Long Overdue BATH 4 Finale

(Part 1 and Part 2}

Having gotten through the Sunset District's vampire clue, Jonathan, Given, Rob, Mark, and I headed north to Golden Gate Park. loxi's clue was there and we were looking forward to something to bolster our spirits — they were, after all, the same group who gave us the amazingly fun Ghost Patrol. Lucky for us, we weren't let down.

The "clue" we had been handed at the beginning was simply the directions to the real clue onsite. There, Jonathan used the combination indicated in the instructions to open a lockbox connected to a Greek-looking building edifice via a strong chain.

Inside, was a really long piece of paper with a really long grid of squares on it, as well as several single sheets of paper. Each single sheet had four images on it and a series of blanks below it, five of which were highlighted. The images, we soon figured, were funny combinations that would fit in the blanks. For example, there was a girl dressed in the almost standard "Sexy Sherlock Holmes Costume" for Halloween, standing underneath a streetlight. This was a PROSTITUTE DETECTIVE. Just as I was sitting down to start taking turns on the different sub-clues, Jonathan pointed out that the five highlighted blanks were always H or T (like the five Ts in the aforementioned example). Ah, heads or tails! A fine dichotomy to work with.

coed astronomy was there when we arrived and there's nothing like having another team in your solving area to encourage a little competitive spirit in our team. We quickly worked on solving each picture puzzle, passing it off to someone else when stuck, and repeating continuously.

At some point, Eric looked at the long document and realized that the two clues at the top solved to "blackhead" (type of pimple) and "whitetail" (type of deer). This gave us the colors to fill the grid in with. So Jonathan started filling in. Eventually, we got it nearly complete (a few of the picture puzzles still eluded us) and realized that in order to fold it accordion style like the directions indicated, we needed scissors. Which were back in the van.

As we walked back to our transport, Jonathan said basically screw it and marked them down on graph paper, grouped by every other column. This spelled out our answer. A fun, satisfying puzzle and definitely a good boost to our spirits.

Night had fallen as we opened the envelope for our final puzzle. In this case, we first had to solve a main clue to find the location solution word. Needing some refreshment, someone suggested we stop by a nearby Starbucks; however, in order to support local business we stopped at another coffee shop down the block. (We would return several times to Starbucks as our selected location did not have working bathroom facilities.)

Our clue consisted of sixteen photographs (half B&W, half color) with text on the back, a sheet of paper that clued the different dichotomies, an envelope that would reveal the code used but only in case of emergency, a paper titled "NIGHT AND DAY" (in green, red, and black colors) with a decoding structure and instructions on how to arrange the photos.

It's at this point I inwardly sighed a little. I had designed a puzzle not just similar to this but nearly exactly like it for something in the future. I hadn't yet showed it to anyone so I told my team that the black and white photographs would alternate within the 4x4 photo grid we were to assemble. "I can buy that," said Jonathan.

We set to organizing the grid based on some classic dichotomies from the clues (black/white, male/female, hot/cold), but quickly found that some of them were on the ambiguous side: Did the male refer to Obama, the king, the hot guy, or any of the animals? Did the white refer to the dove, the polar bear, the iceberg, or Sarah Palin? After some frustration, we got a configuration we were happy with and flipped the cards over. A bunch of tri-colored letters greeted us. After a little discussion about whether to use the included code sheet and a little mistake on my part involving speed-reading the use of said sheet, we (and by "we", I mean Jonathan) set to decoding. It became pretty clear, though, pretty quickly that something was wrong.

Every dichotomy was in play, the B&W squares alternated, everything made sense, there were no contradictions, and yet the decoding process was giving only gibberish. It was late and despite the coffee and pastries, energy began to ran low. I don't know how long it took us but suddenly somebody realized a problem: The arrangement of the 4x4 grid could be reflected across one diagonal. There was some... philosophical discussion at this point about the advisability of using a puzzle with two possible solutions (an ironic foreshadowing of an our performance in BANG 21), but eventually we decided to just read down instead of across.

