it properly, we were given a trivia question, which simply wanted to know the name of the tallest mountain in North America was. None of us knew, so, feeling somewhat sheepish, we looked it up using Rob's iPhone.

Clue One: Our Decent into Hell

Our first clue was in some sculpture garden. We claimed a spot in front of a sculpture we were soon to find out was named "The Gates of Hell", pretty near to where we had reluctantly dropped off the cube a few years ago in No More Secrets.

I usually expect a kind of lightweight puzzle for the first clue, something to ease teams into the hunt. But looking over the thirty some-odd closeup B&W photos of sculptures we were given, it was pretty clear that we'd have to find out which statue went with which picture. In other words, a lot of data gathering, and just from looking at it, no clear extraction method.

So we split up the photos among the five of us and went around trying to find them. Some were pretty obvious, others seemed to take forever to find. We even had a list of names as well as all the other teams gathered around sculptures as a hint, but it again became apparent that data gathering is one of our weaknesses. There was a map, but it didn't provide enough information. After I located and labeled most of my pics, I handed them to Jonathan, and took some that others hadn't been able to find. We all repeated this process several times.

When we had about half of the sculptures named, I discussed how we were going to get an answer out of all this with Jonathan. Neither of us had any ideas, which is kind of sad for the first clue. At one point, he mentioned the somewhat odd border around the names of the sculptures. "I bet this is the key," he said. "I just have no idea how." I didn't think much of the idea, though; I had wasted many hours on some puzzles thinking that the border might be relevant and was kind of jaded.

Teams dwindled out of the large courtyard as we finally finished labeling each photo. Our location in front of the Gates of Hell began to heat up, so we moved over to a table in the shade. We still had no idea how to get an answer from all this and were beginning to feeling pretty dumb. There was no call for a hint yet, though, because we still were eligible for a speed bonus (anyone solving this clue within fifty minutes got a relative bonus). That bonus would automatically be forfeit if we did ask for a hint.

With no clear indication of what to do next, some of us started scrutinizing the sculptures for any additional data. Sculpture creator? Some had it inscribed, some didn't. Photo capturing something with a letter one it? Not really. Numbers? Well, this one has a "3/12" and another had a "7/12" on it... and there were twelve sculptures named! Maybe the number of the sculpture could indicate a letter to use? But then why did we have all these photos? But no, not every sculpture had a "x/12" on it. One sculpture was so high that it was practically impossible to view any inscriptions on it without a ladder... meaning that it was a pretty sure bet that any extra information on a sculpture was irrelevant.

Back at the shaded table, Jonathan agonized with what to do with all our discoveries. Rob suggested that maybe the dots and dashes in the border I'd dismissed earlier indicated something to do with Morse code? There was silence and I looked at Jonathan expectantly... But after a few seconds, Jonathan went on to another theory, seemingly having examined Rob's idea and discarded it.

Soon, there were only a few teams left. William grabbed some photos and went to go re-examine a few of the sculptures. A few minutes later, he came back, clearly excited. "They're in order!" he explained. "They go from top to bottom, with no overlap. And," he continued about to point out something we should have paid attention to from the beginning, "some are portrait and some are landscape."

"Portrait and landscape!" Jonathan exclaimed. "That's it!" Duh. The border around the sculpture names that I had discarded earlier as just decoration had dots and dashes... and the dots were in the shape of a portrait photo and the dashes in the shape of a landscape photo.

"Rob mentioned Morse ten minutes ago," I said to Jonathan reproachfully.

"He did?" said Jonathan, surprised. "Well... next time make sure I hear him!"

We quickly translated the photos to Morse and then to English: COOKBOOK ITEM. Jonathan put RECIPE into the web app. Finally, solved... and only then did I noticed the title of the clue was "Orientation".

Longshots was generous for the first clue, though. We were still within the bonus period and earned a few extra points for our "quick" solve.

Clue 2 - Late for Class

In our experience, sleep helps in solving puzzles. I hadn't slept well the night before and felt like my mind was in a fog. Jonathan had stopped at a friend's house on the way up from Southern CA, instead of driving all the way up to Santa Rosa and then back down to Stanford. This was supposed to afford him five hours of sleep instead of his normal three. Only thing is, this friend was having a party and Jonathan ended up only getting two hours.

Somewhat discouraged from our nearly last place solve, we headed to the next clue, hoping that at least Jonathan's and my heads would clear (Rob and William seemed to be in fine form and Given was... well, Given). We needed a moral boost. Unfortunately, we weren't going to get it here.

GC was on the first floor of some building with a lot of exterior glass. Our clue was upstairs in an actual classroom (nice touch). There, we found a bunch of arranged seats, each with a name card on it. We all wrote down the names and saw that each first name was three letters long and each last names was four letters long.

When all the data words are all the same length, it's a good indicator that a sequential index extraction is needed (i.e. the first letter of the first word, the second letter of the second word, etc.). Since each name was seven letters long, we tried that. First, we did it by row and got AIGGVNE and stopped since that was going nowhere. Then we did it by column and got ABOCNND and didn't go any further down that path either.

We then started discussing orientation, i.e. should we start indexing from the front of the classroom or the back? Were we looking at it from the teacher's perspective or the students? We tried various other theories, most of them having to do with extracting a single letter from each name somehow, but none were working. With only five minutes or so left of our bonus time, we admitted to ourselves that we were stumped. Even Jonathan agreed it was time for a hint, which is saying a lot.

Our hint gave us everything we needed to solve it. Instead of sequentially indexing by the full name, we should have been sequentially indexing only the three-letter first name when looking at it by column (since there were three columns) and only by the four-letter last name when looking at it by row (since there were four rows). This gave us ABOVE AMATEUR for the first names and FARMING TRUCK for the last names. PROTRACTOR was our answer.

We didn't feel so dumb when finally solving that. For the first puzzle, there had been a dot and dash border; I mean, how much more obvious can you get when trying to signal that Morse code was going to be used? This clue, though, was a clever offshoot of a standard puzzle type that threw us for a loop. And judging from the average grade for the clue (C+ or so), we weren't the only ones.

Clue 3 - Math vs. Geography

One nice thing about Longshot's scoring system was that it completely eliminated travel time from the equation. Points were only awarded on solve times. Which is fine by me... we're not exactly efficient at getting from one clue to another, although we have been getting better since Rob has taken on our navigator role. Regardless, it's always seemed kind of silly to me to have a contest of mental agility come down to a foot race.

Our next clue, our Math class puzzle, was a 3 by 5 grid, with most cells containing an integer. Some integers were very very large (billions) and others were... three. Some numbers were repeated and three of the corner cells were empty and shaded.

Given took one look at it and said "Prime factorization?" Seemed like as good an idea as any and we soon had them all worked out. A few alternate theories were being worked on in the background, but when all the cells with a 2 as a factor made the letter S, we knew we were nearly done. Taken in order, the factor shapes spelled out SIERRA LAKE. "Tahoe?" I put ventured. It seemed likely, but the Sierra is a long mountain range and I knew Donner Lake was up there too. And wasn't Yosemite considered part of the... "TAHOE is correct!" said Rob, looking up from his iPhone.

Okay, now it felt like we were in the right mental gear.

Continued in part two and part three.

24: The BANG - Or how I got my puzzling groove back (Part Three)

(Part 1 and Part 2)

Clue Ten - A Quiet Revelation

Our search for why someone tried to blow up Twitter and why somebody was trying to buy up California's debt had brought us to San Jose's Martin Luther King Library to find out who checked out a certain history book. Our clue was located several floors up. Rob once again took the elevator, while the rest of us hiked up four flights of stairs. But it was better than the parking garage: One of the most important aspects of this clue was that it was air conditioned.

We collected our puzzle, saw that Blood and Bones still solving (a good sign), and found a nice, quiet nook to solve in. The clue had an update of the story: Medium — the man behind the Twitter plot — had been caught, but before he could be interrogated, had taken a poison pill. A piece of paper with a letter grid and crossword phrases had been found on him. That was our puzzle, a word search. The strange thing about the word search was that each letter was in its own square. I kept that in mind as we started solving the crossword clues.

Solving seemed to go fast. My mind was half on trying to figure out why there was a letter per square, half on helping solve the crossword clues. I'm not sure at what point we figured out that each clue's solution was a four-letter word, but we came to that conclusion pretty quickly. While we worked, a member of CRANEA peered over the divider and let us know that at some point we may need some... additional... information that they'd be happy to provide should we ask. Somehow I connected that bit of information to the square formation.

The four-letter crossword clue solution words turned up in the word search grid, only with an extra letter per word (i.e. a clue would solve to CATS and then we'd find CASTS in the grid). As the rest of the team circled those words, I started counting the squares. Fifteen by fifteen. That rang a bell for some reason.

