BANG XXVI Pics (and a Vid)

I have yet, to date, been able to play with the same set of people in the twenty-some odd puzzle events I've participated in. Eric Prestemon and Dan Roberts joined us in our Viking expedition in the really well-executed BANG XXVI. I've put up pictures of the event and a short video of the penny challenge.

We had a lot of fun, and were really impressed with the puzzles and production value, so many kudos to Los Jefes and Code Yellow! The meta gave us quite the knocking, but in the end we're kind of proud that we didn't take any hints, even if it might have bumped us up a few positions in the rankings.

BANG 26 also brings to an end what (little) influence I had on SNAP simulcasts. In my quest to have The Smoking GNU do one, I was able to help Seattle teams find counterparts in the Bay Area. The simulcasts would have (hopefully) happened anyway, but I like to think of it as my own small contribution to the community.

DASH 1 SF Thoughts & Pics

So we of The Smoldering YAKs (team w/Jonathan = GNU, without = YAK) traversed the streets at the same time as hundreds of other people in eight cities around the United States, solving a variety of puzzles from diverse teams. We had a good time! The YAKs are slower than the GNUs though, which meant less time for taking pictures. I did manage to snap a few and they're up.

I really have to thank Debbie, Greg, Jesse, Sunshine, and all of lowkey for putting on this production, as well as all the teams who contributed puzzles. They did a great job and I'm grateful for all their work.

I do have to say that I was surprised at the challenge these puzzles presented, as DASH was catering to new teams in diverse cities. I think it's a function of the distributed puzzle creation process: Each team has all this time to spend on one or two puzzle(s), so they tend to be, as Jonathan put it, "meatier". This has been true in BANG 18, BATH 4, and now DASH 1.

I had been considering the idea of rehosting DASH 1 in Sonoma County, but now I think that some amount of reduction of difficulty would be required for the puzzle hunt virgins up here. Apart from getting permission from everyone to do so, I'm not sure we have enough time to set everything up before the rainy season fully kicks in.

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.

Belated Photos from BANG 24

The summer seems to have limited my blogging abilities, both with my daughter being out of school and a large project I undertook finishing only a week ago. In other words, the fact that I'm putting up the photos that we took at BANG 24, when BANG 25 just happened yesterday is entirely a coincidence.

Our team had a total blast at BANG 24 and much thanks to CRANEA for all the effort they put into it. I'd been having a string of bad experiences at recent hunts and this snapped me out of my funk. I think it may have even been my favorite BANG. Of course, I only have a sample size of seven...

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.

Coming of Age at BANG 21, Part 2 of 2

As we left the 21 Dots puzzle site (see Part 1), Jonathan remarked that coed astronomy had left five minutes before us. This was an important fact because we had arrived at pretty much the same time, even walking with them briefly and asking about reason behind Jan's sudden commitment to GCing (scheduling conflicts leading to playtesting leading to aforesaid conflicts disappearing... "Or at least, that's what we told her," japed Justin). There's a running joke on our team that in one event or another we've managed to come in ahead of most teams... except coed astronomy. Thus, their team has become kind of an unofficial barometer as to how we're doing.

Our next clue went quick. While we sat outside some restaurant to solve, Mark and Rob went and grabbed some grub. By the time they got back, we were all but done. Admittedly, they were complaining about a long line, but the word search for anagrams of mixed drinks names wasn't tough. The clues for the anagrams version of the adult drinks weren't helping much and I said we were spending too much time trying to match them up. But Jonathan insisted on filling in the available spaces, just in case it mattered (it didn't). The left over letters gave Jonathan the answer before I had even separated the words in my mind. Of course, I was sitting on the other side of the table and everything was upside-down. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

The corner park that that solution took us to next had a large amount of people gathered around what we assumed was GC. Whatever was happening was blocked from view by those bodies. When we finally got there, we found Wei-Hwa dealing blackjack from a makeshift shoe. Now this looked like like fun.

Sadly, though, there were only a few spots for people to play, and only one person per team. All the spots were filled, so I hopped on a nearby table for some aerial recognizance. Just as I did, a spot opened up and Rob sat down. So I took a quick video and tried to keep the shaki-cam syndrome to a minimum.

Eventually, we had seen all the chips, each with a message, and seen all the cards, each with some letters. The chips told us to only pay attention to the letters prime number cards and to fit them into the pattern "_ _ _ _ _ - _ _ - _ _". The letters that were on the prime cards ("V", "ING", "TE", "T", "UN") obviously did not make a word when fit into the spaces in that order. So we focused on figuring out what the next step actually was. Mostly, we tried rearranging the letters in different patterns to make them fit. Eventually, Rob pulled out his iPhone to run some anagramming software. I was depleted of thought. We were stumped.

