Havin' a blast at Shinteki Disneyland! (with pics) [SPOILERS]

[Note 1: This blog entry may contain information that can potentially spoil future experiences. Read no further if you are planning to participate should this event be hosted again.]

[Note 2: Pictures are both on my server (with full-size versions available) and on Facebook (no account required). These photos may also contain spoilers.]

After taking my daughter to Discovery Kingdom for her birthday in June (she wanted to ride an elephant), I talked with Jonathan about the logistics of holding a puzzle hunt at an amusement park. It seemed like a fun idea, but had many design challenges that needed to be addressed. We wondered if it was even possible. A few months later, Shinteki announced that they would be holding a "Field Trip" puzzle hunt at Disneyland, so we were soon to find out.

Jonathan was, naturally, thrilled. Seeing as how he drives up for nearly every puzzle event in the Bay Area, he wanted to see how many of his team would be "hardcore" enough to drive down for just one. Three of us ended up making the trip: Andrea, Given, and myself.

And we had a blast! I mean some serious fun. But it was at an intense pace. Thanks to Jonathan's scheduling, we may have been the first team to meet with Brent et al, and definitely the second to get our binder. By that time, Jonathan had already hoofed it to Space Mountain and gotten us Fast Passes. We set off in the other direction and started actual solving at the Indiana Jones ride. It was funny how we'd expected to have plenty of time to solve puzzles while waiting in line, but we rarely saw much of a line, so that we ended up having to actually stop in queues in order to get the data we needed.

Some memorable moments:

Finding the pin traders before the first ride (I had never noticed this phenomenon before) and getting our 10 point set in the first go

Trying to give Given — who hadn't been to Disneyland in twenty years or so — a tour of the Indian Jones line space: "And it used to be that you could shake this pole and the ceiling would come crashing down." *shakes pole and ceiling comes crashing down* "I guess they fixed it."

Playing "Spot Jack Sparrow" while trying to keep track of left-right aspects of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

Figuring out that the "life-like people" for the Pirates clue referred to the people in the restaurant.

Getting all the answers we needed for the Haunted Mansion clue from the greeter and then going on the Nightmare Before Christmas-ed ride anyway.

Jonathan just happening to be looking at the page that required a blacklight while on the blacklit portion of Haunted Mansion

Taking turn-by-turn notes on Space Mountain

Running into other teams at the Tomorrowland photo spot and swapping photos.

Being impressed with the solution to the Give Us A Buzz clue.

Giving up my 28,800 score (18) for 35,500 (13) on the Buzz Lightyear ride.

Running into Ian in front of Pirates when we had only one word to go for The Wordiest Place on Earth and forgetting to ask him for the final GC-only word we needed. "Isn't there something you want to ask me?"

Andrea and I getting way too wet on Splash Mountain even though we were sitting up front.

The satisfaction of solving The Wordiest Place on Earth while eating lunch.

Brent's surprise that we'd solved The Wordiest Place on Earth... apparently at how early in the game we'd accomplished it.

Spending way too much time looking for the other half of our team after we got split up on Tom Sawyer Island aka Pirate's Lair. Plus, the only other inhabitants of said island seemed to be other teams.

Watching Given try and figure out how to extract an answer from the barrel sudoku and having Andrea come up and say, "Hey, isn't that pi?"

Feeling like a crack shot as Jonathan pointed out each target in the Frontierland Shootin' Arcade and I hit it without fail.

My team (well, mostly Jonathan) going into a let's-gather-all-the-data-we-can-before-this-thing-is-over frenzy at around 5pm, while I trailed after them attempting to work on the Tweet Tweet puzzle.

Finally getting a chance to sit down and solve the Tweet Tweet puzzle in the Main Street ice cream shop.

Breaking the Indiana Jones cryptogram with the "eye is not a letter" aha as we got in line.

Eating a great meal at French Market.

Having enough time afterwards to hit all the rides we hadn't got a chance to yet.

We never made it anywhere close to Toon Town and solved nothing on Main Street (by the time we got there, it was as if everyone in the park was there too.) Regardless, we still made enough points to end up with a virtual gold medal.

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.

BATH 4 Pictures and Experiences (Part 1)

(There is the possibility that BATH4 would be run again. In which case, there could be spoilers here.)

BATH 4: DIY. Much to our surprise, we took 2nd! And took pictures! And (some) people like our puzzle! And by our puzzle, I mean Eric Prestemon's. But that's, as Alton Brown might say, another post.

Joining Given, Jonathan, Eric, and myself, were Rob ("You guys only invite me cuz I own a van") and Mark, his second hunt and first "public" one. It was a lot of fun, with some good puzzles and a few that weren't to our liking. Mark was especially frustrated with one puzzle, thought to be fair, we were all frustrated with it.

