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.

Coming of Age at BANG 21, Part 2 of 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming of Age at BANG 21, Part 1 of 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2 soon.

BATH 4 Experiences, Pt. 2

Skipping past our own sector, we headed towards the Burninator's clue at Stonestown Galleria. First, we had to solve twenty-six clues that generally were play-on-word descriptions of stores at said mall. We got some of them from a list on the web site, more from the store directory (after surviving the parking), and eventually got all but two or three by wandering the mall itself. We tried splitting up into two teams, but seemed to end up doing redundant checks instead of solving faster.

All during the hunt, obviously, Eric was fielding hint requests and answer confirmations. The most common hint was "Look at the flavor text." The first team to solve it was Bloodied by Science, who's comment that Eric's puzzle had a very satisfying conclusion certainly bolstered our confidence that we'd made the right choice in going with his puzzle over the one Jonathan and I had been working on.

One response had kind of worried us, though: Jesse of loxi (aka Lowkey and Desert Taxi, aka Ghost Patrol GC) called and confirmed their answer and kind of abruptly hung up. "I guess they didn't like it very much," Eric said with a sigh.

At the mall, though, we ran into loxi in the food court and they assured us that they had enjoyed the puzzle. "You don't have to be so cold about it," they had joked to him after he hung up. I'm guessing it was just one of those times where the vocal tone doesn't always match the emotions (something I have to watch out for myself). But it was all good.

We finished up the mall clue a short while later. It had felt like a huge time sink, but in reality we still had five hours, maybe more, to finish off the three remaining clues. No problem, we could take our time, relax, and try and power through any blockages we might come across.

Which we hit fairly quickly. The next clue was in the Sunset District. It was divided into three sub-clues, with a page full of flavor text describing three murders done by vampires. Along with those were several folded pieces of small paper in a bag labeled "Hints". A discussion broke out as to whether these were the equivalent of the a hint line and whether they were "real" hints or just part of the puzzle. We called the Longshots and asked, and their answer made us think they were real hints that would cost us. This turned out to be a huge mistake on our part.

Each of the clues indicated that it was related to one of the murders at the corner of two cross-streets. The clues looked incomplete, so our obvious assumption was that we needed to be at those locations to solve. We went to each one in turn and found absolutely nothing. This was discouraging. Eric had kind of solved the one similar to a word jumble (later it turned out he'd only half-solved it), and the other two we attacked at many different angles. None of them worked. But we didn't look at the paper hints; only an hour had passed and we still had plenty of time. We would not take a hint.

A half hour later, only a little progress had been made. Jonathan had solved the other half of the word jumble-ish sub-clue and it gave us a location. Sensing we needed to connect the location of the murder and the solve location, Rob decided to drive along that path to see if anything jumped out at us. What else did we have to do?

More time passed and frustration levels were high all around. Finally, I told my team that I would look at the hints. If they were something that the rest of team could eventually solve, I would recuse myself; otherwise I would reveal the hint. I opened the first one: "It is a cryptogram" it read. We had tried to solve that sub-clue as a cryptogram; however, Jonathan's crypto-solver software gave over a hundred possibilities for the title, so we pretty much permanantly discarded the idea. I told them the hint.

Solving quickly, it gave us another location, and drawing a line again gave us a point where it crossed the previous one. The clue said it could be solved with only two of the sub-clues solved, so we headed to that point. We had figured we were looking for dolphins (based on the back of each sheet), but also some wording in the flavortext lead us to think that we might be looking for a bell instead. But again, nothing was there.

While searching that location, Jonathan remarked "Why else would they give us this map if they didn't want us to draw these lines and come to this location?" And since we had already marked down that we'd taken a hint, I told him that I'd read another hint and it indicated that the map was to solve the third sub-clue. Jonathan quickly figured out that the ages and flavors on the blood-tasting menu indicated streets and avenues. Drawing along them revealed our third location. The line it gave us criss-crossed in the same location we were in, so it hadn't been much help.

We got back in the van and drove some more along each of the different paths, and then ended up wandering at random. We always kept to one side of Sunset Blvd.; the flavortext said not to be out after sunset and we had taken that as a hint to not cross to the other side.

Eventually, I took a look at the "Lair" hints and it revealed that the location was a reflection across Sunset. Our team let out a collective "grrrr" and we headed over towards the beach.