We didn't seem to be the only team in that predicament. I saw a few teams just studying their notes, no longer playing blackjack, but not moving on yet. I heard someone call my name and found Kiki of Blood and Booze saying hi. She had been tremendously kind during the MSPH playtest when I had decided to see which would break first, my back or her living room steps. It was good to see her again. I had actually taken her for a puzzle-widow so was surprised to see her in the field. We talked for a little while before I went back to hair pulling with my team.

Rob finally got back to us with the results of the anagram search: VINGT-ET-UN, which was exactly as it was if the letter groups had been written down in order. "Oh!" I said, "That's French for '21'". "Why didn't you say so earlier?" Jonathan fumed at me good-naturedly. "The only reason we keep you on this team is for your knowledge of French!" I protested with the weak excuse of not actually having seen the letters in their proper order; it seemed like our entire team assumed that the order that they were in could not be the answer. The solution seemed anti-climatic; I guess I had assumed some sort of Scrabble-like ban on foreign words. We headed out, and we noted a few teams that we had passed. The fact that they had the answer and just didn't know it didn't seem right.

A lengthy walk took us to the last puzzle before the meta. It didn't seem like much time at all had passed and yet we were nearly done. Hopefully, that meant we were doing pretty good. We arrived, grabbed our clue and lay down on the grass to begin figuring it out. Two sheets of paper presented a series of four numbers that needed the proper arithmetic signs between them to make 21. We split them up, with Jonathan and I working on one, and Given, Rob, and Mark working on the other. Jonathan's fast at math, but I found myself matching his speed (or he slowing down to mine) as I worked from the top of the list and he from the bottom. We started converting to letters and were able to make some good guesses as to what letters, and thus which operations, went in the more difficult ones. It took a bit, but we finally finished and had the message ORONEONEEIGHTTHIRTEEN.

Obviously, it was the second half of the message, so Jonathan concentrated on helping the other half of our team. I tried to make sense of the message. I thought of several theories, but by the time I hit upon the one that seemed most likely — having to come up with the operations for those four numbers — the first half of the message had been deciphered: FINDALLFOURSOLUTIONSF. Jonathan and I quickly found the four possibilities and anagrammed them into SIGN.

We were feeling pretty good at this point. We had cruised through the puzzles, hardly being stuck at all. That was all about to change.

Looking at the backup, handwritten log as we arrived at the site for the meta, it looked like we were in about seventh. We didn't see the Judean People's Front, so we figured we were slightly ahead of our sometimes teammate Eric. As we sat down at a picnic table, CRANEA headed out in a hurry (which makes me think our officially recorded arrival time is off). Blood and Booze was there along with a few other teams. We felt good about our position.

There were two parts to the puzzle: Squares and somewhat-triangular quadrilaterals. Two grids were given to us to place them on, so Given and I started work on the squares, while Jonathan, Mark, and Rob worked their quads. Given and I made little progress; it seemed like there were too many possibilities for our minds to handle. I figured that once we had the squares in place, we could use the numbers on the side to index into the solution word each square represented (a little picture was in the corner of each square). Frustrated and unable to go further, my brain began to crash.

Luckily, the quads got completed and the rest of the team used the information they provided to complete the interlocking square puzzle. (I read that at least one other team was able to solve the squares without the quads.) We tried the indexing theory, but it didn't work. We tried other things, but they didn't work either and we kept coming back to the index theory. It just seemed to make the most sense.

Around four o'clock, I began to push for a hint; we'd already been there a half hour. Jonathan argued against it, since we had over an hour before the hunt was over. We finally compromised and agreed to get data verification to make sure our square was correct.

I saw Blood and Booze get up to leave as I walked over and asked GC Thomas Snyder (who I'd met briefly while volunteering for Ghost Patrol) to come take a look at our square. He did and explained that he had only playtested it, but as far as he knew, there was only one way to put the square together correctly. Since our square was together correctly, it must be correct. We thanked him and kept trying to come up with new theories.

Twenty minutes later, we heard "See you, Jonathan!" coming from Eric as he and the Judean People's Front headed towards the finish line. It wasn't long after that that we completely ran out of new ideas and agreed to a hint. Since hints were free after a half hour, there was no penalty. Thomas said he was kind of surprised we hadn't solved it yet and thought a hint was a good idea.

He came over for a second time and we went over the puzzle. After explaining what we'd tried, Thomas nudged us enough so that we realized we had been able to transpose the square. It still worked and was a valid solution, it just didn't work with the index number. So we fixed the square, got the final message SECOND PERSON SINGULAR, which indicated that the solution was YOU.

That experience left a sour taste. It seemed it was no one's fault, nothing could have been done about it, and it was just one of those things. We talked about how if there truly had been only one way to make the square we could have been done thirty minutes earlier. In each subsequent retelling, the length grew by five minutes, until we probably would have been able to solve the puzzle before we had arrived on site.

