DASH 1 - Get Along Lil' YAKies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clues 1 - 3 - Gamblin' with Sandwiches

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

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

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

Clues 4 - 6: Slim Musical Crackers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clues Seven through Nine - Dead Dolls with Occasional Meta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part Three

(Part 1 and Part 2)

Clue Eight - A Quick Exercise

I went and grabbed some water that GC was kind enough to provide as Given, Rob, William, and Jonathan sat down to solve our next puzzle. It had a list of people you would never expect to play baseball, their position, and batting order. My teammates were already matching player names to capital cities of states (Abraham Lincoln = NEBRASKA). I grabbed my almanac to help verify data. What to do with a list of states, then? Rob, our sports expert, astutely pointed out that baseball positions have an implicit numbering. "Really?" was the basic response of the rest of the team. Rob wrote down the numbers and, indexing them into state names revealing CT CAPITAL, giving HARTFORD as our answer. It was over so quickly, I felt like I had barely seen the puzzle.

Clue Nine - Our Genetic Malfunction

Our next puzzle was near tennis courts, so we grabbed some seats to sit and solve. I heard some visitors behind us remark that they sometimes used these courts for competitions and would move bleachers over the first and third court (I guess they were talking about the Bank of the West Classic?). I always find it neat to solve in a place with history or uniqueness. I think sometimes how neat it would be to get teams into baseball or football stadiums to solve, but that would probably require more money than would be worth it.

Anyway, this was a cool puzzle. It had a lot of stuff to play with: A bunch of double-sided multi-colored tags with a single letter and a curved edge, a wooden dowel, and a set of six rhomboids with IN on one side and OUT on the other with crossword clues. I had a brief thought that the IN and OUT referred to the tennis, but nothing about the puzzle spoke to that idea. In fact, some other details and the class name (biology) led us in a different direction.

The letters on the multi-colored tags were all A, C, G, and T, all DNA codes. The holes in them fit the dowel. The answers to each of the crossword clues was two letters long, also of using DNA letters. Jonathan wanted to build a double-helix, but how? We spent nearly a half hour trying to figure out how to do it. One thing did become clear, though: Getting only two hours of sleep and then having to wake up early enough in order to drive three hours to Stanford was beginning to take its toll on Jonathan. Rob and William were trying to explain some of their ideas to him and they just didn't seem to sink in or make sense in his mind.

We used the crossword clues to build a circular chain (AT -> TC -> CT, etc.), with the IN side facing in and the OUT side facing out. Something felt wrong about it, though, as two tags ended in A and two ended in T, making multiple chains possible. Eventually, a configuration worked. We put all of the tags on the dowel and put them in the center of our circle. Semaphore was mentioned and we tried to line up all the tags so that one of each color was showing and in a semaphore position. It wasn't working and besides we had no orientation for north even if it did. William or Rob (or both) mentioned that the rounded ends were there for a reason, but we couldn't figure out how to work them in. As time was running out for our bonus, I suggested we go confirm our data. Balancing our little model precariously, we took it to a staffer, who said it wasn't the right configuration.

Back in the courts, we took it apart and tried to start again. William (I think) explained that he wanted to connect the rounded end of the tags to the angled end of the rhomboids. William started putting them together, the rest of us caught on and we all started building. I was in charge of handing out strips of tape. The idea was working and we started getting twisty levels that looked like... "I knew it was supposed to be a double-helix," exclaimed Jonathan. And not only that, one of the tags had UP written on it and each color was paired. Semaphore for sure. It spelled out NATURE.

Just in time too: We didn't get our bonus, but did get full marks. And even though we didn't do the greatest, it was my favorite clue for the game.

Clue Ten, Eleven, and Twelve - Go Speed Solvers!

We were all itching to see if our position had changed and pestered Jonathan and Rob to see if we had moved up any in the standings. Although the P.E. clue had moved us close to the top ten, the Biology clue hadn't moved us either way. Some teams were finished, locking in their score. Trying to beat the Judean People's Front and win for once in our good-natured rivalry with Eric was clearly out of reach now. "We can beat Blood and Bones," Jonathan said confidently. "We just need more solves like P.E."

So we kicked it into high gear. The next three puzzles took us about a half-hour to solve, which for us is pretty fast. The tenth clue dealt with descriptions of movies that were actually two titles combined ("Can't Buy Me Love Actually") and the common word in the title fed into an acrostic. Fairly straight forward and a fun team solve.

The next one had cryptic clues that fed into a letter drop chart. My practice using Kelger's Kryptics (for junior high school) had certainly paid off, as these once alien and confusing clues fell one after the other. The letter drop helped clue us in on the idea that each solution was paired to make an oxymoron. The hidden cryptic within the oxymorons gave us ACT so the answer was NATURALLY. Again, lots of fun mini-ahas.

And for the final regular clue, we were given a bunch cards, each with a questions about naming cities on it. Half the cards in different foreign languages, but seemed to be the same questions. On the back of each card was a twelve-pointed star, with a circle at each point. We started filling the circles with city names matching the question. The highlighted circles indicated which letter of the city name to use, but only on the English cards. We anagrammed the letters into FESTIVAL. As we walked away, I figured out there was an ordering mechanism using the cards with foreign languages.

Clue Thirteen - Meta Homework

As we came round to the campus eatery again, we were excited about our chances. A quick solve on this meta and we could maybe place ahead of Blood and Bones. A really quick solve and we might be able to overtake Mystic Fish. CRANEA, then in fifth place, was out of reach though.

After the past few puzzles, we felt like could take the meta no problem. We sat down at the same table we'd had lunch at and looked looked at our clue: A bunch of strips of paper with different mini-clues on them. Some of the more obvious ones indicated that they were directly related to the the previous clues we'd just solved. At first, I thought they would use the same solving mechanism, but it became clear that wasn't exactly the case. For example, one read "If you get to me, it means you've almost had sex... but not quite." 3rd base, right? And the third baseman in the P.E. clue was Abraham Lincoln.

With only a couple of answers like that, it became clear we're dealing with presidents. "I wasn't first, but today I was." referred to the example clue (McKinley), so even that was being used. We had a hard time matching one of them to a clue, though. It was orientated vertically instead of horizontally. Jonathan then asked us to count the strips... there were fourteen. So that must mean the extra strip was our extraction method: It had thirteen numbers on it, so they must mean indexes.

But in what order? Presidents had an innate ordering, so we went with that and began to get something, along the lines of LEAF of ???ADA??. At that point, for reasons I can't remember, I went inside the cafe to look at the pictures of presidents on the wall. While I was in there, though, the thought struck me, "What if it's LEAF of CANADA?" That would make the answer MAPLE. I went back out and pitched my idea, but Jonathan had been figuring the answer would be a president or president related. Finally, a few more letters fell into place, confirming my idea, and we did enter MAPLE.

Epilogue

We had time left after finishing. Some of our team grabbed some much needed food. Teams that had already finished and were still hanging around were in a social mood, so we talked with a bunch of them.

The one thing about talking with Jonathan is that his passion for puzzles comes out clearly. He's read so many writeups and puzzles that he can talk on so many subjects as if he was there, even if it was an event he never played in. I know on more than one occasion I saw people's eyes almost begin to glaze over. I know mine did and from time to time I went back to my eating team, just to talk about non-puzzle things.

The game ended. Bob got up to give his talk about the game and announced the rankings.

The rankings revealed something we didn't know: coed astronomy and CRANEA had voluntarily disqualified themselves in order to play with an oversized team. This put us in fifth! Prizes were still left when our team was called, so I walked away with a darn good bottle of wine. Blood and Bones came in behind us and started looking over the prizes. Our contribution, Guitar Hero 3 (with guitar), had yet to be taken. Rich Bragg said it was probably the most expensive prize he'd seen in a BANG, but it showed just how unpopular the PS3 was that nobody had taken it. He kind of talked Matt into getting it, even though he didn't have a system. "I always meant to buy one," Matt mentioned, looking over the box. "Now you'll have a good excuse to get it!" Rich laughed.

We stayed around talking with people until it was nearly dark and then headed home. It had been a good day.

BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part Two

(Part 1)

Clue Four - Handwriting Analysis

Eliminating travel time from scoring consideration had some side benefits: We could grab food and/or take care of other things before requesting the puzzle. That way our team isn't discombobulated and split up doing several different things instead of all of us working on the puzzle. Since our next clue was at a campus eatery, we went ahead and got lunch orders taken care of, then sat down as a team to solve.

The clue explained about being borrowed notes from a friend with bad handwriting. The paper contained a typewritten interpretation of those notes and it was up to us to understand them. They went along the lines of "The E is L at 0 DL" and "There are 4 C in a HH", so we needed to reconstruct the sentence with words for each capital letter. One of the more obvious ones was "9 I in a BG", which meant "9 innings in a baseball game". It was pretty fun as we worked on getting all forty-five notes deciphered; there are lots of mini-ahas and good of team solving.

The instructions said we needed to keep track of which class each note was from, and gave us a line-up of the three Tuesday and three Wednesday classes they could be from. So the nine innings one was from P.E. Four chambers in a human heart would be biology. Knowing that the equator is as at 0 degrees latitude would be geography. What would we do with that data in the end? Someone, probably me, suggested that since there were three classes in two columns, maybe it was a Braille encoding? But the lack of delineation between glyphs as well as a note in the flavortext about Tuesday being an "off day" discounted that idea. Instead, binary was noted with each solve.

