DASH 1 - Get Along Lil' YAKies

(Note: I only took around five photos during this hunt, therefore many of those below are thanks to Amy aka amster_girl, who holds the copyright. Used with permission.)

When the Different Area Same Hunt (DASH) was announced, there were a few things our team needed to sort out before registering. Many of the teams we were familiar with would be playing in Palo Alto; however, since DASH was to be on a Sunday, driving up was pretty much out of the question for Jonathan. Since L.A. was one of the hosts, he figured it'd be better to just stay down south. He didn't have a team there, but as luck would have it, my brother David in Long Beach decided to make this his first puzzle hunt. Jonathan decided to tag along with David's team, solving puzzles solo and offering help to the newbies.

So with the GNU's captain sticking to Southern California, I signed up our Smoldering YAK team and got Given, Andrea, and William to join me. And since it was closer, we chose to play in the San Francisco hunt.

We arrived fairly early; there were only a couple other teams around. More and more showed up, until we had a small crowd in front of City Hall. As we stood there, some guy on a bike came speeding past and told us to stop "f****** protesting" and get some lives, or something to that effect. An unexpected attitude for a city that has practically made protesting an art form.

Debbie Goldstein got up to give the introductory talk. I'd met her when we joined a couple other people to playtest an event for Alexandra a year or so ago. I thought it was pretty awesome that she came up with this idea to have the same event in several cities across the U.S.; talking with her during the playtest, it was pretty obvious how passionate she was about hunts in general and puzzle hunts specifically.

Desert Taxi and Lowkey, the teams that we playtested the most excellent Ghost Patrol Game for, were on GC/staffing duty. It was pretty cool that we'd be seeing them throughout the event.

In Debbie's introduction, we found out that there was a western theme and that this wasn't to be a competitive hunt. There were to be no rankings at the end, though they would be keeping track of data for those who were interested. I think this fact may have contributed to our team's relatively slow pace through the hunt.

Clues 1 - 3 - Gamblin' with Sandwiches

Our first clue dealt with solving three crossword clues, chaining the overlapping letters into a single fake word/deli sandwich name, and then extracting random letters, in order, to make a new word that matched a clue on the side. We didn't have to figure this out, though; it was given in the instruction. Us YAKs went slow on this for a few reasons: One, we definitely had trouble figuring out some of the crossword clues, especially the ones that relied on having solved other parts of the clue first. Two, it was challenging extracting a word from each deli sandwich name, as it was kind of like unclued indexing. Three, the numbering of both the sandwich name clues and the extracted word clues implied that they were in the same order. Since the final step was to alphabetize the extracted words anyway, I'm not sure what point the disparate numbering system served. Anyway, we worked with incomplete data, and then it finally dawned on me to ignore the order the the extracted word clues.

For the next puzzle, we were given poker hands, with each card having a label from a different casino. We spent far too much time trying to figure out a way to find patterns in the casino names and how to group them accordingly. We found some patterns, then found some that overlapped, but never were able to come up with an all-inclusive grouping. Eventually had to ask for a hint. Ignore the casino names, came the hint; instead, order the hands. So we did that and noticed that indexing the card value into the casino name gave us several words: SPADES CLOVERS HEARTS ROYALS and PRIMES. So we mentally crossed out cards that fell into those categories, which left us with cards with STIRP as letters. STRIP certainly seemed like a viable answer, given the poker theme and it kinda maybe matched the location-finding crossword clue on the map ("A type of dance"). The staffer grinned when I told him and said we weren't the first team that come to that conclusion, but it was wrong. So we drew lines between cards for each category and that revealed the letters for the solution.

Our next clue had pictures of random people and clipart. We quickly caught on that the pictures represented numbers (Bishop Desmond Tutu = 22, Trinity = 3, etc.). Some didn't fit that pattern, though, until someone realized that Jack Black was a jack. Ah, more cards and given the casino in the title, more poker. Andrea thought early on that a cartoon devil might represent 666. "But 666 is actually the number of the beast, not Satan, and probably is meant to be a stand in for Emperor Nero..." I started to argue/lecture and got a somewhat exasperated look in return. So we went (correctly) with 666. It took us a few tries to get the right sort and index method right, but eventually we did. It was probably our quickest solve for the day.

Clues 4 - 6: Slim Musical Crackers

At the next stop, we received a pamphlet containing Slim's catalog of several different items that might come in handy in the Old West. After each one was a colon and a single letter, as if extracted. Only not every letter was in the item. Several other words were included with each catalog item, only with question marks instead of letters. We set about trying to figure out the extraction pattern to apply it to the others. Some were fairly straight-forward, such as using the middle letter of a palindrome, or taking the double letter. Others were a bit more challenging, such as taking a word that's also a team name, and using the first letter of the city where that team plays. One in particular was confounding us; I finally decided that the G extracted from CART meant the first letter of a word that could go in front of it, in this case I thought it was GO. It wasn't until the next day talking it over with Jonathan that I found out that it was supposed to be GOLF and finally noticed that all of the words were from the NATO phonetic alphabet. You would think SIERRA Mist and SIERRA Nevada would have given that away.

Since each puzzle was coming from a different city, I'd been guessing which city had designed which puzzle. For some reason, I was thinking Palo Alto for this one. In the end, it was the only one I got right.

The average solve time for the next puzzle was 24 minutes. For the top ten teams, it was 12 minutes. The fastest team took 2 minutes. We took 43. It was pretty much my stubbornness that kept us that long on a relatively simple clue. We were given paper Graham crackers, with marshmallows, chocolate, and an image of an actor portraying a cowboy on each. The flavortext hinted at putting together Graham crackers by pairing actors who were in the same western and using the resulting chocolate/marshmallow alignment as Morse. The problem? None of us watch westerns. Given and I knew the two from Blazing Saddles, both being Mel Brooks fans. I think William knew one of the others. That left four crackers to be paired, plus we had no way of ordering it; I guessed (correctly as it turned out) that we would order by title, which we didn't have. Luckily, one of the pairs translated to RR, which we were pretty sure couldn't start a word or end it.

