Puzzle Forum Up

Last night at the GC Summit, Scott Blomquist mentioned that he had taken down the puzzlehunters.com forum due to spam abuse. As an alternative, he mentioned maybe using the forum I'd been hosting, though embarrassingly enough, I couldn't remember the address when asked. I got home and found out why: It's been offline for nearly a year. Like Scott B., I'd shut mine down when it began getting spam from Russian advertisers on a daily basis.

So today I installed a new forum at http://forum.puzzalot.com/ if anyone would like to use it. That's a big assumption, though. Someone once pointed out that people only tend to post when there's something big and interesting going on, such as a Game. Since that happens, if we're lucky, once a year, so far teams have set up individual forums after each event. If people like the idea of having an all-encompassing forum, I would love to hear thoughts on how to make it better, organize it best, and retain users.

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.

Unexpected Convergence in Researching Game History

Last night, I was continuing my quest for more information about Stephen Sondheim's Halloween Hunt from 1968. A certain Los Angeles Times article quoted in one of his biographies was my goal. At the same time in a separate window, I was reading Larry's entry on a death during a Russian urban hunt. He linked to Pervasive Games as a source. In the original window, I typed in the keywords I was looking for. The first link to come up was, disappointingly, my own blog. But the second link was from Pervasive Games!

Funny coincidence, right? Okay, sure, but the link I pull up is about how The Last of Sheila inspired Don Luskin's Games which inspired Midnight Madness. Hmmmmm...sounds vaguely familiar, almost like I wrote it myself. But it turns out that the people at Pervasive Games wrote a book and had been doing the same research I had at pretty much the same time, getting the Los Angeles Times newspaper clippings from Luskin close to when I got them from Patrick Carlyle. Talk about coincidence.


An idle thought in the back of my mind has been that beyond satisfying my own curiosity, perhaps I could put what research I uncovered into book form. But it looks like the folks at Pervasive Games have already done that, saving me a lot of time, travel, and tests of my limited interviewing abilities.

The Game vs. The Game

When I saw Michael Douglas in The Game back in 1997, I thought to myself that it would be awesome to take part in something like that, despite other thoughts that there was no way, no matter how much of a personality test you took, that they'd be able to predict exactly where you'd attempt to commit suicide from.

When Jonathan informed me about the Game, one thought I had was that it was kind of like the movie. "Actually," he said, "The filmmakers say the movie was inspired by The Game, though many Gamers doubt it."

That bit of info used to be a "fact" in the IMDB trivia entry for the film. At least, if I remember correctly... which often I do not. However, there's no mention of such a connection in the Wikipedia article on the film. It says the three primary influences were Ebeneezer Scrooge, Mission: Impossible, and The Sting.

Today, checking IMDB's trivia section for The Game, I find a few surprising gems:

The real Game is, more-or-less, a Ph.D. caliber scavenger hunt. It's also a team event. There is no prize money. Each team's entry fee is $25,000; limited to ten teams. All of the entry money is donated to charity. The game is actually supported by several wealthy benefactors, including Microsoft's 'Bill Gates'. Each team consists of one van full of players - usually four to six people. A series of clues, often in the form of puzzles, must be solved; each clue's answers lead to the next clue. Teams travel from clue to clue, until reaching the finish line. The winners typically take about 24 hours to finish. Often the clues are so intricate and choreographed that they approximate small theatrical productions, occasionally employing a dozen or more actors.

At first I thought, is this the real Game and the one I've been playing in a shoddy knock-off? But then I was reminded that $25K per team was what Shelby Logan's Run cost... or at least so I've heard. But all the money donated to charity? Supported by Bill Gates? A dozen actors? It's got to be an amusing mixture of fact and lore.

The equipment need to solve the real Game has become, in recent years, increasingly high-tech. Palm Pilots, pocket PCs, wireless Internet connections and portable photocopiers are a given. One year a snorkel, mask and a wet suit were required to locate a clue tied to a rock at the bottom of a lake. Another time, tuxedos were necessary so that a clue could be surreptitiously solved in the midst of a formal banquet.

At first, the thought of a portable photocopier on a Game seemed absurd... until I realized that we had brought my all-in-one printer with us on our first Game to use for that exact purpose. I had also heard and read about the diving clue, but the tuxedo clue, which sounds cool, didn't ring any bells.

