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The Microsoft Puzzle Hunt, which I've been working on for about 15 long months, is now over. This event broke me. It is probably the last puzzle event I will ever run with a volunteer committee.

We tried some big, risky things in this event, and I'm very happy about that. I'd rather fail spectacularly for trying something different than do something safe that doesn't push the envelope. At least one of our innovations-- timed puzzles that teams were encouraged to solve as a team as an in-conference-room event-- was a resounding success. This concept was born from my feeling that out-of-conference-room events represent a tremendous amount of overhead for something that a small percentage of players ever see. From a cost/benefit perspective, they're a horrible investment. I wanted to find a way to create special moments the entire team could partake in. Timed puzzles, specifically constructed to be conducive to group solves, were a great low-cost, high-impact solution, and they seem to have been universally adored.

Some experiments work, some don't. In retrospect, it's clear how different decisions would have made the event better. I take the blame for all the problems that didn't get corrected. There was no one leader-- the hunt was essentially run by committee. That doesn't excuse me from responsibility for poor design or execution. We had a chance during the event to correct the biggest problem-- players being blocked from accessing more puzzles-- and I pushed the wrong priorities. Instead of looking at the evidence that teams just didn't want to use our existing release valve of moving from the Competitive to the Recreational division, I stood by it under the belief that any change of course at 3 AM would represent a breach of trust to the Competitive teams that had moved beyond the blockage, and to the teams that had already switched to Recreational to get around it. I still believe that to be true, but breaching that trust and unblocking players may have been the lesser evil.

I feel deeply disappointed that, after 15 months of planning, the event we ran was not the event people wanted to play. I grossly misjudged what people wanted from Puzzle Hunt. Competition is deeply ingrained in the DNA of its players, and they accepted enormous amounts of frustration rather than give that up. Some people on the organizing committee thought that might happen, but I didn't believe it. I was wrong. I accept the blame. I deeply apologize to all the players whose fun was compromised as a result. I also feel terrible for all the puzzle authors whose work got less exposure because of it.

The event was created when two teams, each planning a Hunt, ran out of steam on their own and merged (the events merged; almost all of my original team simply bailed). That was reflected in many ways in the event, and usually not for the better. Elements conflicted with each other. Problems compounded each other. And mostly, the creators were just tired and ready to be done. It frustrated me to be the front man for an event that I didn't entirely believe in, and it depresses me to feel so defeated by the experience. I don't intend to put myself in that position again.

Every muscle in my body aches.

Yesterday I participated in City Chase, an "urban adventure" competition running in multiple cities around the world this year. Teams of two have 6 hours to complete 10 challenges (from a menu of 14 choices) located all around the city.

When my teammate and I arrived and met up with a pair of friends-- with whom we traveled the entire day-- we quickly realized as we surveyed the crowd of young, athletic competitors that we had signed up for a very different event from the rest of them. Many of the other teams, with their camel packs and lycra, were clearly there for the "race" aspect of the event. When the perky hosts got on stage to lead the group in a series of warm-up exercises and received about a 95% participation rate, I had an acute feeling of culture shock. These people were serious. We were there to have fun. And to be fair, so were they. Our definitions were just a little different.

The event kicked off with a tiny scavenger hunt as a way to stagger teams out from the start-- answer some trivia, find a couple of goofy things (a stranger the same height as you, a live animal, etc), that kind of thing. Then you received your list of "ChasePoints" and could begin planning your own route for the day, restricted to travel by foot or public transportation. The winner of the event did the smart thing and immediately ran themselves in the opposite direction from the closest ChasePoints, thereby avoiding crowds and experiencing no wait times. The key word there was "ran". Our foursome was on a strict no-running plan, so we want with the path of least resistance and hit the closest sites first.

Here's the rundown of what we did:

Because you (yes you, Wei-Hwa) demanded it, a recap of the fourth Shinteki Decathlon, which the fiancee and I played in a couple of weekends ago (on different teams).

