1 GNU + 3 Meat Machines = Shinteki Decathlon 5 Playtest (Part 2)

(Part 1 here)

Clue 6: Color Blind

We drove a little further up the road for our next clue at one of the Marin Headlands batteries. We searched all over the battery for someone from Shinteki GC, but saw no one. Were we early? Did we have the wrong place? Is that a Port-a-Potty down there?

After I got out, Erik had somehow got ahold of the puzzle. It was four mini-clues with a box of large box of Crayola crayons, the size of which I coveted as a kid. We pretty quickly realized that we had to divide the crayons between each of the minis. Since two team members were relatively color-blind and Erik was already working on another mini, I started on the mini that was basically matching smudges of color to crayon names.

It was about then that this hunt went downhill for me.

We put all the crayons in the back of the van and handed them to each team members as they figured out that they needed them, Erik in solving trivia questions, George in deciphering French, and Jason in working with the weird cut-off crayons that ended up bring binary somehow. I was pretty sure from the start that I needed to determine whether each color smudge in the grid was actually part of the crayon package and use that data as a bump/no-bump indicator for a Braille grid. All that needed to be done now was determine which of the fifty or so smudges were real Crayola colors...

(In hindsight, we should have done this mini last: We would then have had the definitive set of crayon colors that would be used on the sheet.)

After what seemed like an hour or so of rubbing possible crayons around and sometimes through the smudges, I had bupkis. Well, I had letters, but they weren't making any sense. So I went to see if I could help any of the others. I couldn't figure out the few trivia questions Erik had left and George seemed all over the French mini.

So I joined Jason trying to fit his as a binary code. He showed me one way to do it, I told him it made sense. He told me it didn't work. Then he showed me another way. Made sense, I told him again. Doesn't work either, he said. So we sat for another half-hour or so trying to make these clipped-off crayons into a binary message. I think in the actual event they had a color wheel available; for us, we ended up needing a hint.

Eventually, after free hints (and maybe some non-free ones), we figured out each of the minis (Erik came in and worked out my mistakes on the color grid, found the answer — TURN OVER — whereupon he turned over the card to find the answer written in white), decided they each referred to a colored Clue character, GREEN, WHITE, PLUM, and SCARLETT. The missing color, Mustard, was the killer and solution. Or something like that; I was mentally fried and frustrated by that point.

Clue 7 - Posters in the Park

I'm a big fan of the North Bay; it's why I live here. But for all of the "Bay Area" in the BANG name, there have been, what, two of them north of the Golden Gate Bridge? So I'm always happy when we venture that way in a hunt. Our next clue took us to a water-side park in Sausalito, which was indicated by a crazy art car. We got out and George gave me a pose for the camera before we went searching for the puzzle.

And we ended up doing a lot of searching. We were looking for posters. It wasn't a big park, but for some reason we seemed to have difficulty finding all the parts of the puzzle. Maybe it would be different in the actual event with a lot of teams swarming from poster to poster. But even the transients in the park were making fun of us as we searched for these posters.




Eventually, we located and photographed them all. We sat on a fence, looking at a Howard Stern-like DJ named "Shockey", debating how to use this data. Well, there were seven posters and each poster had a fake superhero character whose name was seven letters long on it. This suggested a count-in indexing, if only we could figure out an order.

Well, it's a color-based hunt and there were seven colors in the traditional rainbow spectrum (we ignored, momentarily, the point that Roy G. Bv had made about indigo, like Pluto, being removed from the standard). It seemed a fair way to do it, but although some of the posters had solid color backgrounds, others had mixed coloring.

Perhaps, someone suggested, there was something color-related in each picture? The Palm Pilot that Mrs. Palm was holding, assuming it was the same as the one we had, would be blue. Deep Tan could be orange. But what color would, say, Clarity be? And why were her fingers in such an odd position anyway?

As we were sitting there thinking it over, mulling different ideas, a free hint popped up that nudged is into understanding that each picture had something not just from the color spectrum, but the entire electromagnetic spectrum (e.g. Show Off = x-ray, Col. Pops = microwave, Shockey = radio, etc.). That gave us our ordering, which gave us our indexing, and then the solution. We were off.

Clue 8 - The Slippery Elephant

We worked our way further up north to some shopping center, where we were told to look for an elephant in a fountain. Not seeing it immediately, we asked some guy going by. "Yeah, that's through there and just around the corner. It's kind of slippery lookin'." We cracked a few jokes amongst ourselves about a "Slippery Elephant" being a likely cocktail name.

