Shinteki Decathlon 4 - Part the Third

EIEIO and the Shintekimon bonuses were still kicking our butts when we arrived at the next location, a giant book in front of a library. A librarian leaving the building let us know that the library had just closed, for which we thanked her. It took us a second to realize that the mural in front of the library actually was the giant book, only turned on its side.

This was a fairly simple puzzle, as evidenced by Coed Astronomy solving it in what GC figured was a record fifteen minutes. After they left, we kinda took their place and started trying to identify the books. Most of them I had no idea and my brain was preventing me from naming the ones that I was familiar with. Sam's iPhone and Erik's wife became invaluable at this point. I became Keeper of the Crayons, providing them at a moments notice, coloring in squares based on colors mentioned in book titles. I mentioned the first one kind of looked like a Xmas tree, although the black bauble made me wonder if a Goth had had a hand in decorating.

The funny thing is, as we continued coloring and identifying the images, we did not begin trying to figure out what the solution was until we were nearly done coloring. Maybe we were having too much fun or maybe we just got into a pattern - Jonathan asks for a number, Sam indentifies its color, I hand over the crayon, and Eric indentifies the numbers on the grid that were the same color - that worked too well. Eventually we decided we better solve the puzzle, which was simply the first letter of each of the images depicted. We had been told it was a fast puzzle, but it was also kind of enjoyable too.

As Eric and Sam took us to our next location, Jonathan and I worked on the color sudoku. The first problem was that the sudoku solver Jonathan was using complained that there were over twenty possible solutions to the grid we'd been given. Something seemed wrong with that, but we double-checked our paper-to-computer data transfer and still got the same result. So I took to manually pinning down squares while Jonathan used the solver to do some bifurcation checking.

We hadn't finished the bonus when we arrived at Monopoly in the Park, a pretty cool site in itself, let alone for a clue. After a few trips around the board to earn our clue, we went back to the van to work on solving it. Funny thing is, I don't remember much of the solving process. It went fairly quickly and we were working together as a team and finally came up with "GOBACKER", which the Palm told us was the correct solution to the puzzle, but not, as it were, the final solution. We sat in the van for a while trying to figure out who the backer of the "GO" square was... Boardwalk? Banker? Parker Bros? Hasbro? Rich Uncle Pennybags? Nothing was working.

At there near-breaking point, somebody mentioned that it was too bad there wasn't any data on the Monopoly board in the park itself. Aha, I said, but there was! I got out my camera and showed proof. Apparently, businesses can "buy" squares on the board, such as Silicon Valley Business Ink did with Community Chest. However, in all the photos of the Monopoly board I had taken, none had had the Go square in it. So we did a drive-by, dropping Eric out to attempt to be seruptious in finding the answer and getting a comment from Rich about his been expecting us.

As we headed towards the final clue, I found out that it's hard to read a number when you've filled a square with a black crayon and that wax is hard to erase :) We didn't completely solve the sudoku grid but filled in enough to make a flag on the lower grid. As we arrived at the location, I grabbed my handy dandy almanac and started skimming country flags. By the time we had settled in a cafe with the candy puzzle, I'd settled on South Africa, despite some bad pixels.

Nine candies. Eight minis. One mini-meta. A few simples solves. A whole lot of frustration. Tasty leftovers. That pretty much sums up our experience with Orientation. I spent nearly the entire time working on one mini, CERTS, only to find out I'd solved it in the first few minutes. After writing out the answers to all twenty-five mini-mini clues, I noticed that Z was missing, but that there was the line "And so on..." at the end. Aha! Pretty trick of them, I though, to hide the final letter like that.

But what to do with all this information? Someone suggested maybe it was a code, along the lines of RESTSET = OK. Sounded good to me. All I needed was a word to decoded. CERTS seemed the most obvious and so I came up with PHDBA. Aha! A Ph.D. and a B.A. are both certifications or CERTS! Then Eric burst my bubble by pointing out that those were just the naturally occuring. I tried doing it backwards and came up with the garbage string of STSRCTRCCTS. I looked for something else to decode all over the CERTS package. Ironically, I thought it would have been interesting if somehow the word "RETSYN" could be used, but since I couldn't get anything out of it, I handed it off.