This was unquestionably the easiest Decathlon yet. Briny Deep solved all regular clues without taking any hints, missing only two bonus clues. Which isn't to say the event was easy. I think the difficulty level was just right, and most of the clues were solid. In the past, bonus puzzles were hidden inside each other puzzle. While intriguing in concept, in practice they were often very difficult to find and, due to the constraints such a scheme places on their construction, sometimes not very good. The new system dispensed with the hide and seek and gave us a booklet of bonus clues outright, leaving it to us to figure out which ones linked to which main clues and how. This worked out much better, giving teams something tangible to chew on between main clues. Definitely a keeper going forward.

As always, a big thanks to Brent, Linda, Martin, and the entire JPT crew for running the event.

The theme this time was Child's Play, and all of the clues hewed nicely to that theme.

Shintekimon: Teams faced off in rounds of Shintekimon using the traditional Shinteki Palm devices. After naming their Shintekimon, teams could battle each other by using the Palm's beaming ability. The result was anywhere from 0 to 5 rounds of battle, with wins, losses, and ties reported for each round. When we thought we were ready, we could fight the reigning champion, Superstar. Defeating him opened the gate for the team to move on to the next clue. Shintekimon could be renamed at any time, and the more battles you fought, the faster you got hints. We were just converging on the preponderance of Rs and Ss in the various champion names when the hint dropped revealing were were playing Rock Paper Scissors by comparing the names of the two competitors and ignoring all letters except R(ock), P(aper), and S(cissors). Another few minutes and I'm confident we would have hit it on our own. We spent a little too much time blindly battling and not enough analyzing our data. Or too much time analyzing our data and not enough battling and earning hints. Take your pick. A nicely-conceived puzzle that leveraged the presence of all teams and got everyone interacting.

Nursery Rhymes: A long climb up a hill to a scenic view, thus continuing the Shinteki tradition of getting teams sweaty at the start of the event for maximum van ambience. Along the way we encountered reworded nursery rhymes we had to recognize, and at the top we got a double crostic to make sense of them. Entirely straightforward, it would have been nice to have some kind of twist here to spice up the puzzle. Other than recognizing the rhymes, of course, which were all pretty obvious.

Connect Four: A travel Connect Four set with letters written on both sides of the checkers. Each checker indicated which column it belonged to, and the board itself had word separators. A rather clever use of Connect Four, turning a game about dropping checkers in columns into a two-sided drop-quote. Noticing that the blank-on-one-side checkers had only once place they could be gave us our start point, and we made pretty short work of the grid by solving from the bottom up on one side and using the back as a sanity check. The next leap-- recognizing the grid itself as a calendar-- was satisfying, making good use of the seven-column grid size and neatly explaining the blank leading/trailing checkers. A solid puzzle and a fun one to solve as a group.

Red Light, Green Light: To obtain the next clue we played a quick game of Red Light Green Light with a human traffic light-- some quick, childish fun. The clue itself was a set of eight cards, each with a set of eight transinserted (scrambled, along with an extra letter) items. Unscrambling the items identified the extra letters, which themselves formed transinserted members of a ninth set. A classic, recursive puzzle form, and one that is marvelously suited for team solving (unlike, say, a cryptogram or sudoku). I'm a big fan of puzzles composed of self-contained micro-puzzles for that reason. Lay out all the cards and everyone on the team can contribute, calling out answers and filling in the blanks.

Gashlycrumb Tinies: At the Winchester Mystery House we received a copy of Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies and a puzzle derived from it, a set of word balloons containing strings of letters and numbers that looked like cryptic crossword enumerations. No coincidence, that, because each balloon was the result of running a word through a cryptic-style transformation suggested by the manner in which one of the children in the book died. This part of the puzzle was nifty, fun, and a good group solve. The next step-- taking the resulting sequence of children and reading them as binary based on their gender, felt arbitrary and an unnecessary extra layer. The hint for it was on page one of the book, which I looked at in the very beginning and then completely forgot about by the time we needed it. Even had we been staring at the hint the entire time, the puzzle would have been more satisfying without the shift from cryptics to binary. This feeling was exacerbated by the choice of message generated by the first step-- a series of children's names from the book-- which suggested a form of recursion. In fact it was completely arbitrary and could have been many different letter sequences, but the apparent signal of names from the book kept us from searching the book for other clues and rediscovering the binary hint.

