Ghost Patrol Playtest - Part 3

(Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4)

Ghost 5 – A Love/Hate Relationship

The hotel stand-in, Casa De Ashby, was our next destination. There, along with one or both of the other teams, we began to work on the cryptogram and other pieces of information at the dining room table, almost like a conference room puzzle event. GC gently suggested that we were welcome to move about the house, invading it to our hearts' content... appropriately marked doors being the exception.

Given discovered a car ad hanging on the refrigerator in the kitchen that indicated that the blacklight was needed. He got me with the blacklight and we found reason to believe that the light switches were also marked with invisible ink. We covered each light switch and found the numbers 1 to 9 written in almost Braille-like patterns on them. I copied down the patterns and we went back to the table to join Eric and Jonathan.

The cryptogram was tough. They'd made little headway with it. Finding no leverage point with the lightswitch data, I photographed and copied down the information on the post-its. The good doctor's sayings on the one side and evil person's on the other, with no overlap, made me want to push them through the wall and find out what the reverse of each saying was. No luck. Nothing was falling into place. Someone suggested we shine the black light on the skulls over the fireplace that had initially just looked like pre-Halloween decorations. There, Jonathan found some incomplete information, but it did not help us.

We thought we were working on four different puzzles. Someone from GC (I think) mentioned that most of the data was all connected, so perhaps there were only one or two. We still had made no headway when GC told us and the other teams that we needed to head out because of the timing of the other locations.

(I got the impression while looking through documents at GC HQ during the actual event that the colored cryptogram had been the key to the whole thing and that some of the data we'd gotten out of it was correct, but apparently we hadn't made the right leap to solve the whole thing. And by “we”, I mean Jonathan and Eric, who were the only ones to try it.)

GC gave us directions to the next location; the SHaRC didn't have the right data for it. We started to walk off, when Given and Jonathan said they needed to head back to the van and that they'd catch up to Eric and I. Eric lead the way and two turns later, I was unsure how our two lagers were to catch up with us.

Immediately upon arrival, my brain shut down. Sure, it left enough systems running for breathing and circulatory measures but none of the new data that was being presented to us was being recorded in my soft drive. We were in an empty house with painting of people committing suicide on the wall, each casting different colored shadows. A wooden model of the human form was on a nearby table with a piece of paper with some writing on it. It may have even been in English. Meat Machine was already there when we arrived; I don't know about There Be Dragons, maybe they were too. My addled brain can't quite remember.

There was too much data for either of us, so Eric and I headed into the back room where we encountered a easel, a painting, a wooden pallet with three paints on it, and a paint-by-numbers diagram hanging on the wall. A member of one of the other teams was in there looking it over. He asked me to turn off the light (which I did) and he shone the blacklight on the painting and pallet, revealing hidden colors. Neat! I though. Where's the bathroom?

It seemed like an hour later when Jonathan and Given arrived. It was probably only ten minutes. I spent the time seeing, but not comprehending. I don't know what Eric did. I took Jonathan on a tour of what we had scene, when the last remaining spark plug fired in my brain and I realized that it wasn't different people committing suicide, but was the same person failing at it several times and they needed to be in order. Jonathan and I worked that out and then I pretty much returned to my oblivious state.

I sat down in the corner of the room and just stared. My teammates joined me and stared too. We didn't talk. Jonathan swears I was asleep with my eyes open. None of us were doing anything. We watch the other teams wander around, but they didn't seem to be making more progress than we were, but at least they were trying.

Eventually, our team got enough rest to kick start the brains. I watched as they consulted the piece of paper which showed that day of the actual Game, there would be lights above the wooden model, arranged on a grid. (I assumed at the time that it would be in scale with the model, but found out much to my jealously, that full-blown colored spotlights were used.) They figured out how to get data from the grid based on the color of the shadows, only it wasn't making sense. Jonathan was about to ask GC for a hint, but found GC talking to There Be Dragons about how some of the blue shadows could be considered different colors. That was pretty much the clarification we needed and came to a solution not to long after that. I'm still not sure how the puzzle works; my brain complains loudly every time I try and revisit it.