So instead of, say, going to GC and asking for the information we were missing, which would have been the smart thing to do since all hints were free and we knew exactly what to do, I decided instead that we could figure it out by going through all the possible iterations. After all, each cracker pairing yielded two letters, so once we had the iterations, anagramming the letter pairs should be a breeze. We went through it once and didn't find any letters that would make a word. So we went through it again, more meticulously, found that we'd missed one iteration, and sure enough, that one was our answer. Oddly enough, finding a way around our ignorance felt satisfying... maybe not as much as being able to solve the puzzle in ten minutes with the right information, but satisfying none-the-less. (Photo copyright Debbie Goldstein, used with permission.)

We were led inside an audio business for next, and then further led into a home theater room that would be a wonderful thing to convert my garage into. In the darkened room, teams were listening to short clips of music. The team in the front row of seats had just vacated as we arrived, so we took advantage of that, sat down, and started identifying songs. We had been given two columns drop-down letter pattern to fill in. The song titles didn't match the available spaces, although they did match the number in parentheses. We had about ninty percent of the songs identified, but still none of the spaces filled in, when I began to get a suspicion in the back of my head. The song title "Sweet Dreams Are Made of These" described exactly, almost crossword-clue like, the artists of one of the other songs, R.E.M. Nah, I thought, that's thoroughly impossible. Then the song title "Barracuda" caught my eye... it reminded me of the ska band Reel Big Fish. I mentioned this to Andrea and we looked at the song below it, "Stayin' Alive". "Survivor!" I said. And the letters matched! We finally had our in.

The thing is, though, that we were solving the second column of drop-downs. The first column, we could not find a starting point. Eventually, we filled in all of the second column letters and it came out to _ _ _ _ DOCTORS. SPIN seemed like a good fit, but we needed the three letters in front of it for a complete answer. Somehow, the word TOPSPIN popped into my mind and it matched the "Employed in tennis or baseball" location clue. We couldn't figure out what five letter band named would end in TOP, but I tried our half-guessed answer on the staffer anyway... it was right! Midway to our next clue, it suddenly hit me. "ZZ!"

(A few days later, I explained the how the clue worked to my wife and we went through the first column of drop-downs together and verified that.)

I tried to figure out which city came up with the clue. It was impressive, well-done, and was cool that GC found a sound theater for us to work in. One of the clues stuck out in my mind: The "Jizz in My Pants" song had matched the band "Cream". That brought to mind something that Jan from coed astronomy had said to me in response to our confusion to a slightly ribald clue during the SF Mini-Game: "That's just my husband's sense of humor." This one felt similar, but I had already mentally assigned Palo Alto to another clue, so I went (wrongly) with Seattle for this one. It was Palo Alto's second contribution to the event, I found out later, though I'm not sure whether Yar was behind it or not.

Clues Seven through Nine - Dead Dolls with Occasional Meta

We crossed a winding pedestrian bridge to reach our next clue, where many a gravestone had been set in a field. I was so impressed with the setup that I ran back up to the top of the bridge and snapped a photo. Meat Machine, a team I'd test solved with for the most recent Shinteki Decathlon, was wandering through the impromptu graveyard as we approached Jesse of Desert Taxi to get our clue. It consisted of a visual representation of the graveyard before us, only with all the gravestones blank. The actual ones in front of us were all engraved with a name and a year. But not normal names.

We have this game, Mad Gab, that we've played perhaps twice in the ten years I've owned it. We've also have You Don't Know Jack, which features a Gibbersh Question. We suck at them. Which didn't bode well for this puzzle, since all of the names were likewise mondegreens of English phrases. It took us a long time to sort them all out, even after we noticed that each phrase was also a clue who's answer was a single letter. CONSTANCE 'FERG' RAVITY was one of the easy ones, as the constant for gravity was G. Other ones weren't so easy to decipher or translate into a single letter. I had been trying to budget our time for the two remaining puzzles, but was failing as we passed the hour mark. We'd found out we needed to use the years on the gravestones as Cartesian coordinates. We tried made several failed attempts using the origin in the wrong corner before finally getting right. As we left the site, I razzed Given for this, but he just grinned at me, knowing that I was really criticizing myself.

We only had a half-hour left for the last puzzle and then the meta. I was really hoping that we could blast through the next one, but as we pulled it out of the envelope, my heart sank: It was a logic grid puzzle. I was never good at them when trying the ones in the back of Discover magazine as a teen; that hadn't changed, and I didn't think the rest of my team had that much experience either. This was going to take us some time. The twist in the clue was that we were given paper dolls to help us keep track of which one was wearing what when. We tried to go through the logic and pin things down, but kept getting mixed up. After a bit, William decided try it on his own while Given, Andrea, and I continued on. We were beginning to get a good feel for it when large, fat drops of rain began to fall onto us and the clue. Debbie came up to our table: Time was up.

We decided not to let that stop us, though. At the restaurant where everyone was gathering, we grabbed a booth and kept working on the doll puzzle. William's solo work ended up providing us a good springboard and we turned in our answer to Greg about ten minutes later. Even though the event was over, he gave us the meta and said he'd be around for a while for hints and checking answers. We decided to take him up on that, as did a few other teams, as I saw by looking around the restaurant. So we didn't hear the ending announcements, the non-ranked rankings, or anything else as we dug into the meta.

Which we had fun with. We worked out that all the answer words had had Rock-Paper-Scissors moves hidden in them and when dueling with standard Old West RPS moves, they yielded a ternary code. This was supposed to be the secret of what ruined some Old West town, but the answer, HABANERO, didn't seem all that likely to cause death and destruction. We gave our answer to Greg and got part two of the meta.