With all the words circled, Jonathan read off the string of extra letters: "SCRABBLE PREMIUMS". So that's why CRANEA said we might need something extra from them, I thought. "It's a Scrabble board!" I whispered urgently to my team. Light gleamed in Jonathan's eyes; he'd either come to the same conclusion or saw the veracity of mine. "Should we go get a board from GC?" I asked.

"Nope!" said Rob, bringing up a Scrabble board on his iPhone. We started taking letters that were on triple word scores, double letter scores, etc., in order from left to right. This proved fruitless after two or three letters. Just as we were about to mention that maybe we should take the premiums in groups (triple word, then double, then triple letter, then double), Jonathan was already doing it. The hidden message told us to take the highest scoring four-letter word as our answer. "Zoos," said Jonathan, and went to confirm it.

We were out quickly. Teams that were there when we'd arrived were still there, a huge boost to moral. Blood and Bones had solved just a few minutes before. We had definitely hit our groove and damn it felt good.

Story-wise, we found out what we'd come for: The only person to have checked out the history book we'd come across earlier was none other than... Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Clue Eleven: Roundtable Solving

I kept thinking throughout the day while seeing all sorts of artistic touches added to San Jose, how relatively boring Santa Rosa was as a city. Our next location was another strange building, this time City Hall. A domed building was at the center of it all. GC was off to its right. We got our clue and saw that all the shaded spots were taken by other teams. However, the fact that other teams were still there gave me some hope that we could catch up or possibly pass them. This was deceptive, though, since unbeknownst to us, two clues were being given out at this location.

We went around to the left side of the round building and found some tables in the shade (I half-seriously suggested we just sit in the middle of the fountain and solve), and the Golden Golems solving away. The other teams may have been out of sight, but we could at least use the Golems as a metric. We sat and began to solve. (Image credit: Goldem Golems/poovey)

This clue consisted of five mini-clues, each of which made use of two solving procedures from the previous ten puzzles. The most obvious one combined the orthogonal encryption with license plate math. Others weren't so obvious and sometimes required data from previous puzzles. There was no in-story reason given for these mini-puzzles. They were labeled as various parts of Jack's personality that helped make him a hero. I don't think we even noticed.

We passed the puzzles around the table, finding and losing traction, until we eventually filled in all five solutions on our answer sheet. The middle letter of each mini's answer formed the final solution (I think it was POWER).

Jonathan and I took the answer to GC to check it. I was thinking that we must have solved pretty fast — though it didn't feel like it — in order to have finished ahead of the Golden Golems. Once we confirmed our answer, though, we were handed... another clue.

As we walked back to our table, Alexandra (guest member of the Golems) was heading to GC to turn in their answer to the final puzzle. "You guys finished too?" she asked us. "Just the first one," I admitted to her. So much for that metric.

Clue 12: A Transparent Mistake

Jonathan sat down and pulled out a transparency from the envelope. It was divided in half, with the top part, labeled "Part 2", having staggered numbers on it; and the bottom half, labeled "Part 1" having a whole bunch of shapes. It was fairly clear that the transparency overlaid our answer sheet, as all the shapes lined up with letters from the previous puzzle and all the numbers lined up with letters from the first ten puzzles.

Annnnnnnnd that was about as much progress as we made for the next half-hour or so.

Sure, many ideas were given. Things were examined by Rob, Andrea, and Given, while Jonathan and I tried to figure out how the transparency worked. Given was the only one who came close to a workable idea when he pointed out that there weren't any "O"s on the first story card. "That's interesting," I told him, "but how can we make it into an answer? Does it happen on any of the other cards?" He didn't know and couldn't find a missing letter on any of the other cards.

"Scott," Jonathan said after some significant time had passed, "I literally have no idea what to do. I mean, nothing is coming to mind." I nodded in commiseration; I was pretty much at that point too. The rest of the team kept coming up with ideas, until we were all at a loss of what to do. "We've got over an hour to work on this," Jonathan commented. "I say we keep plugging away at it until then." He preferred forgoing a hint and maybe a few rankings in order to come in clean. The rest of us grudgingly went along with it for all of five minutes, after which it was obvious that we had tapped the depths of our idea well and didn't feel like spending the next hour looking blankly at a transparency. We convinced Jonathan to get a hint.

The answer sheet had been passed around and had kind of gotten hidden in the mess on the table. We needed to take it to GC in order to get a hint. As Jonathan was looking for it, he pulled out a piece of paper we'd never seen before. "What the hell's this?" he said with a complete look of incredulity.

It was the flavortext for the puzzle.

I still don't know how he could have taken out both the transparency and the flavortext and not have noticed the flavor text. Heck, I was watching him and all I saw was the transparency removed from the envelope. But since our first event, we've semi-jokingly said that we're allowed one major mistake per game. This was Jonathan's.

The flavortext completed the story: Arnold Schwarzenegger was pissed that he couldn't be president of the U.S., so was working on a plan to make California its own nation. With the help of Mexico, he could be president of "Mexi-Cal". Mexico wanted lots of money, but Arnold had found the missing gold from 1848 hidden in a bank earning interest. First, though, he had tried to take out Twitter to prevent coordinated protests. Our job now was to find the password to the bank account where Arnold had put the money and empty it into state treasury in order to solve California's massive budget shortfall.

More importantly, the flavortext was the key to solving. It nudged us to compare the letter outlined by a shape to the card with the matching shape. With this, we discovered that the outlined letter would only occur once on the card. Given actually had been a step away from solving the puzzle without flavor text! If only he'd spotted the one word with the "o" in it...

Regardless, we zoomed through the rest of the puzzle: The words each single letter on each card was in were strung together to tell us how to do Part 2, which was basically add the letter and the overlapping number, then subtracting the clue number. And done: The password was ACTION HERO.

We'd saved California. Not many days you can say that.

24: The BANG - Or how I got my puzzling groove back (Part Two)

(Part One is here.)

Clue Four: Who Put Math in my Crossword?

The story card had directed us to an air-conditioned deli, which was a relief in the near-100F San Jose temps that day. A few teammates went to grab sandwiches while Jonathan and I started work on the puzzle. It was a fairly straightforward crossword, except that none of the clue were numbered. Instead, they were prefixed by a math equation, like "A*B+G: Fish eggs". This meant we didn't know how long the answer to each clue was, nor where it went in the grid.

The rest of our team got back with food and we concentrated on solving the clues, pushing the equations to the back of our minds for now. Our methodology seemed chaotic for some reason and it seemed to be challenging to narrow down answers. "Fish eggs" was probably ROE, but could be CAVIAR. There were spaces for both. Finally out of frustration, Jonathan asked "What do we do with these equations?" I said, "I'm guessing their value equates to the clue's number? And then the letters in the equation spell out the solution?" It seemed like he hadn't considered the possibility, which meant that, once again, we had spent too much effort on the data and not enough on the extraction.

We made better progress after that, as we were able to figure out a few numbers which helped us place specific clues and narrow down where the rest went. Much smoother solving after that, but we should have done it faster. (Looking at the results, it seems as though there was a steep breakoff point for solvers: About 12 minutes average solve time for the top four teams, and 27 minutes average solve time for the next four.)

The solution was also the disarming code for the bomb at Twitter, which was good, but we'd killed Agent X, which meant he was no good to us. Luckily, we'd planted a tracking device on the guy whose clothes and identity we'd stolen, so we went to see what nefarious scheme he was up to now.

Clue 5 - The Gene (and Adrian and Briana and Molly and ...) Pool

There's often a danger of skipping over instructions when getting a new clue and trying to get right to the heart of the puzzle. I mean, it's exciting, you're in a hurry, and who wants to read incidental text when there's a mental challenge just begging to be solved? At best maybe you gloss over, say, "Find the nationalities of these names before working on the gene pool".

We kind of ignored that advice and started working on finding the names inscribed on rocks in the pool to match up with the names we'd been given and where on the circle they were. That seemed to take enough time for a simple task, but it seemed to take to long and eventually one half of the team decided to try gathering data about the countries.

Which may have been a bad idea. I looked up the indicated countries in my almanac, Andrea scouted them out, and Given wrote down, not the name of the indicated country, but its pair on the sidewalk square. Jonathan and Rob joined us after finishing the fountain, but that didn't seem to help, as they set about recollecting information. Time continued to pass and our messy methodology had us no closer to the goal than before. Data was wrong, it was hot, and frustration was beginning to set in.

Eventually, Jonathan stopped the chaos and one by one we went from one country to another, marking down both the country of origin for a name and its counterpart. Andrea scouted ahead and stood on the appropriate sidewalk section. This finally got us all the data we needed and we sat down to consider it. The first letters of the counterpart countries indicated we needed to use a rotational semaphore. But rotated to what?