Take a certain road until it dead-ends in a gate, the decoded message told us. And so we did. Three times. The road apparently was one of those streets that the named portion of which turns but the actual physical street keeps going. The very first false-positive dead-end had the gate in a private residence before explorer Mark finally found that the street to continue on.

After a few repeat performances, we finally found a cul-de-sac with a gate leading to a beach instead of a private residence. The fact that there were also a few vans there already, with people who looked vaguely coed astronomy-ish and Get on a Raft with Taft-ish was a helpful indicator. There was bad news, though.

The gate that lead down to the beach closed at 6pm, making the solution to the puzzle all but impossible to access. Ian informed us that because of this, the team that had set up this clue said that just bringing the CD would be good enough to consider the puzzle solved. Ah yes, there attached to the gate via bike lock was a stack of CDs with a bunch of handwriting over each one:

Contents of CD are for souvenir purposes only - Not part of the clue. Walk through the gate & down the steps. At the bottom of the staircase, bear right away from Robin's bench. At the 4-way intersection head the right-hand way up. Keeping the fence to your left, continue approx. 125 strides past the black door on your right. After about 50 more strides, turn right where the path leads down to the red fence.

The whole point now what to simply figure out the combination to the lock, grab a CD, and leave. In talking with Ian, though, it sounded that so far, there hadn't been much accomplished besides frustration among the other teams. He went back to his team to keep trying new theories.

And I was pretty much done. It was the dreaded "no longer having fun" point of the puzzle for me. Given, Jonathan, and Eric headed back to the van to figure out if they could wrestle a combination out of the photos. One of our teammates decided he'd had enough, broke off one of the CDs for the instructions, borrowed my flashlight, and hopped the fence (he had been especially frustrated by the vampire clue). Soon he was lost to the dark.

Not too long afterwards, as I was trying random combinations on the lock, coed astronomy came up, opened the lock, pulled a CD, and offered one to me. I declined, saying that we hadn't solved it yet, and indicated for them to close it back up. This was probably bad form on my part, or at least very impolite: Other teams had been there longer than us and were very frustrated with the puzzle, so I should have asked if they wanted the same opportunity that I had turned down.

Other teams came, and I explained the situation to them. I began to worry about our teammate wandering a crooked, steep beach path in near total darkness. Time passed.

I don't remember which came first: Our solve or his return. At some point, though, someone on our team figured out that the coloring of the letters was an embedded ternary code (or something; I seriously didn't care) and was able to unlock a CD. At another point, our teammate made it back, having recovered a laminated sheet of paper that was hanging from a tree. Basically, we got both solutions to the puzzle and headed out. (It wasn't until later when we were on our way to the meet up at the restaurant that we realized the puzzle creators hadn't placed the sheet there.)

Finally, done.

The restraunt was fun. I actually had some energy left to be social and talked with various people about various things. Mostly puzzles, sure, but various puzzles. Voting time came, and we put ours for the one we had the most fun on: Mystic Fish's dome assembly. coed astronomy's decision tree clue would have been our second choice.

When all the scoring and voting for favorite puzzles were added up, we came in second, our highest finish to date! Beat one again by coed astronomy, though... and Mystic Fish later told us that it was pretty close for them whether to vote for ca's or our puzzle. Ah well, it was all good fun. And a great way to create an event that "GC" actually gets to play in. I hope it happens again.

BATH 4 Experiences, Pt. 2

Skipping past our own sector, we headed towards the Burninator's clue at Stonestown Galleria. First, we had to solve twenty-six clues that generally were play-on-word descriptions of stores at said mall. We got some of them from a list on the web site, more from the store directory (after surviving the parking), and eventually got all but two or three by wandering the mall itself. We tried splitting up into two teams, but seemed to end up doing redundant checks instead of solving faster.

All during the hunt, obviously, Eric was fielding hint requests and answer confirmations. The most common hint was "Look at the flavor text." The first team to solve it was Bloodied by Science, who's comment that Eric's puzzle had a very satisfying conclusion certainly bolstered our confidence that we'd made the right choice in going with his puzzle over the one Jonathan and I had been working on.