We got stuck on the second part when none of realized that the two half-red squares were actually semaphore flags. A hint was called for and our ignorance was reversed. "And," Gred told us, "when you re-arrange the RPS battles, you need to look at the letters... differently... to get the answer." It was kind of cool using the semaphore-encoded message to figure out how to arrange the semaphore points. Yet, when we extracted the letters again, we, or at least Given and I, tried to come up with all sorts of strange orders to read the letters in. Greg came by to see how we were doing, since it was over an hour after the finish, and basically let us know that he'd meant instead of reading clockwise like before, this time read counter-clockwise. And thus it was DYNAMITE — not ANDY TIME, MANY TIDE, or any of the other strange orderings that we'd come up with — that destroyed the town.

Yeah, it wasn't a very fast DASH for us YAKs, but it was fun and we were happy that we'd stuck it out and at least crossed the finish line... even if the race was already over when we did.

1 GNU + 3 Meat Machines = Shinteki Decathlon 5 Playtest (Part 2)

(Part 1 here)

Clue 6: Color Blind

We drove a little further up the road for our next clue at one of the Marin Headlands batteries. We searched all over the battery for someone from Shinteki GC, but saw no one. Were we early? Did we have the wrong place? Is that a Port-a-Potty down there?

After I got out, Erik had somehow got ahold of the puzzle. It was four mini-clues with a box of large box of Crayola crayons, the size of which I coveted as a kid. We pretty quickly realized that we had to divide the crayons between each of the minis. Since two team members were relatively color-blind and Erik was already working on another mini, I started on the mini that was basically matching smudges of color to crayon names.

It was about then that this hunt went downhill for me.

We put all the crayons in the back of the van and handed them to each team members as they figured out that they needed them, Erik in solving trivia questions, George in deciphering French, and Jason in working with the weird cut-off crayons that ended up bring binary somehow. I was pretty sure from the start that I needed to determine whether each color smudge in the grid was actually part of the crayon package and use that data as a bump/no-bump indicator for a Braille grid. All that needed to be done now was determine which of the fifty or so smudges were real Crayola colors...

(In hindsight, we should have done this mini last: We would then have had the definitive set of crayon colors that would be used on the sheet.)

After what seemed like an hour or so of rubbing possible crayons around and sometimes through the smudges, I had bupkis. Well, I had letters, but they weren't making any sense. So I went to see if I could help any of the others. I couldn't figure out the few trivia questions Erik had left and George seemed all over the French mini.

So I joined Jason trying to fit his as a binary code. He showed me one way to do it, I told him it made sense. He told me it didn't work. Then he showed me another way. Made sense, I told him again. Doesn't work either, he said. So we sat for another half-hour or so trying to make these clipped-off crayons into a binary message. I think in the actual event they had a color wheel available; for us, we ended up needing a hint.

Eventually, after free hints (and maybe some non-free ones), we figured out each of the minis (Erik came in and worked out my mistakes on the color grid, found the answer — TURN OVER — whereupon he turned over the card to find the answer written in white), decided they each referred to a colored Clue character, GREEN, WHITE, PLUM, and SCARLETT. The missing color, Mustard, was the killer and solution. Or something like that; I was mentally fried and frustrated by that point.

Clue 7 - Posters in the Park

I'm a big fan of the North Bay; it's why I live here. But for all of the "Bay Area" in the BANG name, there have been, what, two of them north of the Golden Gate Bridge? So I'm always happy when we venture that way in a hunt. Our next clue took us to a water-side park in Sausalito, which was indicated by a crazy art car. We got out and George gave me a pose for the camera before we went searching for the puzzle.

And we ended up doing a lot of searching. We were looking for posters. It wasn't a big park, but for some reason we seemed to have difficulty finding all the parts of the puzzle. Maybe it would be different in the actual event with a lot of teams swarming from poster to poster. But even the transients in the park were making fun of us as we searched for these posters.




Eventually, we located and photographed them all. We sat on a fence, looking at a Howard Stern-like DJ named "Shockey", debating how to use this data. Well, there were seven posters and each poster had a fake superhero character whose name was seven letters long on it. This suggested a count-in indexing, if only we could figure out an order.

Well, it's a color-based hunt and there were seven colors in the traditional rainbow spectrum (we ignored, momentarily, the point that Roy G. Bv had made about indigo, like Pluto, being removed from the standard). It seemed a fair way to do it, but although some of the posters had solid color backgrounds, others had mixed coloring.

Perhaps, someone suggested, there was something color-related in each picture? The Palm Pilot that Mrs. Palm was holding, assuming it was the same as the one we had, would be blue. Deep Tan could be orange. But what color would, say, Clarity be? And why were her fingers in such an odd position anyway?

As we were sitting there thinking it over, mulling different ideas, a free hint popped up that nudged is into understanding that each picture had something not just from the color spectrum, but the entire electromagnetic spectrum (e.g. Show Off = x-ray, Col. Pops = microwave, Shockey = radio, etc.). That gave us our ordering, which gave us our indexing, and then the solution. We were off.

Clue 8 - The Slippery Elephant

We worked our way further up north to some shopping center, where we were told to look for an elephant in a fountain. Not seeing it immediately, we asked some guy going by. "Yeah, that's through there and just around the corner. It's kind of slippery lookin'." We cracked a few jokes amongst ourselves about a "Slippery Elephant" being a likely cocktail name.

We found GC at a coffee shop, grabbed the clue, and headed nearby to get some food at an Italian deli (frugal me brought a sandwich). We sat in the corner and got to work on what turned out to be a word search, two copies provided.

The two-copy scenario can be a strange one. It always seems to lead to some sort of awkwardness when solving. We decided to divide the work, with Eric and Jason taking the horizontal and George and I taking vertical. No word list was given, but we quickly found that the all the words in the grid were crayon colors from the crayon box we had been given earlier. Jason volunteered to be the crayon wrangler, as we were trying to circle the colors in their own color. He organized the crayons quite deftly, which was to our advantage later.

Things got confusing with the split duty and after a while we went about it very systematically, transferring our finds to Erik's paper. A message started to appear from the left over letters and I begin to write it down while Erik continued adding finds at the lower half of the grid. I ran out of room along the side of the clue and had to start working on another piece of paper. The message indicated that there were more layers yet to go. I inwardly groaned; I was tired of crayon puzzles. But the team persevered, so I did too.

