Puzzalot

I'm sick of "I'm sick of codes"

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:26:00 +0000

Every now and then, I come across the phrase "I'm sick of codes" or "We wanted to write an event that didn't use codes at all" or something to that effect. Every time I do, I almost want to shout "Codes are what make puzzle hunts possible! Without them, my favorite participation event would... not... exist." But I'm not the shouting type.

Of course, we're probably using different nomenclatures. To me, a code is any hidden message that requires a transformation in order to be revealed. Combine that with a series of puzzles and you have a puzzle hunt. Take away the code and all you have is a puzzle, which I can get from my daily newspaper.

I'm pretty sure those who are sick of codes mean what I think of as ciphers, messages that require a key to reveal the hidden message. To a certain degree, I can understand that: Certain methodologies become cliche or even a crutch. But those who would scream if they saw another binary, ternary, Morse, or semaphore clue seem to be satisfied if a clue solves to 3 9 16 8 5 18...

Which is a straight alphanumeric substitution cipher.

And they complain about ASCII?

Maybe it's the idea that having to look at a piece of paper in order to figure out the actual meaning is what bothers some people? It's got to be the least fun of completing a ciphered puzzle. And most people have A=1 memorized (except for me: Still working on 11 and often dyslexic with 24 and 25), so decoding alphanumeric isn't as much of a chore. Or maybe it's just the non-novelty of it... but letters, English words, numbers, there's nothing really new about them either.

So in my mind, there are codes and many codes use ciphers. And I'm not sick of either one.

(Note: This psychotic rant was set off by a web page I just came across that's over five years old, and not (to my knowledge) anything I've heard recently or by anyone I know.)

On Puzzle Hunt Forums

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:07:00 +0000

People seem to want there to be a puzzle hunt forum where they can gather to post and discuss different issues. However, when there is one, they rarely post. Why? I think it's because there's already one, but spread across the Internet. Instead of new topics, people write blogs. Instead of posts responding to topics, most blogs have a comment section. Instead of stickies announcing important information, there's tweets and Curtis' calendar. It's all very decentralized but provides people with the outlet the need to express their opinions and gather facts. Finding them all may be a bit of a challenge, though.

Temporary forums have popped up for recent Games, which I think is great. The No More Secrets forum had over 100 posts and the Ghost Patrol forum had close to 200. I don't know about Microsoft Puzzle Hunt or the MIT Mystery Hunt; they may have internal forums or lists. There's also the Game list and the BANG list for general discussion.

So what people want from the Puzzalot forum? Apparently, they want it to be there. They want people to post, because everyone loves reading what other people have to say about puzzle hunts. But nobody wants to post there; to do so would take away from a blog post.

And require effort. People (including myself) are lazy and tend to not register or go to the trouble of posting if they don't have to. I would like to provide alternate ways to set up accounts, using logins from, say Facebook or Twitter. I'm concerned abouts security, though, so haven't delved too deeply into those options. Making use of OpenID would be great, but it won't be supported until SMF 2.0, which I don't want to install until the final version is available (it's at Release Candidate 2 right now).

So how to make the Puzzalot forum succeed where others have failed? For one, I think the SMF software is more secure than phpBB, which is the forum that was spammed out of control for both Scott Blomquist and myself... so it should be around as long as there is a puzzalot. This gives it more of a chance to grow.

Towards that goal, here are some things I've set up:

Boards created for each event and give moderator powers over that board to the organizers (when they register).

So instead of there being a forum setup on a Game's website, there would instead be a link to the board on Puzzalot, where GC would have the same power as they would over their own board.

A board dedicated to linking to other puzzle- and puzzle hunt-related topics

I will continue to post to with interesting links that I find, regardless whether people post to the board or not. Having other people post links there too would be, of course, awesome.

Sending out tweets of each new post to the board.

Right now, they're sent out via my Twitter feed, but I may change that to a dedicated account at a later time.

Using Twitter hashtags

I need to decide which hash-tag is best for the posts. Right now I'm using #puzzleforum, but I'm wondering if #puzzalotforum or #puzzlehuntforum (#phforum?) might be better. And maybe have a separate hash-tag for posts that are simply links (#phlinks?).