Sam had been working on the Skittles puzzle and seemed to make good progress with his hypothesis, until it ended up looking like nothing much. With Certs off my hands, I offered to take a second look at it, and see if I could find any mistakes or other issues that might be important. .I started retracing the first few letters and found some of the connect points were a little off (we were going off of ten-pin bowling, having no idea until Jan's blog that Skittles was a nine-pin bowling game). My methodology, while exact, was slow for everyone else. And then either Eric or Jonathan asked why we weren't making use of any information in the Skittles themselves. Sam and I saw no information in them and had figured they'd be used later on in the puzzle. Then Sam got this idea: Nine pin bowling! I'm not sure I had ever heard of it. So he mapped out how he thought it was set up and I started drawing them. However, again, I was going too slow, so Jonathan took it and completed it fairly quickly. Only thing is, it was backwards and upside down.

I took a look at Certs again, but found nothing new. My teammates were working on other puzzles, so I picked up the orange TicTacs, looking surprisingly similar to a pack that some orange-ish team had forced on us only a few months earlier. I decided it was the meta and went to looking at other puzzles. Once again, we didn't start working on the mini-meta for quite some time. When we did, NEEM and ETC (*facepalm*) came out pretty quickly. With all the information, the mini-meta seemed to go fast, especially since I literally had the answer ("RETSYN") in my pocket.

We started the van to head towards the final location when Eric made a point: We had half an hour until the 10pm deadline, at least 15 minutes of which would be used in travel time, keeping 1-2 of our solvers from working on the bonuses. So we stayed in the parking lot. Four bonuses. Four people. Sam took the Monopoly bonus, Eric continued the frustration with Shintekimon bonus, Jonathan worked on the Candy bonus, and I was on EIEIO duty.

Sam actually took the Monopoly bonus pretty far: He got to the point were he had all the states and abbreviations; however, none of us knew what to do next (Peter told us later that it was to assign the state abbreviation to each cube and take a letter from the abbreviation based on which face was forward). Jonathan had figured that in his bonus each of the grids was a letter and figured it'd be easier to treat it as a cryptogram than find the correct solution technique with so little time left. Eric and I were basically banging our heads against the wall.

Time ran out.

I'm not the biggest fan of the end-game party (Midnight Madness and the SF Mini-Game being exceptions), which is almost exactly the opposite of how I want to be. I guess partly being an introvert (i.e. large groups of people drain energy), but it's also the frustration of trying to even hear people I'm attempting to communicate with, everybody talking to everyone else, and a sense of isolation. I fear sometimes that I come across as anti-social, which is usually far from the truth.

After the reading of the scores and the dispensing of the goodies, people trickled out and smaller groups formed. We talked with Peter to find out about bonuses. I chatted with Larry and found out about his unfortunate van incident. More people left and Michael Kearney of the Silly Hat Brigade came up to rag on Jonathan, his teammate in the MIT Mystery Hunt. We talked for a while, but it felt a little odd to me since I had just seen him a few weeks earlier on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

Hmmmm... talking to two WWTBAM contestants in the space of a half hour - one more thing checked off on my To-Do list.

So how did I affect our Shinteki team? The good: We finished all the clues for the first time. The bad: We finished four or five places lower than normal and "Old MacDonald Had A Farm" has been permanently ruined for me.

Shinteki Decathlon 4 - Part II

Okay, the heat wave's over, my laptop is no longer resetting every five minutes, and Natalie's asleep...

(I should note that since my last Shinteki post, the results have been posted and my theory that not going back to the van to use the computer to aid in solving Teamwork cost us was correct: Our solve time was almost fifteen minutes longer than the average time of teams that finished all ten puzzles.)

So, having finished the bonus for Enigma, we were about to arrive at the location for Manipulation, some park whose name I can't remember (when not navigating, I have a tendency not to pay attention to any directions or location names). We knew from the crossword bonus that we'd have to find a plaque, and we discussed the best ways to view the plaque without alerting other teams as to its location. Invisiblility cloaks were not mentioned.

We got lost trying to find the rose garden, since we were trying to follow the map Sam had photographed on his iPhone instead of looking through the trees and spotting the roses. We eventually made it, though, but only after running into someone from Team Shark Bait and asking whether Midnight Madness or Finding Nemo had been the inspiration for the team name (neither, she thought) and a brief stopover at the Chinese Culture Garden for a look at Confucius.
At the small, circular rose garden we met the staffers and I thought it was great that their kids were helping, wondering about my daughter being in the same position a few years from now.