Our estimates put us at a certain location, but again, no dolphins, no bells. We began to spread out, since our "reflection" may have not been exact. We even went to far as to explore the beach, where Given said he had run into another team who said what we were looking for was on the beach (we never saw the person, but we had been misdirected by non-participants before).

Eventually, we wandered by a colorful house that had tons of animals painted on it. It looked promising, plus coed astronomy was looking around the same location. A guy hanging out in the garage, almost asleep in the back of his car, asked us what we were doing. We gave him the usual spiel and asked if he had any dolphins painted anywhere on his house. "No way man," he said in either a surfer's or toker's accent (or both). I decided to move on.

A few seconds later, however, I spotted some dolphins painted on the gate. So much for our informant's credibility. Eventually, one of us spotted the life preserver with the answer on it between a pair of dolphins on the top floor. Exhausted and relieved, we finally moved on.

BATH 4 Pictures and Experiences (Part 1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Excellent Leisurely Feelings

In The Smoldering YAKs debut puzzle hunt yesterday, hosted by coed astronomy in San Francisco, set at a liesurely pace (although I did see more than one team running between clue sites), I have to say... we had a blast! I think Andrea summed it up best when, as we walked from the final clue to the pizza joint, she said, "I'm almost sad it's over!" Much thanks to Yar, who took a while to wind down his puzzle creating spirit after No More Secrets (something I can relate to) and to his team for refining the puzzles, making them playable ;) and putting it all on. My only complaint is... that atoms are now divisible. Seriously. Read up on it.

So I'm in a great mood this morning. And I plan to take advantage of it by playing with my daughter (who is facinated with this triangular object made of Legos for some reason), rototilling the garden, and hanging out with my brother, sis-in-law, and nephews.

It's a good day.

That's a Meta???

The answers (pdf) to the haiku clues used in the Downtown Santa Rosa Puzzle Hunt were released recently. I actually wasn't that interested in the answers, having solved a few and saw how little fun it would be to solve any more; however, I was curious how the meta worked, the one thing that made me think it was possible this was a "real" puzzle hunt. Here's what the solution to the meta reads:

Using the answer sheet numbers corresponding to the answers of questions 1-15, plus the number 1041 yields a list of all the plant patents awarded posthumously to Luther Burbank when the 1930 Plant Patent Act was signed into law. He was awarded Plant Patents numbers 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 41, 65, 66, 235, 266, 267, 269, 290, 291 and 1041.

Right! Shoulda been obvious...

Clues from the Downtown Santa Rosa Puzzle Hunt

I don't know if anybody is curious about the how the clues turned out for the "puzzle hunt" that Santa Rosa hosted on the 5th, but some friends of mine did go and attempt to participate. They were not having any fun, so left after about fourty-five minutes and came over to visit me. They said some people who worked with the BANG had come up and joined them, but left disappointed fairly quickly. Here are the clues they were given, in pdf format:

Downtown Santa Rosa Puzzle Hunt Clues.pdf

Looking over them, I can only figure out where to look for one ("Simon's fingers...") and can understand why it would be frustrating and no fun. The sad thing is that this almost indelibly prints upon the local mind a bad impression of what a puzzle hunt is.

How the meta works, I can only guess at. Perhaps the numbers associated with each of the correct answers formed some sort of pattern, say prime numbers for example, that could be continued once more, and the answer associated with that number was the meta solution.

Anyway, I hope the organizer will have learned a few things from this one and if it is to be put on again next year, will improve tremendously. Or at least, he'll change the name to a more accurate description.

Midnight Madness Appreciation

Photos and video are up, my sleep cycle has been restored, and the house is nearly back in order. Thus, I have a moment to thank Snout and Drunken Spiders for providing us with a unique and challenging life experience that we'll never forget. Kudos to them for all their hard work, planning, time, and expense.

I only just met Curtis and DeeAnn at the Captain's Meeting and again at the wrapup party. It's kind of sad to see them leave already - was it something I said? - but I wish them best of luck in their future endeavors in Oregon.

As for The Smoking GNU, we had a blast with Larry on our team. It seemed within five minutes of picking him up that he had always been part of the team and always would be. He seemed to be able to put up with us, so hopefully we didn't scar him too much.

We were the ninth team to arrive at the Community Center, but I'm not sure that means anything, apart from the fact that we got to eat breakfast before eleven other teams. We were the last team to leave a few sites and got skipped over three and a half clues... to be fair, though, we were told two of those were compromised (Acorn ran several blocks to catch our van to let us know about one of those), one was automatic for nearly all teams once the first team solved it, and we had only just entered Pinball City when the message went out to go to Standford.