Well, apart from True Lies.

The Ghost Patrol Playtest, Part 1

(Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

It was 10pm Friday night when my family and I arrived home from Tahoe to find a red, extra-extra large passenger van parked in front of our house. Five hours earlier, I had been first on scene of a SUV accident where the vehicle rolled down an embankment sideways over tree stumps and yet the driver was basically unhurt (he later sent us a case of wine for helping which was seriously altogether too kind) so I wasn't sure if I could handle any more surprises. Calling Jonathan, I found out that Given had rented it for the Game playtest the next day and had dropped it off at my place while he took care of a few things.

(We of The Smoking GNU were not fortunate enough to get accepted for Ghost Patrol proper — I later asked a member of Game Control how far out of the running we had been, and was told they had stopped ranking after the first twenty-two teams had been selected — but Desert Taxi and Lowkey were kind enough to not only let us playtest, but be in the full-scale playtest. Pictures from our experience are here.)

Given returned later that night and we removed a bench from the van (as is tradition it seems), got some sleep, picked up Jonathan in Rohnert Park the next morning, and met Shinteki Eric (aka Eric Prestemon) in Berkeley out in front of one of GC's houses. That was to be our team, apparently. BANG Erik was signed on to play, but was running late and said he would join us later that morning with Jared. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.

The Briefing

Joining us at GC's hotel standin were Meat Machine, sporting all green shirts, and There Be Dragons, each sporting different virtual virtues. I always worry about being late, but as Jonathan pointed out, there always seems to be people who arrive after us. In this case, it was someone from GC.

After they arrived, we got started. Sitting in the living room, GC practiced their lines while giving us a slideshow as to how this all was going to go down, which was basically this: Ghosts haunted areas and left behind evidence of who they were. This evidence was in the form on spirit type, name, favorite color, favorite scent, death date, death location, etc., all of which we would get by solving clues. One or more clues would be put into the OWL, which would spit out a new "haunt valence" that we would enter into our SHaRC. The SHaRC would give direction and distance to the next clue or, if we had all the necessary data, the actual location of the ghost so we could go capture it.

One interesting thing was how much stuff was in our very cool Ghost Patrol kit. I remembered Rich Bragg noting a long time ago that there's a trend away from the "guess what you'll need to bring" paradigm of Games past, and more towards giving teams information as to what to bring. In this case, we pretty much got handed everything we needed: Magnifying glass, black light, crayons, 3D glasses, slime collection kit, etc. Okay, I admit we probably wouldn't have brought a slime collection kit, we only had colored pencils not crayons, and 3D glasses wouldn't have entered our minds to bring. GC did give all their items appropriately cool names, not one of which I can remember.

Ghost 1 - Barking Up The Wrong Tree

To start off, GC told us they'd let loose the spirit of a canine in the vicinity to give us practice catching. The next slide came up and was an anaglyph. Getting out the 3D glasses showed an underwater scene with weird shaped seaweed, which resolved into letters. The next few aspects seemed to require more lateral thinking-style puzzling, something I haven't seen much in hunts. Given figured the name of the ghost was "Buster" because of all the busters in the posters; Eric and I figured its favorite color was aquamarine and Jonathan that it had died by drowning, both due to the scene was underwater. As to its animality, I mentioned either dogfish or dog shark, both of which were met with skepticism (as to whether they are actual animals) until the OWL accepted the former. With “bacon ripple” as the flavor, we had entered enough data and got a haunt valence number, entered into the SHARC and it told us to leave the house. Specifically, it pointed us in a direction and said a few hundred feet that way.

We gathered some stuff and headed out, first team to leave. Somehow, I ended up in charge of the SHARC and kept that position throughout the game. (I later tried to share it with others a few times, but was told the “expert” should keep it.)

The trail led us to a Whole Foods market. We walked past the clue site a few times before finding it. A Scooby-Doo clue let us know that Buster died "Rorty-Roo Rears Rago Roday" (or something like that). We put in the date from 42 years ago, but no go. We were stumped at that point... and things had been going so smoothly. We tried dates one or two days off, just in case, and re-decoded the Scooby-Doo puzzle a few times, but came to the same conclusion. The staffer then reminded us that these disturbances/clues were from the ghost's point of view. And then it hit: Dog years! Jonathan put in the date six years earlier and we got a new haunt valence. We still wonder if we would have ever solved that puzzle without a clue... it seems so simple in hindsight, but required a leap in logic that we just weren't prepared for.