Maybe we could use the sidewalk square associated with each name as north? Well, it kind of worked, but it turned out rotational semaphore can be kind of difficult using something as flexible as paper as your straight edge. But Jonathan eventually marked everything correctly and we got a message "NATIONALITY OTHERS J". Other's J what? Redoing the semaphore for those letters did nothing to change them. I don't know how long we were stumped before Jonathan finally realized it was "OTHER SJ" and that SJ meant San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica.

An impressively designed puzzle using environmental data, yet it left us feeling grumpy with our results. With a little organization, we could have easily cut twenty minutes off our time.

The story card indicated that the man we'd been trying to find had been shot, the higher ups in his organization having figured out that the failed Twitter bombing meant the operation had been compromised. In his pocket, though, we found a newspaper that dealt with Costa Rican protesters using Twitter to organize a revolution... something that this mysterious organization didn't want to happen for whatever they had planned.

Clue 6 - I Am Jack's Complete Playground Workout

Up until this point, Jonathan, Given, Rob, Andrea, and myself were working as an analog for Jack Bauer. We arrived a park for our next clue and were told that we needed to split up: One person would become Jack's body and scale a building (represented by playground equipment) while avoiding security cams (represented by the ground — except the green part); the rest of the team would become Jack's mind and try to figure out who killed the guy we stole the clothes from based on mug shots.

"Who's going to become Jack's body?" asked the captain of CRANEA. We all looked at each other. Based on Jonathan's previous statement that he always wants to do an activity, I expected him to speak up. He didn't. I thought maybe someone else might. They didn't. And darn it, I really wanted to do the playground traversal, so after a brief beat, I volunteered. Nobody complained or contradicted me; maybe I'm the only one who thought it would be fun.

I asked Rob to take a picture or two while I accomplished my task...


At the top of the final tower was a bunch of sheets of paper. The first one had some multicolored letters, "NY YY NY NN" on it. I looked at the others, the odd thought being that I might have to solve while up there. All the other sheets where the same, though, so I tore the top one off and climbed down.

"Took you long enough," quipped Jonathan, as Rob and I rejoined the team at a shady table. I thought I had actually made good time. But he, Given, and Andrea were looking a little frustrated because they hadn't made much progress: There were several sheets of paper filled with South Park-like characters, each in its own yellow rectangle. Basically, it was a variation of the game I used to play as a kid, Guess Who? At the top of each sheet of paper were a few anagrams, unscrambling to descriptions such as "black haired", and our team had solved all but one of them (which Rob and I set to work on). With my return, the little "Yes/No" next to each anagram finally made sense, as they matched via color to one of the Y/N letters on the sheet I'd retrieved.

A braille pattern emerged as we marked the people who met the criteria. The braille gave us four new criteria to meet, narrowing it down to one person by the name of MEDIUM. Finally, we had our killer and our answer.

The story card detailed how we called this information into HQ and found out that security footage showed that Mr. Medium was at the top level of a nearby parking garage.

Clue 7 - Licensed to Chill

Rob took the elevator; the rest of us walked up. In near-100F heat, Rob was the smart one. Regardless, we retrieved our clue and headed to a place that had two amazing factors going for it: First, it was air-conditioned; and second, it was Starbucks.

We ordered a bunch of frappuccinos (I got a Vanilla Bean, which was exactly what I needed and suddenly my new favorite drink) and sat down to solve. The clue consisted of many seven character strings with one question mark in each — passed off in-story as incomplete license plate numbers we needed to identify. Somebody pointed out that "PEMDAS" was in the flavor text, referring to operation of order. That, along with hints to concerning bringing about equalization, had us working on the theory that each seven character string was a math equation that when we filled in the one missing character, would be valid. The only thing was, we didn't know which letters stood for which operation.

Jonathan and Given attacked the puzzle head on. The rest of us seemed to be content to watch, throw in a helpful comment when we could, but mostly to enjoy a little rest with a cool drink. Soon, the puzzle was solved and Jonathan volunteered to run back up the parking garage to turn in our answer. Nobody objected.

Story-wise, it turns out we had found a briefcase in the abandoned car in the garage with the Constitution of California in it. Since it's too dense to read, let alone figure out what its connection to Twitter is, we get in contact with the only constitutional scholar we know: Barack Obama. While we wait for him to get back to us, we get information on where the driver of the car currently is.

Clue 8 - A Password-Protected Puzzle

We arrived at some sort of plaza to pick up our next puzzle. There was a covered stage nearby, offering some good shade and steps to solve on. From the story's point of view, a laptop had been found that password protected. The papers found near the laptop, in the form of a clue, might provide some way of figuring out the password. The instructions for the clue also detailed finding a book about something called "orthogonal" decryption: The grid of letters on the password screen had to be decrypted by row, then read by column.

The papers basically consisted of ordered crossword clues on the left, and unordered clues on the right. We figured there was some pattern connecting them, but it wasn't immediately apparent. Some initial words gave us the impression that there was some anagram-plus-one-extra-letter going on, but we couldn't see how that would apply to the grid of letters. We made some changes and worked on firming up the answers.

(At some point, Andrea noticed that Jonathan got a little bit of whipped cream on his nose from his Starbuck's drink. She borrowed my camera and delighted in taking a picture of it before he could get it off.)

Finally, we figured out that solution words on the left could always be anagrammed into one of the right side words (SPRITE -> PRIEST). Assuming that the pattern of anagramming could be applied to the password window's grid of letters, we came up with something about the sixth gift in the twelve days of Christmas. So GOOSE was the password and our solution. I liked that there was a plausible real-life reason, even if it was a form of the Only the Smart May Pass trope, to have the puzzle.

With that solve, our story continued: On the laptop is a PDF that is also password protected. The techs at CRANEA would attempt to break it, while we continued with our investigation. Just then, Obama called us back about the highlighted portions of the California constitution. He said that if California ever defaults on its loans, the state becomes the property of whichever entity owns 51% of the states debt. Obama had just check and found that Mexico had recently acquired just the right amount of California's debt...

Clue 9 - I Go All In

Near some oddly shaped building (which I see now is the San Jose Repertory Theatre), we were given a pack of cards, the box of which was custom labeled for the BANG with the ranking of poker hands. Something was odd about the printed rankings, though: There were no spaces between words.

Opening the pack revealed the card deck, but going through them revealed that there were several different card backings. We worked hurriedly to sort them and found that there were six cards per backing. It was pretty easy to notice that there was a poker hand in each group, so we arranged the hands into poker hands and ordered them on the ground in front of us by rank.

Some idea came up and Jonathan, Rob, Andrea, and Given discussed discussed it, almost completely ignoring the cards. After thirty seconds or so, I stopped paying attention and instead concentrated on the cards. An idea quickly came to me and I tested it against the first few hands.

"Hey guys, I've got TOOL," I told my team.

They fell silent.

"Taking the unused sixth card in each hand to index into the name of the poker hand," I explained.

"Well," replied Jonathan, "keep going with it."

This surprised me. Usually, if I hook onto an idea, I share it with the others so that the extraction can go quicker. But not this time: I was being asked to finish it on my own.

They all looked at me. I tried to quickly process the remaining hands. S then H then something then D. I paused a second, then said, "TOOLSHED".

Jonathan took the answer to GC while I verified that the seventh letter was indeed E. It was, and Jonathan came back with our story card:

The PDF had been cracked by some experts. It had information taken from a San Jose State library book about a payment of gold bullion to Mexico for the state of California back in the 1800s. However, the gold's escorts had died mysteriously and the implication is that Mexico never received it. The connection to the Twitter bomb and the succession plot wasn't immediately obvious, but maybe the person who had checked out the book would know? So said library we went.

Continued in Part Three.

24: The BANG - Or how I got my puzzling groove back (Part One)

For a few puzzle hunts before BANG 24, I hadn't left feeling satisfied. I think it is because of not being able to match some pretty big (for me anyway) ahas I got while playing in CiSRA 2009. Of course, in BANG 21 the ahas were purposefully minimilzed and in the Shinteki playtest it seemed the free hints beat us to the ahas more often than not. Regardless, I was kind of in a funk about puzzle hunts.

That all changed with 24: The BANG.

The Prize

A rough transcription of a conversation that took place the night before the hunt:

"So what if we put our prize in a silver suitcase for delivery?"

"Cool! And you know how in season four of 24, they had the nuclear football in a silver suitcase? Why don't we get a real football as a prize and deliver it like that?"

"I like it. How about I get a glow-in-the-dark football, so that it really can be a 'nuclear' football?"

"Good idea! And be sure to get handcuffs."

"I'm on it."

(I don't think anybody got the joke and we ended up taking the football home as our own prize, so maybe it wasn't such a great idea.)

Clue One: Failing to Embody the Spirit of Jack Bauer

After dropping of our prize and working through the issues of where an open bathroom was, we got to reading the rules while waiting for the official start.  One line caught our attention:  The third criteria for team scoring was " How best your team embodies the spirit of Jack Bauer".  "Jack breaks all the rules in order to get the results needed, right?" expressed Jonathan.  "Maybe we should open the first puzzle and start solving."

