The picture gallery from my first Shinteki event, Decathlon 4, are
up for viewing and since I've been working on setting up a forum, I added a thread in case anyone wants to vote for their favorite puzzle or discuss anything that isn't covered by the after-party talks or by blogging. Guests can post so you don't have to register (yet). [Edit: the forum I was working on was completely removed as there's a
better board in town.]
Many thanks to Just Passing Through and all their volunteers. We had a great time and I was impressed with the high production values put into the hunt.
A brief history: After Jonathan discovered the Game/puzzle hunt community, he immediately registered for Shinteki Decathlon 2 as "Better Late Than Never" without a team. He eventually got in touch with another team and they became kind of the Shinteki version Smoking GNU. One member of that version could not make it this year, so I filled in.
After a two-hour drive down, filled mostly with discussions pro (me) and con (Jonathan) for the idea that the Lost Island is made from
mirror matter, I finally got to meet Eric and Sam and we headed off to the starting location.
The first puzzle, Shintekimon, I contributed absolutely zero beyond holding up my clipboard to shade the battles. I like to think I'm smart, but it's a slow smart. I need time write things down, consider patters, and do my thinking. This puzzle was a rapid pace and I rarely got to see what our monster's name was. When we got enough battles under our belt for the second hint, I started attempting my analysis while the rest of my team battled.
I began working on the hypothesis that letters had to be within one of each other for a battle to take place, but couldn't take it anywhere.
The crowd of teams began to dwindle out as teams begin to win battles again Superstar Rich. I think we were about middle of the pack when Eric shouted out "Rock-paper-scissors!" as quietly as he could. Jonathan renamed the monster as a minimal winner and we defeated Rich.
Eric would have a lot of those moments during the game. We got our revenge by making fun of him not being able to solve the first bonus... not that any of us could!
Back in the van, Jonathan and I shouted out clues to driver Sam and navigator Eric for the crossword puzzle, ignoring for the moment the bonus associated with Shintekimon. We had it finished by the time we arrive at the next clue.
I made a huge mistake at the second puzzle. I have asthma but was well prepared with my inhalers and confident as I made my way up the mountain; however, I found a recent re-injury of a hiatal hernia seemed to be causing deeper breathing difficulties than before. My team quickly moved on ahead of me as I took my time with breaks and inhalers pumps. By the time they came back down, the puzzle was practically solved, so I worked on the Shintekimon bonus hiking back.
Our original (and brief) assessment had been a ternary code (WTL), but with five words in the title, five letters in each clue, five clues per group, and five groups, I figured (completely incorrectly) that it had to be a binary encoding. I eventually passed the puzzle off to Eric while Jonathan and I solved the bonus for the songs.
Clue three was pretty much my favorite. Although I'm no big fan of drop-quotes (we were hit with a stalling one in Midnight Madness and decided waiting in line would be more fun), I thought the idea of really "dropping" a drop quote into place was genius. Jonathan was shocked that he was the only one who recognized the quote. The missing words spelled out "A date in May" so we entered "tenth". No go. What other dates were there? I mentioned Mother's Day and we got back that the answer was nearly complete but that we had made a spelling mistake. This problem kept us side-tracked for a while trying to figure out how we could misspell "Mother's Day". We called GC to make sure the Palm was functioning correctly. It was.
Completely at random, I said that maybe we should try "Father's Day". Everybody, including myself, laughingly (and ironically) discarded the idea and eventually we took a hint. Believe it or not, we had
not noticed the big ol' "15" the checkers had formed. We were also pretty amazed to find out that they also made a calender with could only correspond with May and June. June 15th, it turned out, was Father's Day. We entered that for the solve.
We solved the bonus as soon as my brain would let me think of the name of those poles carved by American Indians were and why "motet" was related to it. Unfortunately, this brain fart was a sign of things to come for me.
I hadn't played a game of "Red Light, Green Light" since the last time I went roller skating, about twelve years ago. It was fun, even though I was the only one on our team sent back. We then settled down to my least favorite puzzle style: anagramming. However, this time with an extra letter. For some reason, we opted to solve out on the lawn in the beautiful sun, instead of heading back to the van and using a program. Our pattern was that we'd figure out one of the words on a card someone else was working on, get passed that card as the now "expert", and then not be able to think of another one. Eventually we got the words for each category and decided against trying to anagram eight eight-letter words manually and went back to the van. We had the bonus down before we arrived at the next location.
The Enigma clue was at the Winchester Mystery House, but only in the gift shop. We listened to a player piano in order to get our clue (and me thinking it
was our clue). This was our second favorite clue. I know I loved using
The Gashlycrumb Tinies as a clue (I don't think I'd read it since I was a wee lad). We solved 90% of the cryptic clues without realizing they were cryptics until the free hint came in. We had a bit of difficulty understanding the blatant hint for binary but eventually we came around and got our solve.
Jonathan and I worked on the bonus. We figured we had to use one of the children's names for the rhymes, but couldn't figure out a logical pattern of selecting which. As we neared our next destination, Jonathan just wrote down both letters for each one and selected the ones that ended up making a sentence. I don't know if there was a more elegant way of solving it, but it worked.
Part II tomorrw, hopefully.
Labels: decathlon, forum, photos, shinteki 4, wrapup