Heading into the backroom again, someone finally spotted that we were working with binary. Meat Machine's working group had left, so we felt free to work on the puzzle. I actually was able to contribute in deciding which colors were which.

At some point, I'm not even sure how or where or when, we got a sheet of paper showcasing some modern art soon to be displayed. It consisted of a bunch of lines and a rather large frame. Extending the lines gave us “MIN WAX”, which took us a second to decode to “WANE”, which the OWL didn't accept, so we entered “WAYNE” as a likely name homonym. It worked.

We left the artist's house about the same time as There Be Dragons (I keep wanting to write that as There Might Be Dragons for some strange, musical reason). We could have gone on to the capture point, but one of our members was using the facilities, so it may have looked like to them that we were set to follow them. After seeming to eavesdrop on their clarification conversation with GC, it may have looked like we were trying to ride their coattails. Our member got back just as TBD set out, further giving that impression. They made some good-natured jokes — at least I hope they were good natured — about us; we good-naturedly protested our innocence.

Ghost 6 – A Chili Morning

We were told that our next location was at a house, but we weren't supposed to go in, despite what the SHaRC said. We grabbed the van and drove to the house. There we found three sticks as stand-in gravestones with team names written on them, with a box at the base. It was probably Jenn who informed us that for the actual event, the boxes would be buried and teams would have to dig up their own grave. Neat idea, plus we were the first team to arrive.

We had parked the van across the street next to a play park, so that seemed like a natural place to solve. It had good lighting and uncramped solving possiblities that the van just didn't provide. I'm still not quite sure how it happened, though, but despite being the first team to pick up our box, the other two teams were already solving in the park when we arrived.

Our new ghost was a fortune teller and in the box were chicken bones with red stamps of various symbols. Based on another activity I had done, I figured the symbols needed to be placed right up against each other in the same orientation. I set about assembling the bones like that, but it became pretty clear that that was not to be: It was too rickety and not all the symbols could work. We were fairly certain, though, that we had the right idea, and someone had the bright idea of breaking it down by symbol type, since that was the way the different symbols were shown in our guide. It worked and we left the park with a bit of a lead.

Another house was our destination now, only this one we could go into. We were greeted by someone way too enthusiastic and alive at 3 or 4am. He brought us into his house and offered vegetarian chili with toppings. We didn't take him up on it immediately but did compliment him on his large collection of board games. “That,” he said, “is only about a quarter of what I own.”

Our next clue seemed pretty intriguing. It was a Ouija board, only much thicker than, say, the one in our GP application video. We played around with it and found it buzzed sometimes when passed over certain letters. I had formulated the theory that we'd have to pass the pointer over each number in the center and then pass it over all the letters to find out which letter went in that position. Greg stopped by and mentioned that he wasn't sure it was working right yet. He handed us our next puzzle. I kept playing around with it anyway, trying to get to buzz consistently when passing over any letter. But it just wasn't happening, so we got some oh-so-delicious-and-much-needed-everyone-had-two-bowls-and-almost-wanted-three chili and turned to the star puzzle.

(Jenn continued playing with it even after I gave up on it, though, and eventually got it to work... kind of. To celebrate, she took a nap in the living room.)

The star puzzle consisted of several stars that were basically paths with a symbols at each corner. A list of overlapping symbols was also given to us; two overlapping symbols would form a letter. Traversing each star would then yeild a set of overlapping symbols that we could decode. It seemed fairly difficult, but we gave it a try as to what symbols stood for what. Other teams trickled in and finally Eric and I figured out that the five single-symbols corresponded to vowels, and the rest fell quickly after that.

Back in the van, we got a group of six test-tubes, each filled with a colored liquid. Across the top of each tube was a letter and together they spelled SPRITE. So that's why we'd been carrying around a mini-Sprite bottle that came in our GP satchel. Only thing is, when opening a mini-bottle of Sprite that you've been carrying around all day long, there's going to be a pressure release.