Jenga: A set of Jenga blocks and an algorithm for manipulating them. Once we'd completed the algorithm, the blocks themselves formed letters when seen from two of the four sides (since the letters, YAHOO, are left-right symmetrical). Less a puzzle than an exercise in following directions. Fun to work through together, but just meh overall because of the extremely low difficulty.

See 'n' Say: At a farm-themed park we faced a giant See 'N' Say depicting eight farm animals. Answering an animal trivia question allowed us to set the initial position of the dial and see where it wound up pointing and what animal sound it made (which weren't the same). Once we'd collected all eight data points-- sets of two locations at 45 degree increments on a circle-- we immediately knew we had eight semaphore letters. But the data gave us garbage. Fortunately the trusty Palm device recognized the garbage as a partial answer and told us to use all the data. We'd been using only the endpoint of each spin and the sound it produced, but the start point also gave us information-- an orientation. Viewing each semaphore pair with the start point of the spin as "up" gave us the real answer. We knocked this one out in very little time, and it was quite cute, but simple. Shame they weren't able to hack real See 'N' Says, which would have been teh awes0me.

Coloring Books: A great idea marred by its form factor. We received a small, staple-bound booklet with grids of numbers on the back pages and photos of childrens' book covers-- titles digitally removed-- on the front pages. Since this was conveniently distributed at a library, we went inside to use the internet to help identify the books we didn't recognize. The key was that all of the books had a color in their title, thus mapping their page number in the booklet to a color. The number grids were therefore paint-by-numbers (in the original sense!) artwork. Correctly identifying the art and reading the first letters in order gave the final answer. The big problem with this puzzle is that, distributed in book form, it was highly serial. With a team of four, serial is bad. I'd be surprised if any team didn't tear the book apart, if not for the identification step, then certainly for the coloring step. But the grid pages weren't numbered, and until you solve the grids you don't know that the order is important, so taking the book apart effectively destroyed a key bit of data. Plus, when something is presented as nicely as the booklet was, there's a natural resistance to disassembling it. Coloring books. I get it. Very clever. Now figure out how to distribute the puzzle in a way that helps solvers instead of hindering them. Aside from that gripe, the process was quite fun and I enjoyed this puzzle.

Monopoly: Located at San Jose's Monopoly in the Park, the world's largest Monopoly board, this puzzle involved solving crossword-style clues whose answers consisted of two word phrases-- a color matching a property group, and a four or six letter word. The second word was then broken into bigrams and the bigrams mapped to each property in the color group. Finally, a bigram sequence served as a guide to how to fill in an 11x11 grid, pointing us back to the giant Monopoly board to extract a final answer. Everything flowed pretty naturally despite the excessive flavor text. Our team really nailed this one, which always feels good. Neat location to visit, although I have to say that the world's largest Monopoly board isn't really all that large.

Candy: A bunch of different kinds of candy, each modified into its own puzzle that contributed an answer to a meta puzzle on a Tic-Tac-Toe grid. The nature of the meta required some pretty unsatisfying answers to the micro-puzzles, however, which severely detracted from the solving experience. And some of the puzzles were just... bad. One puzzle, for instance, consisted of a bag of M & Ms with a sticker on it showing a 4-digit number. Some of the M & Ms were normal. Others said "arhsall" and others said "athers". Ok, we get it, it's hinting us toward Eminem. Then what? Like every other team, we counted the candies in each color and tried to make sense of them, but we already had the answer-- Eminem. Just index each digit of the sticker into Eminem to get the answer, NEEM. Of course! Neem! Everyone knows neem is a large, semi-evergreen tree of the East Indies, right? Ugh. Neither the answer nor the path to getting there felt good, and some of the other candy puzzles suffered from similar problems. They were just too micro and terse. The meta came together nicely, but the cost of admission was rather high.

