Last weekend I went to San Francisco for the latest Bay area Game, Justice Unlimited. The SF Game community is much larger and more active than Seattle's, and frankly seems more fun. In Seattle all the team names are colors which, while faithful to the source material, aren't much fun. SF teams get more creative with both naming and costuming, with teams like Orange Crush (clad in bright orange), Blinded By Science (wearing sunglasses and lab coats), and the Scooby Doobies (their van is, of course, a replica of the Mystery Machine). The Games themselves are also more publicized, without the cloak-and-dagger don't-talk-about-Fight-Club attitude prevalent in Seattle. All of these things are, in my opinion, Good Things which help make the experience more fun. We are team Briny Deep, the puzzle pirates, complete with pirate shirts, Jolly Roger head wraps, an anchor to toss overboard whenever we pulled up to a clue site, and a hearty "Yarrrrrr!" for all we meet.
At the start of the event, each team was given a groovy custom-made device that strapped to your forearm. It contained a two-line dot matrix display, a knob/button, and an infrared sensor. The device came preloaded with potentially useful information (Morse code, Braille, Semaphore, tide data, ASCII codes, etc), thereby ensuring that each team had any decoding data they might need. Each clue also contained a code which, when input into the device, yielded supplemental information (mostly just for flavor, unfortunately, but very occasionally containing a hint). Puzzle answers were intended to be input into the device as well to produce the next clue location, but sadly that aspect of the device didn't work and teams had to phone in our answers instead.
The event ran from 10 AM Saturday though about 4 PM Sunday and took us all around the Bay area starting at the SF Municipal Pier a stone's throw from Ghiradelli Square. Location-wise, the next stop was one of the coolest: the Bay Model, an enormous scale model of the Bay area used to simulate tidal and other natural effects. Teams had to identify parts of the map by matching line drawings of topography to the right part of the model-- a fun scavenger hunt activity that got all teams moving amongst each other.
Other highlights included the Bat Blinker, a custom-made electronic persistence of vision gizmo supplying an elegantly-designed AHA puzzle; searching the beach at night for a hidden clue, flashlight beams cutting through the mist to create an X-Files-like vibe; a wonderfully collaborative solve on an audio puzzle where high and low sound effects overlaying dialogue from the Daredevil movie mapped to-- what else?-- Braille; a clever puzzle in which multicolored plastic strips had to be threaded through like-colored metal connectors to create letters; and a very nice balancing puzzle involving coins and a ruler.
With very few exceptions (the beach, Bay Model, a mountainside, a park, and a rooftop), however, the locations were largely unremarkable and underutilized. We rarely had to really search for a clue, and consequently our out-of-van exposure at any given location was minimal. I'd have preferred the clues to either be better integrated with the environment or better concealed, so that we interacted with each location instead of just hopping out to grab the clue and then piling back into the van.
A couple of clues really spanked us hard. One, a rainbow jigsaw that had to be cut out and assembled, was just poorly designed. When the pieces were properly assembled, the resulting shape had the same number of rows as the letter grid we were to use to extract an answer, and the shape had irregular square gaps that just screamed to be utilized. Was the shape a physical mask to be overlain on the letter grid? Were the gaps some kind of mathematical encoding to determine which letter to extract from each row? No. They were just noise. Each piece of the puzzle was a different color, and each row of the grid was a color. If the color sequence was red, yellow, purple, orange, purple, green, blue, red, we were supposed to take the first letter from the red row, the second letter from the yellow row, the third from purple, and so forth. That's it. We wasted a lot of time analyzing the gaps which had absolutely no purpose in the puzzle. That's just poor puzzle design-- in this kind of event, where you're working without instructions, you don't throw false leads in front of people that can rathole them for an hour. In fact, you remove as much of that noise as possible to help funnel solvers to the correct approach. This puzzle aggravated us and left us disgruntled when we finally hit on the solution.
We also got spanked by a puzzle incorporating Heroclix figurines. The puzzle itself might have been fine a few hours earlier, but it hit us around 4 AM when our energy was at its lowest ebb. Four of our six players were asleep, and the other two were barely staying conscious. It was ugly-- especially coming off a semaphore puzzle that also spanked us because it appeared to be a completely different sort of puzzle, and consequently we overlooked an important bit of information.
There were some nice opportunities to draw on useless superhero knowledge gained through years of comic collecting in my adolescence-- a crossword puzzle where the clues were superheroes and the answers were their secret identities, and a quiz on superhero origins. I pray no Game ever has a Pokemon or gangsta rap theme.
Team Snout, Game Control for Justice Unlimited, generally did a terrific job. Aside from the DRUID problems (the whole infrared sensor thing never really worked right, either), the puzzles appeared to be error-free and Snout staff were unerringly upbeat and helpful when reached on the phone-- impressive, considering 25 teams were playing the Game (for comparison, only 9 teams played in Shelby Logan's Run in Vegas, the last Seattle-based game). Aside from reporting our answers, we generally called under two circumstances: when we were about to embark on a lengthy decoding process and wanted to make sure it wasn't going to be a blind alley; and when we were stumped and collectively agreed we weren't having fun anymore. Game Control was always happy to unblock us and keep us energized, which was exactly the right attitude.
I look forward to playing in the next Bay area game. If you'd like to join, Briny Deep may have a couple of spots available...
Posted by Peter at August 4, 2004 7:38 PM