The next layer required us to find spots where crayons with the same sleeve colors intersected. Jason pretty much had that read for us, so we set about finding and marking those spots. The revealed instructions said to consider the three letters to that spot's right. Okay, nice letters, but what to do with them? Then we noticed that there were only zero, one, or two words that used those letters. A ternary light bulb turned on in all our heads practically simultaneously.

Somewhere around this time, the deli closed and we were politely asked to move to the courtyard. The light was fading as we gathered around a table and Brent joined us. The decoded ternary message said to mark the colors with six letters on them. We found those crayons, marked them, and came away with the answer: INK.

All in all, it was an impressive puzzle and I'm glad we worked through it, instead of punting when we got to layer 15 or 23. However, that choice did costs us.

Clue 9 - Skipped

Shinteki GC said that clue 9 was the least interesting of all the puzzles; since we were running late and they wanted us to try the final clue, we were skipped over it.

Clue 10 - The Revenge of the Colorblind

Finally, we're in San Rafael, where, not a month earlier, The Smoking GNU had hosted BANG 22 and a scant twelve hours earlier I had been wanting to yell at some guy for not keeping the parts of the Park and Ride open that they weren't working on yet.

Our clue was in an ice cream shop. It was on a DVD, so while Erik got it set up, the rest of Meat Machine took turns getting fattening foods (I decided on a milkshake, yum!). The movie showed some numbers and then colored bars, and then a white screen. I was reminded immediately of the "Revelation" card from Perplex City, which made use of the negative afterimage effect. We went through it several times, and the funny thing is that Jason, who claimed to be pretty strongly color-blind, was best able to replicate this effect. Although I could see the after images, I had problems keeping them visible for long. (I think my 20/20 left eye, 20-150 right eye vision might have had something to do with it.)

They were all pretty much vertical or horizontal stripes. We discussed what to do with them. I thought that the color changes would be consistent across the board and that they could be figured out without actually looking at the screen; however, but neither I nor anyone else seemed to have the energy to give it a try. I mentioned that they might be flags, but this idea was discarded because no one could remember a flag with four vertical stripes.

Eventually, we did come to the conclusion that they were flags (maybe with a free hint, I don't remember) and so I went to my backpack to grab my handy dandy almanac. Only it wasn't there! When preparing I checked the list of things that were required to bring and apparently I went pretty strictly by that list. Usually (and ever since then!), I always bring a dictionary, thesaurus, and almanac. I felt I'd let my team and myself down. (Brent later told us that they had specifically left it off the list of helpful things to see how many teams would bring one.)


No one else had brought one either, so we checked the GPS for a book store, found a Borders nearby, and headed over there. There, in the cramped reference section, the four of us sat on the floor and went through the inverse flags, and finally had all of the positive images and had them identified. We used the numbers at the beginning of the film to index into each country name and come up with "STARE AT YEMEN". So we took the inverse of the Yemen flag as the answer.

Bonus Clues

Finally, we were done! Our ending location was... the ice cream shop we'd just left. Back there, we found out that the other two teams were having car problems and probably wouldn't arrive for a bit, meaning they would miss the final clue. Brent gave us the bonus clues to work on in the meantime... they would be for the teams that finished early, he explained.


We had actually already done a few bonus clues during the main hunt, but we really only paid attention to one: A CD with several songs on it, all mentioning numbers. We figured they were visible wavelengths, but I don't think we were able to extract an answer.

Our bronze bonus was a crossword labeled "Synesthesia", which was crossed out and retitled "Colorblind". Several of the crossword squares were in gray. After a bit, we hit upon the idea that they were each a color, so that the "RED" in "REDCROSS" all fit into one square. That worked for some clues, but still created conflicts. I mentioned that maybe the "Colorblind" title meant that the color of the grey square could be interpretted two ways, as if colorblind. So by putting "GREEN" in the same sqaure as the "RED" in "REDCROSS", we could finally solve the down clue to "GREENDAY". Okay, so then what? We were completely stumped as to how to make it all a single answer. Brent eventually gave us a nudge, saying that they were thinking of putting the color wheel on the crossword sheet. So I drew out a color wheel, and with a further nudge, drew a Braille grid overlapping it. The colors in the grey square could then be treated as bumps, giving us the letters we needed. "You always," Brent said with a grin, "treat a clue with 'blind' anywhere in it as Braille!" I mumbled a reply about the "colorblind" reference being used, but then realized it wasn't true: A couple squares had had three colors in them.

The silver bonus consisted of a 3x3 grid of black and white pictures with star ratings above each, indicating that these pictures represented movies. We pretty quickly realized that since the pictures were B&W, we needed to fill in a color to get a film title. So a picture of chicks became "WHITE CHICKS" and one a close-up of Mickey Mouse's eyes became "MICKEY BLUE EYES". The star rating indicated which letter to take, giving us TED TURNER.

I never saw the gold bonus: As we finished the silver one, the two other teams arrived and it was time to be debriefed.

And if I had been able to park at the San Rafael Park and Ride, it would have been a short walk to my car and a half-hour drive home. As it was, I got to spend some more time hanging out with Erik, Jason, and George before being dropped off at the Exploratorium. I had had a really good day solving with them and was happy they'd let me join them. But for some reason I couldn't put my finger on, I didn't enjoy the hunt itself as much as I had Shinteki Decathlon 4. It would be several weeks before I could figure out why.

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.

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.

LARFing it

I occasionally point out to Jonathan (daily if possible) that despite his love of puzzle hunts, the first thing he did after playing in BANG 16 is move to Southern California, almost the antithesis of puzzle hunts compared to the Bay Area. He laments the fact each time, but until Google realizes that hiring him could improve their search result accuracy by 95%, he's staying put.

Tomorrow, Jonathan'll try out the Los Angeles Race Fantastique (LARF). He's hoping to have fun, but expects the puzzles to be perhaps slightly below BANG level. Regardless, it'll sate his need for puzzles for a few weeks.

