Static Zombie

Things I Didn't Like

The bumps, however, were minor and easily overshadowed by the positives. Great locations, many great clues, and terrific people all around. We had a fantastic time. Many thanks to Captain Bloodbath and crew for all their effort in staging the event!

And now, the clue-by-clue rundown. Apologies in advance if I say horrible, mean things about your baby. Kudos to EVERY team who created a puzzle for this event, even the ones I hated. I appreciate the time, effort, and creativity that went into them. But I nevertheless offer my honest opinion, because I believe honest feedback is the only kind that's of any value. If my words are too blunt, I hope you'll forgive me.

Single Pirate Seeks Same: The event began with a fun scramble through a playground to find 26 pirate portraits and associated words, each of which paired with another based on similar meanings of their words. Once you had the pairs, you had to notice that each member of a pair was wearing their eyepatch on a different eye, telling you how to arrange them so you could read their shirt buttons as Braille. We did pretty well on this clue-- we knew immediately that we had to pair the pirates up, but there were so many other potential data points-- hat/hatless, weapon/weaponless, shirt/shirtless, male/female-- that it took a while to zero in on the words. I think it was a poor design choice to have an equal number of male and female pirates, but not have all the pairs be mixed gender-- when we noticed it was an even split, it seemed a clear signal to put them in male/female pairs. Still, we left the site only a few minutes behind the leaders and way ahead of most other teams, and the puzzle had plenty of internal cluing to lead teams to the pairing and Braille steps. A solid kick-off to the event.

Turtle Island: Ugh. Six photographs of pirates burying treasure, and a big map of an island with lots of spots circled and labelled with letters. This puzzle had two problems. Fundamentally, it wasn't especially fun to solve. Even when we knew exactly what to do and what the answer was, some of the pieces still didn't seem to jibe-- associating each photo with where it seemed to be on the map was inexact at best. But the bigger sin was made by GC when a) they told us to bring a shovel, and b) they positioned this puzzle at a large, water-encircled park. Those things together made us believe that the map correlated to the real location and we'd need to dig something up somewhere. I mean, come on-- six photos of pirates with shovels!. Digging! So two of us traipsed around the entire island looking for a landmark from the photos. An hour later, we found the rest of the teams in the parking lot solving from their vans. It was absolutely, 100% foreseeable that some teams would think the park and map went together. All GC had to do was distribute this puzzle almost anywhere else-- somewhere not park-like, not encircled by water, and otherwise not resembling the hilly, grassy island depicted on the map. This fiasco sucked all the momentum we'd gathered from rocking the first clue, put us in a foul mood, and made us not trust GC for a long time.

iPatch: A set of words with their letters arranged alphabetically except for the final letter, which was out of sequence, all presented on the screen of an iMac. The last letters, read in sequence, told us to apply an eye patch to the words. The eyepatch/iPatch pun was immediately obvious, but we were stuck for far longer than we should have been because all the ways we tried to apply the iPatch weren't working. We tried inserting an I. We tried inserting an I and anagramming. We tried deleting an I. We tried deleting an I and anagramming. What failed to occur to us was replacing an existing letter with an I. Immensely aggravating at the time, since we felt we had solved all but the last step of the puzzle, so we knew hints weren't going to be useful, but entirely our fault-- the right approach was just sitting in our blind spot. Many thanks to lowkey for breaking the conceptual logjam for us and XX-Rated.

Lego Battleship: In retrospect this puzzle, which involved reconstructing naval signal flags on a Battleship-like grid using narrative accounts of sea battles between four warring fleets (each with their own Lego color), was a bit overwrought. The puzzle was straightforward and mostly a matter of just following somewhat obfuscated directions. But it was well-suited to parallelization by four solvers, and... Legos!