One response had kind of worried us, though: Jesse of loxi (aka Lowkey and Desert Taxi, aka Ghost Patrol GC) called and confirmed their answer and kind of abruptly hung up. "I guess they didn't like it very much," Eric said with a sigh.

At the mall, though, we ran into loxi in the food court and they assured us that they had enjoyed the puzzle. "You don't have to be so cold about it," they had joked to him after he hung up. I'm guessing it was just one of those times where the vocal tone doesn't always match the emotions (something I have to watch out for myself). But it was all good.

We finished up the mall clue a short while later. It had felt like a huge time sink, but in reality we still had five hours, maybe more, to finish off the three remaining clues. No problem, we could take our time, relax, and try and power through any blockages we might come across.

Which we hit fairly quickly. The next clue was in the Sunset District. It was divided into three sub-clues, with a page full of flavor text describing three murders done by vampires. Along with those were several folded pieces of small paper in a bag labeled "Hints". A discussion broke out as to whether these were the equivalent of the a hint line and whether they were "real" hints or just part of the puzzle. We called the Longshots and asked, and their answer made us think they were real hints that would cost us. This turned out to be a huge mistake on our part.

Each of the clues indicated that it was related to one of the murders at the corner of two cross-streets. The clues looked incomplete, so our obvious assumption was that we needed to be at those locations to solve. We went to each one in turn and found absolutely nothing. This was discouraging. Eric had kind of solved the one similar to a word jumble (later it turned out he'd only half-solved it), and the other two we attacked at many different angles. None of them worked. But we didn't look at the paper hints; only an hour had passed and we still had plenty of time. We would not take a hint.

A half hour later, only a little progress had been made. Jonathan had solved the other half of the word jumble-ish sub-clue and it gave us a location. Sensing we needed to connect the location of the murder and the solve location, Rob decided to drive along that path to see if anything jumped out at us. What else did we have to do?

More time passed and frustration levels were high all around. Finally, I told my team that I would look at the hints. If they were something that the rest of team could eventually solve, I would recuse myself; otherwise I would reveal the hint. I opened the first one: "It is a cryptogram" it read. We had tried to solve that sub-clue as a cryptogram; however, Jonathan's crypto-solver software gave over a hundred possibilities for the title, so we pretty much permanantly discarded the idea. I told them the hint.

Solving quickly, it gave us another location, and drawing a line again gave us a point where it crossed the previous one. The clue said it could be solved with only two of the sub-clues solved, so we headed to that point. We had figured we were looking for dolphins (based on the back of each sheet), but also some wording in the flavortext lead us to think that we might be looking for a bell instead. But again, nothing was there.

While searching that location, Jonathan remarked "Why else would they give us this map if they didn't want us to draw these lines and come to this location?" And since we had already marked down that we'd taken a hint, I told him that I'd read another hint and it indicated that the map was to solve the third sub-clue. Jonathan quickly figured out that the ages and flavors on the blood-tasting menu indicated streets and avenues. Drawing along them revealed our third location. The line it gave us criss-crossed in the same location we were in, so it hadn't been much help.

We got back in the van and drove some more along each of the different paths, and then ended up wandering at random. We always kept to one side of Sunset Blvd.; the flavortext said not to be out after sunset and we had taken that as a hint to not cross to the other side.

Eventually, I took a look at the "Lair" hints and it revealed that the location was a reflection across Sunset. Our team let out a collective "grrrr" and we headed over towards the beach.

Our estimates put us at a certain location, but again, no dolphins, no bells. We began to spread out, since our "reflection" may have not been exact. We even went to far as to explore the beach, where Given said he had run into another team who said what we were looking for was on the beach (we never saw the person, but we had been misdirected by non-participants before).