An interesting idea.  I thought back to No More Secrets when we chickened out on shutting off electricity to the bank in order to gain entrance, figuring that would be a little too, well, real. Finding out later from Jan that such a move would have been acceptable, I think there was the subconscious desire on our part to make it "real" whenever we could. It was tempting to go through with Jonathan's suggestion, but this wasn't The Game and we wanted to be on equal footing when being ranked against other teams.

CRANEA's team captain got up and gave us the usual spiel. He was asked if torturing GC was allowed, but apparently GC members had been trained to resist all forms of torture. No luck on bringing realism to the BANG there.

We opened the first puzzle and sat down by the river to solve. There were several descriptions of games, appropriate since we were a few steps away from Monopoly in the Park (familiar to us from playing in Shinteki Decathlon 4). It became clear that the descriptions were slightly off, giving funny versions of the names, such as Moose Trap for a game that traps elk instead of rodents. For once, having two copies of the puzzle worked well and we solved with speed to get a final clue of COW SUBS GET HIT. "Cattleship!" I whispered urgently, and oh man that felt good. I knew then that this was going to be a good hunt and that any thoughts I'd had that maybe I was over puzzle hunts were dispelled.

So we headed off.

Kind of. We were the first team to solve the puzzle — at least that's what we thought at the time; actual results show that coed astronomy finished a few minutes earlier — so there was no general stream of teams to let us know we were navigating correctly to the next location. Our navigator unfortunately read one of the street names wrong and we set off in the wrong direction. It was only about after a good stream of teams were heading the other way that we added a level of oversight to Rob's navigation. (On a side note: Rob's still the best navigator our team has had.)

As we walked, we read the short blurb that we received upon confirming our answer. I thought it was pretty cool, presenting the story and raison d'être for the puzzles. I liked that it was presented separately from the puzzles so that there was no confusion as to what was flavortext and what was story, a design flaw that was present in our BANG 22.

Clue 2: The Colored Cube

We arrived at the next site, kind of towards the middle flow of teams. I had put Andrea in charge of finding a sitting spot, so as Jonathan collected the clue, the rest of us followed her to a shady sidewalk spot. Jonathan came back holding a Rubix cube and the clue, a color-based nonogram. The main snag in solving it was that there was no specific length indicated for each color.

The two copies didn't help much in this case. I didn't help much at all, despite having written many a nonogram-based puzzle; I just couldn't get my mind into the non-length specific portion. Ironically, Andrea, to whom I kind of introduced the nonogram style when I had her solve some of mine, was contributing quite a lot.

So I sat back and tried to work out our endgame. The center of the grid was outlined like a 2D representation of a cube, so it was pretty probable that once those colors were filled in, they would represent a way to arrange the Rubix cube. That seemed pretty challenging to me... too challenging for a BANG. I was hoping Jonathan had practice arranging the cube properly, cuz I was pretty sure the rest of us hadn't. I was trying to think of a way around this difficulty, when enough colors were filled in that I was able to contribute more. In the back of my mind, I was wondering if we could create some sort of mapping like we had done for the No More Secrets sudoku cube puzzle.

With the grid finished, Jonathan didn't even look at the cube but asked us to tell him the letters on sections that matched patters. Well, obviously... why hadn't I thought of that. The center squares were obvious, but then they got more challenging with "I need a corner piece that's blue-yellow-red" which required imaginary folding in the head. Pretty soon, though, we had the answer and moved on. Maybe we'd passed a few teams that had passed us due to our navigation error.

Our story card let us know that we'd confronted a suspicious character who had plans to blow up some data center, but instead of getting a confession from him THERE'S NOT ENOUGH TIME so we knocked him out and stole his clothes.

Clue 3 - Bathroom Breakdown

Our next location was a bathroom at a park. The tiles on the bathroom were either red or yellow, an exercise in data gathering. Blood and Bones, coed astronomy, and Judean People's Front were there, a hopeful sign that we weren't doing too terribly.

Andrea snagged us a shady spot while we went to collect the data. I guess we're not particularly good at meticulous collection, since we ended up going back several times to the tiles and redoing our grid. As our theories regarding what to do with the data changed, we also had to redo the data.

I noticed that some teams had been paying particular attention to some letters and numbers inscribed on a cement divider. I hated noticing it, but at the same time I wasn't ashamed to used that information and snapped a few photos. How the puzzle was going to relate to those, I had no idea and as we still hadn't completed the data collection portion of the puzzle, no one was all that interested.

As we continued working, many teams that were there began leave. It felt like we were taking too long to mark this information down. We tried working with what we had, but couldn't get anything out of it. So we abandoned our shady spot and attempted to get a definitive marking of the tiles. Eventually we did and found that with the tiles XORed with markings on the grid we'd been given, we got a strange message: [N754M2IN], followed by A = [A] and V = [10].

What the heck? We tried to make sense of that and got nothing. I let everyone know again that many people were staring at that weird assortment of letters and numbers and it seemed to make sense that it was somehow connected. But nothing was coming to mind. Eventually, building off each other's theories ("Maybe X?" "Nah, but how about X+1?"), we finally realized that the information in brackets referred to what was written on the cement divider and the A and V mentioned were the letters in the same position on the other cement divider, which was just a straight alphabet with the number 1-10 under it. We now had our decoding mechanism and, quickly, our answer.

With the answer came the next part of the story. In the clothes we'd stolen was information about a pre-arranged meeting with Agent X. We had gone in disguise and met with him. During the conversation, he started a countdown timer that would blow up Twitter's data center in sixty minutes. So we'd shot him.

Continued in Part 2.

Burninators bag BANG 28

Just happened to stop by the BANG website today and saw that the Burninators have continued their tradition of hosting every seventh BANG. Maybe The Smoking GNU should plan on hosting BANG 29 and then hold it before BANG 28, just to keep that a tradition?

Eating Afterwards

(Egads, this blog's a mess. I haven't updated the sidebar since BANG 22. I still need to preserve my memories of BANG 24, 25, and 26. But the sun is out, the dog is restless, and I have the attention span of a squirrel these days.)

I'm not a big fan of the after-BANG restaurant meal. Teams have a tendency to keep more to themselves when offered a team-sized table to sit at and a bill to tie them to that location. I actually enjoyed the meal after BATH 4, since we were all gathered at two tables and were forced into social interaction without having to leave the table. BANG 25 was good, too, since people could buy food from any of the restraunts and go out and eat in the food court. Nothing tying them down equals more socializing, which is a good thing. (I can honestly say that Gamers are some of the nicest people I've ever met.)

It makes me wonder if the catered/rented-venue method of the SNAPs might not be a bad idea. Would asking $20 more drive some teams away? If so, would dropping the prize requirement bring them back? Would that drive other teams away? Personally, I'm thinking I'd rather pay the money up front than feel the obligation to order expensive food and drinks from a restaurant providing a free venue.

BANG XXVI Pics (and a Vid)

I have yet, to date, been able to play with the same set of people in the twenty-some odd puzzle events I've participated in. Eric Prestemon and Dan Roberts joined us in our Viking expedition in the really well-executed BANG XXVI. I've put up pictures of the event and a short video of the penny challenge.

We had a lot of fun, and were really impressed with the puzzles and production value, so many kudos to Los Jefes and Code Yellow! The meta gave us quite the knocking, but in the end we're kind of proud that we didn't take any hints, even if it might have bumped us up a few positions in the rankings.

BANG 26 also brings to an end what (little) influence I had on SNAP simulcasts. In my quest to have The Smoking GNU do one, I was able to help Seattle teams find counterparts in the Bay Area. The simulcasts would have (hopefully) happened anyway, but I like to think of it as my own small contribution to the community.

BANG 25 Appreciation and Photos

We of The Smoking GNU did incredibly horrible for the first couple puzzles of BANG 25: Back to School. However, we were able to overcome our slow start and end up in the top 10 (top 5 when adjusted for two teams of excess size). We had a really good time solving Longshot's clues: Many thanks to them for all the hard work and effort they put into making this such an enjoyable hunt!

Additionally, we really liked Longshots' web app with real-time status updates; I wouldn't mind if it became standard for all BANGs. I've heard rumors of an open-source release; however, I've heard similar about other hunt interfaces so I guess I'll just have to wait optimistically. (Of course, if it is released, there'll suddenly be an iPhone app, an Android app, several forks, and maybe even a text message option for those few teams without a smartphone. Within a week.)

Oh and I did manage to take some photos.

Belated Photos from BANG 24

The summer seems to have limited my blogging abilities, both with my daughter being out of school and a large project I undertook finishing only a week ago. In other words, the fact that I'm putting up the photos that we took at BANG 24, when BANG 25 just happened yesterday is entirely a coincidence.