Pieces of Eight: The Bonny Wenches' puzzle. They spent literally hundreds of woman-hours on this puzzle over the course of multiple months, much of which went to actual physical production. The lunatics decided to fabricate it themselves, which entailed cutting out 216 circles (9 x 24 teams) from foam board, further cutting each of those circles into three pieces, and gluing content to the top of each piece (which also had to be cut out...). Not to mention putting a complete set of the resulting pieces into a lovely sachet. In contrast, Briny Deep spent less than ten man-hours on our puzzle, leaving the production to Captain Bloodbath's galley slaves. But back to Pieces of Eight. Each properly-assembled circle spelled out an 8-letter word, but of course the words were tricky and were split among the pieces such that none of the first letters were actually first on a piece-- so finding them was a fun puzzle. Ultimately we were aided by a production glitch which effectively split the pieces into two sets, one for six of the words and one for the remaining three. Noticing that glitch enabled us to focus on the smaller set and isolate the correct words quickly, which in turn helped us gain a foothold in the other set. Once assembled and sorted alphabetically, highlighted letters spelled out SHIFT VIII. Caesar-shifting the words eight places revealed the answer reading down one column of letters. Placing the puzzle at an outdoor statue of Caesar at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose was a nice touch, although one whose significance went unnoticed until after the fact. We felt like we did very well on this puzzle, gaining back some time, momentum, and good spirits.

Letter from Home: The first of two tile-matching puzzles in the event. The creators of this one were kind enough to cut up the tiles for us (are you listening, Golden Booty?). Numbers on some edges mapped to elements, the abbreviations of which also happened to be same as the abbreviations for U.S. states on other edges. Assembling yielded a morse message of directions and values, which told us how to navigate through the letters of a fixed-font message and generate the answer. The pieces were a bit disjointed-- why combine Morse with states and elements?-- but it flowed pretty naturally. I would have liked the start point on the message to be clearer. Our suspicion of where to start was correct, but we were more certain that we'd wind up ending at the X so we opted to start there instead and work backwards.

Knots: We were given dozens of tiny pictures illustrating steps in the creation of certain kinds of knots, each associated with a letter. We had to follow instructions to tie knots, labelling each step along the way with the correct picture/letter to generate a message. I didn't much care for this one, because there wasn't much puzzle solving involved until the final step. It was mainly an exercise in following directions and not letting tiny slips of paper blow away in the afternoon breeze. A much more entertaining version of the same puzzle would have had us making knots of each other's bodies instead, Twister-style. Future GCs: feel free to steal that.

Daggers: The second tile-matching puzzle. This time, we had to cut up the tiles ourselves (boooooo!). The first step was similar to my tile puzzle from Mooncurser's, but with words instead of pictures and with flimsy paper tiles we had to tape together instead of sturdy foam tiles that were easy to manipulate. Did I mention we had to cut them out ourselves? Each tile showed two halves of a dagger, with the blade pointing in from one edge and the hilt pointing out from another. When property matched up, the tiles formed a skull shape (very nice). Each hilt had one to three dots on it, and apparently there was a message to be read by indexing 1, 2, or 3 letters into the word for that dagger. We, however, immediately thought of ternary, so we skipped that intermediate message. We used the right ternary decoding (subtract 1 from the dots) and somehow (thanks, Excel!) found the message reading backwards-- which is what the intermediate message would have told us to do. Since we didn't know about the indexed message the final step felt clunky to us, but now that we know how it really worked it was rather nice-- and we feel even smarter. A win-win all around, then.

Boardwalk: This puzzle, located at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, involved matching Photoshopped images of signs in the area to the real signs to extract a message. This was the broken puzzle, which wasn't a big deal. Especially because along with the puzzle came a bonus challenge, to win any prize at the boardwalk and modify it to make it more piratey. So what does a Jersey boy do to win a prize at the boardwalk? Skee-Ball, baby! I was pleased to see I hadn't lost my touch. I was psyched to be on the boardwalk, and only wish we'd had more time to spend there-- definitely one of the most fun locations I've been to in a Game.

Crates: The puzzle itself was very simple: tip over crates of various heights to create a path from start to finish. Too simple, really-- it only took a couple of minutes to solve. Lowkey took it to the next level by constructing a life-size version of it for us to solve on the beach. A+ for production values-- I just wish it had been a bit more challenging.

Chantily Clad: Day two began with the aforementioned sack race, followed by a delightful clue involving a CD full of sea chanties accompanied by a deck of image cards. The title of each chanty could be formed by phonetically combining three of the cards. Arrange the cards for each chanty in order created a 3x15(?) grid. The back of each card depicted a pirate, but inspection revealed that the pirates weren't all the same. Some had patches, some had tattoos, some had hats, some had hooks, and so forth. Isolating each trait and looking at only those cards which had that trait revealed 3x5 pixel letters forming the final message. This was totally fun, thematic, solvable while driving, and very satisfying. Bravo!