The SHARC said our next location was a few miles away, which was when it dawned on us that this was no longer a training exercise, but the Game proper. So we headed back to GC's house, got the van, and headed out. And by we, I mean our team and David, our GC ride-along. At one point at the house, he had been negotiating to ride with another team, but that team was worried the van might be too cramped. I volunteered our team as an alternative since we could take fifteen people if we needed and so David ended up getting an entire bench to himself.

The SHARC led us across the freeway to a road close to the bay. We drove down one road, following the SHARC's direction exactly into a park, only to have the road come to an end at the ocean with a few hundred yards still indicated on our guide. "It's," I told everyone, "over there across the bay at the marina." After some more navigation fun, we finally found parking, and went to a grassy green near the beach.

In an attempt to be funny, we followed the SHARC past the obvious GC staffers, seeing how exact we could get to the location it indicated. GC indicated that in order to get our next clue, we had to throw a frisbee at a pair of sticks with a plastic cup on each, and catch the cup before it hit the ground. "Who", asked Jonathan, "is any good at throwing a frisbee?" I told the team that just the day before I had been disc golfing. "Okay, you throw!" was the team consensus. "But," I protested, "I didn't say I was any good!"

Too late, I was selected. I threw my first disc. It flew a few inches away from the first stick. Feeling a little more confident, I threw again and had a direct stick hit. The team hadn't been expecting me to hit, though, and the cup flew to the ground before they could get it. Third times a charm, throw, hit, and catch.

Our reward was another frisbee, this one bitten-up. It was a fairly-obvious braille imprint and just took a little bit of figuring out which side was which to get the answer. Putting it into the O.W.L., we finally had enough info to catch the ghost ("Get 'em!" said the SHARC). The ghost capture consisted of following the SHARC down the beach to the specific location and pressing K/O on the keypad. Our first capture! And, despite it not really being a competition, we felt good about being the first team to capture!

Our next location: Chinatown.

Ghost 2 - The Chinese Funeral

Arriving at our destination, we showed off our amazing navigation skills, taking a good 10-15 minutes to park the van after spotting the clue site. We eventually parked in the garage right under the park we were going to. Taking an elevator up to the park (a first for me, as far as I can remember), we found six urns of different colors spread out in a lotus flower diagram. Each urn held slime, which I collected — I pretty much did all the slime collection but nobody ever did any analysis despite my urgings (I was usually driving or navigating). We also got a paper depicting the diagram, which Jonathan immediately marked with X's to indicate the position of the urns.

But if that was all there was to this puzzle, we were stumped. We looked up the spirit type in our Condensed Toben's Spirit Guide and read that it liked to haunt statues. There was a very interesting statue in the park, so Given went over to check it out. He came back, saying there wasn't anything of note over there. So we kept on working, but absolutely nothing was coming to mind.

Eventually, someone else decided to recheck the statue and found a piece of a paper with a bunch of crossword-style clues on it. Always helpful to have all the information. We started solving the more obvious clues, figured out that they were in alphabetical order and all five letters long. Using the X's as a pattern to follow, we filled in letters spiraling out from center. We didn't think to think that the X's were letters as well, but at some point Greg from GC mentioned that there should have been a clue at the top. That clue solved to "SLIME" and we finally figured out the slime in the urns indicated those were the letters that should be put where the X's were. Filling in the final letters, reading around the edge, and adjusting several centuries gave us our solve.

The SHARC led us deeper into Chinatown, where we received a rubber chicken who had eaten a bunch of recipes. We spread them out amongst the team and read them over. The ingredients didn't match the directions, though. We got some information from the ingredients by indexing the amount into the ingredient. Then we all began to notice that all the directions were about, of all things, chicken. "Maybe we're supposed to figure out what the name of the recipe actually is," remarked Jonathan, "cuz this one sounds a lot like Chicken Parmesean." Jonathan and Given looked at me. "You're the chef," Jonathan stated, "so what are these?" "I just follow the instructions," I protested, "I rarely look at the title." Which is true, a bad habit I guess. I probably couldn't tell someone the difference between Chicken Cacciatore and Coq Au Vin, but I have cooked them.