After a hasty cleanup, we figured we needed to fill each test tube to the marked level with the Sprite. Jonathan did and the liquid in each changed color. The second one got a little overfilled though, so we had to kind of guess at it what it would have been. So now what? Our consensus was that we change each letter by how far each color had changed up or down the color spectrum. The “S” went down four, the “P” stayed the same, the “R” down three, the “I” up six, the “T” down four, and the “E” down six.

Jenn gave a laugh and said, “Now it says 'OPOOPY'.”

Which it did. We may have even typed it in, but to no avail. It seemed like the perfect solution, so we kept at, rechecking our data, making minor, questionable adjustments (“Maybe that green is more yellow?”), and always coming up with nothing. Another classic case of being stuck in the rut of an idea. Eventually we asked for a hint and soon figured out that the colors were associate with the letter beforehand. So, for example, since the “E” started off blue (or whatever it was), everytime we saw a blue color after the transformation, it was an “E”. And thus, OPOOPY became PEPPER.

(We suggested that maybe the letters on top could match the color of the original liquid in the test tubes since by the time we came to the proper conclusion we only had Jonathan's amazing memory and Eric's amazing notes to rely on.)

I don't remember the capture of this ghost. That may be because I was only functioning on a cylinder or two, or because, as Jenn noted, the captures were somewhat anti-climatic. She was thinking that maybe the capture site should be where the slime was located, or perhaps have some sort of light show to indicate that the capture was complete.

Final part is next...

The Ghost Patrol Playtest - Part 2

(Part 1, Part 3, Part 4)

Ghost Three – The Pirate of Presidio

Getting to our next site of our new ghost proved to be a challenge in and of itself. While we knew that our location was across the street from a sports shop, the sports shop turned out to be on a street that occurs more than once in San Francisco, thus confusing our GPS system, and thereby us. Eventually, we found the right street with some help from David, and parts of it looked very familiar: Jonathan and I spotted at least two clue locations from BANG 18.

We parked it front of the sports shop and headed across Crissy Field to find a treasure chest and several markers in the sand. GC informed us that we needed to blindfold two members and have the other two direct them to the various markers to dig up whatever treasure therein lay. Given and Jonathan volunteered to be blindfolded. Eric controlled Jonathan and I controlled Given. Given was interesting, since apparently a “giant step” is one foot in front of the other, where a tiny step is inching along. Jonathan's giant step was a full stride and could explain to some degree why they ended up winning the unofficial in-team competition.

Each site contained a buried box with a washer and a word written on it. We figured pretty quickly, as There Be Dragons started to arrive, that each of the objects in the large treasure box to the side contained in the words on each washer, with an extra letter. Before we headed off, though, GC mentioned to us that the next clue location might need a hint to find due to the limitations of GPS. “Under bridge” were the two words she gave us, so I immediately thought our next stop was the Pet Cemetery we had visited for the Perplexcity Live event two years ago.

The SHaRC took us along the shore towards the Golden Gate Bridge. We came to a point, though, where a military-looking building had a crossarm down across the road and nobody manning the station. So we turned back and began an adventure in finding roads that might go under the bridge. We nearly ended up going over the GGB, but luckily we were able to spot our problem before the Vista exit. Having given up on the Pet Cemetery idea, we were thinking that our location was possibly near the road that ran under the bridge, connecting the two Vista stops. No luck, but walking around the Vista, we kept following the SHaRC until we came to the edge of a cliff. It said we still had a few hundred feet to go, though. Looking down, we spotted Fort Point, which, had that crossarm been up, we would have reached twenty-seven minutes earlier.

