Ghost Patrol Playtest - Final Part

(Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)

Ghost 7: Here I Go Again

It was back to the hotel analog — aka Casa de Ashby — for our next ghost. One of the upstairs rooms had been transformed into a temporary hotel room; we were the first team there. Lining the wall was a series of gold records from different heavy metal bands, each with a number from one to ten spelled out underneath it. I heard one of my teammates note that the fact that they were spelled out was important as I excused myself to make use of the facilities. By the time I got back a few minutes later, they had solved the puzzle. To this day, I don't know how it works.

The early gray of dawn was showing as we got a box filled with bottles. Heading out to the van, we put the bottles on the drafting table and began to consider what to do with them. They were all corked or otherwise stoppered, which impressed me for some reason. Each bottle was filled with liquid and...

I blinked.

By the time I opened my eyelids, it was more than a half-hour later. The sun was up. The bottles were lined up in a row on the table and Brian from GC had joined us in the van. Jonathan was attempting to blow notes on the bottles. My first though after my inadvertent nap, similar to a famous bowl of petunias, was “Oh no, not again.” (Our disastrous showing at Iron Puzzler II had had a bottle puzzle that consisted of blowing on bottles to get notes out of them; it was a frustrating puzzles.) Brian was kind of walking us through the clue since it was a music puzzle and our abilities with music puzzles are our main weakness. Also, we'd completely missed the fact that we needed to use the UV light to reveal the right liquid level for each bottle. Because of said past experience and because I'd missed most of what was going on, I just watched and didn't even try to help.

Whatever lead we may have had in the unofficial competition was lost due to our performance on that clue. And we felt bad, too, since it was Brian's puzzle. I have to say our poor performance was more a reflection on our team than on the puzzle; for all I know it was beautifully constructed and amazingly elegant.

It was at this point that we lost our handler, probably to the lead team. It seemed kind of weird not having David or Jenn around, like there was too much empty space in the van as we headed to our next clue.

After the normal joys of finding parking, we followed the SHaRC under a freeway overpass, where strange metal statues were. We spotted a member of GC across the street, but she emphatically waved us away. Our clue was on this side. We found it in the form of a CD behind one of the statues.

This clue put a little bit of moral back into our team. Each track had two songs mixed into it and the titles of the song were anagrammed into another amusing title. Removing the letters in the actual song title from the fake song title left a letter, and thus the solve.

The capture was nearby. We had only done three clues for this ghost. Slightly depressing.

Ghost 8 – Idea Pooping

The sun had broke through the early morning clouds and it had turned into a gorgeous morning as we pulled up for our next ghost at Lake Merritt in Oakland. On our way there, Jonathan finally got in contact with BANG Erik who had been planning on joining us at around 11am the previous day. He hadn't been feeling well, but could now make it. Jonathan gave him directions to the park and we got out of the van.

There we say the impressive figure of Jesse in his lab coat and Meat Machine throwing bocce balls over an impromptu line. They were just finishing up as we arrived, so we took balls in hand and since there were four of us, each tossed a ball at the jack. Jesse consulted a sheet at exclaimed happily “Amazing!” (or was it “Awesome!”) Eric immediately got out his clipboard and started writing as we continued to make several additional bowls. It became clear pretty quickly that each bowl, depending on the order away from the jack would get another word of praise, such as “Va-va-voom!”, “Terrific!”, or “Great!” (to which Jonathan replied, “Great? That's all you can say about that bowl? How about 'glorious'?”), each of which started with a different letter of the alphabet.

Jonathan and Eric broke the code within a few bowls and Eric had the entire code written down in a few minutes. Okay, so what now? We rolled a few more just to make sure, exaggerating distances to the extreme in order to be exact, such as the time I threw the blue ball twenty-five feet from the jack in order to make absolutely sure it was the farthest away. Nifty encoding scheme verified, but what did we decode with it?

While discussing, someone looked over at the balls left by the other two teams and decided that it wasn't a case of GC being too tired to pick up the their balls after all; they were, in fact, the message we needed to decode. “GUM” was the answer and apparent flavor of ghost. Jonathan and I had a short discussion as to whether gum actually had flavor as we moved on.