Overall, a good time, lots of good memories, and fun experiences to tell my family. Many thanks!

Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt Photos and Wrapup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     P   R
       N
     D   L

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

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

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.

MSPH 11.0 Initial Assesment

MSPH 11.0 is finished. The team Jonathan and I joined, 196 (don't ask, only two team members truly understand the reason for the odd team name, and nobody understands when they explain anyway), placed 7th or 10th depending on whether you find total points or finish order more important. We were even in first place for a time, which was both surprising and exciting. Additionally, it was the first time 196 has completed a MSPH and we were glad to be a part of that! I want to personally thank them for having the faith and courage to give us spots on their team and for being such great people to puzzle with.

I also want to thank SCRuBBers for hosting. It is a dedicated person who is willing to give up a portion of their life and dedicate it, with their teammates, to creating complex and devious ways of hiding information for other people to try and break through, for no real profit of their own. I always think they are worthy of praise and thanks, and I wish to extend both profusely to SCRuBBers for their hard work and dedication. MSPH 11.0 was fun, challenging, and a great event to have had the chance to participate in.

There were puzzles good and bad, experiences fun and frustrating, and ideas unique and silly. Those, though, I plan on sharing in my write-up and here at 33,000 feet seems as good a place as any to get started. See ya on the other side!

Wedding Acrostic Wrapup

I am so happy for my two newly wed friends, Eric and Linda, and almost, but not quite, as glad to have the acrostic puzzle for their wedding completed. It turned out to be a bigger part of their wedding than I expected and I got a little more notice than I had planned on, but overall I think it was good.

The funny thing is there may not have even been one; apparently, there was some miscommunication and the puzzle never ended up getting printed by whomever was responsible for that part of the wedding. It was a good thing that we decided at the last second to make a bunch of extra copies of the puzzle to bring with us in case there were any problems. My wife was kind enough on the drive down there to scroll up the paper and wrap it with a gold ribbon and we distributed them amongst the tables while hor'dourves were being served.

I'm still not sure anyone there knew how to do an acrostic. I had provided a small example clue, but hadn't had the room for instructions. One table attacked the puzzle, but for the most part I saw people waiting to work on the grid until after all the clues were solved, which was pretty much impossible.

Linda took a few minutes of downtime between the toast and dinner to shine the spotlight on me as the puzzle creator (I had been hoping to stay somewhat anonymous) and asked me to tell everyone what the first letters of each word spelled out ("CONGRATULATIONS [their last name]") to give people a bit of a helping hand. She also announced that there was a prize for the first table to finish, so that made things a bit more interesting.

After dinner, one table finally solved it and received a potted flower as a prize. Linda brought it over to the table, grabbed a fork, and shoved some of the dirt into Eric's mouth. Turns out it was a dirt cake and I'm pretty sure from the look on Eric's face that he didn't know.

The happy couple then took center stage and went down the clues one by one so that everyone knew the answers. She explained the reasoning for the two confusing clues ("old mud lab" and "off gum"). I heard more than one person mention how hard they had been and that made me feel a little ashamed that I hadn't found a good way to work those letters out. Various comments, jokes, and alternative answers (such as "bruises" instead of "trophies" for the "Linda took home a lot of these from skating" clue) came out as each answer was read out. But the one that made me laugh was when the answer to the clue about Eric and one of his groomsmen visiting a "lifesaving TV set" was revealed to be Baywatch, the groomsman quipped, "Yeah, that was the best day of my life!"

What made it all worthwhile was after the answers had been read, Linda had one of the guys from the winning table read off the quote (the last verse from "Miracle of Miracles" along with a well-wishing from myself), and as he finished reading, Eric turned to me and gave me a grin and a wink, as if to say, "That was perfect, Scott."

Later, several people complimented me on the puzzle, but, amusingly enough, about half of them had not worked on it at all. I just hope that people enjoyed what I had only expected to be a little diversion while the newlyweds were getting pictures taken, but regardless, I'm pretty sure that the bride and groom were happy with the result.

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.