Our first puzzle had us walking around AT&T park, matching photos to points on a map. It was a good puzzle to get us started. Jonathan got some good-natured ribbing about his inability to recognize Willie May's statue from behind and Mark and Rob threatened to solder a needle to Barry Bonds' arm on his plaque.

Deciding to move around the city (somewhat) clockwise, we next visited coed astronomy's site, where we filtered a series of tiles through a decision tree. When we got the answer and were heading away in the van, coed astronomy asked us to sing the answer. Apparently, I lead a sheltered life, since I had no real recollection of the song and wondered what the heck my teammates were singing. A darned good puzzle, and probably the one that made best use of its environment.

We stopped at a Taco Bell to tackle Mystic Fish's excellent word-connection puzzle, which often forced compound words out of non-compounded words (such as connecting "prose" and "cute"). Bit by bit, we got a dome built and saw the directions around the edge leading us to a play park. Which had a climbing dome. Which we climbed, got locations on the mini-dome, took words, found pun directions, and solved. Very fun, very clever puzzle. It got our vote for best puzzle in the end.

Next, we stopped at a pizza place that Rob said was where he went 30 years ago for pizza while in college. There, we solved Ian's fun portable puzzle and got a receipt out of it. We were able to finish the puzzle before finishing the pizza... but that includes baking time.

We drove further south to the next sector on our list. We were to find a gray Cadillac after solving a puzzle where different names were hidden in sentences. At first they appeared to be countries, with a few odd ones thrown in. Then Eric, looking at his laminated map of the City, saw that they were all street names within a certain grid. After getting all the street names out of the puzzle, we realized two were missing, so we drove to where they crossed.

We looked all over the four blocks adjacent to that corner, but did not spot a single Cadillac. Mark got out of the van to scout on foot. "Wouldn't it be funny," I told my remaining teammates, "If it were on that mural on the playground?" I was only 10% serious; it seemed an unlikely subject for a grade school mural. But when Mark rejoined us a bit later, he confirmed my little joke. The license plate was our answer.

Coming soon: A mall, a stall, and jump off a wall.

The Ghost Patrol Playtest, Part 1

(Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

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

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

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

The Briefing

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

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

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

Ghost 1 - Barking Up The Wrong Tree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our next location: Chinatown.

Ghost 2 - The Chinese Funeral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2 is here...

When Puzzled Zombies Attack (aka BANG 19)

A couple days ago, Team Goldfish, aka Golden Golems and Mystic Fish, brought Liboncatipu's SNAP vision to the Bay Area. Many thanks to all three teams for putting it on and all the hard work they put into it!

This was my second time captaining The Smoldering YAK. Although our roster wasn't confirmed until 8:30am day of, we ended up with all of the original YAK members except Matthew. Linda's Eric had had a documentary shoot with Stephen Baldwin that got cancelled due to weather, so he was able to meet us in Berkeley to be our fifth. The GNU had other roster problems, with two of their members being unable to make it as of Friday afternoon; however, I got them their final member, William, by Friday night.

(What few pictures I took of UDC are here.)

Zombie Horror Picture Show
I was impressed with the production values of the first puzzle. Whoever designed it went to a lot of trouble to animate the letter "Z" attacking a bunch of other letters through sixteen security cams. It was definitely a cool way to start a BANG and kind of put the "night" element back in the BANG, if only briefly and at the wrong time.

There were a few drawbacks to the clue, though: We pretty much had the right idea from the start, but it took us quite a while to keep track of all the information going on in sixteen screens simultaneously. It didn't help that three of the left-hand cams were so dark it was practically impossible to tell what was going on. And it was definitely a challenge to keep track of which letters went into which cubical in the upper-right hand cam. We were so packed in that it often seemed like we were bouncing ideas off of the team behind us: "Look the 'I' is getting killed now." "No no, it's a 'T'."

Finally, we took Andrea's idea of dividing the cams into quadrants, having one team member watch a quadrant, and then simply saying when a letter got killed, while I wrote them down. Even after that it still took us several times to get it done right.

Zombies in the Underground

I have to admit I'm not especially fond of clues requiring large amounts of data collection within a small space. In the Downtown Berkeley BART station, the space to collect from was exceedingly small: The BART schedule pamphlet. Luckily, Eric and Andrea were really into it and speedily got the data out; meanwhile, Linda and Lori worked on the longest zombie trip. That left me as ideas man, trying to figure out how to pull it all together. I had many ideas, but none seemed to work. We ended up taking a hint, which told to basically concentrate on the simplest of my theories. Someone spotted we were using the wrong data (i.e. the station names as they were called out instead of those on the clue sheet), corrected, solved, and moved on.