Our team had a total blast at BANG 24 and much thanks to CRANEA for all the effort they put into it. I'd been having a string of bad experiences at recent hunts and this snapped me out of my funk. I think it may have even been my favorite BANG. Of course, I only have a sample size of seven...

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.

Photos from BANG XX, 21, and 22, plus One Video

I've finally had a chance to organize and upload photos from the past few events:

BANG XX
Many of these were at night, and thus didn't turn out the greatest. On top of that, we only got about halfway through the event.

BANG 21
Entirely coincidentally, I took 21 photos. Includes a video of one round of blackjack.

BANG 22 Scouting
From our first scouting trip to downtown San Rafael, with the comments that were made about usability. (The Falkirk Mansion was unfortunately being used the same day of our event.)

How the BANG differed from the SNAP

So, um, we simulcasted SNAP 5 as BANG 22 a few weeks back (results and puzzles). It was crazy. People say they had fun, but in manning my station for Echoes, all I saw was grumpy teams coming from Cipher thinking they only had one puzzle left, only to be handed nine new puzzles all in one go. So from my point of view, nearly everyone had a horrible time. I've been assured, though, that said POV wasn't reflective of the event as a whole.

Afterwards, the common question we got asked was "Which puzzles are yours?" A good question: When you want to criticize — or even compliment — a puzzle, it helps to know who was actually responsible for it.

The truth is we adapted nearly every single puzzle. The reason for this is that SNAP 5 had a meta consisted of getting a second set of photos for each Echo solved. The photos were of pylons of a bridge, and used them as alphabet letters. We, obviously, couldn't do that, so we came up with an alternative meta. The alternative meta, though, meant we had to change the solutions to all but two of the puzzles, and, in some cases, replace puzzles altogether.

So here's a list of puzzles and what we did to them:

1. Journal
Adapted from the same mechanism SNAP 5 used. Their puzzle solved to "GET NOTES AT KILT STORE". Lacking such, we used a row of palm trees.

1a. Ransom
Using photos to get from site to site was the same thing Grey Goo did. We decided to use different photos, though... just to keep the first walk short.

2. Graffiti
Nearly identical to Seattle's version, only with a different solution word. It was called "Signs", but since we were using an abandoned building, we decided to make the presentation look like graffiti and changed the name appropriately.

3. Calendar
Exact same puzzle as used in SNAP 5. I'm not sure if they used the same binding process, though.

4. Chessboard
Our original puzzle, but inspired by Grey Goo's idea. Their version was pretty cool: You were given laser-cut clear acrylics with words on them, assembled the pieces into a chessboard, and did the semi-knight's tour to the king. The words the knight passed over only had one letter in common for each move.

Although we looked into getting acrylics done, it just wasn't in our budget. After coming up with our version, we thought about using transparencies for the "snakes" (which is why we suggested bringing a dry-erase marker) but decided in the end that they would be too flimsy to work with.

5. Gridwork
Nearly completely unchanged from the SNAP 5 version. The main difference is that we changed solid lines on the grid to dashed as our playtest indicated that no one would think to cut out the different sections. Funny thing is, many teams still didn't... they were able to read "FAMOUS EQUATION" and a few other things to get the answer.

6. Symbols
Exact same mechanism as Seattle's, adapted locally. We obviously needed to change the objects in the environment; Grey Goo used a sculpture garden, we used anything that looked like an identifiable shape. We also changed the sets to work with the our version of its echo.

7. New Arrivals
Our original puzzle. Grey Goo's puzzle dealt with determining the right year for mistaken dates of historical events. We liked the puzzle, but decided the library we were using was too small to have thirty teams simultaneously trying to look up what year the Magna Carta was actually signed.

We had been planning something a little more difficult (descriptions would be a mix of two magazines, always with a single magazine between them, then use the middle letter of that magazine), but the version teams saw during the playtest worked so well that we decided to keep it as it was. Pity none of us ever noticed that a handyman could be a belt-wearer.

8. Word Salad
Same SNAP 5 mechanism, different solution. I think Seattle's version was given to them in a styrafoam container. On a side note, I just want to say that croutons and parmesan cheese take the longest time to drain of oil.

9. Cipher
Our original puzzle, though heavily inspired by Grey Goo's version. We made one or two changes to cipher's mechanism (encoding vs. decoding at one point) and the extraction mechanism (first letter vs. glyph), but pretty similar to Seattle's in the end. One big difference was that Seattle's version was only handed out to the fastest teams. The nature of our meta, though, required every team get this puzzle, so we made an "easy" and "hard" version.

Echoes
I hate to think of Echoes as "mini" clues as they weren't a subset of a puzzle, but simply meant to be a location that teams got nine new puzzles that either directly or indirectly echoed previous puzzles (the hunt had a "deja vu" theme).

10. Poetry
Our original puzzle. Seattle's version of Poetry dealt with poems written on different sides of columns. We tried to adapt it, but it did not get good feedback in any of our tests, so we went with something completely different. The sad thing about our version is that in transferring the poem's text from OpenOffice (where it was written) to InDesign (for the Mobius template), the single up-down apostrophe changed, even though it was the same %&$*&@ font on the same !#&*$!% computer. Desktop publishing, go fig.

11. Questions?
Our original puzzle. Seattle used a version called "Elements" and had periodic table abbreviations with a number attached to them for indexing. We needed a different solution word and ended up adding the drop-quote element to the puzzle at the same time. Apparently, we're too old, though, since some teams had no idea what the numeric solution to "IS ENOUGH?" was.

12. Inbox
Exactly the same as Seattle's version, only with our new solution word.

13. Chessmen
Exactly the same as Seattle's version, only with our new solution word.

14. Rebus
Our original puzzle. Seattle's version was "Gridworks" and had a nonogram that solved to an image of a metronome, as well as letters scattered throughout the grid that would get crossed off, with only the solution word remaining (hmmmm... sounds vaguely familiar). Our new solution word didn't lend itself to a nonogram very well, so we decided to try and put a rebus inside a nonogram. I wrote a version of it, but it was a damn hard solve! We ended up running out of time and decided to put the rebus out as is. The day after the hunt we came up with a better puzzle.

15. Sets
Our original puzzle. Seattle has a sidewalk with images from the Chinese zodiac on them and gave teams copies off said images so that when a line was traced from image to image, letters were spelled out. Obviously, couldn't do it, so we decided to have it work in concert with Symbols.

16. Rags
Another completely original puzzle on our part. Seattle's "History" puzzle was fun, we thought, but it just wouldn't work with the magazine theme that this puzzle would echo.

17. Alphabet Soup
We used Seattle's version of the puzzle, though in changing the solution word, we changed the puzzle somewhat. The solution of each can was now a soup instead of a salad name from the Word Salad, and we providing a rough ingredient list for each soup.

18. Paraphrase
Our original puzzle. It turned out the mechanism Grey Goo used for their "Numbers" puzzle would not work with our meta solution word, so we we decided to reuse the cipher.

19. Meta
Our original puzzle. As mentioned above, Grey Goo's dealt with using photos of a bridge that we couldn't duplicate.

20. Ransom Note
Pretty close to Grey Goo's. I think they made use of two sets of photos; we only had the one and had to adapt accordingly.

Things I Learned from Simulcasting BANG 22

Croutons hold a lot more oil than they let on

Kinko's is open 24-hours a day until Friday night at 11pm

Having a walking route nailed down is pretty darned important

7am is no time for quality control checks

Many photo development stores don't have a problem with getting out 1500 prints in a few hours

Simulcasting gives you the motivation to get things done by a specific date with the frustration of having to wait on the other team to get things in (near) final form

The fastest team will be approximately five minutes faster per puzzle than planned for

Some graffiti fonts are illegible

Restaurants seem very amenable to not charging to have a group of 150 people come eat a meal at their place

It's challenging trying to lock a route down when the team member with final say lives five hundred miles away

It's better to have a good puzzle with a okay presentation than a okay puzzle with a good presentation

Desktop publishing programs mess with imported content, especially apostrophes

The fastest team can inadvertently be used as last second quality control

Some companies don't like having their building photographed

The alphabet soup font costs $45 (but there are alternatives)

Drinking Division teams are very generous to volunteers

InDesign is frustrating to use when you've had no experience with it, and maybe even then

It's pretty neat to think that you're only one of fourteen or so teams to ever do one of these

Calendar Needs

I've been giving our leftover Calendar puzzles to our volunteers as a small reward for all their help in BANG 22. Now that my wife is back from Texas and has seen it, she wants a copy too. I heard at least one team say they didn't want to take it apart during the BANG, despite that being our intention in printing it in pad form. Maybe I'll print some more.

Returned Bowls?

In putting together "Word Salad" for BANG 22, I never once considered the idea that teams would be returning the bowls. What the hell am I supposed to do with 40 faux-wood salad bowls?