After a few compliments from the staffers on our team name and ability to all fall down after ring-around-the-rosie, we got to work on the Jenga puzzle. We quickly decided that solving a balance puzzle on a rickety picnic table with a stiff wind wasn't the greatest idea, so we layed out each of the layers on the table separtely and proceeded to follow the instructions. When done, the layout on the table looked like an equation (1 - 11 = 1, for example) and we tried to figure out what it meant until I mentioned that we were trying to solve a three-dimensional puzzle two-dimensionally. We stacked the layers and somebody realized we did it wrong. So we did it again, this time with two oversites for the person reading the instructions. Eric, who had thought that the top of our first tower looked remarkably like a "Y", noticed that the bottom of the new tower looked like "OO", so he entered "YAHOO" as the answer.

Personally, I thought the bonus was more interesting that the main puzzle (though I always love a puzzle I can get my hands on). We found the Plane Tree plaque, studied it, and photographed it. Our inital thoughts led nowhere and another team had arrived, so we went back to the van. Using the "MOS" hint, we scoured the plaque to guess which month abbreviation came next. We found JAN, FEBe, MARgaret, APRIL MAY, and JASON (July through November), so our inital answer was "December". There was no name that began with DEC, so we were about to be stuck when Jonathan noticed that Jan, Febe, and Margaret were already in the crossword. So we that we entered the next name, "April May".

We were just pulling in for for the A.I.M. puzzle as we finished the bonus and were treated to a giant See-N-Say, complete with banjo and fiddle players (a touch I was especially fond of). Correct answers to trivia questions got us a chance to position the arrow and "pull the string" by shouting (rather badly) "Yeeeeehaw!"

I figured growing up on a ranch would give me a little edge, but the team that was there left after one or two more spins. One of the trivia questions had to do with which of the animals on the board was native to North America. I correctly answered "turkey". A little later, a question had to do with which of the domestic animals was not mentioned in the Bible. Seemed obvious to me that since no animal (or food) native to North America could have been in the Bible, I answered turkey again (remind you of any infamous game show moment?), but was wrong. Apparently despite the Israelites staying with the Egyptians for a couple hundred years and the fact that I had a turkey for a pet as a kid, there's no mention of cats in the Bible and a turkey isn't considered domestic.

With each spin, Brett gave us an animal and a sound, both completely different and completely unrelated to the location of the arrow. It was fairly obvious that we were dealing with a semaphore encoding, and as we walked back to the van, everyone on the team apart from me (curse of the Shinteki newbie?) realized the A.I.M. was using the arrow as the 12:00 position. The message, "I MAY HOWL", caused Eric, Sam, and myself to immediately cry "wolf", but Jonathan figured very few wolves were found on the farm and went with "dog" instead.

Arriving back at the van, we started on the bonus, which for some reason we thought was the "EIEIO" clue. It seemed implied that those five letters were the only data we needed (although I thought some of the wording indicated that it was more important to pay attention to the sound the different animals made as opposed to their common names), so Jonathan and worked on different theories.

EIEIO ended our string of bonus solves. After the game, we talked with Peter from Briny Deep to get some insight into the bonuses we could not solve and found out they had ended up using decryption software. Wish we had thought of that.

Part III soon.

Shinteki Decathlon 4 - Pics, Thoughts, and Something Else

The picture gallery from my first Shinteki event, Decathlon 4, are up for viewing and since I've been working on setting up a forum, I added a thread in case anyone wants to vote for their favorite puzzle or discuss anything that isn't covered by the after-party talks or by blogging. Guests can post so you don't have to register (yet). [Edit: the forum I was working on was completely removed as there's a better board in town.]

Many thanks to Just Passing Through and all their volunteers. We had a great time and I was impressed with the high production values put into the hunt.

A brief history: After Jonathan discovered the Game/puzzle hunt community, he immediately registered for Shinteki Decathlon 2 as "Better Late Than Never" without a team. He eventually got in touch with another team and they became kind of the Shinteki version Smoking GNU. One member of that version could not make it this year, so I filled in.

After a two-hour drive down, filled mostly with discussions pro (me) and con (Jonathan) for the idea that the Lost Island is made from mirror matter, I finally got to meet Eric and Sam and we headed off to the starting location.