Looking a little more closely at Jonathan's Chicken Parmesean, I mentioned that it more closely resembled Fried Chicken, though I had never seen a version that was both fried and baked. That title gave good data and we started naming all the recipes — at least, the three or four we could identify. Eric called someone and read off recipe after recipe, each of which she could name. The main one I remember was a chicken with herbs and spices cooked in a pot of water. The recipe? Simply “boiled chicken”. Eventually we had enough of them to enter a solution into the OWL.

At our next location, we found the other two teams and wondered where they passed us. We followed the ShaRC to a square filled with people and looked around for our clue. Figuring the statue factiod would work again, all of us at one point searched behind the statue, but found nothing. Eventually, GC pointed out a very, very small vial filled with fake grains of rice to Jonathan, so we grabbed them and settled down to solve.

Each grain of rice had a name and several colored dots around the edge. Getting out the magnifying glass, Jonathan noticed that there were even tinier letters on each of the dots, spelling out “THE NAME IS ON THE COLOR” (or something similar). Eric, I have to say, is a master data collector. He grabs it fast and sometimes solves the puzzle in the process. There was a lot of data to collect on this one and he got to work. Meanwhile, with my aversion to data collection in small spaces taken to new heights, I tried to figure out a way to put it all together. I noticed that there was only one dot of the color matching the name on the rice. Eventually, we discarded 90% of the data we wrote down and took the letter on the dot matching the name on the grain, arranged them alphabetically according to the name , and came up with “RONNICHU”, which almost looked like it could be something. We tried re-ordering it and a few other things until GC David suggested we just try typing it in and there it was: “Ronni Chu” was the name of the ghost. We were a little frustrated with the puzzle since, as neat as the conveyance was, we ended up not using 90% of the data.

Our trusty SHaRC (we were told later it was the best performing of the three in the field, lucky for us) took us outside a video shop where we got handed a DVD movie, “Super Fighters 2”. A bunch of clips from movies with both English and (we assumed) Chinese characters. For reasons of pure stubbornness, we ignored the Chinese subtitles and only transcribed the English ones. While transcribing them, we noticed they sounded a lot like movie titles and TV show titles, alternating, that had been translated to a foreign language and then translated back to English. The laptop we had along was making the movie skip for some reason, and suddenly music started playing from up the street. I looked around the corner and a funeral procession was coming down Chinatown. A somber moment, yet strangely it felt thematically appropriate.

The laptop was continuing to give us playback problems so we went back to the van to use a different one. We finally figured out that “Pushing Daisies” and “Six Feet Under”, despite being TV show titles, were being used as euphemisms for death. We worked out all the translations except one, that we suspected was “kick the bucked” but didn't see how it could fit (“kick” was being used in a way we didn't expect), but then didn't know what to do. We pretended to call for a hint, so David acted as our hint line, letting us know we were ignoring some of the data. Duh. We went back and found that one of Chinese characters in each of the subtitles matched the production company's logo. We used that as an index to get our answer.

The next clue we got back up at St. Mary's Park, where we picked up an Asian-looking fan with letters on each fold and some of the symbols blacked in. We were also given a list of five letter words (Thomas of There Be Dragons told us later that their sheet of paper was blank and the words could only be viewed with blacklight), so Jonathan and Eric started writing the words down and whether the fold of the fan had a symbol blacked in. Given and I examined the fan closer and noticed that letters in each word were in order on the fan. Jonathan and Eric had decided it was a binary encoding and were partway through deciphering it when I showed them how the fan could be folded so that only the letters of each word showed, given a perfect way to view the binary encoding. “That might be a little faster,” was the reaction. It was.

I don't think we ended up doing a proper capture for this ghost... there were one or two where we were unable bust them, due to timing or other issues. The main thing I remember is that we were done with Chinatown and now headed to the Presidio for our next challenge.

Part 2 is here...

Ghost Patrol Lessons and Finding Sonoma County Puzzlers

Playtesting and volunteering for Ghost Patrol, I have to say, were invaluable experiences (many thanks to Lowkey and Desert Taxi!). First off, we had so much fun during the playtest, it was all I could do to stop myself from telling everyone at BANG 19 who was going to play "You guys are going to have a blast!" in order not to skew opinions and experiences. (I think my unspoken prediction was accurate judging from the standing ovation for GC.) Secondly, it gave us a behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to run The Game.