New posts also go out to the RSS feed and Google Buzz.

Providing announcements of new events and a calendar to keep track of them.

What else is there?

Puzzle Forum Up

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 07:27:00 +0000

Last night at the GC Summit, Scott Blomquist mentioned that he had taken down the puzzlehunters.com forum due to spam abuse. As an alternative, he mentioned maybe using the forum I'd been hosting, though embarrassingly enough, I couldn't remember the address when asked. I got home and found out why: It's been offline for nearly a year. Like Scott B., I'd shut mine down when it began getting spam from Russian advertisers on a daily basis.

So today I installed a new forum at http://forum.puzzalot.com/ if anyone would like to use it. That's a big assumption, though. Someone once pointed out that people only tend to post when there's something big and interesting going on, such as a Game. Since that happens, if we're lucky, once a year, so far teams have set up individual forums after each event. If people like the idea of having an all-encompassing forum, I would love to hear thoughts on how to make it better, organize it best, and retain users.

When will I hunt again?

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

2009 was an amazingly full year of puzzle hunts. It seemed like there was one practically every month. It. Was. Awesome. I look at the upcoming events section of The Smoking GNU website, and apart from DASH 2, all I see is a lot of To Be Determined (TBD). Still, it looks like we could have three BANGs and maybe even two Games in 2010. And that's not counting the other events (Shinteki Decathlon, MUMS, CiSRA, etc.) that will hopefully/probably happen.

I just read today that there's an RIT CS Puzzle Hunt in the middle of March, and that any team can participate, although the final part requires a live team on campus. Only thing is, it's short (about four hours). I'll have to check out some past puzzles when I have a chance; it could be fun.

But I'm really in the mood to get out, stretch my legs, and puzzle while walking around somewhere. I'm even more eager to pile into a van with some great people and spend thirty-some odd hours driving around solving. But if I'm able to host DASH 2 in Santa Rosa (as I hope to), I have no definitive events to look forward to playing in.

I reread my Ghost Patrol memories today, and I really miss playing in a Game. I've only played in three, but damn if they aren't addictive! There wasn't one in 2009, the first time maybe since they started that there hasn't been a Game during a year. It's very easy to complain, though; much much harder to do something about and put one on. The Smoking GNU hopes to put one on eventually, but given our schedule, the earliest would probably 2012. If the world's still around, that is.

DASH 1 - Get Along Lil' YAKies

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:00:00 +0000

(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.

[Link] Foggy's Puzzle Design Rules

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:29:00 +0000

I really enjoyed reading Foggy's list of standards for puzzle creation.

Rules 1-4
Rules 5-9
Rules 10-12

I especially liked number eleven: "No a-has is dull, one a-ha is fun, two a-has is a stretch, and three a-has is a slog."

BANG 25 Writeup Addendum

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Jonathan rarely reads my writeups. On the occasion he does, he often complains about their accuracy. I think he said at one point that they maybe averaged being 90% accurate. Given the limitations of human memory (especially mine), I'm almost surprised it's that high. I comfort myself that, like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when I'm inaccurate, at least I'm definitely inaccurate.

Some of the inaccuracy may simply occur because I don't have a full team point of view. For example, Jonathan pointed out to me that he was already doing prime factorization on the Math Class puzzle when Given said "Prime factorization?" He had seen the puzzle before and knew exactly what to do. Given, therefore, was just explaining what he saw Jonathan doing. Since I hadn't seen Jonathan start writing down factors at that point, from my point of view it looked like Given had had the aha.

Another one was where the P.E. clue. Rob was talking about how each of the baseball positions also had an innate ordering. Jonathan had apparently just mentioned seeing a similar puzzle that used that ordering before and asked if anybody knew what the ordering was. Rob was giving it to him. I had arrived late to the table, though, so again, from my point of view it looked like Rob had had the key insight.