(At GC HQ at the actual event, I found out that the answer had been changed to “GNU” in a small tribute to our team. Well, that and mainly that it worked with the constraints of the puzzles.)

Our next location was a bit away, but we decided to walk it. We wandered past the real bocce courts and beyond a professional croquet court — which had people in their cricket whites playing that morning. We came to another one of those “It's straight ahead, but we can't walk on water” situations and curved around the lake to find Meat Machine sitting at a small labyrinth. There we got handed a piece of paper with a bunch of ones and zeros on it.

We stared at it for a while. Different theories were postulated. None worked. At first, we thought they could be Morse, but then later groupings were eight digits long. We thought it could be binary, but then why would there be both “0” and “000”? After about ten minutes we began to run dry of ideas. Given or I postulated something, but Jonathan said it wouldn't work (something that had happened earlier when Jonathan argued against “dogfish”, not believing it was a real fish). Eric took exception to this and said, “Don't poop on an idea!” “Until it poops out on you,” I added.

I thought then that should be our new team motto.

We continued to stare at the sheet of paper covered in only two digits. We thought about taking a hint, but Jonathan convinced us that there was no real hurry. Meat Machine was still there. It was a beautiful morning. BANG Erik was to be joining us at that spot shortly (at least in theory). A nearby squirrel hadn't been able to give Given his nut yet, despite several attempts. And we only had a few puzzles to go before this amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience was over. So we stayed.

Now at least twice in the past, I'd had an ideas for solutions that I dismissed as unlikely, which later turned out to be right. I now suddenly had a very crazy idea, and hoping to avoid the mistakes of the past, decided to work it out until it did poop out on me.

I grabbed the paper from Jonathan and twisted around. (I won't go into the details of my theory here since, although improbable, someone could read this far and I could develop a puzzle using the idea.) I worked it and worked it and it almost seemed to be bearing fruit. Based on what I was doing, Jonathan deduced my theory, got the paper back and tried it himself. “You know, it's actually kind of working!” But it didn't work completely and we gave up on it.

Jonathan called Greg for a hint. Greg didn't answer. As he was leaving a message, though, he cracked the puzzle.

[Spoiler: The still improbable reader may wish to avoid the next few paragraphs if they want to solve the puzzle themselves; instead, they should probably click the picture to the right.]

It was all the codes we'd previous thought, but only back to back. Decoding the first set yielded MOPERS. As Jonathan set about decoding the second set using binary instead of Braille this time, I mentioned that MOPERS is Morse with an extra P. That was our solve: Each of the classic encodings was being used to encode a word that was an anagram of the code plus one letter. Eric and Jonathan figured the last set would decode to ATMOSPHERE before even trying it, since they had seen the same word used in the same way in a Shinteki Decathlon.

Greg showed up and said, “I hear you guys need a hint?”

(I later told Ian, the puzzle's author, that it was the puzzle that went from most frustrating to most satisfying in the shortest period of time. I was actually kind of disappointed when they didn't use it for the Game.)

In talking with Greg a little about the puzzle, he mentioned that they planned to have teams retrieve the clue from the labyrinth using RC cars. It depended on the budget and feasibility, though. We thought it was a great idea and only wished we could have tried it.

The SHaRC indicated our next clue was back the way we came. In a real game, deciding to walk the long walk would have been disastrous.

Back at the van, we finally met up with BANG Erik who had parked next to us. We got him up to speed as much as possible as we walked past the once bocce ball-covered field and on towards our destination. We rounded a corner and saw that the lake again stretched in our way and would make for quite a detour.

“Let's take the van.”

With our newly-acquired fifth player in tow, we parked near an Obama rally that, surprising to me, seemed to have attracted very few San Francisco attendees. With propaganda-ish music blaring over the speakers, we crossed the street to where three colorful Z's were standing. Meat Machine was just finishing up and leaving as we got there and got our clue: A series of Taboo cards, each with a dark side. On the front were five words, as in real Taboo, that players weren't allowed to say. It was up to us to determine what the actual word was, though; that part was blank.