BANG 16 - Revisited

So I was cleaning up the desk trying to make room for my old Linux box when I came across a notebook filled with strange notations in it. Turns out, it's my notes from our experience in BANG 16. I had always meant to do a full write-up of it, as those brave enough to look can find out from my corny first blogger post. Time, however, has just not made such things possible. But here are two anecdotes from that night:

1. Coins puzzle - There was a huge crowd gathered around the puzzle-sitter at the fountain, so we grabbed the sheet of paper, headed out of the area, and sat down to solve. The puzzle involved figuring out the minimum number of coins needed to make change for a certain amount. Figuring that the dollar coin was the largest denomination, we figured that you'd take the number of coins needed and convert that number to the appropriate letter. Didn't work, so the team started trying other ideas, while I decided that maybe the puzzle designers were using 50 cents as the largest one. Still nothing. A quarter? Nothing!
   
   
   
   We spent a long time trying to figure out how to solve it and eventually, when we were like the next to the last team there, we took the hint. Turns out my quarter-as-the-highest-coin thought was right, but I had made a huge number-to-letter translation mistake. I felt like hitting that brick wall with my fist, I was so mad at myself. (We found out much later, i.e. the end of the game, that there was a stack of coins next to the puzzle-sitter to let us know which group of coins to use.)
   
   However, it kinda ended up being a good thing. If we hadn't taken the hint, we might have ended up ahead of The Platonic Solids and would have had the honor of hosting the next BANG... on our first outing!


2. Graveyard/Flashlight puzzle - We only had the one code sheet when we arrived at this puzzle and were concerned as to what were going to do when we found out that Jonathan was going to go to the other end of the graveyard and communicate something to us via flashlight. "I don't know Morse code by heart yet," Jonathan mentioned. "I'm sure they'll have a sheet down there for you," I replied.
   
   So off he went. Meanwhile, the rest of us set up: Nathan would tell me whether Jonathan was flashing a dot or a dash, I'd write it down, and Given would translate it. "Okay he's starting, write this down: Dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash... dash..."
   
   "Um," said Given, "that's not Morse."
   
   "Okay he's starting up again. Dash... dash..." Nathan continued.
   
   "I think it's alphanumeric!" said Given.
   
   "Okay, I'll try it," I told him.
   
   
   
   And it didwork. With quick thinking on Jonathan's part and a good catch on Given's, we got out of there pretty quickly, making up some much needed time from the quarter blunder.

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? ;)

NMS Results Show & Analysis

After spending the entire day yesterday in San Francisco securing a passport ("There's one word I just love to hear...") for my daughter and the evening with a downed server, I found out that Coed Astronomy had released their wrapup of No More Secrets, including the full leaderboard, so we could see just how badly we did.

You can see where our navigation problems came in, since the solve times often include travel time. For example, the Karaoke puzzle at the entrance of Microsoft probably only took maybe ten minutes, but we're listed at 37 minutes, showing that at a minimum our trip time was 27 minutes. Since most other teams made the trip in 10 minutes or so, it shows just how much we need to improve our navigation.

In contrast, the Text Adventure puzzle required no travel or navigation, and our solve time of an hour was very competitive with other teams. In fact, only two other teams (The Burninators and Loaded Bonbons) solved it faster.

The one that really killed us was the Bugged clue. It took us 75 minutes over the average of the other teams to solve, and about a half hour longer than the next slowest team for that puzzle. Our first mistake was the location directions: It said something about heading over to 17 at Felton, which we took to mean to travel to 17 Felton Rd. in Cupertino, instead of heading over the 17 freeway down to the city of Felton. I don't know how much time we wasted figuring that out.

After nearly arriving, we decided to get some food, so ten minutes of time was spent going into McDonalds and getting our laptops setup while our orders arrived. Which means we spent maybe an hour and a half actually working on what other teams felt was an easy and obvious puzzle. We still are kicking ourselves for not calling for a hint/confirmation of theories sooner and for not recognizing Bjork=B Ark. But then, our entire team is so allergic to puns, we've trained ourselves to not spot them. Yes, that collective groan you heard across the Santa Clara County was our team's response to "No Morse Egrets".

Apart from that and one or two other clues, our team is satisfied with our actual solution times, feeling that they reflected our abilities well, and were relatively on par with other teams. Our travel times, however, definitely need to be improved. Hopefully, we'll incorporate what we've learned when The Smoking GNU (under the guise of Möbius BrigANDs) plays in Pirates BATH in a week. Sadly, I'll be missing it, since I'll be making good use of my passport that weekend.