Somewhat dejected, we headed to the end location. Looking at the standings, we figured without the square snarl we probably would have ended up in 8th, just after Blood and Booze. As it was, we ended up in 14th. Oh well. At least we'd contributed a kick-ass prize: A bottle of wine trapped inside a Don't Break The Bottle wooden puzzle.

In the end, I really appreciate the Burninators putting it on and all the work they put into it. The production values had some very nice touches. I would imagine it was a great introduction to puzzle hunts to new teams and I think it provides a great example for other teams to emulate should they want to put on their hunt. For my own tastes, I would have liked a little more challenge and could have easily done without the problem at the end, but all in all, it was a good BANG.

Coming of Age at BANG 21, Part 1 of 2

Arriving on time to a puzzle event is not a normal occurance for the Smoking GNU, quite the opposite in fact. However, when Rob, Mark, Given, Jonathan and I set out for BANG 21, the 1.5 hour trip from Santa Rosa to Menlo Park went smoother than expected and we actually showed up a few minutes before registration even opened. As other teams followed, we took it as a good sign that those who had survived BANG 22 were still willing to talk with us.

We got our materials and there was some discussion over the handwritten note included. Since it was a secret message purporting to give us and only us the answers to the first puzzle, it set our minds wandering. "Maybe," Jonathan joked, "they're trying to reward us for hosting the last BANG." Consensus was against this hypothesis, as other teams had similar papers fluttering in the wind. "It's an awful lot of writing to go to for so many notes," I remarked. Being the lazy sort, I probably just would have found a satisfactory handwritten font and printed it in blue.

I got lost trying to find the library (and its restroom) but made it back in time to see Corey from the Burninator's begin the presentation. I held back from joining up with my team, opting to take some pictures from higher ground instead. Corey described the rules, how the answers matched up with a numbered crossword clue, and warned us not to open the tiny envelope except in an emergency (we would later find out the emergency was in case of rain or if the sheriff across the street got wind of what, from their point of view, could be considered a flash mob). He then turned the show over to Wei-Hwa.

And by show, I mean, the first puzzle, based on the quiz show Twenty One. Dressed sharp as the confident game show host, Wei-Hwa began reading the questions, one after the other, as three of his teammates showed boards with the text of the question around the circular fountain. I scribbled down a few answers, waited until the first round was done, and as they began to repeat the questions, I rejoined my team.

Who had, of course, most of the answers down. We worked on filling in the gaps and walked a little ways away so we could concentrate. All the answers to the quiz questions were one letter different than the cheat sheet we'd been given. So we tried using all sorts of different ordering and extraction methods until we finally hit upon the right one. The answer matched one of the crossword clues on the map and we headed off to another part of the park.

We grabbed our second puzzle, consisting of a large amount of laser cut black plastic letters in a sandwich bag and skinny sheet of crossword clues. For solving, we picked one of the few pieces of unclaimed territory: A small bleacher. There was some concern at first that the pieces would fly all over the place in the wind, but they were heavy enough that it didn't matter.

The fact that we took as long as we did on this puzzle is a testament to our second weakness as a team (our first being navigation): Organization. It takes us a few minutes to settle into our location and a few minutes to leave it. Responsibilities for the clue itself are random and half-hazard. Someone takes one part, another person takes another, and it takes a little time for everything to start to mesh.

One example with this puzzle — in which we discovered there were no "U"s (the 21st letter) and the answers to the crossword clues were in alphabetical order — was that the work could be easily divided: Half work from the bottom and half work from the top of the list and meet in the middle. I tried to encourage this but it didn't seem to take hold. Given and I were arranging letters, the "grunt" work I suppose, while the other three were solving. Finally, Jonathan took up arranging letters from the bottom half and we managed to solve the puzzle with the leftover letters.

Corey gave us kind of a sheepish grin at the next site, as the periodic table (prominently displayed on site) had figured into a couple puzzles in BANG 22. I saw Jan's OnLive t-shirt for the cool, newly unveiled product she'd been working on. I idly wondered why she was on GC again, but dismissed the thought as we settled down on the sidewalk to begin working.

A letter cascade accompanies a bunch of cards, all of which say "Like/Unlike [element], I am [description]" with one part a blank to be filled in. For some reason, we treated each card as its own seperate "Guess what I'm thinking of" game, instead of all of them being descriptions of the same element. By the time I did figure that out, we had already completed the letter cascade to get the final element (scandium), so I didn't mention it. Days later, I filled in members of the team as we discussed the puzzles.

Getting the element, though, wasn't the solution, as the index card stated. Instead, it was indexing into the appropriate word, which we had carefully taken note of when we started filling in information. From that point, the solve was quick. Overall, though, the puzzle slowed us down... mostly again due to disorganization. The twenty-one index cards were all over the place, shuffled around, and being answered by different players at different times. Too much overlap, not enough synchronicity.