Which was working pretty well, except that there seemed to be a few that we just couldn't crack. What the heck was "10 P (and 3 T) in C" anyway? So Jonathan started doing either/or checks for them to see what letters would come of it. While he was doing that, the rest of us were able to get some of the remaining. We even forced a few by looking up likely information in the almanac. Soon we had enough to realize the message was simply DO TERNARY.

Ternary is one of Jonathan's favorite encoding methods, since all twenty-six letters are represented by complete set of the first three digits. Having a puzzle solve to a message that tells us to solve it again only this time the right way, is one of my least favorite extractions.

We quickly realized that the position of a note's class in each days lineup (first, second, or third) meant to use zero for the first, one for the second, and two for the third. We still had a couple missing, but I didn't think we needed them now. We got some strange looking letters to start out with: CINWHI. So Jonathan started double-checking them, but they were legit. If this was the correct decoding method, this was the secret message GC was trying to tell us. The next two letters, CH, made it clear, though, that it was "C IN WHICH...", or basically another class note. And the city in which JFK WAS S was DALLAS. It took as about a half hour to get there. Not a superfast solve, obviously, but we still got a twenty point bonus and some important confidence from solving a tricky puzzle without every having been stuck.

And I'm not sure we ever figured out there are ten provinces and three territories in Canada.

Clue Five - Spell-checking Twitter

"Hey, we've moved up a few spaces!" said Jonathan as we walked towards our next mental challenge. It was true: We'd started in the bottom five after the first puzzle, maybe even dropped a place or two after the second, but after the previous two clues we were ranked at 15th. Those bonuses were making a difference and gave us some confidence that we could make up for our earlier blunders.

We received a page of tweets at our next location, all from, amusingly, Tweety Bird. The paper clue was well designed: It was like we were looking directly at the webpage. A Post-It was attached and directed us to look at mispellings, of which there were plenty (it's Tweety Bird, after all). We started counting them, thinking to index in to the tweet, when Jonathan and Rob noticed that the user names of the people Tweety was tweeting at described people with birds in their names: "@gulliverwriter" was SWIFT and the @1stidol was Kelly cLARKson.

The other ones began to fall, sometimes with iPhone help. The only one I figured out was who "@isignbig" was (hanCOCK) and maybe the Walter cronKITE. The first one, @wsvp, seemed incomprehensible until someone realized that it wasn't a Tweety-ized version of RSVP, but referred to Dick cHENey. We then used the misspelling count to index into the bird names to discover HAN SOLO SHIP. Since we were using bird names, we answered simply FALCON.

Clue Six - A Sound Solve

At the Standford Oval, where about a year ago we'd been chased with giant inflatable hammers while trying to determine what had been written on giant inflatable volleyballs (see Snotfart), we found a bunch of people gathered around six white things divided into two rows and spaced a ways apart. Huh, I thought, it kind of looks like a giant Braille pattern. I wondered why so many people were gathered around some of them.

The first white thing we passed looked like a speaker wrapped in a white Glad bag, only no sound was coming out of it. We waited a bit, thinking that something eventually would come, but no. We moved on to the next one and heard a repeating loop. It was Reagan's famous "Tear down this wall" speech, although it sounded like someone was taking a shovel to the wall during the speech. If it was a Braille encoding, which seemed all but a given, using sound to transmit that was kind of a cool idea.

The next speaker had more sounds, like a dog barking and cheering that made it obvious that the cheering from the previous speaker hadn't just been about Reagan's speech, but was a separate sound altogether. "I'm thinking each sound represents a single Braille letter," said Jonathan, writing down the sounds. If that was true, it certainly explained why there had been no sound on the first speaker we'd encountered: The lower right Braille spot was rarely used.

We went through each speaker, gathering sounds. What had seemed like a neat idea was starting to become tedious. Eventually, we found our way to the one that everyone had been gathered around before. It had tons of sounds coming out of it, which made sense, since that Braille spot would be used in all but three letters. It was difficult to decipher with twelve sounds intermingled and sometimes sounding the same. GC had kindly provided water and snacks near the speaker to aid in listening. Having a list of all of them also made us realize that we needed to revisit some of the other speakers, as Jonathan, Rob, Given, and William argued about which sounds were which. I heard, "I think this sound is really two different ones," on more than one occasion.

So we went back through all of the speakers and refined our the sound list. I say "we", but I was content to watch the rest of the team do it. I wasn't that interested in fine data delineation and besides, apparently I wasn't all that good at it. In the end, the Braille spelled out ROCK PAPER AND. We put in SCISSORS for the solve.

Clue Seven - Meta Deja Vu

I walked alongside Jonathan as we headed to our next clue. "That didn't seem all that challenging," I remarked. "Not really a puzzle at all: We all knew it was Braille from the outset and the rest was just data gathering."

"Maybe," he responded, "but we've got a lot of experience now. If it had been our first BANG, we probably would have thought it was pretty challenging puzzle and really enjoyed the Braille-as-sound aha." He considered. "Well, maybe not. Still, it was kind of a cool setup."

We arrived at our next location, grabbed a picnic table and had a quick break before retrieving our clue. It had two pages worth of trivia and fill in the blanks, so we divvied up, with one half of our team working on each page. Only after solving a few, Jonathan and I noticed something, probably due to the meta for BANG 22 that we'd written as it had used a similar mechanism to this puzzle. What we noticed was that WHEREFORE, UNTO, and SEVENTH, all had a phonetic number in them. The puzzle indicated to take one letter from the word, so we used the phonetic number to index into the word (UNTO -> N).

There were some gray boxes, though, that weren't connected to any of the trivia answers. When we had GR_NESS filled in, though, Jonathan had the great idea of putting numbers back in, and then using that number to extract a letter again. This got us more words with missing letters, so we had to do it again, until we finally got UTENSIL OR TUNING BLANK. Our answer, FORK, allowed us to move on.

Concluded in part 3.

BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part One

Prologue: Eye on the Prize

A week or so before BANG 25: Back to School, I stood in Kmart's electronic division and gave Jonathan a call. I explained to him where I was and that I had found a candidate for our prize to bring to the event. "It's Guitar Hero 3 with guitar for the PS3," I told him, "only instead of being $70, they've discounted it to [BANG prize level]."

He did not believe me. I spent fifteen minutes trying to convince him that I wasn't mistaken, lying, or just confused, before he looked up the ad for it on the Internet and was finally convinced. "Go ahead and get it for the prize," he told me, "and for that price, buy me one too."

Clue Zero: We Cheat

With Rob — practically a core member now — and William joining Jonathan, Given, and me, we arrived at Stanford for the fourth time (No More Secrets, Midnight Madness, and a GC Conference were my previous visits). It was beautiful weather, a perfect day for a hunt. We gathered around Bob of Team Longshots, who I was thinking I'd met during the MSPH 123 playtest, only he was wearing a cap at the time so I wasn't sure.

As a blimp floated by overhead (and me having one of those "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" moments), the standard Reading of the Rules commenced. As the BANG's title suggested, we would be revisiting different school subjects and experiences today. We would be graded on each puzzle. The neat thing, though, was that a web app was to be used for answer submission and live team rankings. To make sure everyone was able to use it properly, we were given a trivia question, which simply wanted to know the name of the tallest mountain in North America was. None of us knew, so, feeling somewhat sheepish, we looked it up using Rob's iPhone.

Clue One: Our Decent into Hell

Our first clue was in some sculpture garden. We claimed a spot in front of a sculpture we were soon to find out was named "The Gates of Hell", pretty near to where we had reluctantly dropped off the cube a few years ago in No More Secrets.

I usually expect a kind of lightweight puzzle for the first clue, something to ease teams into the hunt. But looking over the thirty some-odd closeup B&W photos of sculptures we were given, it was pretty clear that we'd have to find out which statue went with which picture. In other words, a lot of data gathering, and just from looking at it, no clear extraction method.

So we split up the photos among the five of us and went around trying to find them. Some were pretty obvious, others seemed to take forever to find. We even had a list of names as well as all the other teams gathered around sculptures as a hint, but it again became apparent that data gathering is one of our weaknesses. There was a map, but it didn't provide enough information. After I located and labeled most of my pics, I handed them to Jonathan, and took some that others hadn't been able to find. We all repeated this process several times.

When we had about half of the sculptures named, I discussed how we were going to get an answer out of all this with Jonathan. Neither of us had any ideas, which is kind of sad for the first clue. At one point, he mentioned the somewhat odd border around the names of the sculptures. "I bet this is the key," he said. "I just have no idea how." I didn't think much of the idea, though; I had wasted many hours on some puzzles thinking that the border might be relevant and was kind of jaded.

Teams dwindled out of the large courtyard as we finally finished labeling each photo. Our location in front of the Gates of Hell began to heat up, so we moved over to a table in the shade. We still had no idea how to get an answer from all this and were beginning to feeling pretty dumb. There was no call for a hint yet, though, because we still were eligible for a speed bonus (anyone solving this clue within fifty minutes got a relative bonus). That bonus would automatically be forfeit if we did ask for a hint.

With no clear indication of what to do next, some of us started scrutinizing the sculptures for any additional data. Sculpture creator? Some had it inscribed, some didn't. Photo capturing something with a letter one it? Not really. Numbers? Well, this one has a "3/12" and another had a "7/12" on it... and there were twelve sculptures named! Maybe the number of the sculpture could indicate a letter to use? But then why did we have all these photos? But no, not every sculpture had a "x/12" on it. One sculpture was so high that it was practically impossible to view any inscriptions on it without a ladder... meaning that it was a pretty sure bet that any extra information on a sculpture was irrelevant.

