I spent last weekend in the SF Bay area for No More Secrets, a Game ably run by first-time hosts Coed Astronomy. You may recall that at about the same time last year, I went down there for the Paparazzi Game and discovered that I was allergic to California. A few months later, however, I was fine during Hogwarts, so I hoped it was just a fluke.
No such luck. The reaction wasn't as brutal this time, but by midnight my nose was running freely and I was not a happy camper. I went through three travel-packs of tissues by the end of the Game. This has me very nervous about PiratesBATH three weekends from now. Are there any allergy remedies that work? I tried some pills (Claritin, maybe?) during Paparazzi, but they had no discernable effect.
Allergies aside, No More Secrets was a well-run, entertaining Game. It was particularly eventful for our team's captain, Jeff, who collaborated with the organizers to incorporate a marriage proposal into the Game's introduction. All the captains were asked to line up in a particular order, and then in unison reveal a page from their starting packets. Each page depicted a giant Scrabble tile which collectively spelled "JESSICA WILL YOU MARRY ME" with Jeff holding the "ME". It took Jessica a few moments to realize she was the one being asked, but she quickly said yes as Jeff got on one knee to present the ring.
Coed Astronomy took our Pit Stop idea from The Mooncurser's Handbook and tweaked it, replacing an assortment of activities with a single linear track of paper puzzles. I'd call the approach a success. It accomplished GC's main goal of slowing down leading teams while still providing them with something fun to do, and as a player it was often welcome to have a place to hunker down for a while and collaborate on puzzles in a setting more conducive to group-solving than a van. The final pit stop was, I think, an unfortunate choice, creating a sense of anticlimax. You really want the event to end with a triumphant surge of van-based puzzling, giving teams the sense of closing in on a finish. Instead, teams wound up staying at one location for hours, first doing a clever and fun series of puzzles (see below) and then killing time at the pit stop before moving on to the wrap party. Briny Deep was inexplicably on fire at this point, burning through the pit stop puzzles with criminal intent while esconced in comfy chairs, so in that sense we didn't mind...
I wasn't crazy about the answer submission system, which had teams phoning in the answer, receiving a new code word in response, and entering that code word into a laptop app to receive instructions on where to go next. It enabled GC to tweak the route and timing on the fly, so I can understand why they chose that approach, but the two-tiered system felt cumbersome. I suspect I'd have objected less if the app was on a Palm instead of a more-awkward-to-carry laptop.
The event's theming and story did nothing for me. The narrative was more of a distraction than a feature since it had no bearing on anything we were actually doing and wasn't particularly compelling. Narrative is hard-- I've only seen two games, The Apprentice: Zorg and Hogwarts, really nail it-- so that's not a knock against Coed Astronomy.
As in so many Bay Area Games, most of the locations were just clue drops with no correlation between the site and the puzzle, either thematically or mechanically. There are some teams who claim not to enjoy conference room-based puzzle events, but I'd argue that if the locations don't matter I'd rather just stay in a conference room. What's the point of sending me from one place to another if I don't need to interact with the location somehow, either in discovering the clue in the first place or solving it once I've got it? Why not just let me sit in a comfortable environment and solve a serialized set of puzzles instead? For Mooncurser's, most of our puzzles were tied in some way to their location. Players bowled at the bowling alley, watched a movie at a movie theater (and got a science fiction movie / theater - themed puzzle at the Galaxy 12 theater), traversed the corn maze, used statues as decoders at a sculpture garden, assembled a sign post at a sign post (well, they would have it they hadn't been skipped over it for time), played food Boggle after lunch, floated down a river to decode nautical flags, solved a song titles puzzle at the Experience Music Project... the locations mattered. Sometimes they can't. Sometimes you just need to get people from point A to point B, and the drive is too long so you need to put a clue somewhere between them to break up the drive. I get that, and that's fine. But most of the locations in a Game should, IMHO, fall into one of two categories: someplace cool or unusual and therefore interesting in its own right, or someplace thematically or mechanically linked to the puzzle found there. Otherwise, what's the point?
GC was friendly and helpful throughout, and we had no glitches either in puzzles or in logistics. We had a great time, and greatly appreciate all the effort that Coed Astronomy put into planning and running the event. I know how much work it is. Thanks!
