Static Zombie

Shinteki: Decathlon Recap

Now that the final run of the event is over, I can talk in more detail about Shinteki: Decathlon. As I said a few days ago, it was generally a great event with none of the hitches we experienced in Shinteki: Untamed. Our team finished a very strong second, and if it hadn't been for a complete shutdown of higher brain function on clue #6, we might even have tied for first. The clues, while often not well-themed, were nevertheless solidly constructed and fun. None of them had us scratching our heads for long. When they wouldn't give up their secrets right away, there were nevertheless enough bread crumbs to follow to find the correct path. This resulted in a great head-scratching:fun ratio for us.

A big change in this event was that it was not a race. Aside from having 12 hours to solve the 10 clues, time was irrelevant. And I found that a big disappointing. There's nothing like the adrenaline rush of arriving at a clue site after another team, but leaving before them. That euphoric moment of passing other teams and moving up in the rankings was definitely missed. But then, we were at the front of the pack. Teams farther behind might have had a different viewpoint.

One reason for the change was the new hint system, in which teams were able to purchase hints through their Palm. Each clue had a maximum value of 100 points. Each clue a team asked for reduced that value. This system worked remarkably well, and special kudos to the Shinteki team for thinking the system through. Early hints often became free after a certain amount of time, and the Palm recognized partial answers so that, once entered into the device, clues which were no longer useful to the team also became free. This greatly reduced the likelihood of purchasing a hint that told you something you already knew. Whether or not to take a hint became a factor of a team's level of frustration and overall time remaining in the event. A nice balance for an event intended to be more recreational than competitive. In a full 30 hour Game, I'd miss the rush of catching up to / passing other teams even more.

Here are some of the clue highlights:

After entering a code of FERNANDO at Ikea, we received a deck of cards with subtle markings on none, one, or both of the indices. After carefully recording the data in two Excel columns, it looked like Braille-- but that quickly failed to pan out. Ikea (Swedish) and Fernando suggested ABBA, which led me to Morse code (a-b-b-a as dot-dash-dash-dot). Treating cards with no markings as spaces, one marking as a dot, and two markings as a dash, the deck spelled out a message: PULL OUT FACE CARDS. Doing so and re-reading the remaining deck gave us PULL OUT RED CARDS. Reading the remainder again gave us ORDER ME. Putting the black cards in traditional deck order (clubs A-K, spades A-K) gave us the answer, MASTERY. I thought this was a terrific puzzle, with great recursion and elegance. And if we hadn't pulled the classic teen horror movie blunder of splitting up in the Ikea, and if the person who found the deck of cards hadn't left his Talkabout in the van, we'd have been out of there fifteen minutes earlier.

The next clue was a nice word search puzzle, but to get it we had to use a pedal boat to reach a raft floating in a lake. Even rotating our foursome so that each of us pedaled only halfway in each direction, it was exhausting. The customized Wheaties box we received, with our team photo on the cover, was a nice touch-- but I was a bit disappointed that it didn't factor into the puzzle as anything other than a delivery vehicle for the word search contained inside.

A set of four speakers at our next stop played a synchronized recording of someone shouting "Ready!" "Set!" and "Go!" at regular intervals, each speaker with a different series. To envision this, imagine a device that reads a Scantron sheet of rows of 3 circles each, and on each row 0-3 of the circles are filled in. Now imagine the device examines a new circle every half second, and calls out the appropriate word (READY, SET, or GO) if that circle is filled in. Now imagine four of these devices running simultaneously, each with a different Scantron sheet as input. That was the puzzle (if you replace the Scantron devices with iPods and speakers taped to trees out of reach). The member of our team with the best rhythm transcribed all the outputs. Another teammate looked at the data and noted that everything came in groups of five rows. I then looked at it and saw that they were 3x5 grids, and said at that size they really wanted to be letters. Almost immediately we began putting all the READY marks from all four outputs together, then the SETS, then the GOs. Whaddyaknow-- letters! We were out of there in record time, over an hour ahead of the average.

The next clue took the form of a Mad Libs book delivered at the top of a steep hill climb. Before we were an eighth of the way back down, one of our team members realized that the correct answer for each word in the Mad Libs was an anagram of the words filling the matching blanks in the other Mad Libs. We had our list by the time we reached our van and finished the solve in minutes.

Then... disaster. The next clue wasn't a puzzle, it was a challenge. 10 straws. 50 cm of tape. A model chasm. Build a bridge to span the chasm and support a 1kg brick for ten seconds. A van full of software engineers completely overengineered the hardware problem. Knowing that triangles are one of the strongest shapes, we set about painstaking creating a train-trestle bridge of triangles. We should have realized there were simpler solutions, especially when the leading team-- only five minutes ahead of us-- dashed off successfully while we were still drawing up plans. But we blundered blindly ahead. Ninety minutes later another team finally showed up and we still weren't done. And then our tape ran out, before we could shore up a key join. Our gorgeous bridge collapsed. We bought another 2 straws and 10 cm of tape for ten points. Then another. And another. Meanwhile, other teams had come and gone with vastly simpler designs, some just barely eking out 10 seconds before giving way. Incredibly, one team even succeeded with the most brain-dead design possible: make two long straws and tape them together. Ten point five seconds. We finally achieved success two and a half hours after arriving, well past the "we're not having fun anymore" stage. This wasn't the kind of activity I enjoy, and it's soooooo cliched. I was enormously disappointed when we found out what the challenge was. But our failure was clearly our own doing. Other teams succeeded in a tenth of the time we took, and we should have had the sense to realize our approach was silly. But dang, our bridge looked nice.

A later clue had us assemble a jigsaw puzzle (always a good team activity to which everyone can contribute) of a bunch of overlapping circles of various colors and sizes. Counting the number of circles in each color, arranging by the rainbow, and coverting to letters gave us WIDTH J. The device told us this was good progress. So we switched to the harder thing-- counting circles by width, and arranging from smallest to largest. This gave us OVERBLUE. Sure enough, there were precisely eight blue circles, one of each size. Counting all the circles on top of those blue circles gave us the final answer. Another very nice puzzle, especially the embedding of the WIDTH hint in the color data.

The final puzzle I want to comment on is the audio identification puzzle. Just as in Untamed, we got a CD full of music. This time, they gave it to us in an area where it was easy to find a wireless internet connection. One of the songs was impossible to ID, however, so we bought it for 5 points. This was the penultimate puzzle, and after the bridge debacle we were concerned about having enough time to go all the clues. Had not flubbed the bridge, we'd never have bought this hint and would have solved the puzzle without it, but we all decided it was more important to reach the final clue with enough time to solve it. But that's besides the point, which is that audio identification puzzles like this are not fun!. Or more precisely, they're great fun when you know the songs, but are utterly not fun when you don't. If you don't know the songs all you can do is try to search for the lyrics. And that's simply not entertaining. So if you're going to do an audio identification puzzle, the content being identified should be stuff 95% of the American populace-- or at least, the target demographic of Game players-- can be expected to recognize. Musical tastes vary so widely that identifying popular songs is not a slam dunk. We've had a pop music ID puzzle in the past two Shinteki events. Please, retire the form and find something else-- perhaps a clue where listening carefully to the music is more important than identifying the songs, artists, or albums.

Posted by Peter at May 9, 2005 05:04 PM