Finally, a note to the Shinteki crew. We always love the Shinteki schwag we get after each event, but after the genius of the clipboards from Decathlon 3, the Jenga sets this time out were a disappointment destined to gather dust somewhere. Perhaps more gear for the stylish Shinteki player in the future-- sunglasses, bucket hats, utility belts, insulated bags-- stuff we might use at future events. Or a giant SHINTEKI dark chocolate bar. Because who doesn't need more dark chocolate?

Last weekend was the latest Bay area Game, Midnight Madness: Back to Basics, and possibly the final one to be run by Snout now that team captain Curtis is moving to Portland (although a Portland-based Game would be many kinds of awesome). As with their last Game, Hogwarts and the Draconian Prophecy, Snout hit the ball out of the park on theme and story. Midnight Madness was a cheesetastic Disney film from 1980, notably mainly for the screen debuts of Michael J. Fox and Pee-Wee Herman and the scene-chewing performances of virtually everyone else in the cast. There's little to recommend the film otherwise, except that the plot revolves around a puzzle-filled road rally and inspired Joe Belfiore to create the first incarnation of what we now call The Game at Stanford, and later again in Seattle.

This Game followed the basic plot of the film, and as with The Apprentice: Zorg which aped The Fifth Element, this proved to be a tremendous amount of fun. The route of the Game echoed that of the movie as much as possible (given that the former took place in the Bay area and the latter was set in Los Angeles), and many of the clues themselves took their cues from the film. It was fun to know that our next stop should be a mini-golf course, a diner, or a brewery, and sure enough, we wound up at one. The one-to-one mapping of Game to film has multiple side effects. It creates a narrative without one being explicitly laid out within the Game itself. It increases the payoff to some clues, their alignment with the movie increasing the sense of elegance and craftmanship of the overall event. It centers the player, giving them a sense of progress and advancement. Briny Deep has already decided to follow this model for our next Game, whenever that might be (and we know the film that will form our template).

It's unfortunate, then, that so many of the clues themselves were disappointments in one way or another. Many felt arbitrary. Some flat-out misled us unfairly. At least one was broken. If the Game's artistic program scored a 10, its technical merit only rated half that. There were few brilliant aha moments, no clues that felt revelatory, no intriguing handouts or manipulatives, and nothing that felt truly fresh. Snout used completely standard, off-the-shelf puzzle forms more than once. The clues often felt like afterthoughts, rushed together because something was needed rather than crafted for their own sake.

The game began with a delightful a cappella rendition of the Midnight Madness theme song, but instead of a tear-open-the-clue high-energy start, Snout opted for a Midnight Madness pub quiz. Teams were called at random-- some getting called multiple times before other teams got called at all (which, while "fair" in a mathematically pure random-is-random sense, was not a great experience for teams waiting to be called). No team waited too long, and the gap was unlikely to mean much overall, but it was kind of a downer to be all geared up and ready to go only to stall out and have to wait our turn to answer a question correctly and earn the starting clue.

Start clue: The opening clue, just as in the movie, was a card with a few cryptic lines and a row of numbers at the bottom. The text was straightforward wordplay, and the numbers a simple decimal-to-hex-to-calculator-spelling conversion (if I remember right, the card read "249973 ==> 773d5", nicely suggesting what to do). We were gone in no time. We liked this clue-- it was easy, everyone contributed to cracking it, it mapped directly to the corresponding movie clue, and gave us good positive energy to lead off with. All of which got sapped at the next location.