BANG 22 is not in Santa Rosa

From talking to a few people last night at BANG XX, it seems that there is an underlying assumption that the Smoking GNU will be hosting BANG 22 in Santa Rosa. Although we can't reveal the specific location yet, I think it's safe to say that we can pretty much rule out Santa Rosa and indeed all of Sonoma County as the local for the April 18th event.

A Queue of BANGs

So we've finally officially announced to the BANG mailing list that we of The Smoking GNU are going to be hosting BANG 22, a simulcast of SNAP 5. (There was a short announcement at the the Microsoft Puzzle Haunt 123, but I don't know how many people were awake enough to notice...)

Which adds one more BANG to the queue. It's funny that within the next three months, there are three BANGs planned (with a fourth set for some unannounced time after that). Not all that long ago it seemed like the dearth of BANGs might mean the end of the line for the event.

I'm curious, though, as to what effect having so many so close together will have on attendence. My guess is that BANG 22 will have the lowest team count of the three: It's long (eight hours is the current estimate), it's north of the Golden Gate Bridge (the Petaluma BANG only had 24 teams, while the recent average has been closer to 35), it's a simulcast (which generally seem to come in on the low side in the Bay Area), and the other two BANGs are original hunts by more experienced, well-known teams.

Doesn't really matter in the end. We just hope to provide a good time and fun challenges as one small way of showing our appreciation for all the hard work other teams do to put on events that we participate in. Plus, it'll give us great experience for the currently purely-theoretical day we put on our own original puzzle hunt.

Looking Forward to 2009

At the beginning of 2008, things looked kind of bleak hunt-wise. There hadn't been a BANG since April of the previous year and I had no idea when this hunger created in me would be sated again. (I went so far captain a team in Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt to feed said craving; it didn't help.) Things look a lot different for 2009: Two BANGs and a Game have already been announced.

That's to say nothing of the strongly-suggested-but-just-short-of-required (as Joe put it) responsibility laid upon two teams to host a BANG; the one, hopefully two, Microsoft Puzzle Hunts; theoretically another Shinteki Decathlon; the MIT Mystery Hunt; and any other unannounced hunts that are still in the planning stages. I'm hoping for about ten puzzle events next year, up from the six or seven we participated in this year.

Of course, I won't be able to make all of them; any that require airfare will probably be out of reach unless my donations to the California educations system pay off. However, the GNU will hopefully be represented at each event. For example, Jonathan is planning to head to Boston again this year to rejoin the Silly Hat Brigade for the Mystery Hunt and Given is thinking to join in the MSPH fun next time it occurs.

I could always try remote solving for events I can't attend; however, the one time I tried it in the past, it didn't work out very well. Maybe it was because I work better in groups or because the one puzzle I'd really got a handle on ended up being solved by someone on site while I was working on it.

Also, it doesn't help that Colin Mochrie & Brad Sherwood's Third Annual Farewell Tour is on the January 16...

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.

BANG 19 Weather Forecast

With all the unseasonably warm weather we've been having, I had kind of expected that the advice GC had regarding inclimate weather would prove useless. However, I checked the forecast for Berkeley today and found that rain is indeed called for.

Guess I'll have to find out where Natalie hid my umbrella.

On Picking Prizes

So far, selecting a prize to offer up for a BANG has usually been a last minute thing. For example, Jonathan and I were in a store at 11pm the night before one event, discussing the ins and outs of different possibilities before finally selecting something (a trivia book I think) and heading out as the store closed.

It's a balance of finding something intersting, unique, useful, and/or fun and of finding something in the ~$10 price range. Since I don't know any other team's taste (apart from, perhaps, puzzles), we try and go with something we'd like... especially if we're lucky enough to place high enough to get a prize and only have what we had brought as a choice.

This time, I decided to get BANG 19's prize out of the way early. Some things I've looked at and decided not to choose:

A 25-piece kitchen knife set (seemed dangerous)

A giant rootbeer keg filled popcorn that can then be used to brew rootbeer

A Sudoku cube

A digital sudoku hand-held game

The complete collection of Space Quest games (dunno if anyone besides me would use it)

A diamond-tipped circular saw blade (ditto)

A collection of burrs (did it last time)

A Halloween costume (it's the day after...)

I finally chose something I though was interesting, unique, useful, fun, and a drinking game to boot, and brought it home, safe in the thought that I wouldn't have to worry about it for the coming month. My wife then mentioned that the package looked a little banged up. I looked closer and saw it was taped shut over the original packing tape. Opening it up, I found that of the eighteen necessary parts to assemble this thing, all but seven were missing. I returned what had obviously been a return.

There weren't any others, so I selected something else with the store credit. Ah well. It may not be as interesting, unique or useful as the first, but I think it just might be fun.

BANG 19 vs Ghost Patrol

Looking at the current list of teams signed for BANG 19: UDC and comparing it against the team list for Ghost Patrol, the crossover looks pretty small:

Burninators

coed astronomy

Continental Breakfast

Space Cops

XX-Rated

But of course, two of the teams in GP are hosting this BANG (thanks Goldfish!) and five or so teams are out of area (but possibly playing in SNAP 4). Team Liboncatipu mentioned that one of the reasons they decided to host the weekend before Ghost Patrol was to give those who didn't get accepted a chance to do some puzzling (and those who did get accepted would have a warm-up). I wonder how many teams are taking advantage of that...

The Burninators got BANG, too

There are no details apart from the Burninators are planning on hosting BANG 21. That's what I get for using the BANG website as a launching point again...

The BANGs are Back in Town

I decided to update our event list after getting accepted into BANG 19: UDC and went to the BANG homepage to get the link. To my surprise, I found that XX-Rated is planning on hosting BANG XX: Get Lucky! next March. I think there also may be another BANG a couple months after that. And those are in addition to any BANGs the winners might/should/will host!

Sweet.

Iron Puzzler BANG - Darned Good Stuff!

I have to say we really had a blast playing in the Iron Puzzler BANG last Saturday! I can't think of any clue in the hunt that I could nitpick or that we didn't enjoy. Of course, we solved them all and usually a solved puzzle is an enjoyed puzzle, so there's that as a qualifier.

Many thanks to coed astronomy, Burninators, BootyVicious, Evil Geniuses, Platonic Solids, and Wrong Ideas for all their work, and to Greg DeBeer, whose Iron Puzzler event led to this (hopefully) renewal of the Bay Area Night Game. It was a good, solid event, and I recommend that it happen again with the next Iron Puzzler.

Since the IP BANG may be run again and/or at a different site (a wonderful new tradition I think), I guess I won't write much about our specific experience... except to say that Erik practically jumped ship after hearing from Rich about how Blood and Bones played in their own division (i.e. a drink after every solve, similar to a methodology Erik employed in the SF Mini-hunt) and that I have never seen a man so pleased to win a rock garden.

Iron Puzzler BANG Photos

There didn't seem to be many picture opportunities apart from our team gathered around a puzzle, but what few I took are up at ipbang.puzzalot.com.

All YAKs left behind

Despite all my Smoldering YAK teammates eagerly anticipating a new puzzle hunt, when the Iron Puzzler BANG comes along, suddenly they're all busy. Okay, sure, one's got a wedding reception, two others have anniversary plans, and another already had made camping plans, but still! All the "When is there going to be another puzzle hunt?" fell by the wayside pretty quickly. Ah well.

Since I'll be on the Smoking GNU instead, Jonathan and I were hoping to reunite our core team of three for a short event (i.e. non-overnight) for the first time since April 2007, but Given's place of employment has given him all but unlimited overtime. Thus, his plan for September 6th is to sleep all day.

Trading Seattle and San Francisco Puzzle Hunts

Jonathan called the other day and, as it invariably does, talk got round to puzzle events. The fact that two SNAPs are in planning triggered the thought that it might be fun to have someone in the Bay Area host those SNAPs as BANGs (and vice versa, if and when a new BANG rolls around). It seemed to work well enough using coed astronomy's mini-Game as SNAP 3. It would double the amount of puzzle events in each area with (hypothetically) only half the work.

I mentioned in the Puzzle Hunters forum that I think we'd be up for hosting a SNAP in the Bay Area, assuming it was logistically possible. It'd be a good way to test the waters as a host, and be good experience should we ever (hopefully) get around to doing something more.

I heard that Wei-Hwa ran a version of the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt at Google once. Would trading longer events like that be feasible on a regular basis? Given the rising price of airfare, it'd certainly have some pluses going for it. And if we want to talk really crazy, there's always the MIT Mystery Hunt...

Single word vs. directions solves

Last night, Given's ear infection kept him from joining Andrea and I for our Wednesday night session of Agon. Deciding not to waste puzzling time, she and I enjoyed some practice for the SF Mini-Game by working on BANG 12 clues, picking up where we left off after The Smoldering YAK's practice session on Sunday.