We found GC at a coffee shop, grabbed the clue, and headed nearby to get some food at an Italian deli (frugal me brought a sandwich). We sat in the corner and got to work on what turned out to be a word search, two copies provided.

The two-copy scenario can be a strange one. It always seems to lead to some sort of awkwardness when solving. We decided to divide the work, with Eric and Jason taking the horizontal and George and I taking vertical. No word list was given, but we quickly found that the all the words in the grid were crayon colors from the crayon box we had been given earlier. Jason volunteered to be the crayon wrangler, as we were trying to circle the colors in their own color. He organized the crayons quite deftly, which was to our advantage later.

Things got confusing with the split duty and after a while we went about it very systematically, transferring our finds to Erik's paper. A message started to appear from the left over letters and I begin to write it down while Erik continued adding finds at the lower half of the grid. I ran out of room along the side of the clue and had to start working on another piece of paper. The message indicated that there were more layers yet to go. I inwardly groaned; I was tired of crayon puzzles. But the team persevered, so I did too.

The next layer required us to find spots where crayons with the same sleeve colors intersected. Jason pretty much had that read for us, so we set about finding and marking those spots. The revealed instructions said to consider the three letters to that spot's right. Okay, nice letters, but what to do with them? Then we noticed that there were only zero, one, or two words that used those letters. A ternary light bulb turned on in all our heads practically simultaneously.

Somewhere around this time, the deli closed and we were politely asked to move to the courtyard. The light was fading as we gathered around a table and Brent joined us. The decoded ternary message said to mark the colors with six letters on them. We found those crayons, marked them, and came away with the answer: INK.

All in all, it was an impressive puzzle and I'm glad we worked through it, instead of punting when we got to layer 15 or 23. However, that choice did costs us.

Clue 9 - Skipped

Shinteki GC said that clue 9 was the least interesting of all the puzzles; since we were running late and they wanted us to try the final clue, we were skipped over it.

Clue 10 - The Revenge of the Colorblind

Finally, we're in San Rafael, where, not a month earlier, The Smoking GNU had hosted BANG 22 and a scant twelve hours earlier I had been wanting to yell at some guy for not keeping the parts of the Park and Ride open that they weren't working on yet.

Our clue was in an ice cream shop. It was on a DVD, so while Erik got it set up, the rest of Meat Machine took turns getting fattening foods (I decided on a milkshake, yum!). The movie showed some numbers and then colored bars, and then a white screen. I was reminded immediately of the "Revelation" card from Perplex City, which made use of the negative afterimage effect. We went through it several times, and the funny thing is that Jason, who claimed to be pretty strongly color-blind, was best able to replicate this effect. Although I could see the after images, I had problems keeping them visible for long. (I think my 20/20 left eye, 20-150 right eye vision might have had something to do with it.)

They were all pretty much vertical or horizontal stripes. We discussed what to do with them. I thought that the color changes would be consistent across the board and that they could be figured out without actually looking at the screen; however, but neither I nor anyone else seemed to have the energy to give it a try. I mentioned that they might be flags, but this idea was discarded because no one could remember a flag with four vertical stripes.

Eventually, we did come to the conclusion that they were flags (maybe with a free hint, I don't remember) and so I went to my backpack to grab my handy dandy almanac. Only it wasn't there! When preparing I checked the list of things that were required to bring and apparently I went pretty strictly by that list. Usually (and ever since then!), I always bring a dictionary, thesaurus, and almanac. I felt I'd let my team and myself down. (Brent later told us that they had specifically left it off the list of helpful things to see how many teams would bring one.)


No one else had brought one either, so we checked the GPS for a book store, found a Borders nearby, and headed over there. There, in the cramped reference section, the four of us sat on the floor and went through the inverse flags, and finally had all of the positive images and had them identified. We used the numbers at the beginning of the film to index into each country name and come up with "STARE AT YEMEN". So we took the inverse of the Yemen flag as the answer.

Bonus Clues

Finally, we were done! Our ending location was... the ice cream shop we'd just left. Back there, we found out that the other two teams were having car problems and probably wouldn't arrive for a bit, meaning they would miss the final clue. Brent gave us the bonus clues to work on in the meantime... they would be for the teams that finished early, he explained.