Walk the Plank: Our puzzle. 24 dowels and a wooden plank with 12 rows. Each dowel had a word and 0-2 stripes on it. Each row of the plank had two blank lines (one flush left, the other flush right), 0-2 nails driven in between the blanks, and a hole for a dowel on each side. The word THE was written down the center of the plank, and the bottom two blanks were filled in with the words WALK and PLANK. This was a word association puzzle. Each dowel was half of a compound phrase. Each compound phrase matched another, such that the non-dowel words formed a 3-word phrase of the form VERB THE NOUN. For instance, the dowels SKI and FIN lead to SKI JUMP and SHARK FIN, or ski JUMP THE SHARK fin. So the SKI dowel got inserted on the left side of the plank, and the FIN dowel on the right side in the same row. Solvers were instructed to fill in their answers in alphabetical order, and when they had them all each row could be read as ternary using the bands on the dowels and the nails. We revised the puzzle multiple times to remove as many ambiguous pairs as possible, but the capacity for people to make up phrases and feel strongly about them is boundless. The ones that tripped the most people up seemed to be SODA POP THE QUESTION MARK and STAR BURST THE BUBBLE GUM. People really wanted to make POP THE BUBBLE instead, but BURST THE BUBBLE is the stronger idiom (and the completely flawed approach of Googling the two phrases bears me out, 73,800 to 29,100). The puzzle was originally created with constraints that were ultimately removed, so I'll take the blame for not returning to the puzzle after the constraints went away to remove the weakest pairs (DIFFERENCE ENGINE) and eliminate all ambiguity. Still, multiple test groups solved the puzzle as-is. I liked this puzzle, especially for this kind of event, because it's a great team activity. Even if you're driving, you can still participate and shout out phrases. It's hard to create Game clues that can get all team members involved.

Message in a Bottle: The production work on this was the real star-- a real FUZE drink bottle had been precision etched with custom content, hidden beneath the obviously-detachable label. Inside the bottle was a stick with a rubber tip. The label had to be put inside the bottle and positioned with the stick so that its contents lined up with etchings on the bottle. We completely overlooked a key element of the bottle that bound two pieces of content together, and so we were stuck on the final step for entirely too long. But what really bothered me about the puzzle was that one of its two messages was completely unnecessary, effectively just telling you to read the other message. I suppose in a way it's no different from the Daggers puzzle in that regard, except in this case we didn't skip directly to the second message. But the second message was obvious to us, we just chose to decode the other one first-- which turned out to be a waste of time. A nice idea with great production, though.

S un ken Ship: Two easy crosswords fastened together with a vertical barrier between them, obviously evoking Battleship. One side of the barrier showed a deaf pirate, the other a blind one. Each puzzle contained coordinates hidden inside the completed grid. On the blind pirate's side, the coordinates were phonetic (BEFORE = B4); on the deaf pirate's side the coordinates were spelled out (HEIGHT = H 8). The coordinates on each side pinpointed locations on the other representing ships 1, 2, 3, and 4 spaces long (as hinted by the title of the puzzle). When read in size order, those letters spelled the final clue. We completely rocked this puzzle, which our morale sorely needed after our flubbing of the bottle puzzle. I thought it all worked together beautifully.

Origami: A surreal origami puzzle, presented in an enormous origami container. I am not very good at construction puzzles so I mentally checked out on this one and focused on mini-puzzles instead, but it all seemed to work nicely as intended. Again, though, most of the puzzle was just following directions-- the actual puzzle part was pretty small.

+ Marks the Spot: A set of popsicle sticks with velcro pieces and numbers on them, which had to be assembled such that the value shown on one stick was formed by summing the values shown on all sticks touching it. Just to make things harder, the sticks were double-sided. Harder, but certainly not more fun. The correct approach to this puzzle seemed completely arbitrary to us. In fact, even after scratching off major hints for this one, we STILL had trouble making it work out properly. Maybe we were just grumpy at this point, but by the end of this puzzle the bile had risen in our throats. Suffice it to say that this is the only puzzle in Briny Deep's history to be cast out of the van in disgust and literally peed on by two pirates.