The first puzzle, Shintekimon, I contributed absolutely zero beyond holding up my clipboard to shade the battles. I like to think I'm smart, but it's a slow smart. I need time write things down, consider patters, and do my thinking. This puzzle was a rapid pace and I rarely got to see what our monster's name was. When we got enough battles under our belt for the second hint, I started attempting my analysis while the rest of my team battled.

I began working on the hypothesis that letters had to be within one of each other for a battle to take place, but couldn't take it anywhere.

The crowd of teams began to dwindle out as teams begin to win battles again Superstar Rich. I think we were about middle of the pack when Eric shouted out "Rock-paper-scissors!" as quietly as he could. Jonathan renamed the monster as a minimal winner and we defeated Rich.

Eric would have a lot of those moments during the game. We got our revenge by making fun of him not being able to solve the first bonus... not that any of us could!

Back in the van, Jonathan and I shouted out clues to driver Sam and navigator Eric for the crossword puzzle, ignoring for the moment the bonus associated with Shintekimon. We had it finished by the time we arrive at the next clue.

I made a huge mistake at the second puzzle. I have asthma but was well prepared with my inhalers and confident as I made my way up the mountain; however, I found a recent re-injury of a hiatal hernia seemed to be causing deeper breathing difficulties than before. My team quickly moved on ahead of me as I took my time with breaks and inhalers pumps. By the time they came back down, the puzzle was practically solved, so I worked on the Shintekimon bonus hiking back.

Our original (and brief) assessment had been a ternary code (WTL), but with five words in the title, five letters in each clue, five clues per group, and five groups, I figured (completely incorrectly) that it had to be a binary encoding. I eventually passed the puzzle off to Eric while Jonathan and I solved the bonus for the songs.

Clue three was pretty much my favorite. Although I'm no big fan of drop-quotes (we were hit with a stalling one in Midnight Madness and decided waiting in line would be more fun), I thought the idea of really "dropping" a drop quote into place was genius. Jonathan was shocked that he was the only one who recognized the quote. The missing words spelled out "A date in May" so we entered "tenth". No go. What other dates were there? I mentioned Mother's Day and we got back that the answer was nearly complete but that we had made a spelling mistake. This problem kept us side-tracked for a while trying to figure out how we could misspell "Mother's Day". We called GC to make sure the Palm was functioning correctly. It was.

Completely at random, I said that maybe we should try "Father's Day". Everybody, including myself, laughingly (and ironically) discarded the idea and eventually we took a hint. Believe it or not, we had not noticed the big ol' "15" the checkers had formed. We were also pretty amazed to find out that they also made a calender with could only correspond with May and June. June 15th, it turned out, was Father's Day. We entered that for the solve.

We solved the bonus as soon as my brain would let me think of the name of those poles carved by American Indians were and why "motet" was related to it. Unfortunately, this brain fart was a sign of things to come for me.

I hadn't played a game of "Red Light, Green Light" since the last time I went roller skating, about twelve years ago. It was fun, even though I was the only one on our team sent back. We then settled down to my least favorite puzzle style: anagramming. However, this time with an extra letter. For some reason, we opted to solve out on the lawn in the beautiful sun, instead of heading back to the van and using a program. Our pattern was that we'd figure out one of the words on a card someone else was working on, get passed that card as the now "expert", and then not be able to think of another one. Eventually we got the words for each category and decided against trying to anagram eight eight-letter words manually and went back to the van. We had the bonus down before we arrived at the next location.

The Enigma clue was at the Winchester Mystery House, but only in the gift shop. We listened to a player piano in order to get our clue (and me thinking it was our clue). This was our second favorite clue. I know I loved using The Gashlycrumb Tinies as a clue (I don't think I'd read it since I was a wee lad). We solved 90% of the cryptic clues without realizing they were cryptics until the free hint came in. We had a bit of difficulty understanding the blatant hint for binary but eventually we came around and got our solve.

Jonathan and I worked on the bonus. We figured we had to use one of the children's names for the rhymes, but couldn't figure out a logical pattern of selecting which. As we neared our next destination, Jonathan just wrote down both letters for each one and selected the ones that ended up making a sentence. I don't know if there was a more elegant way of solving it, but it worked.

Part II tomorrw, hopefully.