I told him he should start throwing his own Games down there, to try and build a community. He thought that was a little extreme as a first step, but considered the idea of re-running some BANGs (as LANGs?). Ah, such puzzle bravado.

GenCon Puzzle Hunt?

Doing a little research after reading thedan's blog entry about working on a puzzle hunt for Gen Con has turned up little about the puzzle hunt itself. It's not listed, as far as I can see, on the list of events and descriptions of previous versions have been scant. The best I could come up with was this Norbert(a) puzzle from last year.

There is a puzzle-related aspect to the True Dungeon portion of the event which sounds fun. It's kind of weird though: I solved the sample puzzle, but not consciously. It has you decide which of the nine shapes does not belong and I thought of a few theories about how to go about making that determination, but one of the shapes just kept bugging me. It just didn't feel right. And it didn't feel right pretty strongly, so I went with it, without any real justification. I mean sure I had a one in nine chance, but still, my guess was correct. The sad thing is that my subconscious solved such a simple puzzle before my conscious mind did.

Renewed Puzzle Hunt Enthusiasm

If nothing else, Saturday night's city search for obscure parts of streets fired a renewed desire to participate in more puzzle hunts. On the drive home after the Treasure Hunt, I was urged by more than one person to get off my ass and put on another Santa Rosa Puzzle Hunt (which I had to indefinitely postpone last year due having to do it solo and to lack of time). Our two Petaluma members are considering constructing their own puzzle hunt and Jonathan once again has the bug to get a BANG together, despite being 500 miles away from the rest of the team.

The season is warming up. In addition to an as-of-yet-unscheduled BANG, a leisurely mini-game, and Shinteki's fourth Decathalon, I see that an invite-only Game, Midnight Madness: Back to Basics (why do people keep stealing my never-to-be-implemented ideas???), has popped up. Sad to say (to us anyway), our somewhat obscure year-and-a-half old team doesn't always stick out in people's minds when considering who to invite (changing our name a few times since inception probably hasn't helped either). Anybody know where I can buy some good subliminal advertising?

Superbowl Mini Puzzle Hunt Recap

Using puzzles I'd developed, but did not get a chance to deploy (having been Porlocked), for New Year's Eve, I set up a "surprise" puzzle hunt at the Superbowl party at my Dad's. It was to be a distraction for those who weren't that interested in football or the other activities, as well as a way to feel like I hadn't spent all that developmental work for nothing.

I didn't directly tell anyone. In the emails I sent out, I put a little code at the end which, when deciphered, lead to a YouTube video, which lead to an entry in my blog about my "secret" plans for the Superbowl. However, of all the people I asked to join us, only three noticed the code, and only two of those attended.

The puzzle hunt was five puzzles long and had three paths. The puzzles on each path were similar but lead to different locations in order to prevent accidentally seeing a team retrieve a puzzle (the house and yard being the extent of the hunt). Only the final puzzle was the same for all paths.

It took me longer than expected to get organized and place all the puzzles around the house. Oddly, no one seemed to notice. Once everything was in place, I began surreptitiously dropping the starter puzzle around the house in what I thought were obvious locations. Nobody saw them. I overheard the two people who knew there was to be a puzzle hunt asking when I was going to start it.

As the Superbowl neared its end, I discussed it with my wife and she suggested I abandon my plan of hoping some would pick them up out of curiosity and instead announce it. I reluctantly agreed and pointed them out to a couple people and asked them to point them out to others. That finally got them noticed but this was a few minutes before the Patriots scored their 4th quarter touchdown and the ball game suddenly became a lot more interesting.

Four impromptu teams of two formed eventually, one of which had to leave as soon as the game was over, and only solved the preliminary puzzle.

Apart from the final one, I had written the puzzles to be especially easy... or at least so I thought. I tested them on Jonathan and he thought they worked fine, but as always, little things began to pop up. For example, one clue was "Place on a scale": Some interpreted "place" as "a location" instead of "put". At that point, I knew I couldn't just sit back and participate in other activities; I had to actively GC.

As luck would have it, the three teams that stayed each went on a different path, so each had their own unique puzzle hunt to play. Each puzzle in each path lead to a similar location; for example, puzzle 2 would lead to the kitchen area, with the red path leading to the freezer, the blue path to a cookbook, and the green path to a cabinet drawer.

Puzzles one and two both consisted of crossword style clues that were assembled in different ways to lead to the next location. Puzzles three and four were two parters: Three was a cryptogram (which one team had never tried before) that gave instructions on finding an Apples-To-Apples card with a code on it, while four a semi-acrostic that ended up telling solvers to go to a room where the names of stars were written on the wall. This puzzle was kind of broken, as I had designed it to make use of a planetarium projector, but the kids who came to the party decided that that room was the most fun to play in, so i had to improvise. Considering the quality of the toy star theater, maybe that was a good thing.

The fifth puzzle was a chess puzzle, but required players find the already setup chess board next to the fireplace. Nobody picked up on it and instead tried to solve it just based on what was on the paper. I basically had to give all three teams a hint that they needed something more to solve it.

I think everyone had a good time playing, which is the important thing. Each team got a prize, although my brother "dragged" his wife into it, but had dropped out to play Lego Star Wars by the middle of the last puzzle, so she got to choose her prize. A few things popped up, like a typo on the semi-acrostic, my dad's place turning out to have two woodpiles, one team never having heard of the Crash Test Dummies, and the chess puzzle should have been tweaked more. But all in all, I think it went pretty good.

An American Idol Puzzle Hunt

Karina (my wife) has long had a dream of having karaoke at any of the 5-10 events we organize for our friends each year. For the New Years Eve party we hosted, we decided to make it happen by buying two USB microphones and renting a copy of Karaoke Revolution: American Idol (we had intended to buy a copy of Karaoke Revolution Party, but could not find it for under $70 for the PS2, despite being $10 for the Xbox). Knowing that many of my friends enjoyed puzzle hunts but would probably be adverse to singing in front of friends, I designed a quick five-step puzzle hunt, the clues of which would encourage/require them to sing in order to get to the next step.