We had actually already done a few bonus clues during the main hunt, but we really only paid attention to one: A CD with several songs on it, all mentioning numbers. We figured they were visible wavelengths, but I don't think we were able to extract an answer.

Our bronze bonus was a crossword labeled "Synesthesia", which was crossed out and retitled "Colorblind". Several of the crossword squares were in gray. After a bit, we hit upon the idea that they were each a color, so that the "RED" in "REDCROSS" all fit into one square. That worked for some clues, but still created conflicts. I mentioned that maybe the "Colorblind" title meant that the color of the grey square could be interpretted two ways, as if colorblind. So by putting "GREEN" in the same sqaure as the "RED" in "REDCROSS", we could finally solve the down clue to "GREENDAY". Okay, so then what? We were completely stumped as to how to make it all a single answer. Brent eventually gave us a nudge, saying that they were thinking of putting the color wheel on the crossword sheet. So I drew out a color wheel, and with a further nudge, drew a Braille grid overlapping it. The colors in the grey square could then be treated as bumps, giving us the letters we needed. "You always," Brent said with a grin, "treat a clue with 'blind' anywhere in it as Braille!" I mumbled a reply about the "colorblind" reference being used, but then realized it wasn't true: A couple squares had had three colors in them.

The silver bonus consisted of a 3x3 grid of black and white pictures with star ratings above each, indicating that these pictures represented movies. We pretty quickly realized that since the pictures were B&W, we needed to fill in a color to get a film title. So a picture of chicks became "WHITE CHICKS" and one a close-up of Mickey Mouse's eyes became "MICKEY BLUE EYES". The star rating indicated which letter to take, giving us TED TURNER.

I never saw the gold bonus: As we finished the silver one, the two other teams arrived and it was time to be debriefed.

And if I had been able to park at the San Rafael Park and Ride, it would have been a short walk to my car and a half-hour drive home. As it was, I got to spend some more time hanging out with Erik, Jason, and George before being dropped off at the Exploratorium. I had had a really good day solving with them and was happy they'd let me join them. But for some reason I couldn't put my finger on, I didn't enjoy the hunt itself as much as I had Shinteki Decathlon 4. It would be several weeks before I could figure out why.

1 GNU + 3 Meat Machines = Shinteki Decathlon 5 Playtest (Part 1)

Pre-game: Pandemonium

Just as I sat down to my computer to send an email to the Shinteki Decathlon 5 organizers to ask if any playtest teams might be in need of an extra, up pops an email: "Meat Machine is looking for a single player to fill our team for the playtest of Shinteki Decathlon..." Talk about perfect timing! I fired off an email to them and a week later I found myself parking at the Exploratorium to meet my new team at Crissy Field.

My original plan didn't include Exploratorium parking. Since the hunt ended in San Rafael, having to drive back to down San Francisco in order to drive back up to Santa Rosa seemed like a waste. However, the Park & Ride in San Rafael was completely closed and I could find no other suitable place to park in order take the bus. I was pretty pissed off, not a great way to start the day.

Arriving early due to not being on the bus, Brent asked why I hadn't turned in an answer for the Shinteki Puzzle of the Month for June, which had come out the day before. I had taken a look at it, but as I told Brent, I had wanted to save whatever brainpower I had for the playtest.

With still a little time to go, I asked about how long it took to develop a Decathlon. Brent said they'd actually had this idea brewing for a couple years or so, but it usually took them about nine months to put one together.

Finally, teams arrived and I got to meet Meat Machine, captained by Erik, and co-teammates Jason and George. We had actually been in a playtest together before: Meat Machine was one of the other teams in the Ghost Patrol playtest.

Clue 1: Some Light Trivia

Three teams were supposed to be there for the playtest, but although Darcy's team was there, the other one was having problems and would meet us for the second clue. Brent went out and explained that this was a spectrum themed hunt and that he was Roy G Bv. Our first clue would have one member of each team lining up to answer a trivia question. But it wasn't knowing the answer that was so important, it was whether the teammate could snag the ball of the color that matched the answer on the way across the field. Get the right ball, and they went to the winner's circle. When all your team was in the winner's circle, they could proceed to the next clue.

Erik and Jason got into the winner's circle after a few questions, and I was feeling a bit nervous. Of the questions asked so far, I had gotten most of them wrong in my head, even getting red-shift and blue-shift confused. However, I got an easy one dealing with the Hulk. Soon after, George joined us in the circle and we were on our way.