Eventually, we wandered by a colorful house that had tons of animals painted on it. It looked promising, plus coed astronomy was looking around the same location. A guy hanging out in the garage, almost asleep in the back of his car, asked us what we were doing. We gave him the usual spiel and asked if he had any dolphins painted anywhere on his house. "No way man," he said in either a surfer's or toker's accent (or both). I decided to move on.

A few seconds later, however, I spotted some dolphins painted on the gate. So much for our informant's credibility. Eventually, one of us spotted the life preserver with the answer on it between a pair of dolphins on the top floor. Exhausted and relieved, we finally moved on.

BATH4 Puzzle Origins; or A Study in Chaos

When the Smoking GNU was invited to participate in BATH 4, we looked forward to it for two reasons: a) it's a puzzle hunt; and b) it might give us a chance to redeem ourselves from our disastrous showing at Iron Puzzler (an event from which I can say definitively that it's not a good idea to change clear letters into coke bottles representing semaphore because you don't think that using Frankenstein as the wallpaper for an autostereogram covers the ingredient requirement enough). The first step, of course, was to choose a sector to place the puzzle in.

Jonathan and I came up with some basic requirements for our location: It should be interesting, should be accessible during the length of the hunt, hopefully be inside in case of rain, and maybe most importantly, it should have easy and free parking. Places such as the main branch of the library and the building where Sam Spade had his office were considered, but ultimately rejected.

After much discussion and debating, we decided our choices would be the one that might have live gnus (kind of funny after we found out where this year's GC Summit was to be held), the one with the 25-foot tube slide, and a third, throwaway choice.

After getting assigned the last, I scoured Google street view to see if there was anything interesting. The best I could do was a playground with a map of the U.S. on it, but it looked like it was solidly padlocked. Despairing, I looked to as-of-yet unclaimed sectors and found an interesting, possibly haunted cave/tunnel at the Sutro Bath ruins. I wasn't sure we could find a solution word there, except perhaps in graffiti.

Given and I finally went out to scout our sector and found nothing. Well, we did find a post that had "Jenna Earth Day 06" scrawled on it, which we could have used in a "Who attended Earth Day three years ago?" question. But somehow, it just kind of lacked the "punch" we were hoping for.

Midway through driving from there to the cave, we stopped when we spotted this beautiful white fountain at a roundabout. Not a single identifying word was on it. But the environmental contrast from the sector we'd just come from was so great, so we just started looking around when we stumbled upon the St. Francis Wood fountain. It had tons of inscribed bricks and quote from the Song of Solomon on its centerpiece. Compared to the drought of data were we had been, this truly was a garden of possibilities. There were no parking difficulties, birds were singing ("And not seagulls!"), and it didn't even feel like you were in San Francisco.

Leaving the fountain and heading towards the cave, we spotted another interesting place in a different sector, but didn't have time to look at it. We were running out of time though and figured when Jonathan was visiting the following weekend we could scout it then.

The first thing I noticed when we arrived at the Sutro Baths ruins was that parking was terrible. It was free, which was good, but it took us 10-15 minutes to find parking. It was not a good sign. The ruins were pretty neat, especially keeping in mind the amzing structure that was once there. The cave was also kind of neat, but the graffiti I was hoping for had been worn away by the salt air or pasted over by a greenish-concrete. There was some amazing graffiti on the rocks outside the far end of the cave/tunnel, but it was indechipherable (to us anyway) and who knows how long it would be there. That only left us with the "Danger" sign or the band sticker on its back as a possible solution. Not ideal.

Jonathan and I had been talking about what we wanted our puzzle to be for the past couple months. We came to the consensus that we wanted one that would first solve to the destination, then once at the destination, would resolve to instructions as to which word to take as the answer. Good structure, we thought, only that with three weeks to go, the number of puzzles we had come up with was exactly zero.

During the week between the first scouting trip (sans Jonathan) and the second (with Jonathan), I had an idea. I didn't think it was a very good one, but it worked. The first layer would have solvers decide to take a letter based on whether the first or last name of a person on memorial bricks matched with the first or last name of somebody famous (a weak dichotomy, I know). It solved to "ST FRANCIS AND SAN ANSELMO". At that location, all the names on the bricks fell within twenty-six spaces of each other, and thus represented letters. It spelled out "UPPER FOUNTAIN SONG AUTHOR". On the upper part of the fountain was an engraved quote from SOLOMON.