Unfortunately, some of our guests arrive about an hour early and I didn't get a chance to print them all out and hide them. So I went with my backup plan: I told everyone that I would get up and sing until everyone had taken a chance and sang.

It worked.

In fact, we spent the entire night playing the game, instead of doing that and a the other activities we had had planned. We nearly missed the countdown! Thirty seconds after it, people were singing again.

My thought is that since Karaoke Revolution (and similar games) use a pitch bar and gives a grade, it gave people something else to concentrate on instead of the idea that you're singing badly in front of friends. If we had just brought a karaoke machine, people would not have had as much fun nor played it for so long. For goodness sake, someone decided to sing "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" and someone else said that we had to do it "Top Gun-style"... I have never in my life before seen all my friends sing together!

However, that leaves me with an unused, location-specific puzzle hunt...


(On a side-note, Casey brought a puzzle based on a prototype I'd showed him and those who were in the mood did have a chance to solve that.)

End of the Season

Well that pretty wraps up the 2007 puzzle hunt season. Although the Unibangers plan to do the next BANG, something tells me that it won't happen until 2008. It seems kind of weird that there was only one BANG this year when the average has been about four. Maybe that's due to all the other events, including a new puzzle hunt at the Google campus (a tradition which I hope continues), keeping people/teams who might otherwise be orginazing another BANG from having the time to do so.

Or perhaps it's because the Platonic Solids did such a good job that the BANG bar has been raised a notch? I'm thinking that if I dug into my puzzle file, pulled out 10 puzzles, fitted them into a meta, and just placed them at random locations, people might be a little bit disappointed.

Gamin' on the Slopes

If it rained today, I didn't see it. But it was predicted and that shows that the 2007 puzzle hunt season is drawing to a close. No one has announced any new BANGs (though I hear of rumors from time to time of teams, including my own, working on one), or Games, or anything else. After Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 11.0 (and one other), I'll probably start going into withdrawal.

It, along with the next full moon, also marks our annual trek to Tahoe. However, this is the first time since I was five or so that family won't be joining me up there (they're all going to Bend for some reason). Well, my wife and daughter are going with me, but they weren't around when I was five...

I keep wondering about using Tahoe as a location for a puzzle hunt. I figure there are some people out there who'd drive the four hours (or fly from wherever) to participate, but I and my co-creators would have to have developed some sort of reputation I guess, or else who would travel all that way for a puzzle hunt of unknown quality?

That thought then leads me to snow skiing. Would it even be possible to have a puzzle hunt on the slopes? Teams would ski from one location to another, solve a puzzle, to find out the next place in the ski area to go. Paper puzzles would be kinda difficult though...

The idea kind of borders on the ridiculous, but I have fun thinking about it.

Puzzle Hunt Prizes

I was talking with a friend yesterday about how, when trying to describe a puzzle hunt to someone who's never heard of it before, one of the typical responses is, "So, what do you win?" Almost invariably, the person cannot understand why anyone would want to compete in a contest of skill that has no prize. We discussed how one of the main reasons, of course, is that if a prize were offered, competitors would try to bypass, short-circuit, or otherwise get around puzzles as quickly as possible, since the goal was no longer solving puzzles, but winning. After our conversation was over, I was thinking that I was glad I had never seen such things happen, but then I realized that I already had.

Though it had many flaws (eliminations for one) and unfair puzzles (breathing on mirrors for one), I still consider "Treasure Hunters" to be a puzzle hunt. It did offer a prize and because of that, all but one team destroyed a kinda neat little puzzle. Teams were supposed to arrive at a stop on the Underground Railroad, spot the word "FREEDOM" painted on the door with the letters r, e, and d in red, and make the connection to use their rose-colored glasses to look at the tons of quilts scattered throughout the room. When doing so, a star would be revealed on one of the quilt panels, indicating where a hidden message was located.

Instead, most teams simply used the tried-and-true brute force method and started ripping through the quilt panels until they found which panel held the hidden message. Only Team Geniuses, who were in last place at that time, figured it out. Of course, one of the benefits was that this saved them a lot of time.

I keep thinking that as a puzzle designer, I would have been tremendously disappointed to see teams ripping through my puzzle like that, but maybe breathed a sigh of relief when one team actually tried to solve it the intended way.

I love prizes. I rarely win them. And with teams like Five Blind Boys, The Buninators, Get On A Raft With Taft, and Coed Astronomy, to name only a few, it would be chancy even in our best moments for The Smoking GNU to come out on top of any puzzle hunt.

There were enough prizes at BANG 16, though, that we were able to take some home. I treasure my "Match Wits With MENSA" book (thank you to whichever team brought that!), but the real prize comes from truly solving quality puzzles.

How to treat a Mythbuster

A member of the Mystbusters' team was a groomsmen at my friend Linda's wedding yesterday. Eric (her now-husband) had told me his old roommate and long-time friend was on Mythbusters and, being a huge fan of the show, I always thought it'd be cool to meet him.

I know Eric and Linda told him about the puzzle hunt that I co-hosted and they participated in, and I guess he thought it was kinda cool (especially the opening the elevator between floors part), so I would think we'd have plenty to talk about. However, I got to thinking: How would I want to be treated if I were Discovery-channel celebrity at one of my best-friend's wedding?

I know that I wouldn't want to be inundated with comments and questions about the show or my co-workers or sought out for conversation simply because someone saw my show; I'd want to be treated like just an ordinary guy and enjoy celebrating the joining of my friend to his wonderful girl. Having come to that conclusion, I decided to treat him like I treated all the other groomsmen (none of whom I'd ever met before either).

I ignored him.

I hope he appreciates it ;)

A Wedding Acrostic and a Postponed Hunt

I've decided to indefinitely postpone the puzzle hunt I was working on for friends and family. Although I have the puzzles, developing them solo takes too much time away from my daughter, my wife, my friends, and a hunt for a way to earn some side income. When we did it last year, it was just two of us, and that was hard enough. This year, I figured that starting on puzzle design early would make up for working on it alone. Wrong! Anyway...