Our next location gave us my favorite puzzle of the day. In a sheltered alcove, we sat down and started solving. Crossword-style clues on arrows abounded. Spaces to put short answers in a circle containing a single letter also abounded. Answers like "muumuu", "tutu", and "Wii" fitted with the spaces in the M, T, and W circles, quickly leading us to realize the answers consisted of words that only had the single constant plus a single vowel.

We started pointing clue-arrows to answer-circles and taping them together (thank goodness Rob had grabbed a roll before we took off). Hoping to create a single path, we were stymied briefly when that turned out to be impossible. Mark suggested maybe it was a 3D object, like the dome in BATH 4. The configuration would make a great cube, we realized. I suddenly realized that the "What a dark circle in this clue represents" clue didn't refer to the colored circles (duh) but to the large dark circles behind every constanant that for some reason hadn't registered in my mind. Obviously, with the a white cube, each dark circle was a pip! We finished assembly, found the constant on the opposite side of the die for each colored circle and came up with "B_XC_R" (there was nothing opposite the colored squares, hence the blanks) Obviously, it was "BOXCAR". Later, Wei-Hwa told us that each side of the die represented a vowel, so taking the the vowel opposite each square would have filled it in for us. Neat idea, but that part of the solve mechanism would take more effort and time than just mentally filling in vowels, and thus was useless to us.

Part 2 soon.

Photos from BANG XX, 21, and 22, plus One Video

I've finally had a chance to organize and upload photos from the past few events:

BANG XX
Many of these were at night, and thus didn't turn out the greatest. On top of that, we only got about halfway through the event.

BANG 21
Entirely coincidentally, I took 21 photos. Includes a video of one round of blackjack.

BANG 22 Scouting
From our first scouting trip to downtown San Rafael, with the comments that were made about usability. (The Falkirk Mansion was unfortunately being used the same day of our event.)

Long Overdue BATH 4 Finale

(Part 1 and Part 2}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, done.

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

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

Major Contributions to MSPH 123, Plus Photos

I had meant to write up about my experiences playtesting Microsoft Puzzlehunt 123 a while ago, and eventually post some pictures (eventually, being now). I had gotten started, when my three year-old daughter snuck on to the computer and managed to publish only the whiny parts and none of the "I had so much fun!" parts (since I tend to analyze my mistakes or shortcomings before my accomplishments). I've made no effort to revisit that topic or include moments like:

Making sure the white flashes of the Jeopardy squares where random

The joy of finally solving Pink's Hot Dogs

Holding up a colored-in Honeycomb for everyone to take wild stabs at identifying

Dying every single time I played Hunt the Wumpus, without ever once killing the beast.

Larry solving Crown Royal in ten minutes after Dunn and I had worked on for a hour or so (I found out later from him that he built on our work, but at the time it looked as though he was able to bypass it completely)

Being ten seconds away from diving into Rich's pool if that invisible plastic thing slipped away one more damned time

The frustration of trying to solve Triple Sec back when all the clues were scrambled, not just the second and third layers.

My only contribution to the Daily Doubles ("The Princess Brine!")

The interesting and completely incorrect monster I constructed for the Lego puzzle

Attempting my first duck conundrum with Rich, a half-naked Chris, and Ed (hopefully got those names right) and some... interesting props.

Brainstorming supervillian occupations for Bad Boys with the team, though it took two more days and an extra large "What bloody path?" hint to solve.

Finally solving Time Corpse the day after the playtest, while on a dinner date with my wife, and the bemused look I received from her.

All that's past, but Larry's recent notes spurred me on to write, despite not having yet finished the BATH 4 story.

My main, important, exciting, without-which-it-couldn't-have-happened contribution to helping out at GC at Stanford was... providing the chess pieces for Terminal Jeopardy. Yep, hunt definitely would have been ruined without me.

Okay, okay, I did actually help out a little:

Set up Gmail Notifier to beep as loudly as possible whenever GC got email from teams, as it was a rare thing for the first 18 hours or so

Was one of the four or five people fighting for the chance to reply whenever said email did come

Tried to give the Terminal Jeopardy a little more of a dramatic effect by placing the globular structure in a vase, lit from below with my headlamp and turning off as many lights as I could

Here's a list of other things I was able to do while staffing, due to GC's impressive orginization and preperaredness, as well as that amazing admin app:

jam on Guitar Hero 2 with Matt, Simon, and Josh. I was even allowed to torture the people there with my vocal rendition of "More than a Feeling" and "The Middle" ("'The Middle'? What song is that?" "Don't worry, you'll recognize it." [song plays] "Oh yeah.")
- keep track of how Team 196 (Jonathan) and Judean People's Front (Eric and Given) were doing in relation to each other

provide miniature pool table entertainment

create the Smoking GNU website in preparation for announcing BANG 22

blog about BATH 4

So, it'd be easy to say that there would have been no problem if I had stayed home for the weekend, but really, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Missing a Team Photo

For some reason, I can't find a single photo where our core team (Jonathan, Given, and myself) are all in the same picture. Obviously, I take nearly all the pictures, but even in the photos GC took during the Ghost Patrol playtest, only 2 of the 3 of appear together. Well, technically, Given's leg is in this photo...