I hate to rob anybody of credit for having a major insight into a puzzle. The truth is, though, that Jonathan, Eric Prestemon (when he plays with us) and to a lesser extent myself, usually have a majority of them. This may simply be because we've had more experience than the rest of our team and it doesn't hurt that Jonathan and Eric have really quick minds. I also don't mean to diminish from other team members' contributions either; they all have invaluable insights and are never lacking when it comes to making our team competitive.

In the end, my goal is not necessarily to provide an accurate reporting of what went on for any given puzzle event, but instead to preserve my memories, flawed as they may be, before they fade from my head completely.

BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part Three

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:48:00 +0000

(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

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:23:00 +0000

(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.

Given joins the MIT Mystery Hunt

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:44:00 +0000

Up until now, it's normally been Jonathan and I who would participate in the conference room-style puzzle hunt. Lately, though, Given has taken a liking to them. His first experience was with Microsoft Puzzlehunt 123 and he loved it. This year, he's joining Jonathan and Eric in Boston on the Silly Hat Brigade team for the MIT Mystery Hunt. I was *so* close to joining them, but alas having our core Smoking GNU team together in a conference room for the first time was not to happen. As it is, I'll be super busy the next few days (snow!) and won't even have much time to work on part two of my BANG 25 memories. Hopefully, nobody will hurt me for it.

BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part One

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:15:00 +0000

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.

Adventure Gaming: Lights Out vs The Longest Journey

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:37:00 +0000

Adventure games have some fairly well-defined genres of puzzles. There's the inventory puzzle, the logic puzzle, the task puzzle, the dreaded slider, and a few others. Perhaps one additional genre should be the talker.

We started out The Longest Journey with high hopes. The voice acting was so much above some of the previous adventure games we'd been playing that it was so refreshing. It wasn't long, however, before we found out how much we would be hearing it. At least we could skip past some of the dialog, unlike some others that would torture us with it.

We hit a certain point in The Longest Journey where basically we needed an encyclopedia's worth of knowledge to continue and only had one way to get it: A lecture from one character. As it started, it became clear that we needed about an hour's worth of talking to be able to continue. It was pretty much at this point that Andrea gave up in disgust and Given wasn't far behind. (I'm more persevering than most, I guess — I grew up on a ranch and had to put up with a lot of crap, quite literally.) Too much talking is the kiss of death for an adventure game for us.

So I installed another game I had handy, Light's Out. This was one that I saw while walking by in a store and was impressed that it was pretty much all put together by one person. We were immediately drawn in by the spooky atmosphere and the minimal dialog.

Finding a floppy disc while being in the early twentieth century didn't hurt, either.

Basically, we played a mapmaker called to a lighthouse, where its three keepers had mysteriously disappeared. The game play was fairly similar to Myst and hotspots were pretty easy to find. The puzzles were enjoyable except for one: The dynamite puzzle, which actually wasn't a puzzle, despite the interactive interface.

I really enjoyed the game, although afterwards the explanation for the disappearance was less than satisfying. It was more like a hand wave than anything else.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:30:00 +0000

(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.

An Undercover Puzzle from the SMDB

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:14:00 +0000

I'm a long-time semi-lurker at the Straight Dope Message Boards (SDMB). Relatively recently, though, they added a Game board that I haven't checked out until today. One of the first things that caught my eye was a puzzle, entitled A Holiday For Spies. It's got a story to go with what I first took for a straight cryptogram. However, Decrypto 8.5 couldn't make sense of the puzzle text, so I guess there's more to it. Maybe I'll take a look at it later tonight.

Puzzling Letters

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:30:00 +0000

Hundreds of strange snail mail letters have been sent to residents of an enclave of Pittsburgh. At first, I thought it might be an interesting puzzle-based project: Some had received multi-part messages that looked like they needed assembly; another had received a letter that was had a curving cut on it and a giant letter "C" in the center (a blog has been started to keep track of all of the letters). Then I read it was a project of a couple of artists, which probably means they had nothing more than being mysterious as their endgame.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:00:00 +0000

(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)

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Eric solves puzzles

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:25:00 +0000

Eric Prestemon, captain of the Judean Peoples Front and part-time Smoking GNU member, is darned good and experienced puzzle solver. He's recently started a blog — Solving Really Hard Puzzles — devoted to chronicling his thought process as he goes through some challenging puzzles. How challenging? Well, his first entry deals with a clue from the Labor Day Extravaganza which took him a little over five hours to solve.

