Static Zombie

Don't beat yourself up. There was far more good than bad last weekend. That there were as few glitches as there were is a testament to the sheer volume of planning you guys must have put into it. We found no errors in any puzzles (that I remember anyways), the handbook was awesome and ours only crashed once (what are you guys doing with them anyways? I had hoped in vain that we got to keep them...), the puzzles, as you said, were often quite integrated with the locations, and it was very approachable for us newbie teams.

You guys have said more than once that the pit stops were rest breaks, but the challenges during the stops prevented rest from occurring. This was especially true due to the fact that at the first pit stop, teams that didn't win at least one game were given zero trade goods for the next round - two of our team members missed dinner that night, wandering desperately through the corn maze because we thought if we didn't succeed there we wouldn't get trade goods for the next round.

This game was both more intense, and less intense than I expected. More intense due to the trading and trying to solve the newspaper in the first leg, so that we were going pretty much full speed for five hours straight, though it did slow down a bit after that (and a lot in the last leg.) Less intense, in that we didn't do the kinds of things I'd read about in previous games - going to some location, where you're not sure you're even supposed to be there, and doing insanse stuff like search through a prison or climb on top of the space needle. That's the tradeoff of every site being staffed, which I'm sure you were aware of. I understand there's a history here (as well as a ton of newbies), so I hope the next one can stretch the boundaries of safety and uncertainty just a tiny bit more now that this weekend was so successful.

Your strategies to get teams to interact were a success - right now I desperately want a message board or forum to swap stories, trading information (I was our team's trader) and strategies with the other participants. Even coming from the PuzzleHunt community, I got to meet a lot of other people from PH that I had never really interacted with before.

We listened to a song or two on the soundtrack during the first breakfast, but somehow never got around to throwing it in any time during the rest of the weekend. I still plan on listening to it and reminiscing, so your effort wasn't totally wasted :)

The weekend took a lot out of me, and at times I wasn't sure that I would want to do it again. But now that I've recovered, I'm glad for the experience and can't wait for the next one.

I think Steve hit the nail on the head. Very few of the things you listed as having gone wrong were visible from the customer side of things. The only measurable morale drop on Shark Bait was due to a series of compounding bugs in the "WHO F***ED WITH MY SHIP?!" clue. And we even got over that as soon as we got some momentum on the bridge of glass puzzle (which was a cool puzzle, even having seen a similar puzzle barely more than a month ago).

This is in contention for being not just the smoothest running Game that I've seen, but the smoothest running puzzle event I've seen of any sort, _especially_ given the complexity. Stop beating yourself up.

I'll have more detailed feedback posted on my blog over the next few days-- feel free to drop by.

This was the first Game for myself and four of my teammates on The 'B' Ark, so I have nothing to compare it to. But overall it seemed to go much smoother than I would have expected given the amount of complexity.

The charades movie was inspired, and I really loved the Labrynth puzzle (probably my favorite). We were one of the teams that had trouble mapping the strips to the grid on the second site, but that was entirely our own fault, as we failed to realize that the man on the grid was upside-down, as we were using it. (That said, did you know there was a second 23 x 76 grid about 100 meters away, containing slightly different information? We stumbled across that and we certain that it was relevant.)

The only puzzle I did not like was Codex, as both halves involved searching for things (the first for the strings of digits or letters, the second for the book) which I thought was uninteresting. We never saw the artwork map, despite searching all over for it.

I really liked the trading game, but our team (as with many of the rest, from what I gathered) gave up on it on the third leg, as the rules became too complex and the opportunities for trade too few. Plus, our low placing in the first two legs gave us almost nothing to work with, cargo-wise, and it just made more sense for us to ignore it and focus on the puzzles. I would have prefered the the trading half and the puzzle half to be entirely divorced, with all teams starting with the same amount of goods, regardless of place.

One thing I *really* appreciated about this was that there were no red herrings or other "tricks." It was nice to know that we could trust you guys to play fair. For example, we could have easily have squandered a lot more time trying to figure out how that second grid fit into the "Shredded ET" puzzle, but at some point we just said "you know, GC has played straight with us so far, so the solution to this puzzle almost certainly doesn't involve randomly stumbling across a clue 100 meters away." Ditto for our malfunctioning Blinky disk -- when it didn't work, we knew immediately that the disk was bad, not that you were hornswoggling us in some nefarious manner.

Ditto what Scott said - SharkBait had a fantastic time. Overall, from my perspective this was a very polished event, and there were only two incidents that felt a little rough. One was the technical glitch with the Blinky CD, and the other was the mob arrival at Seattle Center, where we had to wait for valet parking. (BTW, were you aware we'd pulled the same trick ("valet parking" in order to mess with the players' vans) during the Intern Game just last month? With five team members who'd been involved with IG, we immediately suspected you were up to something.)

