The Game is a 30 hour mobile puzzle challenge in which team of 6 players each travel in a van, solving a clue at each destination that leads them to the next. Information about the Game's history can be found here, and official details about our event can be found at The Mooncurser's Handbook web site. Early in our planning process, we agreed that we wanted our Game to be more social than most. Often in a Game you see very few other teams, and even when you do you're all embroiled in whatever puzzle is facing you and may not take time to chat. We wanted teams in our Game to have a chance to get to know and interact with each other. Towards that end, we tried a few experiments. We knew going in that reactions would range from love to hate, and decided we were OK with that. Hopefully more people were in the former camp than the latter.
The big experiment was dividing the game into four legs, with a pit stop between each one, and serving teams a meal. When teams arrived at the pit stop, they were fed a complete meal and given time to relax, chat with other teams, and participate in an activity that would translate into a slight advantage in the following leg. This structure meant that all teams would start on roughly equal footing four times during the Game, and no team would get too far out in front of the pack. Everyone would be seeing each other throughout the event.
The second big experiment was running a trading game concurrent to the traditional puzzle-based Game. The trading game was inspired by Sid Sackson's Haggle, but tweaked to better fit a Game format. Instead of getting a bunch of stuff at the beginning and then first trading for info and then trading their commodities, teams got a few goods at the start of each leg and more upon arriving at each clue site. Upon leaving a site they got a manifest of what would be available at the next one, with the idea that figuring out what they wanted at the next stop would give teams something to do during the drive between sites. Information was also doled out a little at a time through the Handbook itself (see below), but all teams got the same information at the same time-- so trading information wasn't really a factor. Teams [mostly] didn't have to worry that everyone else knew something they didn't. At each pit stop teams had to hand in their goods to us for scoring, and anything they kept was worthless in the next round.
The goods themselves were custom-made trading cards with the name of the item, an illustration (all drawn by GC member Dana Young), and pertinent stats about the item (in round one, this meant whether the item was ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MINERAL, or MANUFACTURED; in round 2, items were given some combination of additional qualities FOOD, DRUG, SEX, UNETHICAL, DANGEROUS, and RARE; in round 3, each item had a QUALITY rating of 0 to 10). Additional information about each item could be found by looking it up in the Mooncurser's Handbook.
The trading game existed to give teams something to do during drives, to encourage teams to interact, and to manifest the smuggling/trading angle of the Game's theme. Rather than have an overarching story, we decided to make the trading game, and the universe revealed by the Handbook in the course of pursuing it, our story. Some teams found it to be overwhelming, with too much data to synthesize effectively. Others really got into it and were actively trading right up until the last possible moment.
The Mooncurser's Handbook itself was a Zire app loaded with data, none of which was initially available to players. Upon finding each clue teams got an arrival code which, when entered into the Handbook, started the automated hint system for that clue. At predetermined intervals, the Handbook Intelligent Neural Tracer, or HINT system, sifted through players' unconscious thoughts to detect any brilliant ideas just below the surface and alerted players to insights they were about to have. Entering a correct answer into the Handbook unlocked a page of content about that answer in the Mooncurser universe, providing GPS coordinates of the next clue site and possibly unlocking additional Handbook entries. Some Handbook entries contained information about bonuses that could be achieved through certain combinations of trade goods. The full content of the Handbook will eventually be posted online.
Another experiment involved bringing teams to a hotel on Friday afternoon and hosting a banquet and pre-game event there on Friday night, with teams staying overnight to start the Game itself early Saturday morning. Something similar had been done once before for the Jackpot Game, but we had something a little different in mind. The combination of the hotel rooms and pit stop meals meant that other than keeping their vans gassed up, teams would incur no incidental expenses from their moment of arrival to their moment of departure. This "Club Med" all-inclusive aspect of the experience was one of our big design goals, carrying through all the way to such details as creating a Galaxy Today newspaper for teams to enjoy with their Saturday morning breakfast.
Another design goal was to make the route more than just a bunch of clue drops. Whenever possible, we designed puzzles to fit our sites. Big Rock Garden, Binary Garden, Conway (skipped by most), Rock Paper Scissors, UW Bothell, Tolt River, Galaxy 12 theater, the corn maze, Seattle Center, Guild 45th theater, Sunset Bowl, downtown Ballard, Sturgis (skipped by everyone), Constellation Park, and the Museum of Glass sites all had puzzles designed specifically for those locations, usually incorporating features found there.
While I created a couple of puzzles (the signpost, which most teams skipped, the corn maze tiles, and blackjack) and collaborated on a few others (sculpture garden, Galaxy 12, early charades concept, bowling, some crossword-style clues at Elements (the split-up-each-team site), and Blinky), my primary responsibilities were for the trading game, the Handbook content, the pit stop activities, the Friday night post-banquet event, the newspaper, and the soundtrack audio CD.
The soundtrack CD was inspired by a similar disc we received during Shelby Logan's Run. I realized pretty early on that each track was connected with a site. That Game was entirely over the top, with helicopters, scuba diving, power boating, machine guns, and ATVs-- so when one of the last songs was Van Halen's Jump, I was convinced a tandem skydive was in our future and spent much of the game psyching myself up to do it and not let the team down (the song actually referred to a bungee jump). I'd really enjoyed using the CD to try to anticipate what was coming at each site, so I convinced the rest of GC to provide a similar CD for our Game. We told teams outright that it wasn't a puzzle, however, so I fear most teams may not have given it any attention.
More thoughts beyond the [More...] link.