Binoculars: The idea for part one of this clue was terrific. At this point in the film, teams went to an observatory and looked through the telescope to find the next clue. A bratty kid was using the telescope before them, however, to spy on women as they got undressed. This location was atop a hill with a panoramic 360 view for miles. Forewarned to bring binoculars (thanks to an eagle-eyed teammate who saw the information hidden in the Captain's Meeting presentation), we were able to use them to find two female silhouettes and accompanying data posted in the windows of far-off buildings. The problem was, nobody could find the third. And the GC members staffing the location didn't seem to know anything about the clue. I specifically asked one of them if we could see everything we needed to see from that spot at the top of the hill, and she said we could. I later found out that the third was only visible from a location below and to the side of the hilltop. The way the clue was set up, with a box (bearing a combination lock) at the summit, there was no reason to think we had to venture off the hilltop. Time passed. Team after team arrived, and none left. If I'm GC, at this point I make some kind of announcement about the general vicinity of the third data set. Maybe a 60-120 degree arc to narrow it down for teams. Perhaps a nudge, at least, that we'd have to leave the hilltop. But GC remained mum and allowed teams to collect there, shivering in the cold, frustration mounting. Finally, sunlight gone, they distributed tubes (simulated telescopes) with the data embedded.

About that data. Each set consisted of three equations, one atop another, along the lines of X-X-X, (X^X)/X, X*X+X, and so forth. Each set had a total of nine exes. We got excited at the idea of replacing each X with a different digit from 1 to 9, so that each equation solved to the same value. But that was wrong. Instead, we were supposed to replace the X with a single digit-- the same digit for every X in every data set. Then we were supposed to solve each equation and sum the results within each set. That would give us the correct values to use on the combination lock. There was nothing to indicate what the correct value of X was, or that we needed to sum the equations. With no way to confirm either the value or the approach, the puzzle was essentially intractable. It could have been solved with minor changes to the notation they used, adding a horizontal line below each stack of three equations to suggest a sum. Instead, most teams needed guidance from GC to hit upon the right approach. By the time we left this site, we were testy and disheartened. We didn't understand why GC hadn't provided help on the hilltop when NO teams were able to make progress, and we were crushed when the puzzle itself proved so arbitrary and unsatisfying.

Pianos: The film brought teams to a piano museum where the clue was the Pabst Blue Ribbon jingle painted on a tiny piano. We arrived at a GC member's home filled with pianos and were handed a bundle of strips on which musical scores were inscribed. Immediately Andrew, our resident musical prodigy, perked up as the rest of the team shrunk back. But as he played one of the scores and looked at us quizzically, the rest of the team brightened as we realized it was a commerical jingle. And so we set to, Andrew playing the music and the rest of us identifying the products. We made short work of it and were puzzling over what to do next, when Andrew noted that each of the scores had a mistake. Aha! I'd already sorted the music alphabetically by product, so it was quick work to copy the wrong notes onto a blank staff in that order and identify the Klondike bar jingle. What would we do for a Klondike bar? Apparently, we'd hop around like kangaroos while singing an incredibly bad version of the Friends theme. This was a great clue for us-- we destroyed it in record time, leaving well ahead of all other teams, thanks entirely to Andrew's musical ability. I shudder to think about what this clue would have been like for teams without musical aptitude. But for us, this was a fun, high-energy clue that tied in to the movie beautifully.

Brewery Nonograms: This was just a clue drop at a brewery, but even so the location was a little wonky-- instead of finding it behind the brewery as advertised, we instead found it in the alley beside the brewery. A small detail, perhaps, but when you're told to find the clue behind the brewery, you expect to find it behind the brewery. I was expecting some kind of block assembly puzzle (in the film, the (very lame) clue was on the side of cartons of beer, revealed as a forklift moved them into place), but instead we got a trio of completely standard Paint By Numbers puzzles. We divided and conquered. I got about halfway through one and knew it was going to resolve to a NULL symbol. When another puzzle solved to a CARD, I put them together to make CARDINAL. Then I looked at the partially-solved last puzzle and saw it was a coffee cup. "Is there a CARDINAL COFFEE in the area?" Sure enough. This clue worked perfectly well, but was nothing special. We were shocked to get standard nonograms, and explicitly opted to solve them by hand even though plugging them into a solver might have been faster. The rebus aspect seemed out of place, since the visual rebus in the movie came much later in the story.