Finally arriving at Fort Point, we got a CD, but were told because we arrived so late that we only had about fifteen minutes to work on the clue. We were somewhat disheartened by that and by the fact that it was a musical clue, our Achilles heel. Jonathan spurred us on with a rousing “We can do this!” so we set to listening. A joyful Irish pub song started coming out of the speakers. Three voices sang, each in a different range. Figuring we needed to figure out which was was singing which part of the song, we tried to figure out which was which. And tried. And tried. And pretty much failed. At some point, Jonathan started wondering if there might be stereo channel encoding, a la Midnight Madness, but Windows Vista's ability to adjust channel levels was strangely hidden (at least compared to XP's) and it took some time to find the right controls. Sure enough, there was, lending another complexity to gathering the data. The conclusion, thus, was that it was a braille encoding (“One of the more brilliant braille encodings I've seen,” Jonathan opined at a later point). With our fifteen minutes all but gone and still finding it very difficult to discern between the two higher pitched voices, we allowed ourselves to be skipped and sent to the next location.

Our next location was the Pet Cemetery.

One team was finishing up and the other was about half-way through at the site when we pulled up, showing again that our puzzle-solving times are severely hampered by our (in)ability to drive between locations. The sun was setting but there was still enough light to not require flashlights. We were handed a bunch of faux Polaroids with names blurred by ghostly vapors and saw a bunch of numbered flags inside the graveyard. I was looking forward to seeing Malarky again, but alas, I didn't see his headstone (headboard?) anywhere.

As the other team left, we began gathering the pet name, flag number, and flag color associated with each photo. A few were a little challenging to find, but we had no specific search pattern apart from “Here, you take these photos and see if you find them.” We went back into the van after that and Jonathan typed the data into a spreadsheet. I sat with him on the back bench while Given went over the data that Eric had written down. Were there instructions to group the names or did it come to us? Regardless, we saw that “King” and “Queen” were likely groups, and thought that “Duke” and “Baron” would also fit nicely in that category. Figuring four to a category, we ran into problems and thus many discussions of how to fit name “X” into category “Y” when it clearly didn't fit, despite being the only one left over. Eventually, because of the colors and being the only way to sort some of them, we settled on pairs and soon solved it.

While we had been solving at the Pet Cemetery, darkness had fallen. We followed the SHaRC to the beach and down a stretch of path near some old structures that may have been buildings at some point. At the far end, we met GC who told us the clue we were actually headed for was unavailable (was it the sand dollar clue?) and directed us to the structures. Along a circular platform were a series of shells each with a strip of paper on it. Jenn told us they planned to have actual sounds coming from the shells instead of those described on the paper strips. So we grabbed them all along with a treasure map and headed back to the van, GC Jenn (and companion) accompanying us.

The thing is, GC David had abandoned us. Earlier he had let us know that he had a date with his girlfriend that night. After some good-natured ribbing — after all, he could have a date any night, but how many chances would he get to watch the Smoking GNU solve puzzles? — we found out that his replacement was to be Jenn. Whereas David was tight-lipped while watching us (pretty much how I figure I would be if and when I would be in his position), not wanting to give anything away, Jenn was much more conversational. She even helped work some puzzles she hadn't seen before, including this one.

Back in the van, we rolled out the map on the drafting table. The 36-point compass with E,S,N, and W in strange positions was there. Recognizing it from the pre-clues, we decided that we had to match the sounds on the paper to locations on the map, find their angle using the protractor (I forget the ingenious name it was given) provided in our kit. Only thing is, we needed a straight edge. “Somebody get me a ruler,” said Jonathan. I reached a hand into my backpack, knowing I had two rulers in there, and groped around until I found one. Pulling it out and slapping it on the table, I was surprised: It wasn't the normal ruler, but the "Rolling Ruler". A look of surprise crossed the team's faces as well, but we settled down to using it.

We all tried sounding things out, much to Jenn's amusement (she eventually said she was going to recommend against the recorded sounds because of how much fun we were having). Emphatic discussions came about as to what the difference between rain and a waterfall was, aurally, and others. You'd think some would have been simple, but pretty much every sound had pros and cons argued for it. We finally settled on a few, with Jenn's input, and started to draw a line between them to prepare for angle measuring (which didn't look like a pretty job since we only had the paper's bottom edge as a baseline), when Eric stopped us. “Look,” he said, “all you need to do is roll the ruler across the paper to the compass. It'll keep the same angle and save a lot of trouble.” We tested his theory and it worked. It made me feel proud, like it was an amazing contribution I'd made, when really all it was was pure chance that I hadn't grabbed the other ruler from my backpack.