Back at the shaded table, Jonathan agonized with what to do with all our discoveries. Rob suggested that maybe the dots and dashes in the border I'd dismissed earlier indicated something to do with Morse code? There was silence and I looked at Jonathan expectantly... But after a few seconds, Jonathan went on to another theory, seemingly having examined Rob's idea and discarded it.

Soon, there were only a few teams left. William grabbed some photos and went to go re-examine a few of the sculptures. A few minutes later, he came back, clearly excited. "They're in order!" he explained. "They go from top to bottom, with no overlap. And," he continued about to point out something we should have paid attention to from the beginning, "some are portrait and some are landscape."

"Portrait and landscape!" Jonathan exclaimed. "That's it!" Duh. The border around the sculpture names that I had discarded earlier as just decoration had dots and dashes... and the dots were in the shape of a portrait photo and the dashes in the shape of a landscape photo.

"Rob mentioned Morse ten minutes ago," I said to Jonathan reproachfully.

"He did?" said Jonathan, surprised. "Well... next time make sure I hear him!"

We quickly translated the photos to Morse and then to English: COOKBOOK ITEM. Jonathan put RECIPE into the web app. Finally, solved... and only then did I noticed the title of the clue was "Orientation".

Longshots was generous for the first clue, though. We were still within the bonus period and earned a few extra points for our "quick" solve.

Clue 2 - Late for Class

In our experience, sleep helps in solving puzzles. I hadn't slept well the night before and felt like my mind was in a fog. Jonathan had stopped at a friend's house on the way up from Southern CA, instead of driving all the way up to Santa Rosa and then back down to Stanford. This was supposed to afford him five hours of sleep instead of his normal three. Only thing is, this friend was having a party and Jonathan ended up only getting two hours.

Somewhat discouraged from our nearly last place solve, we headed to the next clue, hoping that at least Jonathan's and my heads would clear (Rob and William seemed to be in fine form and Given was... well, Given). We needed a moral boost. Unfortunately, we weren't going to get it here.

GC was on the first floor of some building with a lot of exterior glass. Our clue was upstairs in an actual classroom (nice touch). There, we found a bunch of arranged seats, each with a name card on it. We all wrote down the names and saw that each first name was three letters long and each last names was four letters long.

When all the data words are all the same length, it's a good indicator that a sequential index extraction is needed (i.e. the first letter of the first word, the second letter of the second word, etc.). Since each name was seven letters long, we tried that. First, we did it by row and got AIGGVNE and stopped since that was going nowhere. Then we did it by column and got ABOCNND and didn't go any further down that path either.

We then started discussing orientation, i.e. should we start indexing from the front of the classroom or the back? Were we looking at it from the teacher's perspective or the students? We tried various other theories, most of them having to do with extracting a single letter from each name somehow, but none were working. With only five minutes or so left of our bonus time, we admitted to ourselves that we were stumped. Even Jonathan agreed it was time for a hint, which is saying a lot.

Our hint gave us everything we needed to solve it. Instead of sequentially indexing by the full name, we should have been sequentially indexing only the three-letter first name when looking at it by column (since there were three columns) and only by the four-letter last name when looking at it by row (since there were four rows). This gave us ABOVE AMATEUR for the first names and FARMING TRUCK for the last names. PROTRACTOR was our answer.

We didn't feel so dumb when finally solving that. For the first puzzle, there had been a dot and dash border; I mean, how much more obvious can you get when trying to signal that Morse code was going to be used? This clue, though, was a clever offshoot of a standard puzzle type that threw us for a loop. And judging from the average grade for the clue (C+ or so), we weren't the only ones.

Clue 3 - Math vs. Geography

One nice thing about Longshot's scoring system was that it completely eliminated travel time from the equation. Points were only awarded on solve times. Which is fine by me... we're not exactly efficient at getting from one clue to another, although we have been getting better since Rob has taken on our navigator role. Regardless, it's always seemed kind of silly to me to have a contest of mental agility come down to a foot race.

Our next clue, our Math class puzzle, was a 3 by 5 grid, with most cells containing an integer. Some integers were very very large (billions) and others were... three. Some numbers were repeated and three of the corner cells were empty and shaded.

Given took one look at it and said "Prime factorization?" Seemed like as good an idea as any and we soon had them all worked out. A few alternate theories were being worked on in the background, but when all the cells with a 2 as a factor made the letter S, we knew we were nearly done. Taken in order, the factor shapes spelled out SIERRA LAKE. "Tahoe?" I put ventured. It seemed likely, but the Sierra is a long mountain range and I knew Donner Lake was up there too. And wasn't Yosemite considered part of the... "TAHOE is correct!" said Rob, looking up from his iPhone.

Okay, now it felt like we were in the right mental gear.

Continued in part two and part three.

24: The BANG - Or how I got my puzzling groove back (Part Three)

(Part 1 and Part 2)

Clue Ten - A Quiet Revelation

Our search for why someone tried to blow up Twitter and why somebody was trying to buy up California's debt had brought us to San Jose's Martin Luther King Library to find out who checked out a certain history book. Our clue was located several floors up. Rob once again took the elevator, while the rest of us hiked up four flights of stairs. But it was better than the parking garage: One of the most important aspects of this clue was that it was air conditioned.

We collected our puzzle, saw that Blood and Bones still solving (a good sign), and found a nice, quiet nook to solve in. The clue had an update of the story: Medium — the man behind the Twitter plot — had been caught, but before he could be interrogated, had taken a poison pill. A piece of paper with a letter grid and crossword phrases had been found on him. That was our puzzle, a word search. The strange thing about the word search was that each letter was in its own square. I kept that in mind as we started solving the crossword clues.

Solving seemed to go fast. My mind was half on trying to figure out why there was a letter per square, half on helping solve the crossword clues. I'm not sure at what point we figured out that each clue's solution was a four-letter word, but we came to that conclusion pretty quickly. While we worked, a member of CRANEA peered over the divider and let us know that at some point we may need some... additional... information that they'd be happy to provide should we ask. Somehow I connected that bit of information to the square formation.

The four-letter crossword clue solution words turned up in the word search grid, only with an extra letter per word (i.e. a clue would solve to CATS and then we'd find CASTS in the grid). As the rest of the team circled those words, I started counting the squares. Fifteen by fifteen. That rang a bell for some reason.

With all the words circled, Jonathan read off the string of extra letters: "SCRABBLE PREMIUMS". So that's why CRANEA said we might need something extra from them, I thought. "It's a Scrabble board!" I whispered urgently to my team. Light gleamed in Jonathan's eyes; he'd either come to the same conclusion or saw the veracity of mine. "Should we go get a board from GC?" I asked.

"Nope!" said Rob, bringing up a Scrabble board on his iPhone. We started taking letters that were on triple word scores, double letter scores, etc., in order from left to right. This proved fruitless after two or three letters. Just as we were about to mention that maybe we should take the premiums in groups (triple word, then double, then triple letter, then double), Jonathan was already doing it. The hidden message told us to take the highest scoring four-letter word as our answer. "Zoos," said Jonathan, and went to confirm it.

We were out quickly. Teams that were there when we'd arrived were still there, a huge boost to moral. Blood and Bones had solved just a few minutes before. We had definitely hit our groove and damn it felt good.

Story-wise, we found out what we'd come for: The only person to have checked out the history book we'd come across earlier was none other than... Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Clue Eleven: Roundtable Solving

I kept thinking throughout the day while seeing all sorts of artistic touches added to San Jose, how relatively boring Santa Rosa was as a city. Our next location was another strange building, this time City Hall. A domed building was at the center of it all. GC was off to its right. We got our clue and saw that all the shaded spots were taken by other teams. However, the fact that other teams were still there gave me some hope that we could catch up or possibly pass them. This was deceptive, though, since unbeknownst to us, two clues were being given out at this location.

We went around to the left side of the round building and found some tables in the shade (I half-seriously suggested we just sit in the middle of the fountain and solve), and the Golden Golems solving away. The other teams may have been out of sight, but we could at least use the Golems as a metric. We sat and began to solve. (Image credit: Goldem Golems/poovey)

This clue consisted of five mini-clues, each of which made use of two solving procedures from the previous ten puzzles. The most obvious one combined the orthogonal encryption with license plate math. Others weren't so obvious and sometimes required data from previous puzzles. There was no in-story reason given for these mini-puzzles. They were labeled as various parts of Jack's personality that helped make him a hero. I don't think we even noticed.

We passed the puzzles around the table, finding and losing traction, until we eventually filled in all five solutions on our answer sheet. The middle letter of each mini's answer formed the final solution (I think it was POWER).

Jonathan and I took the answer to GC to check it. I was thinking that we must have solved pretty fast — though it didn't feel like it — in order to have finished ahead of the Golden Golems. Once we confirmed our answer, though, we were handed... another clue.

As we walked back to our table, Alexandra (guest member of the Golems) was heading to GC to turn in their answer to the final puzzle. "You guys finished too?" she asked us. "Just the first one," I admitted to her. So much for that metric.

Clue 12: A Transparent Mistake

Jonathan sat down and pulled out a transparency from the envelope. It was divided in half, with the top part, labeled "Part 2", having staggered numbers on it; and the bottom half, labeled "Part 1" having a whole bunch of shapes. It was fairly clear that the transparency overlaid our answer sheet, as all the shapes lined up with letters from the previous puzzle and all the numbers lined up with letters from the first ten puzzles.