Melons: Another great thematic fit. At this point in the film, teams are sent to a diner and told to look between the giant melons. A large-breasted waitress wore a necklace with a HUG ME charm, which anagrammed into HUGE M and sent teams to a minigolf course. when we arrived at the diner, we saw a large-breasted woman at the back of the restaurant. Upon closer examination [ahem], we saw she wore a necklace that said "HOT METER", which anagrammed into THE METRO. Tucked inside copies of The Metro newspaper in the diner's vestibule were a completely standard word search puzzle which, when all words were found, provided a message in the grid's unused letters. Once again, an off-the-shelf puzzle form with no twists. To their credit, however, the content of the puzzle was both thematic and fun-- a list of dozens of euphemisms for "breasts". There was much mirth in the van as we solved, with cries like, "I can't find PAWPATTIES!" Nevertheless, it was disappointing to find no hidden layer or extra depth to the puzzle. We also heard that at least one team found the Metro puzzles without ever going further into the diner to find the necklace, which is a shame.

Hitchhiking: At this point in the film the protagonists separate, and two of them hitch a ride with an extremely slow-moving elderly couple. Upon arriving at our next destination, we were met by a convertible driven by a pair of GC members dressed as old people. They invited us to go for a ride with them, and once two of us got in, proceeded to drive around the parking lot VERY slowly, while the rest of the team walked alongside the car. The two of them rambled on and on in that stereotypical old person way, getting tripped up on certain words that we needed to fill in for them. Totally fun and thematic way to gather the data, and the GC actors were terrific. Shame about the puzzle. One of the fifteen words in the list was SCRABBLE, and the narrative made a point of mentioning how RATTLESNAKE hit multiple triple word score spaces. So we immediately tried to reconstruct a Scrabble game with these words. But a little analysis showed that the letter distribution was completely wrong, and the first word in the list was too long to be an opening Scrabble play. Even so, the Scrabble vibe was strong enough that we kept looking for a way to make the puzzle Scrabble-related. No luck. The puzzle was much simpler and weaker. Completely unclued, we were supposed to notice that the first letter of each word appeared somewhere in the following word. Aligning the repeated letters in a single column revealed a message spelled in the next column. Huh? How exactly were we supposed to notice that? There was no context, nothing to guide us to that observation amid so many other potentially interesting properties of the words individually or the list as a whole. The first letters of the words weren't unusual-- there was nothing noteworthy about the first letter of EMBEZZLED reappearing in the next word. Start the list with ZERO, and populate the rest of the list with XYLOPHONE, QUESTION, JOURNAL, and the like. Make me notice the repeated letters. They certainly didn't pop from words like RATTLESNAKE, SCRABBLE, ALOE, and PITCHFORK. The Scrabble puzzle we invented as we solved seemed far more interesting than the puzzle we actually had.

Minigolf: Another location that tracked perfectly to the film, in which teams had to play through a minigolf course to discover a message hidden on the drawbridge on the 14th hole. Merely skipping to the end or browsing through the course wasn't enough to get the clue. So too for this clue. Each hole had a picture on it which, thanks to the iPhone, we gathered quickly and translated into a list of words. But then what? Nothing leapt out at us, so-- mindful of the corresponding clue in the movie-- we went back to the course. Two holes stood out. In one hole, as the ball passed underneath the lighthouse a recorded voice shouted "Fore!" In the other, upon entering the windmill a recorded voice said, "How about a game of air hockey after this round of golf?" Both seemed reasonable in context, but a trip to the air hockey tables still seemed in order. Eureka-- taped to the side of the table was a solving grid. But none of our words seemed to fit-- each was smaller than their corresponding grid row. We had to be missing something. What if there usually wasn't any recording at the windmill at all, and instead of changing an existing recording GC had added it? That suggested that they did the same thing at the lighthouse, which meant "Fore!" was important. Bingo. Each of the words in our list could be prepended with FORE to form a new word that fit the grid. This was a terrific puzzle from start to finish. We loved that the snack bar was open and we could grab some food. The fact that, as in the movie, you had to play through the course to get the information you needed was fantastic. The insights were very satisfying. My only criticism would be that once the place got more crowded, it would be very hard for teams to get the info from the air hockey tables without giving it away to other teams, and having that aha spoiled for us would have been a bummer. This was my favorite clue in the Game.