What Went Well
The banquet food was surprisingly good. I expected mediocre hotel food, but everything was really quite tasty (mmm... escalloped potatoes...). Most people seemed to enjoy the friday night event, and all six challenges got accomplished almost within the expected time frame. Saturday breakfast delivery went without a hitch. I know of no hotel-related snafus. The Game started on time. People seemed to enjoy the games at the first pit stop. The corn maze, at night under the light of a full moon, had a spectacular vibe. We only needed to use footage of ourselves for 4 of the 30 charades in the charades puzzle-- the rest were culled from footage shot the night before during one of the friday night activities (and some of that footage was quite terrific). The movie theater location itself worked very well (thanks, Kim and Nate!) and really upped the ambiance of that puzzle. Everyone loved bowling. Blackjack held teams' interest for longer than intended. All teams got to the finish. All teams got fed at the pit stops. Staffing each site meant we got to interact with teams a lot, and were always on hand to swiftly handle problems as they arose. Using text messaging to spread the word about what was happening at each site worked very well (at least, until the SMS server went down for a bit before sunrise). The friday night stuff, pit stops, and trading game accomplished their goals of providing the means and motivation for team interaction-- I've heard from many players that they met and talked with lots of different people.
There are probably other things that went well, but these are the ones I observed directly.
What Went Wrong
The hotel kitchen had the wrong time for dinner on their schedule, and so the banquet started about an hour late. We misjudged the difficulty level of some friday night activities, resulting in some getting less play than anticipated thereby increasing the lines at others. People wound up waiting in longer lines, and we had insufficient staff to rectify the problem swiftly. Teams had trouble mapping the completed strips puzzle to the inlaid grid at the clue site (four beta teams had no problem here). Teams ignored the map of the artwork where the Codex puzzle was distributed, and therefore didn't understand that the "3" in the decoded message referred to the part of the artwork labeled "3" on the map. Once there, some teams still had trouble locating the proper book. There was some staff confusion about which teams were entitled to laminated decoder cards at the river. Helpers accidentally gave out only one answer card at the end of the river instead of two. Teams got to the corn maze about an hour late, so dinner was cold. Symbols in the maze were more difficult to locate than expected. We cut the puzzle immediately following the corn maze to try to get us back on schedule. The Tile Trouble puzzle at Seattle Center was too similar in feel to the corn maze search that immediately preceded it. Teams had more trouble assembling the Seattle Center cube than our beta teams had. Teams got skipped over the last 2, and in some cases 3, puzzles in the third leg (which we had planned for as the worst-case scenario, so it could be argued that this actually went well in that sense-- we knew in advance that we might skip those 3 locations, and so were prepared to do so-- but of course we'd have preferred teams got to see more puzzles). We didn't receive all the griddles we'd ordered, and so pancake production at breakfast ran at 50% expected capacity, thus prolonging the blackjack activity and delaying the start of the fourth leg. The custom electronic devices for the Blinky puzzle never got made, and so a software CD version was used instead. The CDs were burned on a Mac, and apparently PC laptops had trouble reading them. We were chased away from the Blinky site by the owner, who didn't like lots of vans in his parking lot. Some teams found the Blinky CD early, when the tape holding it to the underside of their seat failed. Even after applying a water mist, some teams couldn't read the message written on Rain-X on the inside of their van windows (contrary to some complaints, it was there, just hard to read unless you looked from the proper angle). Some teams got skipped over the final "meta" puzzle, which used information from the Handbook entries they'd been reading all day long. Some Handbooks crashed multiple times-- not sure how widespread the problem was, or if it was isolated to just a few devices. Fortunately recovery was fast and simple without any data loss. Staffing each site in person was physically demanding. Final standings have not yet been determined, due to timing imbalances caused by the Blinky problems.
I don't know how much of this stuff was noticable to players. Some might have been noticed, but made little or no impact. Others, like the Blinky problems, might have been major fiascos. I certainly hope all the things that went well outweigh whatever problems players may have encountered, but I know from past experience that even a single problem can sour someone's perception of the entire event.
From my own perspective, all the little (and some not-so-little) problems I saw made it difficult for me to celebrate at the end. Objectively I know that hiccups always happen in an event of this complexity, and I should be able to look past them to see everything that went right. But since I didn't play in the Game, I can't react to the players' experience because I don't know what it really was. I can only react to my experience as part of GC, trying to mitigate problems and keep things running smoothly. I play a lot of board games, and I always say that it doesn't matter to me whether I win or lose. What's important to me is that I played the best game I could play. I kick myself for the mistakes I make. In this case, at this moment, I feel that although we put on a good Game, we at GC could have done better. Some of the gripes players might have-- whether or not they liked the trading game, for example-- I accept as the cost of doing business. We were never going to please everyone in that regard. But we'd all run puzzle events before. As organizers we have, collectively, five MS puzzle hunts, 1 Game, and multiple MS Intern Puzzle Days under our belts. Many of our problems were foreseeable-- in some cases, even foreseen-- and should not have been allowed to happen. In the future I might discuss them at greater length, in the hopes that future organizers of similar events might learn from them and not repeat them.
Perhaps the most unexpected thing is that I think I enjoyed the planning of the event far more than the actual running of it. Other big events-- game shows, puzzle hunts, etc-- I've enjoyed running as much or more than planning. This time it was the other way around. Maybe that's because planning was a social group activity, and running was more solitary and stressful. I only saw bits and pieces of the actual event, and most of what I did see were the pit stops where I was stressed about keeping things going smoothly and getting our schedule back on track. I think I most enjoyed staffing the theater, where I didn't have to orchestrate as much and so my level of stress was lower.
I'm looking forward to honest feedback, both good and bad, from players about their experiences.
Posted by Peter at August 22, 2005 10:57 PM