One of the main observations I made about constructing a Game is that having teammates who live fairly close nearby almost seems like a requirement, since Game constructors will have to meet on a fairly regular basis. Someone I asked from GP's GC said they met once a week for about a year and three times a week for the last month or so. This kind of presents a difficulty for us... one I've touched on before.

At some point, The Smoking GNU would like to host a Game. It may be years in the future, but it is on our to-do list. The difficulty is that on our team, pretty much only Jonathan and I are really devoted to the idea; Given maybe to a lesser extent. The rest of our teammates tend to be involved when they have some free time, but aren't ready to commit to such a large production. Heck, sometimes, I'm not sure I am either.

Two and a half puzzlers aren't enough to host a Game and I don't know of anyone else in Sonoma County who's involved in the community. So I keep thinking that somehow I need to introduce the locals to this amazing event. My guess is that 99% or more of people around here think that a puzzle hunt is something involving haikus (thanks, Downtown Santa Rosa Puzzle Hunt!). That opinion needs to change.

One idea I've had include re-running a BANG up here and putting a clue to its existance on craigslist or around the Santa Rosa Junior College. Seems feasible enough and maybe I'll try it after the arrival of spring. I think my teammates would be up for helping with that.

The SRJC, actually, seems like the best place to get people interested in puzzling. It's possibly the best JC in the U.S. and has around 40K of students who have yet to be introduced to this idea. I wish I had heard of puzzle events back when I was going there and would like give that opportunity to students who might be like me (scary thought). So the idea occurs of maybe getting the SRJC to have a hunt a la Mystery Hunt and try and make it an annual tradition. I'm not sure how to go about doing that though.

Assuming a Sonoma County puzzling community would take root and grow, then perhaps we can find enough local people to make whatever Game we eventually come up with a reality.

The Worst Navigators (i.e. us)

I don't know what it is, but our team seems to have extreme fail when it comes to navigation between clue sites in the Game. This became painfully clear during the Ghost Patrol playtest when, on more than one occasion, we left clue sites before other teams and arrived at the next one after them. In one specific incident, the next site was five minutes away and it took us over twenty minutes to get there.

Obviously, we'd like to solve this problem. We thought that springing for GPS when renting a van would help, but it has its own share of difficulties. For example, we got stuck on a Stanford street that someone had decided to put poles in the middle of during Midnight Madness and just recently it thought we were on a freeway just because we were driving alongside it.

(Shinteki Eric also brought his GPS unit for the GP playtest, so on more than one occasion, we had Eddie Izzard telling us to go right, while the standard GPS voice said left.)

Parking is part of the problem, too, especially during the Ghost Patrol playtest. Why? Well, we had been expecting our six player team plus a member of GC to ride along and so figured a mini-van would be too cramped. The next largest size that we could locate, oddly enough, was a 15-seat passenger van. Finding parking with a van that size is a challenge in its own right, especially if the garage has a low ceiling.

(It turned out we would have been fine with a mini-van: One of our members injured her back and couldn't make it, while another decided that there was enough time to attend a kegger in San Diego the night before the playtest.)

I'm really not sure how to improve our navigation. Having a teammate more familiar with the Bay Area? I basically only know Santa Rosa and the freeways to get to airports. Letting teammates out to pick up puzzles at clue sites instead of driving around for five or ten minutes looking for parking? Hiring a chauffeur?

The only plausible thing I can think of is instead of piling into the van and heading out after the solve (something we did once in No More Secrets before even getting our next site location), we should take a few minutes and have a clear idea of where we're going, maybe even on a physical map. I don't know, but this problem is definitely keeping us from being competitive.

The Seattle Times takes on Shelby Logan's Run

Shortly after Jonathan found out about The Game back in spring of 2006, he recounted to me some of the more incredible anecdotes he'd read in his research trying to find out all he could about this amazing adventure. I found out later that most of those stories had come from Shelby Logan's Run: Helicopters bombarding a dry lake bed, microchips in mice, tattoo requirements to get clues, etc.