A clue-by-clue rundown after the jump...
Punch Cards: A series of numbered punch cards with crossword clues. Each answer contained a directional word (UP, LEFT, SOUTH, etc). Tracing the path of the directions on each card yielded letters, and reading the letters in numerical order of their cards provided the answer. A nice first clue-- what to do was immediately apparent, and the form factor made it easy to parallelize and get everyone involved.
Triangles: The basic idea of this puzzle was similar to one I created for Mooncurser's (which was in turn adapted from a puzzle designed by my friend Aaron Weissblum), so I was initially quite psyched to tackle it. A bunch of triangular tiles were divided into thirds, with each third containing a terse text clue (UNIT OF WEIGHT, ANIMAL SOUND, BEAN). The triangles assembled into a bigger triangle by matching edges whose clues are homonyms/homophones of each other. Unfortunately, we matched CLOCK SOUND and BIRD as CUCKOO (instead of TICK and... CARDINAL, I believe), which caused us to have a couple of tiles that we matched only loosely or not at all and just shrugged off, figuring we had enough correctly assembled to get us started on the next step. Then by the time we got into the next step and got a mess of lousy data, we'd forgotten that we had some fudged connections. So we wound up blowing a good chunk of time on this puzzle unnecessarily. I didn't like the fact that once the thing was assembled, the clues on the outer edges didn't need to be solved in the same way that the inner clues were-- there was a completely different encoding system that kicked into effect at that point. That felt inelegant and cost us a bunch of time. Sigh...
Rock Wall: Our team went into the main entrance of the gym, where a climbing wall wth lots of interesting stuff marked off in tape awaited. The tapes were all different colors, and some were numbered and labeled with jazz and rock singers' names. As little girls had some kind of activity class around us, a bunch of grown men in pirate outfits hunkered down to try to figure out what was going on. Meanwhile, no other teams were there. We took photos of the wall and copied down as much data as we could, but feeling increasingly uncomfortable about being in the way of the kids, we exited and called GC. Turns out we were supposed to be around the corner, where a side entrance brought us to a room full of climbing walls. I got into a harness and climbed one of them, but Dann was much faster at it so we just let him do all the rest (my fingers were locked into claws after just the one climb). Each climbing path had a circle of pegs with words on them at the top, each circle corresponding to a rock we were given. Once we collected all the data we made short work of the puzzle, which involved finding the pair of words in each circle that could be anagrammed into the matching rock (AMETHYST, GRANITE, etc) and then reading those two words in the circle as a semaphore letter. I was amazed at my teammates' knowledge of rocks-- left to my own devices, I'd have had to resort to Googling a list of rock types and searching for likely anagram candidates.
Chess: At the Computer Museum we picked up an enormous chess-like board and a page of images grouped into sets. We quickly realized each image represented a six-letter word that could be found in a 2x3 section of the board, and that each section contained a chess piece on one of the squares thereby giving us a letter. So we got the initial message in short order. And even though three of us independently at some point said, "Hey everyone, 2x3 means Braille" we couldn't make the necessary leap of merging all the 2x3 grids from each image set. There were too many other approaches that seemed possible for us to converge on the right one. The puzzle would have been much stronger had it internally clued the merging step. There was also no reason for the words to be arranged in different patterns within the 2x3 grids-- some were simple loops, others were in rows, others were in S-shapes, etc. That seemed like signal, but it wasn't. All the words should have just been simple loops. We burned a lot of time here before getting nudged onto the right track by GC. This puzzle could have been really nice with a little more refinement.
No Morse Egrets: An audio clip gave crossword-style clues which solved to phonetic approximations of various team names (including ours: TIMBER KNEE DEEP!). The timing on this drive-and-solve worked out perfectly for us, since we solved it just as we pulled into the destination town, and everyone on the team enjoyed pitching in. A good group puzzle.
Pipes: A walk through a lovely covered bridge produced a word association maze. The hardest thing about solving this was doing so outdoors, where gusts of breeze threatened to blow away the pieces. I would have enjoyed a larger, more complex version of this puzzle, but word association puzzles are smack in my wheelhouse.
