BANG 25 Writeup Addendum

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

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

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

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

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

BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part Three

(Part 1 and Part 2)

Clue Eight - A Quick Exercise

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

Clue Nine - Our Genetic Malfunction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clue Thirteen - Meta Homework

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

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

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

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

Epilogue

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

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

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

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

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

BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part Two

(Part 1)

Clue Four - Handwriting Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clue Five - Spell-checking Twitter

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

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

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

Clue Six - A Sound Solve

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

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

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

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

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

Clue Seven - Meta Deja Vu

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

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

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

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

Concluded in part 3.

BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part One

Prologue: Eye on the Prize

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

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

Clue Zero: We Cheat

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

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

Clue One: Our Decent into Hell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clue 2 - Late for Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clue 3 - Math vs. Geography

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

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

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

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

Continued in part two and part three.

BANG 25 Appreciation and Photos

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

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

Oh and I did manage to take some photos.