This weekend, The Seattle Times ran a story simply titled "The Game", but it's really an account of Shelby Logan's Run and the unfortunate accident that lead to the crippling of one player and all but shutting down the Seattle version of The Game.

About all I knew of the incident was from Peter Sarrett's writeup of his witnessing at the trial, which I came across after searching for blogs mentioning "No More Secrets" (our first Game). After having seen the clue in question which lead to the mines, I really had to wonder how in the world anyone could go to the wrong shaft.

The Seattle Times story attempts to answers that. As unbiased as news stories are supposed to be, it definitely felt that the writer's sympathy lay with Bob Lord as they describe his sleep-deprived thoughts that literally that lead him down the wrong path: thinking the "ONLY 1306" warning was part of the clue instead of straight-forward directions, postulating that the "NO! NO! NO!" on mine hearkened to an earlier clue, missing the "1296" mine label, and thinking that the organizers were trying to fool him.

I had heard that all but one of the organizers ended up settling, but had no idea it was for such a large amount. Then again, who can put a price on what Lord went through or even who, if anyone, is culpable: The organizers, for even having a clue out there? The player, for ignoring directions? The mine's owners for not having blocked off dangerous shafts? The safety inspectors for not closing said shafts?

Legally, I'd still have to side with the organizers, even after reading about how terrible the accident was for Lord and his family. What's the point of having waivers if you still end up paying out over ten million dollars for something you didn't have control over? The whole thing would be like a shark cage diving instructor warning you not to stick your hand out while under the water and you, thinking he was joking and actually encouraging you to do so, suing him when your hand gets bit. The fact that the waiver you signed to get on the boat doesn't specifically mention that a shark might bite your hand if you stick it out of the cage shouldn't negate the fact that the waiver warns of injury or death.

It's a deeply saddening affair, but ultimately, personal responsibility, not pity, should win out.

Sondheim and Perkin's Game: The Details!

A reader pointed out earlier that the story about Stephen Sondheim's mother giving a clued cake to players seemed unlikely due to the bad blood between the two. My source for the story stated that he could no longer find where he heard the story. However, after a lot of searching, I found it!

The New Yorker ran an article on March 8th 1993 which they have recently posted in their online edition. [Puzzalot note: It no longer appears to be online.] ‘Stephen Sondheim's most famous game took place in Manhattan on Halloween, 1968. It required twenty people (preferably young theatre Turks like Herbert Ross, Nora Kaye, Lee Remick, Mary Rodgers, and Roddy McDowall), four limousines, complicated maps full of numbers and arrows, and a sack of perplexing props: scissors, bits of string, pins. Each team of five had to drive to a spot designated on the map, and there they would find a clue telling them where to go next; the trouble was, the clues were numbers, and there was no way of knowing how they might be revealed. One destination was a bustling bowling alley in which the last lane was curiously empty; there stood a single enigmatic pin, which you had to bowl over in such a way that you glimpsed the number written on the side. Another site proved to be nothing but a nondescript door with a mail slot. But if you stuck your ear near the slot, you could hear the faint voice of Frank Sinatra singing "One for My Baby" - which might still have stumped you unless you recognized that the lyric begins, "It's a quarter to three." A quarter to three: the number was 245. Then there was the vestibule of a brownstone, where a small elderly woman (actually, the mother of Anthony Perkins, Sondheim's fellow game designer) would beckon you upstairs for some coffee and a slice of cake. Those who actually ate the cake stood no chance of winning: the clue was drawn in the icing.

"That was one of the last of the big game parties," Sondheim says. "Toward the end of the sixties, beginning of the seventies, I don't know, it just stopped. Everybody outgrew them except me."’ - Deconstructing Sondheim, The Stephen Sondheim Society quoting the New Yorker

So it wasn't Sondheim's mother: It was Anthony Perkin's mother. How's that for spooky?

Before The Last of Sheila

The story so far: Joe Belfiore created the Game after being inspired by Midnight Madness, which was inspired by Don Luskin's Games from the 70s, which were inspired (at least "in part") by The Last of Sheila. So what inspired The Last of Sheila?