One thing I noticed from both sessions, apart from how much fun we had and how well we worked together, was how much more satisfying it felt to solve puzzles to a single word, as opposed to a directional message (monoverbum vs. polyverbum?). I'm not quite sure why this is; all I can say is that in the former case, the clue felt truely solved while in the latter (admitedly only taken from my experiences in Midnight Madness: Back To Basics and a few other practice puzzles) didn't have that feeling of closure. I suppose this could be due my experiences at the Google and Microsoft Puzzle Hunts, where puzzles often solved to messages that told you how to re-solve the puzzle.

Interestingly, it seems clues in SF Mini-Game will do both, solving first to a location and then to a solution word.

An Idea for Keeping BANGs Going

One interesting thing Rich mentioned during his presentation on Game Offshoots at the GC Summit 2008 (and I believe he mentioned something on this blog a long time ago) is his theory that the reason there hasn't been a BANG 18 yet is that no one felt compelled by their placement in BANG 17 to host the next one. Part of the reason why that happened is the same teams keep winning and either don't want to keep hosting (quite understandable) or are pretty busy developing long term projects (e.g. Google Puzzle Hunt, Games, etc.). I have an idea how to deal with this. Whether it's a good idea or not is another question entirely.

Looking at the BANG Hall of Fame, there are only four teams that have won more than one BANG (some are ties, admittedly), and only three teams that have hosted more than once. Nearly every team that has won has hosted or co-hosted a BANG (Red Sea DespARRRadoes says they will eventually), but teams that have won more than once don't host as often as they win.

So here is my suggestion: All future BANGs would have three comptetive categories, name and degree of difference to be determined by the hosting team. Category 1 would be the casual teams, beginners and intermediates. Category 2 would be the expert/hardcore teams. Category 3 would be any team that has won more than one BANG playing in Category 2, by default. Only the winner of Category 2 would be asked to host the next BANG.

Just an idea.

Two New Puzzle Hunts Scheduled

April 12 - BAAG (1?): Coed Astronomy is hosting what seems to be a non-night version of the BANG (as opposed to confusing people and replacing the "Night" with, say, "Noon") in San Francisco this spring. Sounds like a good idea to me: When comparing BANG 16 and BANG 17, I have to say handling flashlights to illuminate a paper puzzle can be a bit of a pain. One drawback, though, would be the inability to do light-based puzzles such as the graveyard clue in BANG 16.

Assuming a team size of four, we're trying to round up our BANG 17 team, less my brother, and then see if other people who've played on The Smoking GNU at one time or another want to form a secondary team (tentatively named One Smug Knight).

(Note: I find the word "leisurely" in the description to be interesting for some reason.)

May 3&10 - Shinteki: Not sure as to the nature of this event except that it's twelve hours long. Right now, our primary plan is to send the standard Shinteki team, and perhaps a seconary team to volunteer to playtest.

Upcoming Puzzle Events

Today - Trogday: Trogdor turns five.

January 18 - MIT Mystery Hunt: Jonathan's flying out to Boston and joining the Silly Hat Brigade, the captain of which, oddly enough, went to the SRJC with us. Sure, he was eight at the time, but maybe he'll remember.

February 3 - Superbowl XLII: Hosting a surprise mini-puzzle hunt for friends. Something to do between commercials. And if any of them happen to read this, I'll deny everything.

February 9-10 - Iron Puzzler 2008: Tempting, but considering our abysmal showing at the last one, I think we'll pass and leave the slot open for other team.

February 23 - Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt: In the midst of putting a team together. I've been told it won't be as challenging as a puzzle hunt, but it'll be a fun life event anyway.

[Date Unknown] - Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 12: I doubt I'll be going up to Seattle for Cracking Good Toast's hunt, but other GNUs may. Perhaps I can remote solve for Second Breakfast.

[Date Unknown] - BANG 18: The Unibangers are planning on hosting the next BANG. I'm sure we'll be there!

[Date Unknown] - Googol Puzzle Hunt II? - The organizers of the Googol Conglomerate had hoped that it would become an annual event and that the winners (Phobos-Grunt) would host the next one. I have no hints or indications that this will happen, but I can hope, can't I?

Best Laid GNU Plans

Jonathan, co-founder and captain of The Smoking GNU, came up to Santa Rosa for the Christmas-through-New Years week. It had been our plan to get together a least a day or two to do some brain-storming and location scouting in order to determine the feasibility of us hosting a BANG this year. However, due to colds, my daughter, and his family refusing to let him free since they hadn't seen him in several months, it didn't happen.

It may seem like a small thing, but this was a very crucial step in getting our plans off the ground. Phone conversations just haven't seemed to jump-start our creative thoughts, despite the number of times we've discussed it. It's as if it keeps things in the theoretical stage, whereas face-to-face meetings with notes on paper would actually start us moving forward.

Barring Jonathan moving back up to the Bay Area from L.A. (he's looking for a job with company that better suits his talents and/or starting a Masters program), we concluded that our plans probably won't happen this year.

End of the Season

Well that pretty wraps up the 2007 puzzle hunt season. Although the Unibangers plan to do the next BANG, something tells me that it won't happen until 2008. It seems kind of weird that there was only one BANG this year when the average has been about four. Maybe that's due to all the other events, including a new puzzle hunt at the Google campus (a tradition which I hope continues), keeping people/teams who might otherwise be orginazing another BANG from having the time to do so.

Or perhaps it's because the Platonic Solids did such a good job that the BANG bar has been raised a notch? I'm thinking that if I dug into my puzzle file, pulled out 10 puzzles, fitted them into a meta, and just placed them at random locations, people might be a little bit disappointed.

A Santa Rosa BANG?

Assuming that at some point in the future, The Smoking GNU hosts a BANG, one of the key issues is where to have it. Jonathan, Given, and myself are all as near natives to Santa Rosa as you can get without actually being born here and it's the city we know best. But, seeing as how most of the BANG audience is south of the Golden Gate, how many people would actually show up in Santa Rosa if we did?

From what I understand, the attendance of BANG 15: Bang Appétit was somewhat diminished by the fact that it was held in Petaluma. Santa Rosa is a further half-hour north.

While we may have been willing to drive from Santa Rosa to Los Gatos (two hours) for BANG 16, and theoretically there will always be teams willing to drive wherever in the Bay Area for a puzzle hunt, it sounds like it would leave the more casual puzzle teams out, something we wouldn't want to do.

That leaves the question, then: Where?

Bees & Beavers vs. Shinteki Decathlon

That's right, I'm really busy. Yet, I'm taking time out from writing a puzzle for a good friend and former roommate's wedding and trying to finalize puzzles for a friends and family puzzlehunt and get prototypes ready in time for the playtest to say...

We got 4th!

Well, I say "we" much in the same way that a team fan says "We won!" at a football game: I played no part in The Smoking GNU's placement in Shinteki Decathlon III, Week 2.

I got the report from Jonathan yesterday. He said they had a great time, but are a little disappointed with their 4th place finish for two reasons: a) It's the same placing they got last year; and b) They were in the lead for much of the game. Apparently, they ran into trouble on the ninth clue, when they didn't spot a vital part of information on the back of the DVD box. This cost them about a half hour and perhaps 45 points. If they had seen that, it's possible they might have ended up in third, or even second place. That "missing a vital part of the clue" problem happens to our team too often... kind of like the Raiders always seeming to fumble the ball during a comeback drive.

I asked about the laser game clue because it sounded neat based on Ian's description, and apparently like some other teams, they found the puzzle easier to solve without the game. He really enjoyed the Livecube puzzle, which is indeed what I was refering to in my earlier post and was one of the clues I staffed the previous weekend. They never made it to see Leon the Giraffe at the tenth clue (another one that I staffed a week ago; it was amusing how most teams asked Ian and I if we were Leon), since they figured that the half-hour or so that they had left wouldn't put much of a dent in any puzzle labeled "Endurance"; instead, they concentrated their remaining time on solving bonuses.

The somewhat sad thing is that this may be the last time Jonathan (our team captain) comes up for a puzzle event this year. Living in Southern California means that he flies in for each event, which is fine if it's long enough (i.e. longer than half a day). But if a BANG or, if we're lucky, two is held by the end of the year, he'll probably be up for neither. Which would just leave me and Given...

The next event that three of us may be able to participate in together is the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt, which is apparently happening October 6-7. One of the difficulties, of course, is that none of us know any Microsoft employees (well, we met Terrance while playing for Second Breakfast, but I think he's part of the hosting team), and unless I start selling body parts, I wouldn't be able to afford the trip anyway.