I think part of the reason SB lost momentum during Blinky was that it was lunchtime, and we *really* needed to eat, but none of us realized that at the time. We did have a vanfull of snacks and we were parked in a grocery store parking lot, so this was something we could have easily remedied. I was also told by a team member that at one point during Monopoly, all six of us had fallen asleep, which I suspect impacted our solve time on that puzzle. But both of these were issues of team management, not anything GC had control over. Next time, I hope we'll come up with a better way to manage that.

Your plan to resurrect the Seattle Game community seems to have gotten off to a good start.

Steve (and others): I understand the Bay Area Game community has a Yahoo site for Game-related discussion. I'm sure that kind of thing would go over well for Seattle Gamers as well. *nudge*nudge*

Oh, and we never listened to the CD because we assumed that it was a compilation of the "Least Favorite Songs" from the pre-game questionaire. (Actually, we did listen to the first few tracks, and nothing we heard caused us to question that belief). What was the track listing?

This was my first Game, and it was an awesome experience. You guys did an amazing job. My favorite aspects have mostly been listed by other people, so I'll be brief:

1) The pit stop system was inspired, and I hope it will become a standard feature of Games to come.

2) Puzzles required virtually no reference material or Internet access.

3) Lots of the puzzles included the site as an integral component. I don't understand the previous poster who wanted more "take-it-back-to-the-van-and-kill-it" puzzles. I'd save those kinds of puzzles for Puzzle Hunt and its ilk. If we spend time driving to a location, I want it to pay off by having the site be important.

4) The central activity of most puzzles was something fun to do. I think an aspect of puzzle design that is often missed is that a puzzle is a form of entertainment, not just a means to separate winners from losers. The designers of these puzzles clearly generally embraced this idea.

5) Encouraging inter-team cooperation. Though I didn't like the trading card thing, I liked the fundamental goal, and I liked the cooperation that happened at the Friday night event.

6) Most puzzles could easily accommodate many, many teams at once.

7) Often something would happen early that would have a pay-off at some far-off time.

8) Almost no bugs in puzzles.

My favorite puzzles were: #1 Charades, #2 Rebus Dominoes.

I could say a few negative things, too, but for now I'm focusing on the positive since that was by far my overall impression.

Peter, do you think you could do a post on "things we should have done differently"? I know you have a list of things ("what went wrong") that you wish had gone better, but I don't mean that; I mean big-picture decisions that you made early on that in retrospect didn't work out so well. For instance, did your decentralized GC work out OK? At the end, maybe have some other folks cooking burgers so that you could hang out with the arriving teams? How was the route in retrospect? What would you change about the card game after seeing how we played it? This is more of a "lessons to future GCs" and thus useful for the community.

Like Jay, this was my first Game, and I had a blast. My teammates had prepared me to be paranoid---that GC and the other teams might try to mess with our heads or mislead us. That was clearly not the case, which we all appreciated. I had a lot of fun with Charades (despite my embarrassing clip) and Elements. If you hold one next year, I'll do my best to be there. Thanks for organizing it!

As one of the beta testers, what I know is how the chocolate puzzle went. Did you guys manage to fix this "This tastes like liquid pain!!!" problem?

Patrick: We changed that puzzle to be non-edible (felt shapes), moved it to later in the route where it was likely to be skipped, and in fact wound up skipping almost everyone over it.

John: I'll see about the kind of post you suggest. Not sure if it belongs here or on the official site once we get the forum going.

Matthew: I expect the track listing to be part of the official site wrap-up once it's ready. As for searching, typically in Games there's a search for the clue at many clue sites. That element was largely eliminated from our game because of our staffing solution. Instead, we had search elements within some of the puzzles themselves. What I personally like about searches is that the process parallelizes well across the entire team, success is usually very satisfying, and teams can often make up time if they're lucky or efficient. Less cerebral, perhaps, but the Game exercises multiple skill sets.

Jessica: We knew the intern Game had used the Bridge of Glass, but decided that a) there was no player overlap and b) we liked our puzzle better. =) I may have heard about van tampering in the intern Game, but I don't recall. Both ideas were firmly established in our Game plans well before the intern Game decided to use them.