Based on the way the pre-clue had worked — i.e.pairs of locations — Jonathan figured the angle between locations one and two would form a word, then three and four, etc. I all-to-briefly argued that it should be the journey, one to two, two to three, etc., but was overruled. We tried our the ruler and our theory and got letters that seemed to work, so we kept going, hoping the ones we weren't sure about wouldn't prevent us from filling in the gaps.

“ATTENTION THE PARK IS NOW CLOSED! PLEASE EXIT IMMEDIATELY!”

A police cruiser had entered the parking lot and was encouraging people to leave, and somehow the tone of voice seemed to imply anyone at the park that late at night was a drug dealer, a pervert, or both. As we got ready to leave

“GET OUT OF THE PARK NOW! IT IS CLOSED!”

...Jenn mentioned that they had permission to use the park late at night on the evening of the actual Game, but not tonight. We finally got in position to drive out and

“LEAVE NOW!”

... found a point just outside the parking lot to solve. Someone mentioned that the police usually weren't this forceful, but that there was a race the next day and they probably wanted to make sure everything was perfect for it.

By this point we had something like “B O D O _ G _”. Hmmm, I remember thinking, it's too bad we don't have some extra letters in there, we could make “BLOOD ORANGE”, but the idea seemed so ridiculous that I kept it to myself (a folly I need to stop). “BODO?G?” didn't seem to be yielding anything close to an answer, so we tried reworking some of the sound locations, but were pretty satisfied with what we had. It was then that Jenn recommended that we try the “journey” method and see if it gave us anything different. It did: We got all of “BLOOD” and didn't need to do the rest; my seemingly wild hunch had proved true, making me feel pretty dumb.

Ghost Four – Clowning Around at the Wharf

Due to constraints, that was the last clue we got for that puzzle and so we never got to capture the ghost. Somehow I missed that bit of information in transit. That explains why, when we arrived at the Museum Mechnique, I thought we were still solving for the pirate instead of immediately SEQing our new ghost. Jenn handed us our puzzle and explained that day of, the small card we got would actually come from the fortune machine. One of our team decided to get a “real” fortune to make the experience more complete. The puzzle seemed to take no time to complete and it wasn't long before Jenn handed us our next puzzle and recommended that we go eat while solving.

That sounded like a great idea and Jonathan was aching for clam chowder in a bread bowl. We found the nearest restaurant that served them, only to find they were out of bread bowls.

Deciding not move, we got out the papers and found that we had to cut out different parts of a Venn diagram, only we had left our scissors back in the van. Oh well, we could do this by hand. It's always interesting the discussions teammates get into during these types of puzzles. For example, we decided that one diagram represented a bald, blue person with a single name. Bald and blue meant it had to be Blue Man Group, but we could not find a way to make them a single name (it turned out that the third category was “musicians”). Once we got it all done, we had six new categories we figured we would make into another Venn diagram. Using tiger, ringleader, Blue Man Group, balloon, rainbow, and Bill Murry, we had difficulty making a good diagram.

Eventually, we decided that since a proper Venn diagram has six colors, that each of the objects had to be a color: Blue Man Group, obvious. Tiger, obvious. Ringleader usually wears red pants. We changed the rainbow (an arc in the sky) to sun (a group of arcs in the sky) to get yellow, and decided that the balloon had to be purple, and, stretching even further, that Bill Murry was green (bill=American paper currency=green). Using those as guidelines, we put the diagram together and came up with the idea that the answer had to begin with a “B” (Bill, Blue Man Group, and balloon), be circus related (tiger, balloon, ringmaster), and be a sports team (Suns, Tigers, and the Bills). We started naming sports teams that began with “B”, but none of them were really circus-related, until it hit me: Bears! We were so sure it was right, despite the leaps in logic we made, that disappointed when it didn't work.