Burninators bag BANG 28

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:15:00 +0000

Just happened to stop by the BANG website today and saw that the Burninators have continued their tradition of hosting every seventh BANG. Maybe The Smoking GNU should plan on hosting BANG 29 and then hold it before BANG 28, just to keep that a tradition?

Eating Afterwards

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:03:00 +0000

(Egads, this blog's a mess. I haven't updated the sidebar since BANG 22. I still need to preserve my memories of BANG 24, 25, and 26. But the sun is out, the dog is restless, and I have the attention span of a squirrel these days.)

I'm not a big fan of the after-BANG restaurant meal. Teams have a tendency to keep more to themselves when offered a team-sized table to sit at and a bill to tie them to that location. I actually enjoyed the meal after BATH 4, since we were all gathered at two tables and were forced into social interaction without having to leave the table. BANG 25 was good, too, since people could buy food from any of the restraunts and go out and eat in the food court. Nothing tying them down equals more socializing, which is a good thing. (I can honestly say that Gamers are some of the nicest people I've ever met.)

It makes me wonder if the catered/rented-venue method of the SNAPs might not be a bad idea. Would asking $20 more drive some teams away? If so, would dropping the prize requirement bring them back? Would that drive other teams away? Personally, I'm thinking I'd rather pay the money up front than feel the obligation to order expensive food and drinks from a restaurant providing a free venue.

Havin' a blast at Shinteki Disneyland! (with pics) [SPOILERS]

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:45:00 +0000

[Note 1: This blog entry may contain information that can potentially spoil future experiences. Read no further if you are planning to participate should this event be hosted again.]

[Note 2: Pictures are both on my server (with full-size versions available) and on Facebook (no account required). These photos may also contain spoilers.]

After taking my daughter to Discovery Kingdom for her birthday in June (she wanted to ride an elephant), I talked with Jonathan about the logistics of holding a puzzle hunt at an amusement park. It seemed like a fun idea, but had many design challenges that needed to be addressed. We wondered if it was even possible. A few months later, Shinteki announced that they would be holding a "Field Trip" puzzle hunt at Disneyland, so we were soon to find out.

Jonathan was, naturally, thrilled. Seeing as how he drives up for nearly every puzzle event in the Bay Area, he wanted to see how many of his team would be "hardcore" enough to drive down for just one. Three of us ended up making the trip: Andrea, Given, and myself.

And we had a blast! I mean some serious fun. But it was at an intense pace. Thanks to Jonathan's scheduling, we may have been the first team to meet with Brent et al, and definitely the second to get our binder. By that time, Jonathan had already hoofed it to Space Mountain and gotten us Fast Passes. We set off in the other direction and started actual solving at the Indiana Jones ride. It was funny how we'd expected to have plenty of time to solve puzzles while waiting in line, but we rarely saw much of a line, so that we ended up having to actually stop in queues in order to get the data we needed.

Some memorable moments:

Finding the pin traders before the first ride (I had never noticed this phenomenon before) and getting our 10 point set in the first go

Trying to give Given — who hadn't been to Disneyland in twenty years or so — a tour of the Indian Jones line space: "And it used to be that you could shake this pole and the ceiling would come crashing down." *shakes pole and ceiling comes crashing down* "I guess they fixed it."

Playing "Spot Jack Sparrow" while trying to keep track of left-right aspects of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

Figuring out that the "life-like people" for the Pirates clue referred to the people in the restaurant.

Getting all the answers we needed for the Haunted Mansion clue from the greeter and then going on the Nightmare Before Christmas-ed ride anyway.

Jonathan just happening to be looking at the page that required a blacklight while on the blacklit portion of Haunted Mansion

Taking turn-by-turn notes on Space Mountain

Running into other teams at the Tomorrowland photo spot and swapping photos.