I told my teammates that it worked, but was clunky in execution.

Jonathan came up for the second scouting expidition, providing good opportunity to test it out. The test went well, but Given and Jonathan agreed it was clunky and that it should be our backup puzzle. So we went to the site we had spotted earlier but hadn't explored (if there's ever a similar BATH that we get invited to, we plan to use it), and got some good ideas to go with it. We started working on what we planned would be our primary puzzle. We worked on it for about week, when Eric pointed out that the sector that it was in was actually taken...

So now the former backup puzzle became our primary. It needed cleaning up, so we began really pounding it out. A week went by and things were not looking good. The first/last name matching was deemed not a real dichotomy and some of the brick names were really causing problems. It had to change... but how?

At 2:30 am, the Wednesday morning before BATH 4, I woke up and had an idea that was a definite dichotomy and would be a lot more fun then matching first/last names. At 3am, I sent off a trial version to Jonathan. He had fun with it. So with only three days to go, we were completely revising our puzzle.

The next day, an email came in from Eric. He had a backup puzzle for us. It was a crossword with two grids. I solved the crossword but didn't spend much effort on going any further, instead concentrating on getting our primary puzzle ready for production. Jonathan stayed up until 4am getting work done on his end.

Early Friday evening, I get a call from Jonathan. Had I tried Eric's puzzle yet? Yes, but not to completion. He then told me how it worked.

"Damn him," I told him. "It's better."

It was more elegant than what we had been working on. It worked really well. We were impressed.

"We need to decide which we're going to go with," Jonathan told me. "But I'm leaning towards Eric's."

As was I. First, though, we sent both puzzles off to many people to try. Most people preferred Eric's. A few people preferred ours. Finally, we got Given to try it. He needed a hint, the exact same one we gave out most often during the actual hunt, but solved it, and preferred it.

So at 10:30pm the night before the hunt, we told Eric we were going with his puzzle.

It ended up being ironic, as Eric had also wanted to redeem him unsolvable puzzle from an earlier Iron Puzzler. Condering the positive feedback, including a favorite vote from Get on a Burning Raft, I'd say he did exactly that.

BATH 4 Pictures and Experiences (Part 1)

(There is the possibility that BATH4 would be run again. In which case, there could be spoilers here.)

BATH 4: DIY. Much to our surprise, we took 2nd! And took pictures! And (some) people like our puzzle! And by our puzzle, I mean Eric Prestemon's. But that's, as Alton Brown might say, another post.

Joining Given, Jonathan, Eric, and myself, were Rob ("You guys only invite me cuz I own a van") and Mark, his second hunt and first "public" one. It was a lot of fun, with some good puzzles and a few that weren't to our liking. Mark was especially frustrated with one puzzle, thought to be fair, we were all frustrated with it.

Our first puzzle had us walking around AT&T park, matching photos to points on a map. It was a good puzzle to get us started. Jonathan got some good-natured ribbing about his inability to recognize Willie May's statue from behind and Mark and Rob threatened to solder a needle to Barry Bonds' arm on his plaque.

Deciding to move around the city (somewhat) clockwise, we next visited coed astronomy's site, where we filtered a series of tiles through a decision tree. When we got the answer and were heading away in the van, coed astronomy asked us to sing the answer. Apparently, I lead a sheltered life, since I had no real recollection of the song and wondered what the heck my teammates were singing. A darned good puzzle, and probably the one that made best use of its environment.

We stopped at a Taco Bell to tackle Mystic Fish's excellent word-connection puzzle, which often forced compound words out of non-compounded words (such as connecting "prose" and "cute"). Bit by bit, we got a dome built and saw the directions around the edge leading us to a play park. Which had a climbing dome. Which we climbed, got locations on the mini-dome, took words, found pun directions, and solved. Very fun, very clever puzzle. It got our vote for best puzzle in the end.