No really, they're free!

Saw this at the JC...

Ghost Patrol Playtest - Final Part

(Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)

Ghost 7: Here I Go Again

It was back to the hotel analog — aka Casa de Ashby — for our next ghost. One of the upstairs rooms had been transformed into a temporary hotel room; we were the first team there. Lining the wall was a series of gold records from different heavy metal bands, each with a number from one to ten spelled out underneath it. I heard one of my teammates note that the fact that they were spelled out was important as I excused myself to make use of the facilities. By the time I got back a few minutes later, they had solved the puzzle. To this day, I don't know how it works.

The early gray of dawn was showing as we got a box filled with bottles. Heading out to the van, we put the bottles on the drafting table and began to consider what to do with them. They were all corked or otherwise stoppered, which impressed me for some reason. Each bottle was filled with liquid and...

I blinked.

By the time I opened my eyelids, it was more than a half-hour later. The sun was up. The bottles were lined up in a row on the table and Brian from GC had joined us in the van. Jonathan was attempting to blow notes on the bottles. My first though after my inadvertent nap, similar to a famous bowl of petunias, was “Oh no, not again.” (Our disastrous showing at Iron Puzzler II had had a bottle puzzle that consisted of blowing on bottles to get notes out of them; it was a frustrating puzzles.) Brian was kind of walking us through the clue since it was a music puzzle and our abilities with music puzzles are our main weakness. Also, we'd completely missed the fact that we needed to use the UV light to reveal the right liquid level for each bottle. Because of said past experience and because I'd missed most of what was going on, I just watched and didn't even try to help.

Whatever lead we may have had in the unofficial competition was lost due to our performance on that clue. And we felt bad, too, since it was Brian's puzzle. I have to say our poor performance was more a reflection on our team than on the puzzle; for all I know it was beautifully constructed and amazingly elegant.

It was at this point that we lost our handler, probably to the lead team. It seemed kind of weird not having David or Jenn around, like there was too much empty space in the van as we headed to our next clue.

After the normal joys of finding parking, we followed the SHaRC under a freeway overpass, where strange metal statues were. We spotted a member of GC across the street, but she emphatically waved us away. Our clue was on this side. We found it in the form of a CD behind one of the statues.

This clue put a little bit of moral back into our team. Each track had two songs mixed into it and the titles of the song were anagrammed into another amusing title. Removing the letters in the actual song title from the fake song title left a letter, and thus the solve.

The capture was nearby. We had only done three clues for this ghost. Slightly depressing.

Ghost 8 – Idea Pooping

The sun had broke through the early morning clouds and it had turned into a gorgeous morning as we pulled up for our next ghost at Lake Merritt in Oakland. On our way there, Jonathan finally got in contact with BANG Erik who had been planning on joining us at around 11am the previous day. He hadn't been feeling well, but could now make it. Jonathan gave him directions to the park and we got out of the van.

There we say the impressive figure of Jesse in his lab coat and Meat Machine throwing bocce balls over an impromptu line. They were just finishing up as we arrived, so we took balls in hand and since there were four of us, each tossed a ball at the jack. Jesse consulted a sheet at exclaimed happily “Amazing!” (or was it “Awesome!”) Eric immediately got out his clipboard and started writing as we continued to make several additional bowls. It became clear pretty quickly that each bowl, depending on the order away from the jack would get another word of praise, such as “Va-va-voom!”, “Terrific!”, or “Great!” (to which Jonathan replied, “Great? That's all you can say about that bowl? How about 'glorious'?”), each of which started with a different letter of the alphabet.

Jonathan and Eric broke the code within a few bowls and Eric had the entire code written down in a few minutes. Okay, so what now? We rolled a few more just to make sure, exaggerating distances to the extreme in order to be exact, such as the time I threw the blue ball twenty-five feet from the jack in order to make absolutely sure it was the farthest away. Nifty encoding scheme verified, but what did we decode with it?

While discussing, someone looked over at the balls left by the other two teams and decided that it wasn't a case of GC being too tired to pick up the their balls after all; they were, in fact, the message we needed to decode. “GUM” was the answer and apparent flavor of ghost. Jonathan and I had a short discussion as to whether gum actually had flavor as we moved on.

(At GC HQ at the actual event, I found out that the answer had been changed to “GNU” in a small tribute to our team. Well, that and mainly that it worked with the constraints of the puzzles.)

Our next location was a bit away, but we decided to walk it. We wandered past the real bocce courts and beyond a professional croquet court — which had people in their cricket whites playing that morning. We came to another one of those “It's straight ahead, but we can't walk on water” situations and curved around the lake to find Meat Machine sitting at a small labyrinth. There we got handed a piece of paper with a bunch of ones and zeros on it.