Phone Mastermind: The puzzle itself was entirely pedestrian and straightforward-- playing it by phone didn't alter the basic Mastermind process. Not sure why they bothered with this clue at all. The location, on the other hand, was superb. We loved the blue whale skeleton outside the marine center, and the view of the ocean was pleasant enough that we took a few minutes to just enjoy it.
Numbers: It's always satisfying to be the guy who cracks a puzzle, so when we sat down to look over the list of clues that came with this crossword grid and I realized that they made sense if you put a number in front of them, I was pretty happy. How we managed to not think of treating the values in the table as X and Y coordinates boggles my mind. Unlike the chess puzzle, though, this one was totally our fault. A nice puzzle.
Lego: Another cool location, out on the beach with a shipwreck at the end of the pier. The puzzle was also a great concept-- given a small set of Lego pieces, match each overhead schematic to the correct side view, assemble the pieces properly, and view from the front to see a letter. Except they picked a word that was too backsolvable. Once we had HIP????, we immediately called in HIPSTER. All this puzzle needed was a more carefully-chosen answer. Assembling the Legos was fun, but if a team can short-circuit a puzzle, they will. We'd rather have needed to assemble every letter.
Bank Heist: A huge disappointment. This clue had been built up over the course of the preceding clues. First we received a blueprint of the "bank" we needed to break into. Then we received a couple of transparencies that overlayed the blueprint with additional information about security measures we'd need to overcome. All good, and it seemed to be setting up a nifty scenario. But the reality was lame. Talking our way past the guard required no particular approach-- there was no puzzle to it, it was just basically wheedling until he decided to let us in. Once inside, we had to fish something out of a jacuzzi, which just wasn't very hard or interesting. Finally, the "motion sensor" we had to avoid tripping was a person with a squirt-gun who would fire if our operative's belt of bells made a sound. Turns out you can move pretty quickly in such a belt without jingling. The whole thing was an enormous let-down after the multi-stage build-up. There was no puzzle content, and the physical challenges weren't challenging. There was also a flow problem, in that many teams arrived more or less concurrently, which didn't help matters.
Vowels: This puzzle at the candy shop was one of my favorites (but then, I love word puzzles). Pairs of clues solved to words where all the consonants were the same, but the vowels might not be (e.g. ARENA/URINE). Treat AEIOU as a 5-bit sequence and generate a 5-bit value for each pair of words by turning a bit on if the corresponding vowel appears in the second word of the pair and not in the same position in the first word. If the vowel doesn't appear, or appears in the same place in both words, the bit is off. That gives you values in the 1-26 range, and therefore letters, giving new words. These words can also have their vowels changed, and so on, recursing to a final answer. A solid, fun paper puzzle.
Game of Life: A nice example of interacting with the environment. At this building, a large exterior window looked into an office where, on the far wall, computers were running identical programs. The top of the screen had pairs of monochrome pixel patterns arranged in three pairs, with colons between each pair. The rightmost pattern changed every second. Below those was a scrolling display of 5x5 monochrome patterns, followed by a set of additional patterns in other colors. We also received a PC "sequencer" app that showed us a single 5x5 pattern and three empty 5x5 grids. The grids were interactive-- we could toggle cells on and off, and a VERIFY button would presumably tell us if we had toggled everything correctly.
We'd been forewarned to know about cellular automata, and so we immediately recognized this as a Game of Life puzzle. I left my teammates to get busy while I used the bathroom. Some time later when I emerged, my team had gathered all the images and entered them into Excel, but hadn't figured out what to do with them. They'd tried evolving the first image in the app according to the rules of Life, but that didn't work. There were no obvious relationships among the patterns. I asked them to get me up to speed on what they knew and what they tried. The images at the top of the displays were obviously a clock, so we had the numbers 0-9. When they told me that the clock patterns were 4x4, I immediately knew what we had to do (although it really made no difference-- they could have been 5x5 and the puzzle would have been the same-- but for some reason the fact that they were smaller helped me jump to the right conclusion). There are only 4 rules in Life, which can be summarized as "If a [living | dead] cell has [x] living neighbors, that cell becomes [living | dead] in the next iteration" where x can have multiple values. The 4x4 number patterns were our primer. We had a sequence of 10 patterns, 0-9, and we had to use them to figure out the rules for a customized Game of Life. Once we had them, we could then correctly evolve the single pattern provided in our sequencer app. Once we did, it gave as a sequence of 26 5x5 patterns: an alphabet. This let us translate the sequence from the office into an email address. When we sent an email to that address, a message flashed on the screen in the office with our name and a bunch of colored symbols similar to the ones at the end of the office message. These symbols corresponded to the body of our message. We sent the alphabet next, discovered the symbols were essentially phone-spell (each symbol mapped to letters on the same phone key), and got the final answer.