Being impressed with the solution to the Give Us A Buzz clue.

Giving up my 28,800 score (18) for 35,500 (13) on the Buzz Lightyear ride.

Running into Ian in front of Pirates when we had only one word to go for The Wordiest Place on Earth and forgetting to ask him for the final GC-only word we needed. "Isn't there something you want to ask me?"

Andrea and I getting way too wet on Splash Mountain even though we were sitting up front.

The satisfaction of solving The Wordiest Place on Earth while eating lunch.

Brent's surprise that we'd solved The Wordiest Place on Earth... apparently at how early in the game we'd accomplished it.

Spending way too much time looking for the other half of our team after we got split up on Tom Sawyer Island aka Pirate's Lair. Plus, the only other inhabitants of said island seemed to be other teams.

Watching Given try and figure out how to extract an answer from the barrel sudoku and having Andrea come up and say, "Hey, isn't that pi?"

Feeling like a crack shot as Jonathan pointed out each target in the Frontierland Shootin' Arcade and I hit it without fail.

My team (well, mostly Jonathan) going into a let's-gather-all-the-data-we-can-before-this-thing-is-over frenzy at around 5pm, while I trailed after them attempting to work on the Tweet Tweet puzzle.

Finally getting a chance to sit down and solve the Tweet Tweet puzzle in the Main Street ice cream shop.

Breaking the Indiana Jones cryptogram with the "eye is not a letter" aha as we got in line.

Eating a great meal at French Market.

Having enough time afterwards to hit all the rides we hadn't got a chance to yet.

We never made it anywhere close to Toon Town and solved nothing on Main Street (by the time we got there, it was as if everyone in the park was there too.) Regardless, we still made enough points to end up with a virtual gold medal.

BANG XXVI Pics (and a Vid)

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:23:00 +0000

I have yet, to date, been able to play with the same set of people in the twenty-some odd puzzle events I've participated in. Eric Prestemon and Dan Roberts joined us in our Viking expedition in the really well-executed BANG XXVI. I've put up pictures of the event and a short video of the penny challenge.

We had a lot of fun, and were really impressed with the puzzles and production value, so many kudos to Los Jefes and Code Yellow! The meta gave us quite the knocking, but in the end we're kind of proud that we didn't take any hints, even if it might have bumped us up a few positions in the rankings.

BANG 26 also brings to an end what (little) influence I had on SNAP simulcasts. In my quest to have The Smoking GNU do one, I was able to help Seattle teams find counterparts in the Bay Area. The simulcasts would have (hopefully) happened anyway, but I like to think of it as my own small contribution to the community.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:27:00 +0000

(Part 1 here)

Clue 6: Color Blind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clue 7 - Posters in the Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clue 8 - The Slippery Elephant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clue 9 - Skipped

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

Clue 10 - The Revenge of the Colorblind

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus Clues

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

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

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

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

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

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

DASH 1 SF Thoughts & Pics

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:54:00 +0000

So we of The Smoldering YAKs (team w/Jonathan = GNU, without = YAK) traversed the streets at the same time as hundreds of other people in eight cities around the United States, solving a variety of puzzles from diverse teams. We had a good time! The YAKs are slower than the GNUs though, which meant less time for taking pictures. I did manage to snap a few and they're up.

I really have to thank Debbie, Greg, Jesse, Sunshine, and all of lowkey for putting on this production, as well as all the teams who contributed puzzles. They did a great job and I'm grateful for all their work.

I do have to say that I was surprised at the challenge these puzzles presented, as DASH was catering to new teams in diverse cities. I think it's a function of the distributed puzzle creation process: Each team has all this time to spend on one or two puzzle(s), so they tend to be, as Jonathan put it, "meatier". This has been true in BANG 18, BATH 4, and now DASH 1.

I had been considering the idea of rehosting DASH 1 in Sonoma County, but now I think that some amount of reduction of difficulty would be required for the puzzle hunt virgins up here. Apart from getting permission from everyone to do so, I'm not sure we have enough time to set everything up before the rainy season fully kicks in.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Skott) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:30:00 +0000

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.)