We stared at it for a while. Different theories were postulated. None worked. At first, we thought they could be Morse, but then later groupings were eight digits long. We thought it could be binary, but then why would there be both “0” and “000”? After about ten minutes we began to run dry of ideas. Given or I postulated something, but Jonathan said it wouldn't work (something that had happened earlier when Jonathan argued against “dogfish”, not believing it was a real fish). Eric took exception to this and said, “Don't poop on an idea!” “Until it poops out on you,” I added.

I thought then that should be our new team motto.

We continued to stare at the sheet of paper covered in only two digits. We thought about taking a hint, but Jonathan convinced us that there was no real hurry. Meat Machine was still there. It was a beautiful morning. BANG Erik was to be joining us at that spot shortly (at least in theory). A nearby squirrel hadn't been able to give Given his nut yet, despite several attempts. And we only had a few puzzles to go before this amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience was over. So we stayed.

Now at least twice in the past, I'd had an ideas for solutions that I dismissed as unlikely, which later turned out to be right. I now suddenly had a very crazy idea, and hoping to avoid the mistakes of the past, decided to work it out until it did poop out on me.

I grabbed the paper from Jonathan and twisted around. (I won't go into the details of my theory here since, although improbable, someone could read this far and I could develop a puzzle using the idea.) I worked it and worked it and it almost seemed to be bearing fruit. Based on what I was doing, Jonathan deduced my theory, got the paper back and tried it himself. “You know, it's actually kind of working!” But it didn't work completely and we gave up on it.

Jonathan called Greg for a hint. Greg didn't answer. As he was leaving a message, though, he cracked the puzzle.

[Spoiler: The still improbable reader may wish to avoid the next few paragraphs if they want to solve the puzzle themselves; instead, they should probably click the picture to the right.]

It was all the codes we'd previous thought, but only back to back. Decoding the first set yielded MOPERS. As Jonathan set about decoding the second set using binary instead of Braille this time, I mentioned that MOPERS is Morse with an extra P. That was our solve: Each of the classic encodings was being used to encode a word that was an anagram of the code plus one letter. Eric and Jonathan figured the last set would decode to ATMOSPHERE before even trying it, since they had seen the same word used in the same way in a Shinteki Decathlon.

Greg showed up and said, “I hear you guys need a hint?”

(I later told Ian, the puzzle's author, that it was the puzzle that went from most frustrating to most satisfying in the shortest period of time. I was actually kind of disappointed when they didn't use it for the Game.)

In talking with Greg a little about the puzzle, he mentioned that they planned to have teams retrieve the clue from the labyrinth using RC cars. It depended on the budget and feasibility, though. We thought it was a great idea and only wished we could have tried it.

The SHaRC indicated our next clue was back the way we came. In a real game, deciding to walk the long walk would have been disastrous.

Back at the van, we finally met up with BANG Erik who had parked next to us. We got him up to speed as much as possible as we walked past the once bocce ball-covered field and on towards our destination. We rounded a corner and saw that the lake again stretched in our way and would make for quite a detour.

“Let's take the van.”

With our newly-acquired fifth player in tow, we parked near an Obama rally that, surprising to me, seemed to have attracted very few San Francisco attendees. With propaganda-ish music blaring over the speakers, we crossed the street to where three colorful Z's were standing. Meat Machine was just finishing up and leaving as we got there and got our clue: A series of Taboo cards, each with a dark side. On the front were five words, as in real Taboo, that players weren't allowed to say. It was up to us to determine what the actual word was, though; that part was blank.

We quickly figured out that all the front words began with “TA”. On the back was a ghost saying a “BOO”-related word. Some of them had half-circles on the edges. All of the stickers had images on them. For some reason, I said, “Let's make a ring using the stickers to join them together.” I'm still not sure why. The idea apparently had its merits, though, and we put the stickers on cards that had word portions in common. The easiest sticker was probably “BOO”, which connected TABOO to BOO-BOO. With them all connected, a series of Roman numerals were created running inside and outside of the ring. A discussion broke out as to which order to read the numerals, since we had all assumed they stood for letters. At some point, though, Jonathan pointed out that the outside read “PRWNL”. “It has to be PERIWINKLE,” he declared.

I offered the SHaRC to our newly-arrived teammate so he could get a capture in. He declined.

Finale – A View to the Killed

Our end game was at a Mountain View Cemetery. Honestly, it's probably the largest cemetery I've ever been to. We reached a van point at pretty much the high point on the mountain. It was a gorgeous view and I tried to take a picture of it. Unfortunately, my digital camera was set to “movie”, which I didn't notice until later. All I got was one frame grab and a short movie of my shoes.