We went back and reworked things with our original data. Somehow, Jonathan pulled CLOWN out of it, which apparently the OWL accepted and translated as “Clown Blue”. I never saw that, though, hence my confusion at Rich Bragg's confusion at getting the same answer when I was staffing the site a few weeks later.

The next site the SHaRC took us to was down the wharf to a Ben & Jerry's. There we met a nonoriddle fan (hi catherwood!), although unbeknown to us at the time, who gave us a box of animal crackers. This was a fun puzzle and one that seemed all together too short. We quickly realized that the broken animal cookies each corresponded to a part of their name and were off not to long after that.

A sheaf of paper puzzles was our reward when we arrived at... the heart of Pier 39? I can't say I was exactly paying attention. All I can remember was that it was well lit, we were surrounded by shops, and the place was virtually deserted. Jenn mentioned that we should be careful with the laptop, as some punk had tried to steal Greg's at that exact spot. Luckily, the would-be-thief didn't quite have a good enough hold on it to complete his crime.

We divided up each of the mini-puzzles and I got the one with a circus tent on it and a strangely-metered poem. One of the lines sparked off the idea on how to solve it fairly quickly. Now, I'm more than familiar with the Mad Magazine's Fold-in, but that's not what inspired the idea of folding the A to the B several times over; I'd actually been revisiting The Secrets of the Alchemist Dar the week before the playtest and was expanding on my theory that some of pages needed to be folded. Regardless, I folded into a fan with a picture of a fan and the word “booster” from the poem. Booster confused me until someone, Given or Jenn, pointed out that “booster” was also a type of fan, albeit usually one in a sports connotation.

(David came by to visit us later and asked after the mini. It had been his and was surprised that in one of the previous playtests, no one could solve it. Apparently, they'd never read the proper literature.)

It became apparent shortly afterwards that we were working on a puzzley version of the blind men and elephant fable. “You know,” Jonathan said, “we could look it up on the Internet and fill in the crossword fairly quickly, but I think it'd be more fun to solve it.” So my fan translated into an “ear” in the crossword. I started looking at the other minis to try and help solve. Given was working on a color-by-numbers puzzle that appeared to have a flower, the letter “E”, and a yellow and black zipper, all on some bricked object. It's funny, I thought, that the “E” is on a wall, since that would be “Wall-E”, the Pixar film. To me, it was just a random thought until, with Jenn's nudging that the zipper was a street, we figured out that they were all “wall” objects.

So once again, an unspoken though of mine actually turned out to be the answer. I promised myself I would speak out more often, and I really took that idea to new levels the next day.

With that one solved, we walked further along the pier and spotted a huge cruise ship. As we got closer, Jenn mentioned that next to it was the world's largest sailboat. It was so dark out, we could barely see it. I took a picture of it, but turned out horrible (the version at right is one that someone else took). Apparently, it was up for sale.

On the wooden dock in front of the boat were several wooden cutouts of circus folk with openings for faces. Mustaches had been attached to each one, all in the shape of a letter. GC suggested we should take some tourist pictures. So we did. Some parts of the pictures lit up with the flash and they were all groups of unique numbers. We somewhat assumed that there was one grouping per cutout, but if our theory that the number, say five, indicated that the mustache letter, say “M”, was in that position, then we were missing some. Other teams arrived, so we consulted my camera to see if there was more than one per cutout. It looked like it, so I sprinted back to one of them to verify that the painting was reflective and not just a trick of the light. Verified, we got our answer and our capture valiance.

As we left, we spotted some people taking real tourist pictures with the cutouts.

We walked further down the wharf, captured our ghost, and headed back to the van. Our next assignment, we found out, was back across the bay, in the hotel.

Part three is here...

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...

The Worst Navigators (i.e. us)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Poop Platitude

Shinteki Eric (as opposed to BANG Erik and Linda's Eric) and I came to the following conclusion while spinning our wheels during one particular clue that we couldn't find any traction in the playtest yesterday: "Don't poop on an idea until it poops out on you."

I think we may have found our new team motto.