Clue 2: Electric Boogalo

We walked across the street. The missing team joined us as we headed into the Exploratorium. I had been there twice before in the past six months. Since part of the puzzle dealt with locating different exhibits and extracting a single letter from it, I was feeling confident that my experience would make for relatively fast searching. Unfortunately, apart from the "A-Ha" exhibit, this was not really the case.

I think this was the "Teamwork" puzzle of the Decathlon, but having everything in the Palm made it difficult to work together as a team. We started out with all four of us testing the steam machine ("Is that an 'O'?" "I'm pretty sure it is, but let's try it four or five more times just to make sure it doesn't change."), and tried a scatter-until-exibit-found-and-then-everyone-come-look-at-it method, which quickly proved inefficient. We then tried having one person (me) reading off exibit names to different teammates who would go seek it out, kind of a deploy-and-report methodology. While both brought the single letters we required, neither seemed particularly efficient.

Eventually, we had all the letters we needed. And the message didn't make sense: There were too many X's, W's, and other out-of-place characters. None of wanted to go through the entire three-level clue system to try and find out which letters were wrong (I found out later that simply tapping the letter would bring up the appropriate clue). Eventually, we figured that with a few letter changes, we could make the name of an exhibit and a color. We went to that exhibit, found an electric wire glowing that color, and entered the element the wire was made out of. Success!

Clue 3: Playing with Flags

As we drove to the next site for Wild Card, I finally got a chance to talk a little socially with Meat Machine. They have an interesting team dynamic which seems to be along the lines of "We know we're not going to do the greatest, but we'll damn well have a good time anyway!" Good energy, good people, and probably better solvers than they think. Our conversation steered towards relating different incidences in our puzzle hunting career. Erik had read my blog (I always feel the need to apologize to those who do for some strange reason), so it was funny when trying to talk about some of my experiences and then suddenly realizing "Oh, you already know about that."

We arrived at the location for Wild Card and sent George and Jason down to the corner to grab the puzzle. The corner was full of people and colorful objects of all sorts; gay pride was abundant. The balloons caught my attention, since they were in rainbow order and we were playing a game about the light spectrum, hosted by Roy G Bv. But those were not for us.

Erik and I sat in the car for a while and eventually lost sight of our two teammates. Time passed and nobody emerged. Eventually, Erik dispatched me to find our team and communicated with him as to what to do. I wandered around the corner for a bit, but saw no Shinteki GC and no George or Jason. After a few more minutes, they finally did show up: The Wild Card was a store and we now had a bunch of rainbow flags to play with.

We got out on the sidewalk and laid all the flags on the ground. Each had six different colors on it and no two were in the same order. We discussed what to do with them, how to order them, how to get data from them, and exactly what the heck we were supposed to do with them. The "Bi" comment on the envelope had us thinking binary... but how?

After many attempts, I had a flash of inspiration as to ordering. Erik then had a flash of genius for extracting a binary number from each flag (if the colors not used in ordering were in correct order, take it as a 1; if not, take it as a 0). It worked! And we were out, far faster than I'd have thought after our first look at it.

Clue 4: Disorientated

That solution confidence energy only lasted us until we got our next clue: A series of hexagon magnets, with different colored sections divided by different colored lines, along with an outline to place them on. GC said lunch wasn't quite ready, but find a spot to solve and they'd bring it out to us. Five minutes later, we found parking several blocks away with the only shade around. I didn't think GC would ever find us.

So we started putting hexagons on the board. There was already one in the center, giving us something to build off of. So we started placing them as best we could.

(I should mention at this point that one or two members of Meat Machine had admitted to being a somewhat color blind. They didn't have problems with the previous puzzle, but this one did give them an extra challenge.)

We kept finding contradictions, though, and began to get a little frustrated. Eventually, a free hint opened up which let us know there were actually only a few different iterations of the hexagons. So we sorted them into piles and decided we're only going to place pieces if they can absolutely be proven that they can go there (i.e. no future contradictions would arise). So we started over and made slow, but steady progress.

Along the way, we got a free hint that totally derailed us. Once everything was in place, it said, look at how the green lines ("with help") spell out OK. Cool, we thought, we just have to do the same with the other colors and we'd have the answer. We tried looking at it like that, but nothing made sense to our eyes. So we grabbed the flags from the previous clue, snapped them in pieces, and laid them out on the board along one color to see if we could get more letters. We did this for each color before giving up.