Everyone was there. GC Brian greeted us and explained what was going on. For the actual event, the OWL would explain this all, but right now it was him. The ghosts in containment had congealed into a single boss ghost and when this happened, teams would actually get to chat with the nerd ghost (nerd ghost? I hadn't seen enough puzzles for the previous two ghosts to get a handle on their personalities). He would explain that instead of trying to contain the ghosts, which only made them angry, it was better to figure out how to heal them emotionally... give them the proverbial closure. They would then leave this earthly plane forever.

At the circular base of the gravesite we stopped at were the final puzzles, several of which had slime associated with them. Had we actually done any slime analysis like I told the non-navigating, non-driving portion of our team to, we could identify which ghost belong to which puzzle by finding similar identifying slime at the site. Instead, though, those two teammates had been in the back of the bus solving puzzle steps we backsolved or guessed at. That or they were watching the animations that each capture code elicited from the OWL. Although I had heard them talking about them, I only had a chance to sneak a peak at the first one and pretty much forgot about them until this point.

We gathered up the puzzles and failed to identify the slime. To my horror, two of the samples I collected were labeled as the same ghost. Someone mentioned that there may have been two different slime samples out for the same ghost. It didn't matter in the end.

Eric grabbed one puzzle with pictures of famous people on it, some of them famously dead. He solved it quickly without even knowing which ghost it was for and Brian, again acting as our OWL, gave us the story as to how we had mollified that ghost. Jonathan figured a puzzle involving pets probably belonged to the Benign Booga and solved it pretty much on his own. We got another Brian ending. A bunch of phrases on a sheet of paper seemed like the same font that was used for the St. Mary's park flower puzzle, so we figured it was the Chinatown ghost. Another one consisted of letters on a grid. There were some interesting parts to it, but nothing that I could figure out. Given was working on a bunch of cards that had been divided in two.

Noticing our stalling on these final few puzzles, Brian mentioned that we may want to concentrate more on each ghost's motivation, revealed in the ending videos. Oh, and we may need scissors for the letters for the grid one.

We gathered up the clues and got back in the van to watch each of the videos again. They were impressive, though only in rough draft form. One or two only had a description of what the animation was to be like. But it was enough to solve the puzzles: We split the letter grid in two and actually saw the ending animation of the bi-polar ghost being split in two. I inferred that half of his personality had gone to hell, while the other went to purgatory. We then used the honor-binary system to solve the kung-fu fright's problem.

Up next was the circus lady. Her heart had been broken by another circus performer, so one of the Eric's figured we only needed to put the heart cards back together, mending her broken heart. He pointed out that the letters those cards represented anagrammed to TIME, the perfect solution. This led to a heated — but as always, good-natured — argument, with Jonathan arguing that we were discarding 75% of the data and there was no clear order to the hearts cards. Eric, Erik, Given and I took a side and even after Jonathan had entered TIME as the correct answer, we continued to argue whether it was a satisfying clue or not. Eventually, we agreed to disagree. It was a fun discussion though.

Which left us with the rockstar ghost. We looked at all the pictures covering the sheet of paper, but no ideas seemed to be coming. We watched his video and saw he wasted away and died while trying to write his ultimate song. But still, no ideas came. “Here,” I commented, “is how I would want this puzzle to solve: I'd want each of these pictures to actually be a musical note. The notes would then be from a song but would be missing the last few notes or something and those notes would then spell out the answer.” Jonathan sat forward. “How about if they contained musical notes instead? Like this bulldozer has 'do' in it. You know, do-re-mi?” We liked the idea and set about to figuring out the proper names of the pictures so to extract notes. When done, we figured we'd have to sing the notes to figure out which song it was and what to do next. That, unfortunately, was not going to happen. The other teams had left and it was getting late. We told Brian we knew what to do but the odds of us doing it within a reasonable timeframe were kind of sad. So he told us the end story of the final ghost being released, and the nerd ghost finally getting his dream of having an adventure fulfilled.

It was such a satisfying ending.

GC invited us to lunch at a eatery down at the bottom of the hill, five minutes away. We graciously accepted and after getting organized, headed out.

It took us a half-hour to get there.

Iron Puzzler BANG Photos

There didn't seem to be many picture opportunities apart from our team gathered around a puzzle, but what few I took are up at ipbang.puzzalot.com.

Shinteki Decathlon 4 - Pics, Thoughts, and Something Else

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.

More Photos and On Being An Introvert

I've added some photos taken by my teammates during coed astronomy's leisurely mini-Game to the gallery. They're basically photos that flesh out our experience and, oddly enough, have me in them (sorry).

Speaking of fleshing out, I have been working on a detailed writeup of our experiences during the mini-Game, mostly so I can remember them come six months from now. But once again I find that being an introvert keeps me to about 1.5 paragraphs per day. I need to get into frame of mine where I can concentrate on one specific thing (writing) without fear of interruption. My daughter doesn't like this and will often climb all over her Daddy-Jungle-Gym(TM) to try and hijack my attention.

It usually works.