Radio Station: The next clue in the movie came from going to LAX and tuning in to the AM radio station that normally provides airport information. The times we live in make it impractical to put any clues near a major airport, so a train station filled in. Incongruously, the pointer to the clue was hidden on a lone Obama '08 sign on the lawn in front of the station. We might never have found it without calling GC, and I'm not sure why they chose that form, which was so unlike how we found clues in the rest of the Game. Regardless, we dutifully tuned our radio to the far end of the FM dial and identified a series of song pairs playing simultaneously in the left and right channels. The on-air bumper made a point of saying "It's Midnight Madness-- as in the movie, not the band," so we ignored the bands believing they didn't matter. Wrong! Every team we talked to were likewise mislead by this. Fortunately we called GC to verify our data and specifically asked for confirmation that the artists were irrelevant, so we didn't spend too long looking at the wrong data. Since the songs were presented in pairs, we knew we needed to combine info from the left song with info from the right. The proper way to do so was arbitrary and unclued. For each pair, we had to notice that one syllable of the song title on one side was the same as one syllable of the artist from the other (eg, Adam SANdler and SANta Claus is Comin' to Town). Even when someone suggested it, it sounded wrong to me because it was so arbitrary and messy. The other half of the data-- the other artist and song title-- was completely unused. The overlapping syllables weren't in consistent places, such as the last syllable of the left title and the first syllable of the right artist-- they were random. The whole effect was deeply unsatisfying, not so much a puzzle as "guess what we're thinking."

Hare Krishnas: In the movie, the next clue was disguised as the literature distributed by Hare Krishnas in the airport. Here, a couple of GC members costumed as Hare Krishnas pressed their literature on us as well. We later found out that only three teams were given this clue (the rest were skipped over it), which was probably a good thing-- it required a high level of attention to detail which wasn't easy to apply at that time of night. We received multiple copies of a religious screed full of typos. Close examination revealed that the copies weren't identical-- while some typos were shared, others were not. We had to find all the unique typos and highlight their locations on a master sheet. Those highlights formed a very good rendition of the Greyhound logo-- our next stop. This was a grind-- once we knew what we had to do, it took quite a while to actually do it. On the bright side, it lent itself well to parallelization and cooperation, so it was at least a good team puzzle. But shorter would have been better.LOLCats: At the Greyhound station we found a stack of LOLCat photos with edit marks in the margins. Obeying the edit marks allowed us to extract certain letters from the LOLCat text to get our next destination. I say "we", but I checked out on this puzzle and grabbed a few Zs while other pirates huddled in the back and forced an answer out of the LOLCats.

Pinball City: In the movie, Michael J. Fox plays a Star Fire videogame until he "beats" the game (which wasn't really possible), triggering a custom video telling them where the finish line was (also not possible). The house of a GC member stood in for Pinball City. No pinball machines, but three computers were set up running Star Fire via MAME. The ROM had been hacked to produce some incongruous sound effects under certain conditions. We needed to identify the videogames those sounds came from and, by observing the scores when those sounds got triggered, put them in the proper order and enter their initials into the high score screen. A for faithfulness to the film (although achieving a certain score would have been more accurate and, frankly, more fun), but much lower marks for the clue itself. Again, this felt arbitrary, and a long way to go for "name these three videogames". What if nobody on the team recognized them? Worse, entering the correct answer triggered a video that everyone in the room could see. This puzzle was only solved by a couple of teams-- everyone else just rode the solvers' coattails and eavesdropped on the video. Blech. Our team saw the video when another team solved the puzzle, but some of us felt dirty about leaving the site without having "earned" it. We had a little internal debate about it, but ultimately we decided to stick around until we figured out the right approach and solution ourselves. Making solvers wear headsets and providing key info through audio would have been one way around this problem, although there was no real way to prevent players from seeing the correct letters get entered into the high score board. Ultimately, the free ride was a better solution than some kind of turn-taking system would have been, but redesigning the puzzle to remove the problem would have been even better.