Annnnnnnnd that was about as much progress as we made for the next half-hour or so.

Sure, many ideas were given. Things were examined by Rob, Andrea, and Given, while Jonathan and I tried to figure out how the transparency worked. Given was the only one who came close to a workable idea when he pointed out that there weren't any "O"s on the first story card. "That's interesting," I told him, "but how can we make it into an answer? Does it happen on any of the other cards?" He didn't know and couldn't find a missing letter on any of the other cards.

"Scott," Jonathan said after some significant time had passed, "I literally have no idea what to do. I mean, nothing is coming to mind." I nodded in commiseration; I was pretty much at that point too. The rest of the team kept coming up with ideas, until we were all at a loss of what to do. "We've got over an hour to work on this," Jonathan commented. "I say we keep plugging away at it until then." He preferred forgoing a hint and maybe a few rankings in order to come in clean. The rest of us grudgingly went along with it for all of five minutes, after which it was obvious that we had tapped the depths of our idea well and didn't feel like spending the next hour looking blankly at a transparency. We convinced Jonathan to get a hint.

The answer sheet had been passed around and had kind of gotten hidden in the mess on the table. We needed to take it to GC in order to get a hint. As Jonathan was looking for it, he pulled out a piece of paper we'd never seen before. "What the hell's this?" he said with a complete look of incredulity.

It was the flavortext for the puzzle.

I still don't know how he could have taken out both the transparency and the flavortext and not have noticed the flavor text. Heck, I was watching him and all I saw was the transparency removed from the envelope. But since our first event, we've semi-jokingly said that we're allowed one major mistake per game. This was Jonathan's.

The flavortext completed the story: Arnold Schwarzenegger was pissed that he couldn't be president of the U.S., so was working on a plan to make California its own nation. With the help of Mexico, he could be president of "Mexi-Cal". Mexico wanted lots of money, but Arnold had found the missing gold from 1848 hidden in a bank earning interest. First, though, he had tried to take out Twitter to prevent coordinated protests. Our job now was to find the password to the bank account where Arnold had put the money and empty it into state treasury in order to solve California's massive budget shortfall.

More importantly, the flavortext was the key to solving. It nudged us to compare the letter outlined by a shape to the card with the matching shape. With this, we discovered that the outlined letter would only occur once on the card. Given actually had been a step away from solving the puzzle without flavor text! If only he'd spotted the one word with the "o" in it...

Regardless, we zoomed through the rest of the puzzle: The words each single letter on each card was in were strung together to tell us how to do Part 2, which was basically add the letter and the overlapping number, then subtracting the clue number. And done: The password was ACTION HERO.

We'd saved California. Not many days you can say that.

24: The BANG - Or how I got my puzzling groove back (Part Two)

(Part One is here.)

Clue Four: Who Put Math in my Crossword?

The story card had directed us to an air-conditioned deli, which was a relief in the near-100F San Jose temps that day. A few teammates went to grab sandwiches while Jonathan and I started work on the puzzle. It was a fairly straightforward crossword, except that none of the clue were numbered. Instead, they were prefixed by a math equation, like "A*B+G: Fish eggs". This meant we didn't know how long the answer to each clue was, nor where it went in the grid.

The rest of our team got back with food and we concentrated on solving the clues, pushing the equations to the back of our minds for now. Our methodology seemed chaotic for some reason and it seemed to be challenging to narrow down answers. "Fish eggs" was probably ROE, but could be CAVIAR. There were spaces for both. Finally out of frustration, Jonathan asked "What do we do with these equations?" I said, "I'm guessing their value equates to the clue's number? And then the letters in the equation spell out the solution?" It seemed like he hadn't considered the possibility, which meant that, once again, we had spent too much effort on the data and not enough on the extraction.

We made better progress after that, as we were able to figure out a few numbers which helped us place specific clues and narrow down where the rest went. Much smoother solving after that, but we should have done it faster. (Looking at the results, it seems as though there was a steep breakoff point for solvers: About 12 minutes average solve time for the top four teams, and 27 minutes average solve time for the next four.)

The solution was also the disarming code for the bomb at Twitter, which was good, but we'd killed Agent X, which meant he was no good to us. Luckily, we'd planted a tracking device on the guy whose clothes and identity we'd stolen, so we went to see what nefarious scheme he was up to now.

Clue 5 - The Gene (and Adrian and Briana and Molly and ...) Pool

There's often a danger of skipping over instructions when getting a new clue and trying to get right to the heart of the puzzle. I mean, it's exciting, you're in a hurry, and who wants to read incidental text when there's a mental challenge just begging to be solved? At best maybe you gloss over, say, "Find the nationalities of these names before working on the gene pool".

We kind of ignored that advice and started working on finding the names inscribed on rocks in the pool to match up with the names we'd been given and where on the circle they were. That seemed to take enough time for a simple task, but it seemed to take to long and eventually one half of the team decided to try gathering data about the countries.

Which may have been a bad idea. I looked up the indicated countries in my almanac, Andrea scouted them out, and Given wrote down, not the name of the indicated country, but its pair on the sidewalk square. Jonathan and Rob joined us after finishing the fountain, but that didn't seem to help, as they set about recollecting information. Time continued to pass and our messy methodology had us no closer to the goal than before. Data was wrong, it was hot, and frustration was beginning to set in.

Eventually, Jonathan stopped the chaos and one by one we went from one country to another, marking down both the country of origin for a name and its counterpart. Andrea scouted ahead and stood on the appropriate sidewalk section. This finally got us all the data we needed and we sat down to consider it. The first letters of the counterpart countries indicated we needed to use a rotational semaphore. But rotated to what?

Maybe we could use the sidewalk square associated with each name as north? Well, it kind of worked, but it turned out rotational semaphore can be kind of difficult using something as flexible as paper as your straight edge. But Jonathan eventually marked everything correctly and we got a message "NATIONALITY OTHERS J". Other's J what? Redoing the semaphore for those letters did nothing to change them. I don't know how long we were stumped before Jonathan finally realized it was "OTHER SJ" and that SJ meant San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica.

An impressively designed puzzle using environmental data, yet it left us feeling grumpy with our results. With a little organization, we could have easily cut twenty minutes off our time.

The story card indicated that the man we'd been trying to find had been shot, the higher ups in his organization having figured out that the failed Twitter bombing meant the operation had been compromised. In his pocket, though, we found a newspaper that dealt with Costa Rican protesters using Twitter to organize a revolution... something that this mysterious organization didn't want to happen for whatever they had planned.

Clue 6 - I Am Jack's Complete Playground Workout

Up until this point, Jonathan, Given, Rob, Andrea, and myself were working as an analog for Jack Bauer. We arrived a park for our next clue and were told that we needed to split up: One person would become Jack's body and scale a building (represented by playground equipment) while avoiding security cams (represented by the ground — except the green part); the rest of the team would become Jack's mind and try to figure out who killed the guy we stole the clothes from based on mug shots.

"Who's going to become Jack's body?" asked the captain of CRANEA. We all looked at each other. Based on Jonathan's previous statement that he always wants to do an activity, I expected him to speak up. He didn't. I thought maybe someone else might. They didn't. And darn it, I really wanted to do the playground traversal, so after a brief beat, I volunteered. Nobody complained or contradicted me; maybe I'm the only one who thought it would be fun.

I asked Rob to take a picture or two while I accomplished my task...


At the top of the final tower was a bunch of sheets of paper. The first one had some multicolored letters, "NY YY NY NN" on it. I looked at the others, the odd thought being that I might have to solve while up there. All the other sheets where the same, though, so I tore the top one off and climbed down.

"Took you long enough," quipped Jonathan, as Rob and I rejoined the team at a shady table. I thought I had actually made good time. But he, Given, and Andrea were looking a little frustrated because they hadn't made much progress: There were several sheets of paper filled with South Park-like characters, each in its own yellow rectangle. Basically, it was a variation of the game I used to play as a kid, Guess Who? At the top of each sheet of paper were a few anagrams, unscrambling to descriptions such as "black haired", and our team had solved all but one of them (which Rob and I set to work on). With my return, the little "Yes/No" next to each anagram finally made sense, as they matched via color to one of the Y/N letters on the sheet I'd retrieved.

A braille pattern emerged as we marked the people who met the criteria. The braille gave us four new criteria to meet, narrowing it down to one person by the name of MEDIUM. Finally, we had our killer and our answer.

The story card detailed how we called this information into HQ and found out that security footage showed that Mr. Medium was at the top level of a nearby parking garage.

Clue 7 - Licensed to Chill

Rob took the elevator; the rest of us walked up. In near-100F heat, Rob was the smart one. Regardless, we retrieved our clue and headed to a place that had two amazing factors going for it: First, it was air-conditioned; and second, it was Starbucks.

We ordered a bunch of frappuccinos (I got a Vanilla Bean, which was exactly what I needed and suddenly my new favorite drink) and sat down to solve. The clue consisted of many seven character strings with one question mark in each — passed off in-story as incomplete license plate numbers we needed to identify. Somebody pointed out that "PEMDAS" was in the flavor text, referring to operation of order. That, along with hints to concerning bringing about equalization, had us working on the theory that each seven character string was a math equation that when we filled in the one missing character, would be valid. The only thing was, we didn't know which letters stood for which operation.

Jonathan and Given attacked the puzzle head on. The rest of us seemed to be content to watch, throw in a helpful comment when we could, but mostly to enjoy a little rest with a cool drink. Soon, the puzzle was solved and Jonathan volunteered to run back up the parking garage to turn in our answer. Nobody objected.