It's somewhat ironic that I made a mistake on the second puzzle very similar to the mistake I made on the second puzzle of BANG 16. To wit: I tried an idea and the data came out as "UNDPAB". That almost looks like "UNDEAD", I thought. But since it wasn't, I ended up discarding the right idea.

Ghostbustin' Under a T-Rex

Our next clue took place on campus. Lucky for us, Linda was a graduate of UC Berkeley and knew exactly where the building we were going to was. The clue consisted of 8 mini-logic puzzles that were used to solve a nonogram. Even though most of my team hadn't had much experience with the mini-logics, I had tested nonoriddles on them thoroughly enough that they at least knew how to do the nonogram. Specifically, Andrea was all over it, being able to complete it when we only had three or four of the mini-logics solved. She was telling us what the answers to the other ones were before we could complete them.

Brainless Chess

The next one was done before I knew it. Linda took down the information from the follow-the-zombie's-infectious path while I took advantage of the nearby restrooms. When I came out, Eric had sketched out what Linda told him to and it looked like "FEED". Larry, manning the site, gave me one of those "You're so close but I can't tell you that" expressions, so we went back, re-drew the paths, and came up with "FLEE". Larry was then fairly strict in interpreting the "write the answer on the solution sheet and show it to the staffer" portion of the rules, but we were out quickly after that.

A Soggy Poetry Reading

The funny thing about the next clue, which consisted of finding poem titles on plaques scattered on both sides of a city block, was that arriving after a little later worked to teams' advantage. Before entering the jazz club, it was fairly obvious that other teams were studying the plaques and thus were the key to the puzzle. Jonathan told me that The Smoking GNU arrived at the site approximately in third, and they hadn't even seen the plaques coming in. Thus, staring at the clue, they really had no idea what to do. Eventually, they found a clever solution: Googling some of the phrases lead them to a book. Upstairs from the jazz club was a bookstore. Unbeknownst to GC, in the bookstore was the book and it contained a listing of all the poems and their authors. The GNUs didn't even get wet solving it.

We did. We diligently gathered the data — which was spread out enough and interesting enough — and headed back into the club. We transcribed the poems and authors and tried to figure out what to do next. Nothing came to mind. I kept concentrating on the "III" in the title of the poem; it was the only piece of data we hadn't used. How, I thought, would I have designed this clue if had been me? I would have used the "III" to indicate to use the third letter. "Okay, everybody be quiet!" I hushed my compatriots, as there were a lot of other teams around us. They huddled around me protectively as I started scrawling out my theory. It worked like a charm and we got out of there ahead of many teams that were there when we arrived. It was a great moral booster.

Game Store Tactics

We definitely had fun with this one. Clues that can be divvied up among teammates are good at creating a sense of unity and accomplishment. At least for us. The "Interlaced Video" sub-title made it pretty clear to us what to do, as we found common words amongst joined film, song, and TV show names. Which we then did again with the newly interleaved names that the puzzle solved to. I was in the midst of de-interlacing the fourth new title when Eric urgently whispered "It's 'Wild West', let's go!" So we did.

A Zombie Feast

At some sort of children's brain center (my team stole the location information after the hunt, so I can't be more exact than that), we got a bunch of pictures of things zombies had been dining on lately. Looking for a place to sit, we spotted a couch and zoomed to it. We also failed to spot any other teams, which is kind of discomforting. Are we last to arrive? Slightly ahead of the curve? First? (Highly doubtful.)

We set about deciding what each of the pictures were. Andrea was just noticing that most of our identifications contained the letters "B" and "R", which should have lead us in the right direction. Another team arrive and camped out nearby. Sound carried well in that building, so we ended up in a good-natured shushing match with them, with a few bit of very obviously wrong information spoken loudly.

Still having no idea what to do, apart from having to take out letters from each word the pictures identified to leave a specific number of letters left, I wrote down the first word, "RAINBOW", and the second, "BANNISTER", and crossed off what they had in common. This gave us the proper number of letters left and looking closely I realized that the letters I'd crossed off anagrammed into something very thematic as well as something that should have been obvious from our location. (Talking to Jonathan later, he described how the GNU asked themselves, "So what do zombies eat?" and the answer was immediately obvious).

We YAKs were feeling pretty good at that point. We had hit our stride and had zoomed through the last few puzzles. We were on our way to the eighth and final puzzle, confident that we were going to have a decent finish time.