A little more insight into the SharkBait experience.. Our only real pain point came from multiple issues with the Blinky clue. Finding the CD way early (right after we left Seattle Center), having the Zeus reject "blinky" as a code at that point, and not being able to read the data caused us to drop it in the basket of solved puzzles and miscellaneous junk we'd collected, and pretty much ignore it from then on. We also confronted GC multiple times about it and my impression (although I didn't have first-hand contact) was that we were basically told that they didn't put it there. There's a big difference between "we don't know anything about it" and "we didn't do it", and I'm not sure what GC's actual response was. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that GC would be the only ones that would bother to not just drop something off in our van, but to do so with duct tape. At the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable that the "ARR" written on the disc was just an indication that some pirate was messing with us.

When we finally got to the radio broadcast, combining the earlier troubles with the disc and the lack of clarity of the invisible writing (although I may be blind - one of our shipmates clearly saw a 'B' and repeatedly pointed it out to me - I could still only see the first down stroke), this stop was easily the most frustrating part of the trip. On the upside, once we actually got into the Blinky portion, the decoding part was quite fun.

I'd like to apologize to GC for being a bit bitchy when we left the 3rd stop - the statue garden. We'd gotten some garbage at the start of the message which seemed really out of place, especially given how clean the puzzles at the first two stops were. I was later told there was a second head on the turtle that we missed. Also, for some reason, the head of the fish in the heron's mouth didn't actually count. I was also a little ticked at myself for recognizing the orientation aspect as the correct method for solving (Jess called me with this idea and it absolutely clicked for me, since my pool of statues ALL had clear faces and thus directions), but not stressing this to the rest of the team.

I'd also like to thank the rest of my teammates (especially our mighty trader Andrew) for ignoring my initial negativity towards the card game. Once we started learning a few of the rules, it was quite fun to try and combine a favorable set of attributes at each stop so we'd have a good hand when we rolled into the pit stop.

I echo my teammates' sentiments above - overall puzzle quality was extremely high. The only actual error I noticed was a single incorrect character in the sample Vigenere encoding on the bomb detection kit instructions page.

The timing of the puzzles was well-done too. Star Trek, which was more of a "can you follow the directions" instead of a "figure this out" type of thing, was a perfect way to start the final leg. It's much more of a challenge at that point in the Game, since everyone's pretty well sleep-deprived by that point.

Equally impressive was how on-target the hints spewed out by the Zeus were. With just a few exceptions, you seemed to have anticipated just about all the stumbling blocks teams might have - quite a feat for hints written ahead of time (I'm guessing the beta process helped you fine-tune these a bit). In our case, we were usually on pace or a bit ahead of the hints, so I'm mostly evaluating them in retrospect, but the progression seemed to match our thought processes quite well.

I agree with Peter's assessment that skipping the 2nd puzzle on the 3rd leg made the Seattle Center stop a little annoying, especially since I had the luck to be on the half of our team that got to look for those goofy little plaques (a bit of a "didn't we just do this" moment).

The puzzles where we got to assemble something were my favorites. Though we started out making the shredded ET strips more difficult than they needed to be, the whole thing came together beautifully. The plastic cube was likewise excellent, although I think "geo ape" is a fine answer. "Spy doorman" still makes me laugh.

Blinky was our worst puzzle, too. Our first thought was "there's something written on the windows", but after a thourough spraying showed nothing, we were eventually reduced to spraying every surface in and out of the van - the ceiling, under the hood, unloading the trunk and spraying the back of the back seat, pulling the seat belts out to spray their entire length(!!).

I suppose if we hadn't made the odd choice to drive to a different parking lot (god forbid the other teams see what we were doing), Jeff might have noticed us doing all this and stopped us. Or at least gotten a laugh and perhaps a few pictures.

All right, rabbit, you've convinced me. Seems like much fun was had by... if not all, then perhaps most. It was hard for me to tell, since other than the Guild the only places I staffed were the pitstops, where top teams generally arrived elated, but where other teams arrived looking some combination of exhausted, frustrated, hungry, or relieved. It was hard to look through that to see whether or not they were having a good time.

Derek: You should be sure to do the Signpost puzzle, which is at least partially an assembly puzzle. And I designed it and was bummed all but two teams skipped it, so I want as many people as possible to see it.

A teammate and I did signpost on Friday - that was a fun twist on the classic logic puzzle!

Hi Peter, my name is Bruce and I'm trying to learn more about puzzle games in Seattle. We played a scaled-down mini-Game as an orientation activity at Princeton's Grad College several years ago, and I've played the Park Challenge in SF once. I really enjoyed both and would love to find some more in the Seattle area - I'm actually in Vancouver, Canada, but I think there's not a lot of this kind of activity up here.

Looks like I just missed The Mooncurser's Handbook, but is there anything similar in the near future? (Especially anything a bit less hard-core!)

Bruce