Tony Perkins and Steven Sondheim wrote [the film] and they were ardent game players in real life. If you went to their house, if you had dinner there, there was always a big, complicated type of game. It wasn't charades; it was a very complicated version of charades. There were puns... anyway, it was always complex and it tested you. Everything always tested you. So they wrote this script that is actually a game. - Richard Benjamin, commentary on The Last of Sheila

Pretty cool, except that it even goes beyond that.

The movie was inspired by an irregular series of elaborate, real-life scavenger hunts [Stephen] Sondheim and [Anthony] Perkins arranged for their show business friends . . . in Manhattan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The climax of one hunt was staged in the lobby of a seedy flophouse, where participants heard a skipping LP record endlessly repeating the first line of the Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer standard "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" ("It's quarter to three...") The winning team eventually recognized the clue -- 2:45 -- and immediately headed for room 245 of the hotel, where bottles of Champagne awaited them. - Wikipedia

So a composer and a Psycho actor held puzzle hunts! From what I can tell, Sondheim was the major driver, though.

There's a story about Stephen Sondheim's affinity for puzzles and puzzle hunts, such as one he threw where players had to visit this house hosted by an old lady (Stephen's mother). The lady would serve you cake, and if you ate it, you lost: there was a clue in the frosting. - Dan Sanderson, Brainlog

Where did his inspiration come from? Sondheim did have a facination with puzzles: He wrote crosswords for the New York magazine, and is considered to be the one who brought British-style cryptics to America. Perhaps he was inspired by other musicians?

I was brought up, you know, by Oscar Hammerstein in my early teens, and he liked anagrams, but it was the decorous kind. And then, when I met Leonard Bernstein, he and his family played cut-throat anagrams, and that's how I got into that. - Stephen Sondheim, Academy of Achievement Interview

I'd like to go back further, to find the true source of Sondheim's inspiration for puzzle hunts. There's a gap in what I can research, though, but the Game is a type of treasure hunt, which is generally considered to have been created by Elsa Maxwell:

[Elsa] is proud of having invented such games as Treasure Hunt and Scavenger Hunt, because of their psychological importance. Not unmindful of science (she once devoted most of a column to the fact that she has never had to blow her nose), she says: "Let's break them down scientifically. In the Treasure Hunt . . . intellectual men were paired off with great beauties, glamor with talent. In the course of the nights escapades anything could happen." - Time Magazine, Elsa at War

I can't seem to nail down when she "invented" the treasure hunt, but I can make an educated guess as to what might have inspired her. Going all the way back to 1881:

Though it's not where the premise first appeared, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island was instrumental in planting the treasure map concept in the popular consciousness. - Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope on Pirate Treasures

Newspaper Clippings from Early Games

Following Larry's lead, I asked y2kbozo if s/he could send me the clippings mentioned in the post. A little while later, y2kbozo sent me a zip file with newspaper clippings, invites, and even a clue from the first four Games. I've put all that was sent up in the gallery and some samples below.

An LA Times column detailing the events of the first Game in 1973.	An invite to Game 2 from 1975, with recommended equipment.	An invite to Game 3: 7878 (guess the date) offering a "neon sculpture" as a prize.
Four clippings from an in-depth LA Times story about Game 3. I think this is the article that inspired Midnight Madness.	An invite to Game 4 in 1979, which apparently had a "solving guide" available.	A clue entitled "High-Speed Telescopic Evidence" from an unknown Game.

Perusing these files reveals that the first Game was in 1973 and was at least partially inspired by The Last of Sheila (*adds to top of Netflix queue*). Most of the puzzles seemed to have consisted of cryptic-ish clues; it wasn't until Game III: 7878 that things clues became a little more varied (and thus higher priced).

All in all, some very interesting history.

Captains Meeting - Part 1

Jonathan, captain of The Smoking GNU, decided for some reason that he didn't want to drive the six hours or so to Milpitas last Wednesday to attend the mysterious Captains Meeting for the Midnight Madness: Back to Basics Game. That left it to me, co-captian, co-founder, and Team Wrangler (I'm still working on other titles) to make the journey. I have to admit, I wasn't looking forward to the two hour drive each way myself, but one thing I was sure of was that it'd be worth it.