We quickly figured out that all the front words began with “TA”. On the back was a ghost saying a “BOO”-related word. Some of them had half-circles on the edges. All of the stickers had images on them. For some reason, I said, “Let's make a ring using the stickers to join them together.” I'm still not sure why. The idea apparently had its merits, though, and we put the stickers on cards that had word portions in common. The easiest sticker was probably “BOO”, which connected TABOO to BOO-BOO. With them all connected, a series of Roman numerals were created running inside and outside of the ring. A discussion broke out as to which order to read the numerals, since we had all assumed they stood for letters. At some point, though, Jonathan pointed out that the outside read “PRWNL”. “It has to be PERIWINKLE,” he declared.

I offered the SHaRC to our newly-arrived teammate so he could get a capture in. He declined.

Finale – A View to the Killed

Our end game was at a Mountain View Cemetery. Honestly, it's probably the largest cemetery I've ever been to. We reached a van point at pretty much the high point on the mountain. It was a gorgeous view and I tried to take a picture of it. Unfortunately, my digital camera was set to “movie”, which I didn't notice until later. All I got was one frame grab and a short movie of my shoes.

Everyone was there. GC Brian greeted us and explained what was going on. For the actual event, the OWL would explain this all, but right now it was him. The ghosts in containment had congealed into a single boss ghost and when this happened, teams would actually get to chat with the nerd ghost (nerd ghost? I hadn't seen enough puzzles for the previous two ghosts to get a handle on their personalities). He would explain that instead of trying to contain the ghosts, which only made them angry, it was better to figure out how to heal them emotionally... give them the proverbial closure. They would then leave this earthly plane forever.

At the circular base of the gravesite we stopped at were the final puzzles, several of which had slime associated with them. Had we actually done any slime analysis like I told the non-navigating, non-driving portion of our team to, we could identify which ghost belong to which puzzle by finding similar identifying slime at the site. Instead, though, those two teammates had been in the back of the bus solving puzzle steps we backsolved or guessed at. That or they were watching the animations that each capture code elicited from the OWL. Although I had heard them talking about them, I only had a chance to sneak a peak at the first one and pretty much forgot about them until this point.

We gathered up the puzzles and failed to identify the slime. To my horror, two of the samples I collected were labeled as the same ghost. Someone mentioned that there may have been two different slime samples out for the same ghost. It didn't matter in the end.

Eric grabbed one puzzle with pictures of famous people on it, some of them famously dead. He solved it quickly without even knowing which ghost it was for and Brian, again acting as our OWL, gave us the story as to how we had mollified that ghost. Jonathan figured a puzzle involving pets probably belonged to the Benign Booga and solved it pretty much on his own. We got another Brian ending. A bunch of phrases on a sheet of paper seemed like the same font that was used for the St. Mary's park flower puzzle, so we figured it was the Chinatown ghost. Another one consisted of letters on a grid. There were some interesting parts to it, but nothing that I could figure out. Given was working on a bunch of cards that had been divided in two.

Noticing our stalling on these final few puzzles, Brian mentioned that we may want to concentrate more on each ghost's motivation, revealed in the ending videos. Oh, and we may need scissors for the letters for the grid one.

We gathered up the clues and got back in the van to watch each of the videos again. They were impressive, though only in rough draft form. One or two only had a description of what the animation was to be like. But it was enough to solve the puzzles: We split the letter grid in two and actually saw the ending animation of the bi-polar ghost being split in two. I inferred that half of his personality had gone to hell, while the other went to purgatory. We then used the honor-binary system to solve the kung-fu fright's problem.

Up next was the circus lady. Her heart had been broken by another circus performer, so one of the Eric's figured we only needed to put the heart cards back together, mending her broken heart. He pointed out that the letters those cards represented anagrammed to TIME, the perfect solution. This led to a heated — but as always, good-natured — argument, with Jonathan arguing that we were discarding 75% of the data and there was no clear order to the hearts cards. Eric, Erik, Given and I took a side and even after Jonathan had entered TIME as the correct answer, we continued to argue whether it was a satisfying clue or not. Eventually, we agreed to disagree. It was a fun discussion though.