Little Things: Cards with three attributes-- color, time period, and subject matter. The instructions strongly suggested that the right approach was to create sets of four cards such that no attribute's value was repeated within the set. But we couldn't make it work. We tried, and tried, and tried again. We thought we might have gotten our time periods for some images wrong, so we adjusted and tried again. And again. Instead of thinking, "Maybe this is the wrong approach," we were certain we were doing the right thing incorrectly. The instructions could absolutely be read to confirm it. But no. That wasn't the idea at all. Instead, you just had to deal out the cards in a certain way and read the corresponding letters from the grids on each card. I can't really judge the puzzle fairly because the instructions led us so convincingly astray that I can't imagine how our interpretation hadn't been spotted in playtesting.

Follow the Directions: A meta-puzzle involving all 36 mini-puzzles and the 36 wooden tiles we'd also gotten throughout the event. The tiles, each with a letter or number, assembled into a treasure map. But following the path on the map just produced a "It's not THAT easy" message. Here we were sunk by our own cleverness. On day one, we'd noticed that the answers to the mini puzzles formed pairs-- HEART and SOUL, SALT and VINEGAR, FIRE and ICE, and so forth. Each tile corresponded to a mini-puzzle, and each mini-puzzle had a compass rose on the back. When the path didn't make sense, we were sure the pairings came into play. So we spent forever trying things like: if the path took us south off the SALT tile, read the southern letter from the compass on the VINEGAR tile instead. We tried many variations on this theme, but nothing worked. What we missed was that each answer had some combination of the letters N, S, E, and W. So when the path took us to the VINEGAR tile, we needed to read the northern and eastern letters off the VINEGAR compass rose. This could have been a great meta if GC hadn't decided to be too clever for their own good. The pairs, you see, were part of the hidden meta-meta, which we didn't know existed (in fact, no teams did until the end). So when we hit a meta-puzzle that looked like the finale, nothing on the planet was going to move us away from utilizing the obviously-intentional pairings of the mini-puzzle answers. The meta-meta effectively ruined the mini-meta.

Meta-Meta: The meta-meta itself was actually quite elegant. There were 36 minis and 18 main puzzles. Each pair of mini-answers could be anagrammed into one of the main puzzle answers plus two extra letters. Over the course of the event we also received eight doubloons, each of which depicted an icon. These, too, were paired-- CUT and DRIED, OPEN and CLOSED, LAND and SEA, and YES and NO. If you take the leftover letters from the anagrams and remove all the letters in the doubloon pairs, you were left with the final password to Captain Bloodbath's treasure chest: BARNACLE. I solved this on the flight home with much of the data missing-- I didn't remember all the main puzzle answers and didn't know many of the minis, but once I figured out what was going on I was able to backsolve all of my missing information. It was a fun meta, but only one team got to solve it. Let's think about that for a minute. The entire structure of the event-- the answers teams were assigned to build puzzles around, the very existance of 36 mini-puzzles, let alone the answers to those puzzles-- was designed for the express purpose of making a meta-puzzle, and only ONE TEAM got the opportunity to discover that puzzle during the event. One team out of 24. We would have LOVED to have worked on this puzzle. We'd have marveled at its elegance, at the pieces that had been waved under our noses. But the event hadn't been structured in such a way as to allow us to do so. That's a crushing disappointment for everyone involved. I feel bad for the people on GC who were obviously excited enough about the concept to craft an entire event around it. When you make something with so many precision-crafted parts, you want everyone to wind it up and watch it go. For only one team to have that opportunity must have been a let-down.

In Puzzle Hunt, we've learned not to backload our most impressive stuff. As tempting as it is to build the event around an intricately-devised meta structure, the cold reality is that only a small fraction of teams will ever get far enough to see it. And while every aesthetic, puzzle-designer sense in me burns to create a whiz-bang finale that brings all the pieces together, the sad truth is that all that effort is better spent elsewhere, where more players will actually see and appreciate it. In the case of PirateBATH, considering all the planning that went into crafting the meta, I wish a little more planning had gone into making sure everyone got to it. I'm sure the organizers wish the same.