Story-wise, it turns out we had found a briefcase in the abandoned car in the garage with the Constitution of California in it. Since it's too dense to read, let alone figure out what its connection to Twitter is, we get in contact with the only constitutional scholar we know: Barack Obama. While we wait for him to get back to us, we get information on where the driver of the car currently is.

Clue 8 - A Password-Protected Puzzle

We arrived at some sort of plaza to pick up our next puzzle. There was a covered stage nearby, offering some good shade and steps to solve on. From the story's point of view, a laptop had been found that password protected. The papers found near the laptop, in the form of a clue, might provide some way of figuring out the password. The instructions for the clue also detailed finding a book about something called "orthogonal" decryption: The grid of letters on the password screen had to be decrypted by row, then read by column.

The papers basically consisted of ordered crossword clues on the left, and unordered clues on the right. We figured there was some pattern connecting them, but it wasn't immediately apparent. Some initial words gave us the impression that there was some anagram-plus-one-extra-letter going on, but we couldn't see how that would apply to the grid of letters. We made some changes and worked on firming up the answers.

(At some point, Andrea noticed that Jonathan got a little bit of whipped cream on his nose from his Starbuck's drink. She borrowed my camera and delighted in taking a picture of it before he could get it off.)

Finally, we figured out that solution words on the left could always be anagrammed into one of the right side words (SPRITE -> PRIEST). Assuming that the pattern of anagramming could be applied to the password window's grid of letters, we came up with something about the sixth gift in the twelve days of Christmas. So GOOSE was the password and our solution. I liked that there was a plausible real-life reason, even if it was a form of the Only the Smart May Pass trope, to have the puzzle.

With that solve, our story continued: On the laptop is a PDF that is also password protected. The techs at CRANEA would attempt to break it, while we continued with our investigation. Just then, Obama called us back about the highlighted portions of the California constitution. He said that if California ever defaults on its loans, the state becomes the property of whichever entity owns 51% of the states debt. Obama had just check and found that Mexico had recently acquired just the right amount of California's debt...

Clue 9 - I Go All In

Near some oddly shaped building (which I see now is the San Jose Repertory Theatre), we were given a pack of cards, the box of which was custom labeled for the BANG with the ranking of poker hands. Something was odd about the printed rankings, though: There were no spaces between words.

Opening the pack revealed the card deck, but going through them revealed that there were several different card backings. We worked hurriedly to sort them and found that there were six cards per backing. It was pretty easy to notice that there was a poker hand in each group, so we arranged the hands into poker hands and ordered them on the ground in front of us by rank.

Some idea came up and Jonathan, Rob, Andrea, and Given discussed discussed it, almost completely ignoring the cards. After thirty seconds or so, I stopped paying attention and instead concentrated on the cards. An idea quickly came to me and I tested it against the first few hands.

"Hey guys, I've got TOOL," I told my team.

They fell silent.

"Taking the unused sixth card in each hand to index into the name of the poker hand," I explained.

"Well," replied Jonathan, "keep going with it."

This surprised me. Usually, if I hook onto an idea, I share it with the others so that the extraction can go quicker. But not this time: I was being asked to finish it on my own.

They all looked at me. I tried to quickly process the remaining hands. S then H then something then D. I paused a second, then said, "TOOLSHED".

Jonathan took the answer to GC while I verified that the seventh letter was indeed E. It was, and Jonathan came back with our story card:

The PDF had been cracked by some experts. It had information taken from a San Jose State library book about a payment of gold bullion to Mexico for the state of California back in the 1800s. However, the gold's escorts had died mysteriously and the implication is that Mexico never received it. The connection to the Twitter bomb and the succession plot wasn't immediately obvious, but maybe the person who had checked out the book would know? So said library we went.

Continued in Part Three.

24: The BANG - Or how I got my puzzling groove back (Part One)

For a few puzzle hunts before BANG 24, I hadn't left feeling satisfied. I think it is because of not being able to match some pretty big (for me anyway) ahas I got while playing in CiSRA 2009. Of course, in BANG 21 the ahas were purposefully minimilzed and in the Shinteki playtest it seemed the free hints beat us to the ahas more often than not. Regardless, I was kind of in a funk about puzzle hunts.

That all changed with 24: The BANG.

The Prize

A rough transcription of a conversation that took place the night before the hunt:

"So what if we put our prize in a silver suitcase for delivery?"

"Cool! And you know how in season four of 24, they had the nuclear football in a silver suitcase? Why don't we get a real football as a prize and deliver it like that?"

"I like it. How about I get a glow-in-the-dark football, so that it really can be a 'nuclear' football?"

"Good idea! And be sure to get handcuffs."

"I'm on it."

(I don't think anybody got the joke and we ended up taking the football home as our own prize, so maybe it wasn't such a great idea.)

Clue One: Failing to Embody the Spirit of Jack Bauer

After dropping of our prize and working through the issues of where an open bathroom was, we got to reading the rules while waiting for the official start.  One line caught our attention:  The third criteria for team scoring was " How best your team embodies the spirit of Jack Bauer".  "Jack breaks all the rules in order to get the results needed, right?" expressed Jonathan.  "Maybe we should open the first puzzle and start solving."

An interesting idea.  I thought back to No More Secrets when we chickened out on shutting off electricity to the bank in order to gain entrance, figuring that would be a little too, well, real. Finding out later from Jan that such a move would have been acceptable, I think there was the subconscious desire on our part to make it "real" whenever we could. It was tempting to go through with Jonathan's suggestion, but this wasn't The Game and we wanted to be on equal footing when being ranked against other teams.

CRANEA's team captain got up and gave us the usual spiel. He was asked if torturing GC was allowed, but apparently GC members had been trained to resist all forms of torture. No luck on bringing realism to the BANG there.

We opened the first puzzle and sat down by the river to solve. There were several descriptions of games, appropriate since we were a few steps away from Monopoly in the Park (familiar to us from playing in Shinteki Decathlon 4). It became clear that the descriptions were slightly off, giving funny versions of the names, such as Moose Trap for a game that traps elk instead of rodents. For once, having two copies of the puzzle worked well and we solved with speed to get a final clue of COW SUBS GET HIT. "Cattleship!" I whispered urgently, and oh man that felt good. I knew then that this was going to be a good hunt and that any thoughts I'd had that maybe I was over puzzle hunts were dispelled.

So we headed off.

Kind of. We were the first team to solve the puzzle — at least that's what we thought at the time; actual results show that coed astronomy finished a few minutes earlier — so there was no general stream of teams to let us know we were navigating correctly to the next location. Our navigator unfortunately read one of the street names wrong and we set off in the wrong direction. It was only about after a good stream of teams were heading the other way that we added a level of oversight to Rob's navigation. (On a side note: Rob's still the best navigator our team has had.)

As we walked, we read the short blurb that we received upon confirming our answer. I thought it was pretty cool, presenting the story and raison d'être for the puzzles. I liked that it was presented separately from the puzzles so that there was no confusion as to what was flavortext and what was story, a design flaw that was present in our BANG 22.

Clue 2: The Colored Cube

We arrived at the next site, kind of towards the middle flow of teams. I had put Andrea in charge of finding a sitting spot, so as Jonathan collected the clue, the rest of us followed her to a shady sidewalk spot. Jonathan came back holding a Rubix cube and the clue, a color-based nonogram. The main snag in solving it was that there was no specific length indicated for each color.

The two copies didn't help much in this case. I didn't help much at all, despite having written many a nonogram-based puzzle; I just couldn't get my mind into the non-length specific portion. Ironically, Andrea, to whom I kind of introduced the nonogram style when I had her solve some of mine, was contributing quite a lot.

So I sat back and tried to work out our endgame. The center of the grid was outlined like a 2D representation of a cube, so it was pretty probable that once those colors were filled in, they would represent a way to arrange the Rubix cube. That seemed pretty challenging to me... too challenging for a BANG. I was hoping Jonathan had practice arranging the cube properly, cuz I was pretty sure the rest of us hadn't. I was trying to think of a way around this difficulty, when enough colors were filled in that I was able to contribute more. In the back of my mind, I was wondering if we could create some sort of mapping like we had done for the No More Secrets sudoku cube puzzle.

With the grid finished, Jonathan didn't even look at the cube but asked us to tell him the letters on sections that matched patters. Well, obviously... why hadn't I thought of that. The center squares were obvious, but then they got more challenging with "I need a corner piece that's blue-yellow-red" which required imaginary folding in the head. Pretty soon, though, we had the answer and moved on. Maybe we'd passed a few teams that had passed us due to our navigation error.

Our story card let us know that we'd confronted a suspicious character who had plans to blow up some data center, but instead of getting a confession from him THERE'S NOT ENOUGH TIME so we knocked him out and stole his clothes.

Clue 3 - Bathroom Breakdown

Our next location was a bathroom at a park. The tiles on the bathroom were either red or yellow, an exercise in data gathering. Blood and Bones, coed astronomy, and Judean People's Front were there, a hopeful sign that we weren't doing too terribly.

Andrea snagged us a shady spot while we went to collect the data. I guess we're not particularly good at meticulous collection, since we ended up going back several times to the tiles and redoing our grid. As our theories regarding what to do with the data changed, we also had to redo the data.