Which left us with the rockstar ghost. We looked at all the pictures covering the sheet of paper, but no ideas seemed to be coming. We watched his video and saw he wasted away and died while trying to write his ultimate song. But still, no ideas came. “Here,” I commented, “is how I would want this puzzle to solve: I'd want each of these pictures to actually be a musical note. The notes would then be from a song but would be missing the last few notes or something and those notes would then spell out the answer.” Jonathan sat forward. “How about if they contained musical notes instead? Like this bulldozer has 'do' in it. You know, do-re-mi?” We liked the idea and set about to figuring out the proper names of the pictures so to extract notes. When done, we figured we'd have to sing the notes to figure out which song it was and what to do next. That, unfortunately, was not going to happen. The other teams had left and it was getting late. We told Brian we knew what to do but the odds of us doing it within a reasonable timeframe were kind of sad. So he told us the end story of the final ghost being released, and the nerd ghost finally getting his dream of having an adventure fulfilled.

It was such a satisfying ending.

GC invited us to lunch at a eatery down at the bottom of the hill, five minutes away. We graciously accepted and after getting organized, headed out.

It took us a half-hour to get there.

Ghost Patrol Playtest - Part 3

(Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4)

Ghost 5 – A Love/Hate Relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ghost 6 – A Chili Morning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final part is next...

When Puzzled Zombies Attack (aka BANG 19)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zombies in the Underground

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

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

Ghostbustin' Under a T-Rex

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

Brainless Chess

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

A Soggy Poetry Reading

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

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

Game Store Tactics

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

A Zombie Feast

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

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

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

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

We Fold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Seattle Times takes on Shelby Logan's Run

Shortly after Jonathan found out about The Game back in spring of 2006, he recounted to me some of the more incredible anecdotes he'd read in his research trying to find out all he could about this amazing adventure. I found out later that most of those stories had come from Shelby Logan's Run: Helicopters bombarding a dry lake bed, microchips in mice, tattoo requirements to get clues, etc.

This weekend, The Seattle Times ran a story simply titled "The Game", but it's really an account of Shelby Logan's Run and the unfortunate accident that lead to the crippling of one player and all but shutting down the Seattle version of The Game.

About all I knew of the incident was from Peter Sarrett's writeup of his witnessing at the trial, which I came across after searching for blogs mentioning "No More Secrets" (our first Game). After having seen the clue in question which lead to the mines, I really had to wonder how in the world anyone could go to the wrong shaft.

The Seattle Times story attempts to answers that. As unbiased as news stories are supposed to be, it definitely felt that the writer's sympathy lay with Bob Lord as they describe his sleep-deprived thoughts that literally that lead him down the wrong path: thinking the "ONLY 1306" warning was part of the clue instead of straight-forward directions, postulating that the "NO! NO! NO!" on mine hearkened to an earlier clue, missing the "1296" mine label, and thinking that the organizers were trying to fool him.

I had heard that all but one of the organizers ended up settling, but had no idea it was for such a large amount. Then again, who can put a price on what Lord went through or even who, if anyone, is culpable: The organizers, for even having a clue out there? The player, for ignoring directions? The mine's owners for not having blocked off dangerous shafts? The safety inspectors for not closing said shafts?

Legally, I'd still have to side with the organizers, even after reading about how terrible the accident was for Lord and his family. What's the point of having waivers if you still end up paying out over ten million dollars for something you didn't have control over? The whole thing would be like a shark cage diving instructor warning you not to stick your hand out while under the water and you, thinking he was joking and actually encouraging you to do so, suing him when your hand gets bit. The fact that the waiver you signed to get on the boat doesn't specifically mention that a shark might bite your hand if you stick it out of the cage shouldn't negate the fact that the waiver warns of injury or death.

It's a deeply saddening affair, but ultimately, personal responsibility, not pity, should win out.

Larry's Smokin' Writeup

When Larry Hosken put out that he'd was looking for a team to be an embedded reporter for in Midnight Madness: Back to Basics, we thought it'd be a great idea to have him join us. Assuming he'd forgiven us for thoroughly foiling him in BANG 17, it would be interesting to have a more experienced player with us and also see what our playing style (if it is such a thing) would look like through an outsider's eyes.

His report is now available for perusal. It was really a lot of fun having Larry with us and I think he downplays how valuable a part he played on our team. Regardless, a good time was had by all and I hope those who read enjoy as well.