I thought this was a super puzzle. There was a nice "aha" moment in figuring out what to do, and then executing it was fun and satisfying. I think it's hilarious that practically every team sent the alphabet as their message, which is undoubtedly the WORST possible choice, since any quick-thinking competing team could see that and short-circuit the entire puzzle. Better would be something like THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG, which gives you the whole alphabet but isn't as guessable. In practice I don't think any teams caught on to that and short-circuited, but the point remains.
Gibberish Songs: We powered through the next clue, a list of song lyrics turned into gibberish by replacing each word with a word that rhymed. A veteran of You Don't Know Jack's "gibberish questions", I made short work of this by simply reciting each word without the opening consonant. The whole thing couldn't have taken us more than five minutes to solve. That kind of success is fun to have, but I can't imagine it's what GC expected. A 5-minute puzzle just isn't worth the effort to create, test, and deploy.
Red lights: A large 5x5 grid of blinking red lights was positioned on the Stanford campus. Like everyone else we recorded the patterns and returned to our van. Life was still on our brain, but try as we might we couldn't get the patterns to evolve into anything interesting. We called in to GC to verify that Life was not the correct approach, just so we could get it out of our system and open our minds to other possibilities.
This was a puzzle that just should not have worked. Once Life was eliminated, there were no other clues as to what to do. All we had were a sequence of 5x5 patterns, and it was time to play "guess what the designers were thinking." But I did, in fact, hit on the right solution. The very fact that the data was so sparse limited the realm of possibilities. We were meant to XOR each pattern into the next one in the sequence, producing letters. Amazingly, however, three different people in the van all did the XOR wrong and got garbage. I could chalk it up to being tired, but we were sloppy. Once GC confirmed that XOR was the right idea, we got more serious about it and turned the task over to Excel. Excel is your friend. Excel doesn't make stupid mistakes. Always trust Excel.
DNA Runaround: Oh. My. God. Hands down, the worst puzzle in the event. This puzzle had a confluence of problems: my allergies were in high gear, our team was falling asleep, some of the data we had to gather was fuzzy, the puzzle had too many layers, it relied on a bit of data (that there's a DNA "start" codon) that many teams didn't have, the final step was very weak... a perfect storm of suck. A wide array of objects had to be identified according to the element (earth, air, fire, water) they could represent. These elements then mapped to the GTAC nucleotides of DNA, forming DNA codons. Then we had to leap there being a second categorization system for all the objects, this time based on card suits, which ultmately mapped to Braille. This was far too obtuse a puzzle for the time of night at which it was delivered. The final Braille step was extremely thin and unsatisfying, and the best thing I can say about the puzzle was that we got Pop Rocks, Swedish fish, Red Hots, and Airheads to snack on. I'm certain that James enjoyed this puzzle more than anyone else on Briny Deep, because he slept through it in the van.
Charades: NOW we're talking! Or not, since it's Charades. This was a perfect clue for the time of night, and I would have liked it to have lasted even longer. Each team got split in half, with one half "imprisoned" in a glass-enclosed, mostly sound-proof room and the other half left outside the room to "rescue" them. Each side had a seed word which they charaded to the other, and letters from each correctly-guessed word filled in blanks in the next one in the list. Ok, the mechanics of the puzzle aren't really the point-- the important thing is that we played charades back and forth between the two halves of the team until we got a final answer. We hear the Burninators hated this clue, which pretty much summarizes the difference between us and them [update: Wei-Hwa informs me that the Burninators in fact quite liked this clue, so it turns out this in no way illustrates any difference between us. =)]. Sure, there was no real puzzle here, but after the brain-sapping slog of the previous clue this was an ideal change of pace. I would have happily played charades for an hour here, but it only took us a few minutes to finish the chain.