I noticed that some teams had been paying particular attention to some letters and numbers inscribed on a cement divider. I hated noticing it, but at the same time I wasn't ashamed to used that information and snapped a few photos. How the puzzle was going to relate to those, I had no idea and as we still hadn't completed the data collection portion of the puzzle, no one was all that interested.

As we continued working, many teams that were there began leave. It felt like we were taking too long to mark this information down. We tried working with what we had, but couldn't get anything out of it. So we abandoned our shady spot and attempted to get a definitive marking of the tiles. Eventually we did and found that with the tiles XORed with markings on the grid we'd been given, we got a strange message: [N754M2IN], followed by A = [A] and V = [10].

What the heck? We tried to make sense of that and got nothing. I let everyone know again that many people were staring at that weird assortment of letters and numbers and it seemed to make sense that it was somehow connected. But nothing was coming to mind. Eventually, building off each other's theories ("Maybe X?" "Nah, but how about X+1?"), we finally realized that the information in brackets referred to what was written on the cement divider and the A and V mentioned were the letters in the same position on the other cement divider, which was just a straight alphabet with the number 1-10 under it. We now had our decoding mechanism and, quickly, our answer.

With the answer came the next part of the story. In the clothes we'd stolen was information about a pre-arranged meeting with Agent X. We had gone in disguise and met with him. During the conversation, he started a countdown timer that would blow up Twitter's data center in sixty minutes. So we'd shot him.

Continued in Part 2.

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.

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

Pre-game: Pandemonium

Just as I sat down to my computer to send an email to the Shinteki Decathlon 5 organizers to ask if any playtest teams might be in need of an extra, up pops an email: "Meat Machine is looking for a single player to fill our team for the playtest of Shinteki Decathlon..." Talk about perfect timing! I fired off an email to them and a week later I found myself parking at the Exploratorium to meet my new team at Crissy Field.

My original plan didn't include Exploratorium parking. Since the hunt ended in San Rafael, having to drive back to down San Francisco in order to drive back up to Santa Rosa seemed like a waste. However, the Park & Ride in San Rafael was completely closed and I could find no other suitable place to park in order take the bus. I was pretty pissed off, not a great way to start the day.

Arriving early due to not being on the bus, Brent asked why I hadn't turned in an answer for the Shinteki Puzzle of the Month for June, which had come out the day before. I had taken a look at it, but as I told Brent, I had wanted to save whatever brainpower I had for the playtest.

With still a little time to go, I asked about how long it took to develop a Decathlon. Brent said they'd actually had this idea brewing for a couple years or so, but it usually took them about nine months to put one together.

Finally, teams arrived and I got to meet Meat Machine, captained by Erik, and co-teammates Jason and George. We had actually been in a playtest together before: Meat Machine was one of the other teams in the Ghost Patrol playtest.

Clue 1: Some Light Trivia

Three teams were supposed to be there for the playtest, but although Darcy's team was there, the other one was having problems and would meet us for the second clue. Brent went out and explained that this was a spectrum themed hunt and that he was Roy G Bv. Our first clue would have one member of each team lining up to answer a trivia question. But it wasn't knowing the answer that was so important, it was whether the teammate could snag the ball of the color that matched the answer on the way across the field. Get the right ball, and they went to the winner's circle. When all your team was in the winner's circle, they could proceed to the next clue.

Erik and Jason got into the winner's circle after a few questions, and I was feeling a bit nervous. Of the questions asked so far, I had gotten most of them wrong in my head, even getting red-shift and blue-shift confused. However, I got an easy one dealing with the Hulk. Soon after, George joined us in the circle and we were on our way.

Clue 2: Electric Boogalo

We walked across the street. The missing team joined us as we headed into the Exploratorium. I had been there twice before in the past six months. Since part of the puzzle dealt with locating different exhibits and extracting a single letter from it, I was feeling confident that my experience would make for relatively fast searching. Unfortunately, apart from the "A-Ha" exhibit, this was not really the case.

I think this was the "Teamwork" puzzle of the Decathlon, but having everything in the Palm made it difficult to work together as a team. We started out with all four of us testing the steam machine ("Is that an 'O'?" "I'm pretty sure it is, but let's try it four or five more times just to make sure it doesn't change."), and tried a scatter-until-exibit-found-and-then-everyone-come-look-at-it method, which quickly proved inefficient. We then tried having one person (me) reading off exibit names to different teammates who would go seek it out, kind of a deploy-and-report methodology. While both brought the single letters we required, neither seemed particularly efficient.

Eventually, we had all the letters we needed. And the message didn't make sense: There were too many X's, W's, and other out-of-place characters. None of wanted to go through the entire three-level clue system to try and find out which letters were wrong (I found out later that simply tapping the letter would bring up the appropriate clue). Eventually, we figured that with a few letter changes, we could make the name of an exhibit and a color. We went to that exhibit, found an electric wire glowing that color, and entered the element the wire was made out of. Success!

Clue 3: Playing with Flags

As we drove to the next site for Wild Card, I finally got a chance to talk a little socially with Meat Machine. They have an interesting team dynamic which seems to be along the lines of "We know we're not going to do the greatest, but we'll damn well have a good time anyway!" Good energy, good people, and probably better solvers than they think. Our conversation steered towards relating different incidences in our puzzle hunting career. Erik had read my blog (I always feel the need to apologize to those who do for some strange reason), so it was funny when trying to talk about some of my experiences and then suddenly realizing "Oh, you already know about that."

We arrived at the location for Wild Card and sent George and Jason down to the corner to grab the puzzle. The corner was full of people and colorful objects of all sorts; gay pride was abundant. The balloons caught my attention, since they were in rainbow order and we were playing a game about the light spectrum, hosted by Roy G Bv. But those were not for us.

Erik and I sat in the car for a while and eventually lost sight of our two teammates. Time passed and nobody emerged. Eventually, Erik dispatched me to find our team and communicated with him as to what to do. I wandered around the corner for a bit, but saw no Shinteki GC and no George or Jason. After a few more minutes, they finally did show up: The Wild Card was a store and we now had a bunch of rainbow flags to play with.

We got out on the sidewalk and laid all the flags on the ground. Each had six different colors on it and no two were in the same order. We discussed what to do with them, how to order them, how to get data from them, and exactly what the heck we were supposed to do with them. The "Bi" comment on the envelope had us thinking binary... but how?

After many attempts, I had a flash of inspiration as to ordering. Erik then had a flash of genius for extracting a binary number from each flag (if the colors not used in ordering were in correct order, take it as a 1; if not, take it as a 0). It worked! And we were out, far faster than I'd have thought after our first look at it.

Clue 4: Disorientated

That solution confidence energy only lasted us until we got our next clue: A series of hexagon magnets, with different colored sections divided by different colored lines, along with an outline to place them on. GC said lunch wasn't quite ready, but find a spot to solve and they'd bring it out to us. Five minutes later, we found parking several blocks away with the only shade around. I didn't think GC would ever find us.

So we started putting hexagons on the board. There was already one in the center, giving us something to build off of. So we started placing them as best we could.

(I should mention at this point that one or two members of Meat Machine had admitted to being a somewhat color blind. They didn't have problems with the previous puzzle, but this one did give them an extra challenge.)

We kept finding contradictions, though, and began to get a little frustrated. Eventually, a free hint opened up which let us know there were actually only a few different iterations of the hexagons. So we sorted them into piles and decided we're only going to place pieces if they can absolutely be proven that they can go there (i.e. no future contradictions would arise). So we started over and made slow, but steady progress.

Along the way, we got a free hint that totally derailed us. Once everything was in place, it said, look at how the green lines ("with help") spell out OK. Cool, we thought, we just have to do the same with the other colors and we'd have the answer. We tried looking at it like that, but nothing made sense to our eyes. So we grabbed the flags from the previous clue, snapped them in pieces, and laid them out on the board along one color to see if we could get more letters. We did this for each color before giving up.

Ian from GC called. Where were we? Food was ready. Somebody volunteered to go grab the grub while the rest of us tried to make sense of what we had. Food got back, we ate, drank, and thought.

I blinked. I can't believe I missed it, but one of the letters on the tiles was different. It was green. Following the green line that extended from that green letter, a message spelled out "SWAP COLUMNS ONE AND SEVEN; THREE AND FIVE TOO". "Seriously?" our team asked of each other. "Take a picture first," someone said. "Just in case there's more info on it we need or if we have to put it back to the original state." (Somewhat ironic when we found out one of the bonus puzzles required the tiles to be in the original state to solve.) So I did and we swapped the columns.

Once the swap was made, we noticed the white lines now spelled something: "SPIN 120" with a triangle used to indicate degrees. Fair enough, we though, and turned the entire board around one hundred and twenty degrees. For all we knew, looking at it from that angle would have revealed the MGM lion with the letters ANU on its collar. But it didn't and owing to the fact that we were all sitting around the board, the rotation would have made little difference anyway: One of us would have been in the right orientation.

We'd been working on this puzzle well over an hour now and Ian dropped by to see how we were doing. We were frustrated, going over the possibility of which 120 degrees to spin the board and discussing whether GC would actually have had a solution go through that process. Eventually, we either figured out or got hinted that it was each individual hexagon that we had to rotate 120 degrees. We did that and got our answer from the black lines.

Personally, I was a) really impressed with the amount of design work that went into it; while at the same time being, b) disappointed that we went down the wrong path and that the puzzle ended up being more of a "follow the instructions" thing.