We Fold

In Mel's Diner, it seemed like there were a lot of teams there, so I guess we were middle of the pack or so. The Smoking GNU was there and we stopped by to say hi, noting that they hadn't yet finished the final puzzle. That both gave us hope and dread: Hope that we could pull off a fast solve and end up ahead of some of the teams already there; and dread that if they hadn't solved it by now, how could we get a fast solve?

We found a large enough table and sat down with our colorful clue/newsletter. Again, it consisted of several sub-puzzles that we split up. Andrea and I worked on the crossword, but she seemed to be speeding through the clues faster than I could think. Linda handled the Morse code ("This side up") and Eric and Lori worked on other ones on the back.

I noticed the dashed lines around the clue and figured at some point we'd have to cut it out. I don't know if I had subconsciously spotted other teams making them, but I somehow knew we'd end up folding the paper into an airplane. Thinking that the sub-clues would give us specific directions on how to fold it (I figured all the bull's eyes would line up), we solved them, only to find out that the first two were "AIRPLANE" and "FOLD".

Some "sparing pairings" indicated they would give us directions on how to traverse the maze, but even after solving all of them, we still had no idea how. We tried many paths but got nowhere.

When we had arrived at Mel's, Alexandra told us some information about what hints she would and wouldn't give. For some reason, I thought that she wouldn't give any hints on the final puzzle, much the same way as in BANG 16. However, one of the YAKs spotted one of the GNUs talking to Alexandra and overheard they were taking a hint. This was not only a sure sign that we could use a hint, but also how tricky the puzzle was.

From Alexandra, we were told to ignore the maze for now and focus on folding the airplane. Now I know several different ways to fold an airplane, including my own custom way (that only does a half-loop before falling to the ground), so I set about trying to line up all the bull's eyes and make an airplane. Eric tried with his copy. We got nowhere fast. Going back, Alexandra handed us a paper showing exactly how to fold it (it was a version of the classic dart). The main problem was none of the bull's eyes were used in the first fold; that was a frustrating development.

Once constructed, the folded airplane revealed a wheel that had "Lucky Charms" marshmallow symbols on it. "Semaphore!" we thought, but no such luck. At least not yet. Kind of taking the hint the wrong way, we thought the wheel would help us decipher the symbols in the maze, not the other way around.

The four o'clock deadline came. It was extended to 4:15.

Around 4:10, Jonathan wondered over and I told him of our continued problems. He set us straight: Solve the maze, then the wheel. However, we couldn't figure out how the "spairing pairings" were supposed to guide us through the maze. With only a couple minutes to go, he told us. I'm not sure we ever would have gotten that, but trying to get your brain to work in rush while your stomach is digesting diner food is not always the best environment for creative thought.

In Summary
We YAKs ended up not doing very well. We could and should have done better. The first two puzzles slowed us down more than they should have. We gained momentum on puzzles three through seven, but hit a brick wall figuring out how to fold an airplane. Not being able to solve that kind of left a sour taste in our mouths.

Or maybe it was just that the ketchup at Mel's Diner was rancid.

SF Mini-Game Pics

Pictures from the coed astronomy's puzzle hunt on April 26 are available to anyone who wants to see them. Team members have promised to send me their pictures to add as well, but who knows when that will be?

On a side note, I just noticed that the full-screen slideshow option is not working for some strange reason (it claims a file that isn't missing, is). Not that I, nor anyone else (probably), has attempted to use it before, but my apologies if anyone has.

Midnight Madness Photos

Pictures I snapped during Midnight Madness: Back to Basics are up for viewing. It was impressive how accurate of a movie experience GC was able to give us:



One thing I regret, though, is that I forgot to get a picture of our us all together in our new team shirts, especially the one we forced Larry to wear.

MSPH 11.0 - Pics and Vids

After upgrading my Gallery2 server, I was finally have the capacity to embed videos. With that, the pictures and videos I took at Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 11.0 are now up.

Google Photos

Photos from the first ever Google Puzzle Hunt are up:

http://google1.puzzalot.com/

Written version is still in the works.

No More Secrets Pictures

Our pictures from No More Secrets are up on my puzzle events website. I enjoyed visiting locations I'd never been before, but one of the highlights was watching the sun set over Santa Cruz.



Additionally, here's a pic from GC of us trying to sing our way into Microsoft. How bad was our singing/whistling/humming? Eventually GC let us through so they wouldn't have to be tortured any longer.

BANG 17 Pictures

Pictures that I took from BANG 17 are up. Unfortunately, they're mostly from the pre-game activites (wrapping other teams up in foil armor). I seem to be too distracted during the game to take pictures during puzzles for some reason...