I'm writing an acrostic puzzle and just sent the 4th draft to the bride-to-be for approval (it's something to keep the guests occupied at the reception). This is my first time designing one, so obviously it's not perfect. I ended up with some nasty letters at the end along with somewhat laughable clues for them. I wonder just how many people will figure out what an "aged placed to experiment on wet dirt" (three words, nine letters) is or will forgive the solution to "I'm no longer addicted to Doublemint; I'm ___ ___" (two words, six letters). The bride-to-be, however, thought they were funny, but, more importantly, was especially pleased with all the clues that I worked in about them and the wedding party.

Always looking for a way to use my love of creating and solving puzzles in a profitible means (the whole "do what you love, the money will follow" concept), I thought that maybe creating various custom puzzles for weddings would be a fun idea. The first thing I thought was to check out "weddingpuzzles.com". To my surprise, a website came up dedicated to the idea of selling puzzles (crosswords and word searches mainly) for wedding receptions and other wedding-related activities. Plus, the packages they were offering were below what I had considered charging and much classier to boot (engraved cardstock with ribbons, for example).

I'm still considering it, especially since the site, as well as all its sister sites, is no longer taking orders ("buy our software instead and do it yourself!")... but I can't see operating on much of a profit margin: Their cheapest package is 3 copies (one framed) for $30 and assuming that my time is worth $25/hour, that means $5 for materials and only one hour of work on the puzzle itself. I guess the difference is that the customer is required to supply their own words, while I distilled a ton of details about the bride, groom, and wedding party into a usable puzzle.

My problem with this as a form of employment is that I cannot stand repetitive tasks. And sadly, I know this would become one fairly quickly.

Sunburnt for Shinteki

So I spent yesterday puzzle-sitting for Shinteki's Decathlon III. Apart from not applying sunscreen (despite having brought some and being given some), the day went really well. It was surprisingly relaxing, considering my behind-the-scenes work at our puzzle hunt last year, but the sites were just beautiful. I wish I had brought a tennis racquet (well, two really).

I spent most of the day with Ian Tullis while we watched over three sites. First time I met him, had a great time picking his brain, talking over various aspects of all things puzzley, and sharing stories from previous hunts. Hopefully, he was able to put up with my driving! He was kind enough to bring some of his puzzles along for me to take a crack at, which I had fun doing. Unfortunately, the complications from dry socket were making my brain ache at the second site, while working on what was a fairly simple crossword (Get On A Raft With Taft's entry into Pirates BATH). I ended up having to solve that one at home today, but the rest I had fun solving as the sun set at our third site.

Wish I could do it again next weekend, but since my wife is going to a bridal shower in Concord, I just won't be available. Until next year, then!

Volunteering for Shinteki

Being low on funds, I'm unable to compete in Shinteki, which is a shame because it sounds like a lot of fun. However, I have signed up to be a volunteer for July 28th, so see you there!

Googol Puzzle and Solutions

The puzzles and solutions from the Googol Puzzle Hunt were released today. I completely sympathized with the Burninators, who had this to say:

Most of the information was cobbled from our own notes and some was hastily written up in the last two weeks, so there are bound to me some minor errors here and there. We may not be very proactive in fixing them -- it's been a year-long project for us and we're all kinda tired. :-)

Sounds a lot like how we felt after our own little puzzle hunt... though it took us (i.e. me) several months longer to get the results up. The word "cobbled" strikes an especially loud and familiar bell.

Along with the solutions is also a director's commentary of sorts, giving little bits of inside information, such as the fact that Wei-Hwa designed the Player puzzle as revenge for being forced to "identify pop music songs that he's never heard of"... although I think that might come close to breaking Snout's well-conceived "Only Game Control thinks that's funny" rule.

Another one was from the Statesman solution, which I worked on:

The message begins with "LETTER P" rather than just P to prevent people from getting PPLU and quitting.

Which turned out to be pretty perceptive, considering I got to "LETTERPPL" and nearly stopped, thinking that "LETTER" may have just been a coincidence.

And as indicated in the solution for the Veritas meta, we did backsolve Imperator to some degree, as there are only two five-letter words that have XOR in the center: ixora and uxory. Thanks to onelook and Gwerdy Wordy for that.

Google Puzzle Hunt Wrapup

To my surprise, I enjoyed the first-ever Google Puzzle Hunt more than any other puzzle event I've participated in to date. To be fair, I've only been puzzle-hunting for less than a year, so I've only been in five or six. But considering that this was going to be a conference room-style puzzle hunt, I was skeptical. The only other one I had been in was Iron Puzzler II and that went badly.

Lots of things contributed to my enjoyment, but I think that four in particular were important:

-We had an excellent team that worked together and got along really well.

Second Breakfast is a very unique team. Our team captain was in Seattle, as was half the team. So basically, six people were remote solvers and six people were on campus. It turned out that this setup actually benefited us (save for a few exceptions). Very few of us had ever met before. I was lucky to get in in the first place.

So thanks to Gretta for taking us onboard, to Stacy, Mike, Terrance, and Simon for putting up with us in person, and to Chris, Jon, Emily, Josh, and Kendra for being such great remote solvers!

- Wide variety of puzzles

The Burninators certainly provided puzzles that were all over the map, rarely boring, and always challenging. From T-shirts to pinball, dominoes to sudoku, a (slightly late) midnight gameshow to karaoke, a constant variety provided a lot of entertainment as well as mental challenges.

- Always having something to solve

I think this was a big part of it. In other puzzle hunts I've participated it, the puzzles have been, to one degree or another, serial. So if you were stumped, you either had to take a hint (something I'm generally loathe to do) or sit and stare at the same puzzle for an hour, trying to get your brain out of a rut. No "Fresh Eyes Syndrome". No "if we work on something else, our subconscious will pull a solution out of its ass". No "if we come back to it, we'll have a different perspective".