Clue Five: Tuning In

Our next clue lay across the Golden Gate on the Marin Headlands. We were heading to one of the batteries. As we parked along the coast, several hundred feet up, one of my teammates said, "I never get tired of that view." Neither did I, so I snapped a picture. I also grabbed a few more of other scenic things, but nothing about the puzzle.

We hiked through a tunnel and up a hill to find GC waiting for us. We had to split into two, draw some words from a bag, and then do charades of them. The odd thing, though, is that we were given a list of all words that were to be in the bag, aka the NATO phonetic alphabet. George and Jason did their two words, followed by Erik and I. We drew "Charlie" and "Papa", so I got down on my knees and did my best to look up adoringly at Papa Erik doing his rendition of Charlie Chaplin.

Our clue, it was explained to us after our performance, was to have another part to it in the actual event, but for now here's this radio. It was tuned to some radio station about 3/4 of the way through the band. I gave the dial an experimental twist and realized we'd have to find a signal. Two thoughts struck me then: First, if they were using a short-distance radio broadcast, it was probably going to be in the lower band; and second, it's probably be easier to do a systematic search for the signal and start at the beginning. So I twisted the knob nearly all the way to the left and Morse code starts beeping out at us.


"Who brought the code sheet?" asked Eric. I went to grab it from my backpack, only to find I'd left my clipboard in the van... with the code sheet. Crap. And my asthma was acting up, so there was no way I was running to the van and back to site to get the code sheet. Erik said, "Okay, we'll just write it down and decode it when we get back to van."

So we did just that.

(Continued in Part 2.)

Luckless in BANG XX

The first mistake we made at twentieth BANG was to park near the end location instead of the start. The second was that, in walking from the our parking spot to the start location, we didn't listen to the GPS which was trying to nicely plot us around Telegraph Hill; instead, we went over it. The third mistake would only make itself clear later on.

Given, Andrea, and I — our usual puzzle-adventure game band — had decided to try our luck in XX-Rated's BANG XX without our normal captain. So the three of us ended up at Levi's Plaza Park in the Embarcadero on that Sunday evening. The first things I did was to pay Rich some money. He seemed surprised, so it was worth it. The next thing was to notice during registration that Jan, usually of coed astronomy, was part of GC. The joy of joining the female sisterhood? I wondered. Two BANGs later, I'd find out.

Eventually, Rachel stood up upon a wall and got everyone's attention. Rules were spelled out, information given, and commencement signaled. We went down to some steps a little ways away from everyone, unrolled our scroll and starting working on the first puzzle. A limerick would describe in a silly way a town in Ireland with a silly name (e.g. Kilmacow, Limerick, Ballinrobe, etc.). Andrea and I were working out the limericks while Given was busy connecting them on the map provided. This hypothesis proved fruitless when nothing interesting was drawn and it didn't take into account the numbered limerick on the map itself.

Eventually, we started measuring and converting the inches to scale. It gave us interesting alphanumeric-ranged numbers, up until the line between Blarney and Leggs gave us a 28. That was fine, though: 28 fell between the 1 and 29 ranges on the map's limerick. Now if only we could figure out what the 1 and 29 meant. Before I could give it much though, Given pointed out that there were 29 letters in the last line, which was right next to the "29". "Okay, but how do we use that with the '1' at the top?" I asked.

We spent too much time down that thought, instead of realizing that there was no tricky aha way of making it work. Eventually, we took a hint, found out that the numbers referred to the word count, solved it, and moved on.

Darkness had fallen and I was just beginning to notice that although we had dressed appropriately for a very cold Santa Rosa night, it wasn't appropriate enough for a very cold San Francisco night. Our third mistake was making itself known.

Our second clue was down the street where we were given chocolates coins wrapped in gold foil, all inside a bag with a reverse rainbow (blue on the top, red on the bottom). Nothing was unique about the coins so I bit into one (against Andrea's desire to preserve the clue), expecting a flavor, but getting a color instead. So we set about finding all the colors. Fairly quickly, we hit upon indexing the number of coins per color into the color name and then taking them in reverse color order. Gave us a burst of confidence as we headed...

...up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower. Many other teams were on this exodus with us and we were constantly passing and repassing each other as rests stops were taken. Two things became clear, though:

We should have taken the GPS's advice about walking around Telegraph Hill instead of exhausting ourselves going over it to get to Levi's Plaza Park

We were slowly falling behind the general tide of the crowd.

(In preparation for this BANG, I had been training some on our elevated treadmill, having been warned of having to walk up San Francisco hills. Unfortunately, I wasn't prepared for stairs. I heard later that one team drove up to Coit Tower and another team simply skipped the clue altogether. Considering what happened, we should have skipped it too.)

Up and up, we continued. Given, who had started strong, was beginning to fall behind. Andrea had slowed down to my pace. I wasn't doing terrible, but still needed an occasional breather. The tower went out of sight for a while and when it came back into view, it was closer than ever. Soon, we ran across the Judean's People Front and sometimes teammate Eric Prestemon, solving.

Finally, we got to the top. And by "we", I mean Andrea and I. We wouldn't see Given for over five minutes. So the two of us picked up the clue and were looking it over when Given staggered up to us and collapsed dramatically and spread-eagle on the sidewalk. "Just let me die here," he groaned.

The clue consisted of a leprechaun describing what he thought various clouds in the sky looked like. The obvious connection was with the Lucky Charms box we'd been given at the beginning and that the shapes were the different marshmallows. How we used that was impossible to say: The box didn't have an exhaustive list of the different shapes, so I opened it up and we started trying to assign different cloud descriptions to different marshmallows. Some of them were pretty darned ambiguous in our estimation, and even when we had what we thought was a near complete list, we had no idea what to do with it.

Great frustration set in. On top of that, the warmth we had gained from our exercise in stair climbing was wearing off and the cold, cutting wind was really beginning to bite into our mental prowess (whatever amount we'd had to begin with anyway). So we eventually agreed to a second hint. Just as Andrea was finishing reading the hint, I began to notice that the cover of the box was starting to peel off! XX-Rated had done an excellent job on putting a fake cover on the cereal box. Fooled us completely. Using only the marshmallows on their customized cover, we completed the puzzle pretty quickly.

There was grumbling as we headed down to the next clue: Complaints about the wind, complaints about being stuck on the clue, and complaints about the climb. I thought back a few weeks ago to something I had jokingly described to Jonathan as "Scott's Law", which ran along the lines of "The quality of a puzzle must at minimum match the effort used to attain it", as well its corollary "A great site deserves a great clue." For some strange reason, I think this puzzle ended up becoming our least-liked of the hunt.

Since we had some time in getting to the next site, I decided call Jonathan and let him know about our bleak state during the only BANG he's missed since he started playing. "We've had two hints on three clues and there's only an hour to go," I admitted to him. He expressed, for lack of a better word, his condolences, but went on to say, "It's okay, really, you can take the remain four clues at fifteen minutes each and still maybe even have time to solve the meta!" One thing I have to say I admire in our usual captain is his optimism in the face of despair and his ability to encourage his team.

We arrived at Washington Square Park and that optimism fell apart: Our team was to be divided in two and we had to communicate different parts of the clue to each other. So much, I thought, for a speedy solve.

I ran off to one side and hurriedly writing down descriptions of six different horseshoe layouts and sending them via messenger to Andrea and Given. Sadly, I'm not that fast a hand-writer, so it seemed to take forever to get them sent (and get the messenger's attention). Even more sadly, I didn't notice until the fourth or fifth description that each picture was outlined with a different color. That would have made a huge different, since I was betting that my temporarily isolated teammembers would have to be matching up my descriptions with something and the color would give them which one.

My suspicions proved true not too much longer when enough time had passed (a half-hour?) and I was allowed to rejoin my team. They were setting up actual (plastic) horseshoes based on my descriptions and had a set of viewing guides. Since they didn't know which viewing guide matched which horseshoe setup, no progress had been made. With both sets of information joined, we were able to recognize enough letters formed by the layouts to get the solution.

It was now fifteen minutes away from the end of the hunt. But we got a little lost on the way to the next site and arrived at five till ten. "We know the next clue is the one that costs seven dollars," Andrea pointed out, "and there's not enough time to solve it. Let's just save ourselves some money and head to the end location." I think how readily Given and I agreed with her says something about our state of mind at the time.

We turned in our envelopes at an Irish pub with an Indian interior. Hearing from GC (studiously busy counting envelopes, a task I did not envy them in) that we'd be able to get a copy of the clues we'd missed in a bit, we hung around... but soon the realization that the work week was fast approaching led us to bid goodbye to BANG XX.

A few nights later, Andrea, Given, and I gathered again, printed out the four clues we missed, and solved them in a little over an hour. And we had a great (warm) time doing it.

I want to thank XX-Rated for putting together and hosting their BANG. They put a lot of effort into it and had great puzzles. The fact that we didn't have a so good a time I think is a reflection on our own mistakes.

Long Overdue BATH 4 Finale

(Part 1 and Part 2}

Having gotten through the Sunset District's vampire clue, Jonathan, Given, Rob, Mark, and I headed north to Golden Gate Park. loxi's clue was there and we were looking forward to something to bolster our spirits — they were, after all, the same group who gave us the amazingly fun Ghost Patrol. Lucky for us, we weren't let down.

The "clue" we had been handed at the beginning was simply the directions to the real clue onsite. There, Jonathan used the combination indicated in the instructions to open a lockbox connected to a Greek-looking building edifice via a strong chain.