Ian from GC called. Where were we? Food was ready. Somebody volunteered to go grab the grub while the rest of us tried to make sense of what we had. Food got back, we ate, drank, and thought.

I blinked. I can't believe I missed it, but one of the letters on the tiles was different. It was green. Following the green line that extended from that green letter, a message spelled out "SWAP COLUMNS ONE AND SEVEN; THREE AND FIVE TOO". "Seriously?" our team asked of each other. "Take a picture first," someone said. "Just in case there's more info on it we need or if we have to put it back to the original state." (Somewhat ironic when we found out one of the bonus puzzles required the tiles to be in the original state to solve.) So I did and we swapped the columns.

Once the swap was made, we noticed the white lines now spelled something: "SPIN 120" with a triangle used to indicate degrees. Fair enough, we though, and turned the entire board around one hundred and twenty degrees. For all we knew, looking at it from that angle would have revealed the MGM lion with the letters ANU on its collar. But it didn't and owing to the fact that we were all sitting around the board, the rotation would have made little difference anyway: One of us would have been in the right orientation.

We'd been working on this puzzle well over an hour now and Ian dropped by to see how we were doing. We were frustrated, going over the possibility of which 120 degrees to spin the board and discussing whether GC would actually have had a solution go through that process. Eventually, we either figured out or got hinted that it was each individual hexagon that we had to rotate 120 degrees. We did that and got our answer from the black lines.

Personally, I was a) really impressed with the amount of design work that went into it; while at the same time being, b) disappointed that we went down the wrong path and that the puzzle ended up being more of a "follow the instructions" thing.

Clue Five: Tuning In

Our next clue lay across the Golden Gate on the Marin Headlands. We were heading to one of the batteries. As we parked along the coast, several hundred feet up, one of my teammates said, "I never get tired of that view." Neither did I, so I snapped a picture. I also grabbed a few more of other scenic things, but nothing about the puzzle.

We hiked through a tunnel and up a hill to find GC waiting for us. We had to split into two, draw some words from a bag, and then do charades of them. The odd thing, though, is that we were given a list of all words that were to be in the bag, aka the NATO phonetic alphabet. George and Jason did their two words, followed by Erik and I. We drew "Charlie" and "Papa", so I got down on my knees and did my best to look up adoringly at Papa Erik doing his rendition of Charlie Chaplin.

Our clue, it was explained to us after our performance, was to have another part to it in the actual event, but for now here's this radio. It was tuned to some radio station about 3/4 of the way through the band. I gave the dial an experimental twist and realized we'd have to find a signal. Two thoughts struck me then: First, if they were using a short-distance radio broadcast, it was probably going to be in the lower band; and second, it's probably be easier to do a systematic search for the signal and start at the beginning. So I twisted the knob nearly all the way to the left and Morse code starts beeping out at us.


"Who brought the code sheet?" asked Eric. I went to grab it from my backpack, only to find I'd left my clipboard in the van... with the code sheet. Crap. And my asthma was acting up, so there was no way I was running to the van and back to site to get the code sheet. Erik said, "Okay, we'll just write it down and decode it when we get back to van."

So we did just that.

(Continued in Part 2.)

Shinteki 5 Playtest and Volunteering Photos, Vids

I seem to be keep putting off writing about my experiences playtesting Shinteki 5, playing on Meat Machine's team. Maybe it's the heat, the fact that my daughter's on summer break, or Karina's and my sudden obsession with Dexter. Regardless, I've put the photos from the event up in my puzzle event album.

A few years ago, I wasn't able to playtest but volunteered to help out in "Hero" mode (i.e. have car, will transport), had a great time, and met some very cool people. This time, unfortunately, I only could stick around for the first couple Shinteki 5 puzzles and therefore the pictures I have from it are kind of limited. I may be a mediocre photographer (with a mediocre camera) but I try to make up for it by being prolific. I don't know all the team names, though, so I'll update descriptions with any information sent my way.

After a spectacular crash on the slippery grass during the first puzzle, I decided to take a few videos. Of course, none of them (green, red, or violet) turned out to be as interesting.

Shinteki Decathlon 5 on the horizon

I finally got around to finishing solving a Shinteki POTM from a few months ago and went to the website to check my answer. Just as I was navigating to the solution, I noticed that Decathlon 5 had been announced! Since it's in both May and June, that means apart from April, there's going to be one hunt a month for the first half of this year. And the Burninators have a BANG planned...