Sodokube: A big metal cube, each side a 4x4 grid. Some cells had magnetic letters permanently affixed (six different colors, one color per side). We also received a supply of letter magnets in corresponding colors, enough to exactly fill the gaps in the cube. Inspection proved that each color had exactly the same set of letters, and that no letter repeated within each color. This was a sudoku cube. Once assembled, a path on the magnets traced out the answer word (MULTIDIMENSIONALITY). The hefty cube is a nifty artifact, and it's always nice to see a different take on a standard puzzle type. Ironically, we had an almost identical puzzle in Mooncurser's but cut it because, at the time, we thought it was too hard. It's also a suboptimal Game puzzle, in that a cube is difficult for multiple people to work with at a time. We wound up transcribing the data into Excel and splitting into two teams, one working with the spreadsheet and one with the cube itself. Kudos for the breakfast, however-- the quiches were lovely, and I particularly enjoyed the cheese-and-basil sandwiches.
Scrabble runaround: We started with a set of Scrabble tiles and a clue. At each stop, we got a new tile and had to anagram the set into an answer to the new clue. That answer became the basis for a very simple paper-puzzle that yielded the combination to a lock. Photos directed us to a nearby location where we had to unlock a mailbox containing the next tile/clue set. Lather, rinse, repeat too many times. This probably seemed like a good idea on paper, but in practice it went on a little too long and was only a 1-2 person puzzle. The ratio of walking around to doing fun stuff (solving puzzles) was too high. We wound up having 2 of us doing the walking and solving while the rest of the team followed in the van. The puzzles weren't meaty enough for multiple solvers to dig in. Tweaked a bit-- meatier puzzles, LONGER distances between mailboxes so that teams drove from point to point and solved during the drive-- this could have been a fun sequence, but instead it fell flat and wore out its welcome.
Sound maze: I slept through this puzzle-- possibly the first time I've ever napped during a clue. I understand it involved an audio tour of a park, and using the sounds to navigate from place to place. Other than that, I know little.
Double words: This was a very clever puzzle. We received two copies of the same puzzle grid, but while the puzzles on each sheet were identical, the sheets themselves weren't-- each had a different-colored note conveying essentially the same information. We weren't sure what to make of that-- it was clearly not just "here's two copies of the puzzle so you can work on it more easily", but beyond that nothing jumped out. The right edge of both sheets faded away, as if the copier was out of toner (and in fact the notes on each sheet mentioned such a toner problem). The puzzle itself consisted of crossword clues and boxes (most empty, but some already filled in) for the answers, with lines connecting some boxes to others in neighboring answers, indicating that the same letter was to be filled in for all such connected boxes (is there a name for this kind of puzzle?). Except it wasn't working. We filled in all the boxes, but some letters didn't carry over as expected and when we tried to extract a final answer we got parts that made sense and parts that were garbage. And then someone noticed that ?????LA?????? could be answered as either CHOCOLATE
My Voice is My Passport, Verify Me: To gain entrance to the next clue site, we basically had to play Karaoke Revolution and about a dozen correct notes. Our task was made a little harder by our inability to recognize our song, which (we later discovered) was Puff the Magic Dragon. So we were just trying to match the notes by feel, which is a lot harder than singing a song you know. Still, a few minutes of effort got us in the door.
Dragonquest: A very nicely conceived and executed puzzle in which parts of the Silicon Valley Microsoft offices were recreated in a medieval text adventure, and everything in the physical world had a virtual analog. We needed to open a locked box with colored buttons (a chest with colored gems) by determining the correct sequence to push. This involved talking to a portrait in the game that asked questions about pictures in the real world; finding half a parchment under the real toilet and the other half in the virtual outhouse; and so forth. While the rest of my team wandered the physical site, I explored the virtual one and called in when I found something of interest. That parallelization worked nicely. I wonder why they chose a horrid Scott Adams-style parser (GO N instead of just N) instead of a friendly Infocom-style parser. The parser cost one team at least an hour when their attempts to TOUCH RED met with "Don't touch that", where TOUCH RED GEM was required. Ugh. Happily, that didn't bite us. This was a fresh, innovative puzzle that worked well and I really enjoyed.
Posted by Peter at May 26, 2007 4:44 PM