Next, we stopped at a pizza place that Rob said was where he went 30 years ago for pizza while in college. There, we solved Ian's fun portable puzzle and got a receipt out of it. We were able to finish the puzzle before finishing the pizza... but that includes baking time.

We drove further south to the next sector on our list. We were to find a gray Cadillac after solving a puzzle where different names were hidden in sentences. At first they appeared to be countries, with a few odd ones thrown in. Then Eric, looking at his laminated map of the City, saw that they were all street names within a certain grid. After getting all the street names out of the puzzle, we realized two were missing, so we drove to where they crossed.

We looked all over the four blocks adjacent to that corner, but did not spot a single Cadillac. Mark got out of the van to scout on foot. "Wouldn't it be funny," I told my remaining teammates, "If it were on that mural on the playground?" I was only 10% serious; it seemed an unlikely subject for a grade school mural. But when Mark rejoined us a bit later, he confirmed my little joke. The license plate was our answer.

Coming soon: A mall, a stall, and jump off a wall.

Bright side of BATH 4

Me: Do you think our puzzle will be the worst one there?

Jonathan: If it is, at least we'll get to solve the ten best puzzles.

Apologies For: Feminine Interference and Nonoriddle Delays

Last week my daughter was somehow able to publish an unfinished and unedited blog post of mine regarding a playtest experience. Amazing what a three-year-old can do. I hope to have it completed, revised, and less whiny soon.

With BATH 4 approaching fast, it seems like working on a puzzle for it has sapped all my creative energy. This is probably why no new nonoriddles have been up lately. It seems like every time I go to brainstorm new ones, suddenly I'm trying to interpret "dichotomy" in puzzley ways. (I'm going to assume that the fact that this dryspell also corresponds with "Lost" starting up again is a coincidence.)

NMS Results Show & Analysis

After spending the entire day yesterday in San Francisco securing a passport ("There's one word I just love to hear...") for my daughter and the evening with a downed server, I found out that Coed Astronomy had released their wrapup of No More Secrets, including the full leaderboard, so we could see just how badly we did.

You can see where our navigation problems came in, since the solve times often include travel time. For example, the Karaoke puzzle at the entrance of Microsoft probably only took maybe ten minutes, but we're listed at 37 minutes, showing that at a minimum our trip time was 27 minutes. Since most other teams made the trip in 10 minutes or so, it shows just how much we need to improve our navigation.

In contrast, the Text Adventure puzzle required no travel or navigation, and our solve time of an hour was very competitive with other teams. In fact, only two other teams (The Burninators and Loaded Bonbons) solved it faster.

The one that really killed us was the Bugged clue. It took us 75 minutes over the average of the other teams to solve, and about a half hour longer than the next slowest team for that puzzle. Our first mistake was the location directions: It said something about heading over to 17 at Felton, which we took to mean to travel to 17 Felton Rd. in Cupertino, instead of heading over the 17 freeway down to the city of Felton. I don't know how much time we wasted figuring that out.

After nearly arriving, we decided to get some food, so ten minutes of time was spent going into McDonalds and getting our laptops setup while our orders arrived. Which means we spent maybe an hour and a half actually working on what other teams felt was an easy and obvious puzzle. We still are kicking ourselves for not calling for a hint/confirmation of theories sooner and for not recognizing Bjork=B Ark. But then, our entire team is so allergic to puns, we've trained ourselves to not spot them. Yes, that collective groan you heard across the Santa Clara County was our team's response to "No Morse Egrets".

Apart from that and one or two other clues, our team is satisfied with our actual solution times, feeling that they reflected our abilities well, and were relatively on par with other teams. Our travel times, however, definitely need to be improved. Hopefully, we'll incorporate what we've learned when The Smoking GNU (under the guise of Möbius BrigANDs) plays in Pirates BATH in a week. Sadly, I'll be missing it, since I'll be making good use of my passport that weekend.