I had Google Earth-scouted the territory and found that my initial impression that "the roundabout" was not a bar and grill but an actual traffic roundabout. Figuring I might be able to get a hint as to who was the mastermind behind all this, I looked up some of the businesses nearby, thinking there might be a software company I might recognize and/or one with employee(s) who might be likely Game players. Being Silicon Valley, there were several. I even found a dental software company that boasted of the number of Stanford graduates working for them. I was thinking that whoever was hosting might be using their work as the place to hold the meeting.

I gave up my search when I found out that there were two large hotels right there, figuring they could always have rented a room there for the presentation. I ended up being completely wrong about that, but the knowledge was very helpful, as the hotels stood out as great landmarks when my Google directions failed me at a road under construction.

In my mind, I tried to plan how this would go down. My best guess was that all the team captains would assemble at the clearing in the roundabout, talk about who was behind all this, and then like the butler in "Murder By Death", someone would appear to take us all to the actual meeting location, where, like Twain in the same film, the person behind this all would reveal themselves.

When I arrived at the roundabout, therefore, I was a little confused that nobody was there (the two ladies in "Game Control" shirts may have been there, but I had not spotted them). So I parked my car, got organized, and waited a few minutes to see if anyone else arrived. No go on that, so I headed out and met the two ladies. I was surprised to find out that I was on their checklist, since we were a second tier invite. My immediate (and wrong) surmise was that they had a white list of acceptable invitees. I was handed off from Game Control to Game Control until I entered the conference room of NetRatings. Judging by the short silence as I entered the room, I don't think many people were expecting me, someone relatively unknown to them.

Of the ten or so people gathered around the table, sadly, only three or four names popped into my head. I spotted Wei-Hwa immediately, but in all of our three or four previous meetings (apart from the Google Puzzle Hunt), he had asked us the same question: "So is this your first time?" Apparently, GNUs don't always make a lasting impression ;) I don't think anybody knew my name (I'm in very few of the pictures I post from events I've attended). Coed Astronomy might have known me, since we were their invite, and maybe Alexandra (when I talked with her at the GC Summit, she recognized me by sight but not name), but neither had shown up yet. One captain was from a completely new team and dressed to give some (much needed?) variety to the rest of the fashion in the room.

After talking resumed, it was interesting. Speculation abounded as to who was behind it. Discussion centered around 11 teams on the email list (apparently only first tier invites had access), which meant that GC was probably one of the 11 and probably at that very table. On that table, patterns in six-packs of soda were spotted ("It's braille!") until Wei-Hwa smartly decided to compromise the non-clue by removing all the cans from their rings (I still have no idea why Coke cans were mixed in with Hansen). Were the conspirators watching us? A camera was found but apparently was not connected. Then someone spotted a MacBook with its built-in webcam (I think I overheard someone from GC admit later that they were watching us).

Not too long after the MacBook discovery, someone came in and started the slideshow. I had had my second viewing of Midnight Madness the day before, so it was pretty familiar, though with pictures of what I assume were pics from past Games during the "old games" part of the speech - I had never seen them before and the only one I remember was of a human pyramid - followed inexplicably by a picture of William Howard Taft which I had only previously seen on Get On A Raft With Taft's now defunct website. I'm still not sure as to the meaning or implications of that. Inside joke, I'm guessing.



At this point, the slideshow told the real GC to stand up. And he did.

It was Curtis Chen.

Of Snout.

Sweet.

Renewed Puzzle Hunt Enthusiasm

If nothing else, Saturday night's city search for obscure parts of streets fired a renewed desire to participate in more puzzle hunts. On the drive home after the Treasure Hunt, I was urged by more than one person to get off my ass and put on another Santa Rosa Puzzle Hunt (which I had to indefinitely postpone last year due having to do it solo and to lack of time). Our two Petaluma members are considering constructing their own puzzle hunt and Jonathan once again has the bug to get a BANG together, despite being 500 miles away from the rest of the team.

The season is warming up. In addition to an as-of-yet-unscheduled BANG, a leisurely mini-game, and Shinteki's fourth Decathalon, I see that an invite-only Game, Midnight Madness: Back to Basics (why do people keep stealing my never-to-be-implemented ideas???), has popped up. Sad to say (to us anyway), our somewhat obscure year-and-a-half old team doesn't always stick out in people's minds when considering who to invite (changing our name a few times since inception probably hasn't helped either). Anybody know where I can buy some good subliminal advertising?

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.

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?

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...)