Workin' on my Superpowers

It can be pretty hard to hear Don Luskin when he's talking atop a Stanford parking structure with the wind is blowing and the conversation of a hundred or so other people going on around. The obvious solution is to somehow get my ears nearer to the speaker without actually moving my body. My attempt was captured in the background of one of Larry's photos. Egads! I had no idea my neck could stretch that far! It's like I'm a much homlier version of Professor Impossible, only without the cool costume or Stephen Colbert's amazing voice.

Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt Photos and Wrapup

The weather actually turned out to be pretty good Saturday night as The Smoking GNU, temporarily renamed The Smoking Rat in honor of the Year of the Rat, took to the San Francisco streets to search for plaques and grates. It rained hard at first, but by the time we had located all but one of the clues, it was barely drizzling; the thunderstorm that was supposed to attack Northern California seemed to have fizzled.

I didn't take as many pictures as I wanted, mostly since in just about every location, other teams gathered around trying to find locations we had just found, and I didn't want to spoil their fun.

LTR: me, Given, Dan, Linda, and Eric (View all photos)

This was Dan's first time on our team and Eric and Linda's second. When we got to Justin Herman Plaza, we met one of Linda's oldest friends, Melanie, along with her brother and/or friend, another Scott, who were looking for a team to join, so The Smoking Rat grew to seven players that day. Eric had asked Tory (of Mythbusters fame) to join us, but apparently unless the event requires opening an elevator in mid-flight, he wasn't up for it. ;)

We played in the "Regular" category, even though it was our first time in the Treasure Hunt. Considering that we ended up only completing 13 of the 16 clues, maybe trying as "Beginners" would have allowed us to get into Jayson Wechter's mindset quicker.

After we opened our clue pack, we solved and located all but two of the clues, marked them out on the map, and plotted our route, planning on solving the other two while walking (turned out to be fairly difficult). Eric had borrowed a GPS unit from work, but we never ended up using it, using him instead (we got him to do the voice on a few occasions too).

So we hit Gate B at the ferry, a figure skating statue in front of the Punch Line comedy club, The Old Ship Saloon, a telephone booth on Stockton, a barbershop across from St. Peter & Paul Church, and more. One place we found almost by accident: The clue indicated that we needed to find an alley with the word "tar" in it (but that's a lot of streets to look through) which would be across from something that happens every 29.5 days. We figured on of the moon phases, but that didn't help us figure out the street. On our way to another clue, we went through a street with a large number of Chinese restraunts on it, and I suddenly remembered a "New Moon" Chinese food restraunt in Santa Rosa, so I told everyone to be on the lookout for such a place. I figured it was a long shot, but within a few minutes, we spotted a "New Moon" restraunt across the street from Stark alley.

We did run into some difficulties along the way. The problem with riddles is that there is not always an exact solution, which is why being in the developer's mindset is so important. One example that really slowed us down was clue #3, which read in part, "If you follow customs here, $20 will give you a charge." We correctly figured that we needed to go to the U.S. Customs building, but figured that the second half meant that we needed to go to an ATM (which gives out $20 dollar bills and, if you're not a member of that bank, will charge you for it). There were two or three ATMs around the Customs building, none of which lead us in the right direction. Instead we were supposed to think of Jackson (on the $20 bill) and Battery (the charge), which we only found out after reading the solutions yesterday.

The one that really stymied us was Clue #15. We came nowhere close to solving it at any point that night. It read, in part:

Combine the name of the Big Apple's high point (where a fictional King briefly reigned with the stationary part of

     P   R
       N
     D   L

Well, we tried combinging "Empire State Building" in ways that would match up with the letters (a la EMPIRE), expecting words to appear that would give us cross streets. Nothing came of it. We found out that the next day that the letters were supposed to represent a stickshift (despite being letters for an automatic), the "stationary" part of which was "park". Oh well.

Overall, we had a good time, even in spite of the weather and sore feet. Afterwards, we discussed whether we'd do it again next year. Although we haven't ruled it out, three of us are on tight budgets, so the cost of tickets and parking may keep us from joining again next year.

Late Mystery Hunt Photo

I meant to post this a while ago, but here's a photo of Jonathan (left) doing his part with the Silly Hat Brigade at the MIT Mystery Hunt that was published in the MIT student paper. On more than on occassion, oddly enough, he was asked what team he was on...

Photos - Shinteki Decathlon III

I've finally gotten photos from Week 1 of Shinteki Decathlon III up. Most of them are simply various teams arriving and solving at clue sites I staffed.



However, I decided not to take pictures of teams at Site 10 for the Endurance challenge since: a) none of the teams arrived until after dark; and b) we weren't supposed to reveal our presense, which I'm sure a flash would have done.

When I had taken the photos, I made liberal use of the "audio notes" feature of my camera so I could keep track of which team was which; unfortunately, the sound files didn't transfer. This means that I'm going off my memory, which is quite poor in some cases, so apologies in advance for any mistaken IDs and big thanks if you can provide the correct ones.