Inside, was a really long piece of paper with a really long grid of squares on it, as well as several single sheets of paper. Each single sheet had four images on it and a series of blanks below it, five of which were highlighted. The images, we soon figured, were funny combinations that would fit in the blanks. For example, there was a girl dressed in the almost standard "Sexy Sherlock Holmes Costume" for Halloween, standing underneath a streetlight. This was a PROSTITUTE DETECTIVE. Just as I was sitting down to start taking turns on the different sub-clues, Jonathan pointed out that the five highlighted blanks were always H or T (like the five Ts in the aforementioned example). Ah, heads or tails! A fine dichotomy to work with.

coed astronomy was there when we arrived and there's nothing like having another team in your solving area to encourage a little competitive spirit in our team. We quickly worked on solving each picture puzzle, passing it off to someone else when stuck, and repeating continuously.

At some point, Eric looked at the long document and realized that the two clues at the top solved to "blackhead" (type of pimple) and "whitetail" (type of deer). This gave us the colors to fill the grid in with. So Jonathan started filling in. Eventually, we got it nearly complete (a few of the picture puzzles still eluded us) and realized that in order to fold it accordion style like the directions indicated, we needed scissors. Which were back in the van.

As we walked back to our transport, Jonathan said basically screw it and marked them down on graph paper, grouped by every other column. This spelled out our answer. A fun, satisfying puzzle and definitely a good boost to our spirits.

Night had fallen as we opened the envelope for our final puzzle. In this case, we first had to solve a main clue to find the location solution word. Needing some refreshment, someone suggested we stop by a nearby Starbucks; however, in order to support local business we stopped at another coffee shop down the block. (We would return several times to Starbucks as our selected location did not have working bathroom facilities.)

Our clue consisted of sixteen photographs (half B&W, half color) with text on the back, a sheet of paper that clued the different dichotomies, an envelope that would reveal the code used but only in case of emergency, a paper titled "NIGHT AND DAY" (in green, red, and black colors) with a decoding structure and instructions on how to arrange the photos.

It's at this point I inwardly sighed a little. I had designed a puzzle not just similar to this but nearly exactly like it for something in the future. I hadn't yet showed it to anyone so I told my team that the black and white photographs would alternate within the 4x4 photo grid we were to assemble. "I can buy that," said Jonathan.

We set to organizing the grid based on some classic dichotomies from the clues (black/white, male/female, hot/cold), but quickly found that some of them were on the ambiguous side: Did the male refer to Obama, the king, the hot guy, or any of the animals? Did the white refer to the dove, the polar bear, the iceberg, or Sarah Palin? After some frustration, we got a configuration we were happy with and flipped the cards over. A bunch of tri-colored letters greeted us. After a little discussion about whether to use the included code sheet and a little mistake on my part involving speed-reading the use of said sheet, we (and by "we", I mean Jonathan) set to decoding. It became pretty clear, though, pretty quickly that something was wrong.

Every dichotomy was in play, the B&W squares alternated, everything made sense, there were no contradictions, and yet the decoding process was giving only gibberish. It was late and despite the coffee and pastries, energy began to ran low. I don't know how long it took us but suddenly somebody realized a problem: The arrangement of the 4x4 grid could be reflected across one diagonal. There was some... philosophical discussion at this point about the advisability of using a puzzle with two possible solutions (an ironic foreshadowing of an our performance in BANG 21), but eventually we decided to just read down instead of across.

Take a certain road until it dead-ends in a gate, the decoded message told us. And so we did. Three times. The road apparently was one of those streets that the named portion of which turns but the actual physical street keeps going. The very first false-positive dead-end had the gate in a private residence before explorer Mark finally found that the street to continue on.

After a few repeat performances, we finally found a cul-de-sac with a gate leading to a beach instead of a private residence. The fact that there were also a few vans there already, with people who looked vaguely coed astronomy-ish and Get on a Raft with Taft-ish was a helpful indicator. There was bad news, though.

The gate that lead down to the beach closed at 6pm, making the solution to the puzzle all but impossible to access. Ian informed us that because of this, the team that had set up this clue said that just bringing the CD would be good enough to consider the puzzle solved. Ah yes, there attached to the gate via bike lock was a stack of CDs with a bunch of handwriting over each one:

Contents of CD are for souvenir purposes only - Not part of the clue. Walk through the gate & down the steps. At the bottom of the staircase, bear right away from Robin's bench. At the 4-way intersection head the right-hand way up. Keeping the fence to your left, continue approx. 125 strides past the black door on your right. After about 50 more strides, turn right where the path leads down to the red fence.

The whole point now what to simply figure out the combination to the lock, grab a CD, and leave. In talking with Ian, though, it sounded that so far, there hadn't been much accomplished besides frustration among the other teams. He went back to his team to keep trying new theories.

And I was pretty much done. It was the dreaded "no longer having fun" point of the puzzle for me. Given, Jonathan, and Eric headed back to the van to figure out if they could wrestle a combination out of the photos. One of our teammates decided he'd had enough, broke off one of the CDs for the instructions, borrowed my flashlight, and hopped the fence (he had been especially frustrated by the vampire clue). Soon he was lost to the dark.

Not too long afterwards, as I was trying random combinations on the lock, coed astronomy came up, opened the lock, pulled a CD, and offered one to me. I declined, saying that we hadn't solved it yet, and indicated for them to close it back up. This was probably bad form on my part, or at least very impolite: Other teams had been there longer than us and were very frustrated with the puzzle, so I should have asked if they wanted the same opportunity that I had turned down.

Other teams came, and I explained the situation to them. I began to worry about our teammate wandering a crooked, steep beach path in near total darkness. Time passed.

I don't remember which came first: Our solve or his return. At some point, though, someone on our team figured out that the coloring of the letters was an embedded ternary code (or something; I seriously didn't care) and was able to unlock a CD. At another point, our teammate made it back, having recovered a laminated sheet of paper that was hanging from a tree. Basically, we got both solutions to the puzzle and headed out. (It wasn't until later when we were on our way to the meet up at the restaurant that we realized the puzzle creators hadn't placed the sheet there.)

Finally, done.

The restraunt was fun. I actually had some energy left to be social and talked with various people about various things. Mostly puzzles, sure, but various puzzles. Voting time came, and we put ours for the one we had the most fun on: Mystic Fish's dome assembly. coed astronomy's decision tree clue would have been our second choice.

When all the scoring and voting for favorite puzzles were added up, we came in second, our highest finish to date! Beat one again by coed astronomy, though... and Mystic Fish later told us that it was pretty close for them whether to vote for ca's or our puzzle. Ah well, it was all good fun. And a great way to create an event that "GC" actually gets to play in. I hope it happens again.

Major Contributions to MSPH 123, Plus Photos

I had meant to write up about my experiences playtesting Microsoft Puzzlehunt 123 a while ago, and eventually post some pictures (eventually, being now). I had gotten started, when my three year-old daughter snuck on to the computer and managed to publish only the whiny parts and none of the "I had so much fun!" parts (since I tend to analyze my mistakes or shortcomings before my accomplishments). I've made no effort to revisit that topic or include moments like:

Making sure the white flashes of the Jeopardy squares where random

The joy of finally solving Pink's Hot Dogs

Holding up a colored-in Honeycomb for everyone to take wild stabs at identifying

Dying every single time I played Hunt the Wumpus, without ever once killing the beast.

Larry solving Crown Royal in ten minutes after Dunn and I had worked on for a hour or so (I found out later from him that he built on our work, but at the time it looked as though he was able to bypass it completely)

Being ten seconds away from diving into Rich's pool if that invisible plastic thing slipped away one more damned time

The frustration of trying to solve Triple Sec back when all the clues were scrambled, not just the second and third layers.

My only contribution to the Daily Doubles ("The Princess Brine!")

The interesting and completely incorrect monster I constructed for the Lego puzzle

Attempting my first duck conundrum with Rich, a half-naked Chris, and Ed (hopefully got those names right) and some... interesting props.

Brainstorming supervillian occupations for Bad Boys with the team, though it took two more days and an extra large "What bloody path?" hint to solve.

Finally solving Time Corpse the day after the playtest, while on a dinner date with my wife, and the bemused look I received from her.

All that's past, but Larry's recent notes spurred me on to write, despite not having yet finished the BATH 4 story.

My main, important, exciting, without-which-it-couldn't-have-happened contribution to helping out at GC at Stanford was... providing the chess pieces for Terminal Jeopardy. Yep, hunt definitely would have been ruined without me.

Okay, okay, I did actually help out a little:

Set up Gmail Notifier to beep as loudly as possible whenever GC got email from teams, as it was a rare thing for the first 18 hours or so

Was one of the four or five people fighting for the chance to reply whenever said email did come

Tried to give the Terminal Jeopardy a little more of a dramatic effect by placing the globular structure in a vase, lit from below with my headlamp and turning off as many lights as I could

Here's a list of other things I was able to do while staffing, due to GC's impressive orginization and preperaredness, as well as that amazing admin app:

jam on Guitar Hero 2 with Matt, Simon, and Josh. I was even allowed to torture the people there with my vocal rendition of "More than a Feeling" and "The Middle" ("'The Middle'? What song is that?" "Don't worry, you'll recognize it." [song plays] "Oh yeah.")
- keep track of how Team 196 (Jonathan) and Judean People's Front (Eric and Given) were doing in relation to each other

provide miniature pool table entertainment

create the Smoking GNU website in preparation for announcing BANG 22

blog about BATH 4

So, it'd be easy to say that there would have been no problem if I had stayed home for the weekend, but really, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

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.