During the Google Puzzle Hunt, we were constantly rotating puzzles, not only between on-campus members, but also between Mountain View and Seattle. Sometimes if we hit a wall, then we'd send it up north, and vice versa. Not only did this give everyone a chance to contribute, it also made sure that when we requested a hint, we really needed that hint.

- It was at Google
Okay, so maybe it sounds corny, but who hasn't wanted to work at Google? Being there, solving puzzles, gave us a taste of what we've been missing.

So thanks to Google for putting up with, what, about 250 geeks invading your site and doing non-work related stuff for the weekend! Here's to hoping that this is the beginning to a fine tradition.

So who wants to start a Pixar Puzzle Hunt? ;)

Google Photos

Photos from the first ever Google Puzzle Hunt are up:

http://google1.puzzalot.com/

Written version is still in the works.

Google Puzzle Hunt Results

Awesome time. Great team. 5th place. Extremely tired. Daughter woke up early. More later when conscious.

Chaos

Suddenly, Second Breakfast's mailing list is going crazy as we all try to co-ordinate six members in Seattle and six members at Mountain View. The good news? We got a new Google team member to replace the one who got sick (get well soon!), bringing our count up to three onsite Googlers. The bad news? No one has volunteered for the position of Puzzle Wrangler (yet), which leads me to think that my "I'm willing to do something that nobody else will" syndrome will kick in, and then prevent/distract me from working on puzzles.

At the same time, I've been working hard to finish the results pages for the friends and family puzzle hunt we did last year. I think it's done, despite the database disappearance of the wiki Wednesday morning. I'm gonna have someone check it and hopefully send it out to all the participants on Monday.

Which would give me the time on working on a second one. Two problems with that:

• My co-creator of the first one has moved away, making collaboration and brain-storming a lot less feasible.


• One of the participants from last year mentioned the puzzle hunt to a somewhat-known TV personality and they seemed interested, to the point of perhaps participating. Hopefully, I won't let that intimidate me. If they bring their entire team, on the other hand, then I'll definitely be worried.
  

Change in Plans

I was going to write today about my thoughts on puzzle design, especially puzzles where the data extracted can be applied arbitrarily, but I'm leaving tonight for Ecuador, so I guess I should start packing.

The Googol Conglomerate Open House is on only a few days after we get back. I don't even know what team I'm on, just that I'm on a team...

Top Ten Things I Learned from No More Secrets

No More Secrets was The Smoking GNU's first full length game. We came in 18th out of 20, it seems, but we had fun, and hopefully we learned a few things:

1. Pony up the extra cash for the navigation system on the rental van instead of relying on your brother's company's handheld GPS navigation system that's still in alpha, despite how well it worked for you last year.

Navigation was a serious issue for us: The GPS system kept pushing the SD card with the software on it out, Google Maps kept failing because everyone and their mother was calling our Internet-enabled phone to see how things were going, and the only person familiar enough to use MS Streets and Trips was the one answering the phone every time someone and their mother called.

A consistent navigation system might have saved us up to five minutes a clue.


2. Don't try sleeping at a friend's on their air mattress the night before, despite his house being an hour closer to the first game location.

Especially if your teammate(s) snore, or are a snorer yourself (as your non-snoring teammate will get up and kick you to try and get you to stop).


3. Be exacting when data collection is in an inaccessible location.

At the wall climbing puzzle, we failed to record the exact location of each word, so that once we figured out it was a semaphore puzzle, we had to go back and climb each location again.


4. Excessive wall climbing leads to cramped hands that are unable to close properly

See above.


5. Remember to eat baby carrots

Baby carrots have become something as unscientific as a good luck charm for our team, and we forgot to have any during the entire Game.


6. When you have nothing to contribute, sleep! (Or at least rest your eyes)

Although I'm familiar with cellular automaton, it's definitely not my forte. Being late night/early morning, I should have just dozed while my teammates worked on it and not worried about missing the next puzzle (in this case, the XOR light puzzle which my only contribution to was filming the animation).


7. We'll always be over prepared.

I'd say about 90% of the stuff we brought, we did not use. We were going by a combination of Blood and Bones' equipment list, write-ups on past Games, and things we had that just might possibly be useful if GC was really crazy. It would explain how the ratchet screwdriver, the laser-level, and the Simple Green (which was in this case yellow for some reason) ended up in our van.


8. When kneeling in front of a former Netflix building trying to take a picture of strange symbols after sending an email to a strange account in the middle of the night, the sprinklers will turn on.

But I did get the picture.


9. Standford has no bathrooms

Or at least any that are open on a Sunday morning.


10. Wrap the string around the Styrofoam ball instead of trying to hook it with a over-used paperclip

Okay, so maybe that won't especially be useful in future events.

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...

BANG 17: Knights of the Round Table

Operating for the first time under our new team name (the old one, while somewhat amusing, was didn't easily roll off the tongue), we had a strong showing in the seventeenth Bay Area Night Game, which took place entirely during the day (not that I'm complaining!). I'd never been to UC Berkeley before, so I was lost pretty much the entire time. But that's what you have navigators for, right?

I really appreciate all the hard work that the Platonic Solids put into creating this puzzle hunt. Especially the interactive ones which impressed me the most: The charading hermit, the singing monks, and the Black Knight. They require a lot from the volunteers and we really appreciate all that they did to make this possible. We even had a sidequest after finding the Grail: Providing water for the Black Knight.

The only puzzle I didn't enjoy was the very first one: Finding Camelot. In a puzzle hunt dominated by non-paper puzzle, giving everyone four paper puzzles that they need to solve before they could even leave the starting area seemed counter-productive. Additionally, there was no way to confirm we were making progress until all four were solved. Eventually, after discussing what it all meant, our team just decided to go to where the lightning bolt on the nonogram pointed.

Apart from that we enjoyed pretty much all the puzzles, found them challenging at about the right level, and had a good time. My favorite quote from the whole day? As Eric was about to "drink" from the Holy Grail, he said "If I shrivel up and turn to dust after drinking this, I'm coming after you guys!"