BANG 16 - Revisited

So I was cleaning up the desk trying to make room for my old Linux box when I came across a notebook filled with strange notations in it. Turns out, it's my notes from our experience in BANG 16. I had always meant to do a full write-up of it, as those brave enough to look can find out from my corny first blogger post. Time, however, has just not made such things possible. But here are two anecdotes from that night:

1. Coins puzzle - There was a huge crowd gathered around the puzzle-sitter at the fountain, so we grabbed the sheet of paper, headed out of the area, and sat down to solve. The puzzle involved figuring out the minimum number of coins needed to make change for a certain amount. Figuring that the dollar coin was the largest denomination, we figured that you'd take the number of coins needed and convert that number to the appropriate letter. Didn't work, so the team started trying other ideas, while I decided that maybe the puzzle designers were using 50 cents as the largest one. Still nothing. A quarter? Nothing!
   
   
   
   We spent a long time trying to figure out how to solve it and eventually, when we were like the next to the last team there, we took the hint. Turns out my quarter-as-the-highest-coin thought was right, but I had made a huge number-to-letter translation mistake. I felt like hitting that brick wall with my fist, I was so mad at myself. (We found out much later, i.e. the end of the game, that there was a stack of coins next to the puzzle-sitter to let us know which group of coins to use.)
   
   However, it kinda ended up being a good thing. If we hadn't taken the hint, we might have ended up ahead of The Platonic Solids and would have had the honor of hosting the next BANG... on our first outing!


2. Graveyard/Flashlight puzzle - We only had the one code sheet when we arrived at this puzzle and were concerned as to what were going to do when we found out that Jonathan was going to go to the other end of the graveyard and communicate something to us via flashlight. "I don't know Morse code by heart yet," Jonathan mentioned. "I'm sure they'll have a sheet down there for you," I replied.
   
   So off he went. Meanwhile, the rest of us set up: Nathan would tell me whether Jonathan was flashing a dot or a dash, I'd write it down, and Given would translate it. "Okay he's starting, write this down: Dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash..."
   
   "Um," said Given, "that's not Morse."
   
   "Okay he's starting up again. Dash... dash..." Nathan continued.
   
   "I think it's alphanumeric!" said Given.
   
   "Okay, I'll try it," I told him.
   
   
   
   And it didwork. With quick thinking on Jonathan's part and a good catch on Given's, we got out of there pretty quickly, making up some much needed time from the quarter blunder.

Future Games

I've been thinking too much about what we would do if and when it came time for The Smoking GNU to host a BANG. We came in fifth in BANG 17 and if we used B&B's standards, hosting would fall on us. Luckily, Platonic Solids added that the next host should also have participated in at least three BANGs. We only have two under our belt, so unless someone sprouts another BANG this year, we're going to have to wait until next year to even gain our third merit badge, and maybe the year after to host.

Assuming we continue to participate, it will eventually fall upon us to host, and I'm already (mentally) scouting locations. Additionally, the thought of hosting a Game is in the back of my mind, although that might be several years down the road, if ever!

I think a fun idea would be to have a "Greatest Hits" Game, where a selection of puzzles from the previous Games would be presented. This would allow teams to experience some of the best/most interesting puzzles that they may have missed out on since 1973 (at least that's when Wikipedia now is saying that it began) to have a chance. Of course, each puzzle would have to have a twist on it so that teams who had already experienced it wouldn't get bored.

My teammates think I'm crazy that I'm actually looking forward to hosting. To be true, I can't even explain it to myself. My best guess is that I've hosted tons of other events and the greatest joy I get from it is hearing how people (usually) enjoyed themselves. What more reason would I need?

BANG 17 Pictures

Pictures that I took from BANG 17 are up. Unfortunately, they're mostly from the pre-game activites (wrapping other teams up in foil armor). I seem to be too distracted during the game to take pictures during puzzles for some reason...

BANG 17: Knights of the Round Table

Operating for the first time under our new team name (the old one, while somewhat amusing, was didn't easily roll off the tongue), we had a strong showing in the seventeenth Bay Area Night Game, which took place entirely during the day (not that I'm complaining!). I'd never been to UC Berkeley before, so I was lost pretty much the entire time. But that's what you have navigators for, right?

I really appreciate all the hard work that the Platonic Solids put into creating this puzzle hunt. Especially the interactive ones which impressed me the most: The charading hermit, the singing monks, and the Black Knight. They require a lot from the volunteers and we really appreciate all that they did to make this possible. We even had a sidequest after finding the Grail: Providing water for the Black Knight.

The only puzzle I didn't enjoy was the very first one: Finding Camelot. In a puzzle hunt dominated by non-paper puzzle, giving everyone four paper puzzles that they need to solve before they could even leave the starting area seemed counter-productive. Additionally, there was no way to confirm we were making progress until all four were solved. Eventually, after discussing what it all meant, our team just decided to go to where the lightning bolt on the nonogram pointed.

Apart from that we enjoyed pretty much all the puzzles, found them challenging at about the right level, and had a good time. My favorite quote from the whole day? As Eric was about to "drink" from the Holy Grail, he said "If I shrivel up and turn to dust after drinking this, I'm coming after you guys!"

The Longest (Puzzle) Day - Part 1

I'm a Total Perspective Vortex Survivor, and August 12th was the longest puzzle day of my life.

(A story of how we made it through both Perplexcity's SF Live Event and BANG 16 in the same day. Sorry for the length... a journal is for recording memories, after all. Skip to parts two and three, after they're available, to read about the actual event.)

The Shocking Discovery!

Jonathan found The Game after several online treasure hunts came online, specifically one blogged about by Wei-Hwa Huang. He was completely shocked to find out about this subculture of puzzle-addicts who have been running puzzle hunts since at least 1985. "We've been missing out on these for over twenty years!" he continuously points out to me.  And he has a valid point.  Jonathan and I have known each other almost twenty-five years and we've always been puzzlers.  We've played Infocom (we one went through the Enchanter series in six hours), we read books, he subscribed to games magazine.  This love of puzzles never died down and now we find out that about The Game and he's pissed and I'm in disbelief that we'd never heard of it.  Of course, neither of us went to Standford or Berkley, or worked for Microsoft or Google, so that's a big disadvantage right there.

But now that we found it, we weren't going to waste any more of our time.

Jonathan soon inserted himself into a team for the Shinteki Decathlon II (it was too expensive for me to enter, but I was his go-to guy when he needed trivia) and they finished in fourth place, not too bad.  Then BANG 16 was announced and we quickly formed a team that included my brother Nathan and our friend Given.

Then shortly before the BANG was to be held, Jonathan called me all excited:  Another puzzle even was happening the same day! Perplexcity was having their second live event (it was free!) and after he described the London live event, we were convinced. The timing would have to be perfect: We'd have to leave the Palace of Fine Arts by 3pm in order to make it to Los Gatos on time, which meant that we'd miss the opening of the SF connection at 3:30, but we would get to participate in all the puzzling events.

The Amazing Preparations!

We felt that it important to practice as a team, so Jonathan, Given and I gathered at my house and printed out puzzles from Bang 8 and went about solving them. A lot of fun! And we worked well together! A good boost of confidence for us. The only problem was I earned a reputation for leaving stuff out, when we were completely stuck on the "First Letters" puzzle, and it turned out it was because I hadn't realized there were two sheets of paper that printed (it was a quick solve for us after that).

Friday night, the three of us drove down to South San Francisco to do some practice puzzling with our fouth member, Nathan. We did some puzzles from BANG 13: Trick-or-Bang. I think we had more fun just being together, but we did enjoy the puzzling as well, especially trying to solve the spiders puzzle and eventually taping pictures of spiders to Jonathan's fingers.

Nathan took leave of his wife and two kids so we could spend the night in San Fran, so we wouldn't have to travel so far to the Perplexcity Event. Nathan works for SIRF, a maker of GPS chips, so he volunteered some stuff he was working on to take with us to help during the next day (Given got the best use out of it, driving from South San Fran to Los Gatos), so we had to stop by his work before heading up to the City. While Nathan got the equipment and set it up, Jonathan, Given and I discussed some of the puzzles on the whiteboards. When all was ready, Nathan said this was one of the few times he was out without his wife and kids, so we were darned well gonna play some foosball on the table in their office! We humored him but had fun for about fifteen minutes before heading north to the City.

The Events Antecedent!

Jonathan's aunt owns an three level apartment complex valued, he says, at three million dollars. She's out of town, he got permission, so that's where we were staying. It was beautiful! Hardword floors, beautiful decorations, and plenty of high-tech stuff, not that we had any time to play with anything. We quickly divied up the beds (Given ended up with a floor mattress), got a late-night sleep.

After showers and oatmeal the next morning, we waited in the solarium-like living room as Jonathan got final software on his laptop, and we collected our things. Out the gate we went, when our first strike hits: Nathan's van has a flat tire. The first problem was actually finding the spare tire, since the van's makers had decided to hide it pretty well. Nathan eventually solved that puzzle though, and, getting the spare on quickly, we rush down to the Palace of Fine Arts, parked, make our way through a hole in the chain-link fence and finally end up at the theater.

(Part II - Soon to come...)