Hissy Fit: To reflect Michael J. Fox's character jumping out of his brother's Jeep and running away when he felt unwanted, we had to send our whiniest team member away, then try to entice him back via a cell phone game of Mastermind. We could only talk in 4 word sentences, and our teammate's response was dictated by the number of "correct" words we used. The magic phrase was "Jeff, you are special." You'd think that with an almost infinite domain space it would be exceptionally hard to zero in on the right words to say, but we locked on the "Jeff, you are" within about 5 minutes. Some fun playing around with filling in that fourth blank ensued, until someone hit on the right word. Amazingly, three teams-- none within earshot-- solved this puzzle within about 5 seconds of each other. We've had Mastermind puzzles before, but this was a fun twist.

Don't Get Hammered: This was a perfectly good puzzle wrapped in a frustrating form factor. Each of six inflated balls had about 14 pieces of data on them. Only two players from each team were allowed on the field at once, to gather the data or bat the balls toward the sidelines so teammates could read them. Meanwhile, GC members wielded inflatable hammers; when tagged, a player had to leave the field and tag in a teammate. Sounds chaotic and fun in theory, but was more chaotic and frustrating in practice. For starters, most of the balls were quickly punctured and deflated. There was a huge amount of data to gather, and strategy only got you so far amidst the chaos. Once we had the data, we completely blew the analysis phase by using the Post-Its GC provided instead of doing the smart thing and going directly to Excel, which is what we ultimately converted to. Once the spreadsheet was fired up, sorting the data into sets and putting each set in the right order fell out quickly-- hooray for the iPhone! The puzzle would certainly have been too simple had we just been given all the data, but this particular method of gathering the data was, I think, just a little too wild for my taste.

So where does that leave us? Overall the clues were disappointing-- there was too much unclued arbitrariness, too many instances where, in the course of solving, we created a more interesting puzzle than what we were given. There were too many opportunities for teams to skip their own ahas and get spoiled by the progress of other teams. On the other hand, the tight binding to the film made Midnight Madness: Back to Basics a lot of fun and solidified my belief in that model of Game structure. Snout has a lot of talent in acting, performance, and theatrics that was showcased quite well in this Game, and I'm glad I got the opportunity to play.

Another year, another Shinteki. This was the third Decathlon so I won't belabor the format-- see my report on the first Decathlon for details.

As usual, the organizers continued to tweak the format to good effect. This year we were told in advance when certain sites would close, so we could budget our time accordingly if we wanted to make it to all the clues. Partial answers now awarded partial credit, and some hint prices decayed over time so that the longer you worked on something, the cheaper it became to get unblocked.

As in the last Decathlon, each puzzle had a hidden bonus puzzle associated with it. Some bonuses were given in plain sight, others were hidden at the clue location, others had to be ferreted out by careful investigation, and still others were merely implied by the clue data. Each bonus was 15 points (regular puzzles were worth 100), and gave teams something extra to do during drives or if they found themselves idle at a clue site. I thought these were a great idea, and they were executed much better than last time, but I'd have liked to have known in advance if a bonus was obtainable only at the clue site (as at sites 4 and 7) so that a) we could decide to look for it before leaving, and b) we wouldn't waste time searching for it later. Notes for Decathlon 4.

I thought this event was solid from every angle, but especially in its theming. There was no story, but the overall theme of "time, space, and multiple dimensions" came through in virtually every clue, often in clever ways. As always it ran smoothly, the puzzles were fair and entertaining, and the overall vibe was mellow and social. And sending six of the 24 teams (three of which finished in the top 5), Seattle was there to Represent.

Sprint: "String Theory": Three teams were tied together by colored ropes, and everyone had to work together to untangle themselves. We might have finished sooner, but one team in our group was short-handed and so a fourth member was supplied by the organizers and instructed to just stand there and not help. Having one person anchored in place is handicap enough, but when that person is six foot fourteen, comedy ensues.

Knowledge: A stack of Trivial Pursuit-like cards. The questions on each card resolved to either a synonym of antonym of one of the Decathlon events (KNOWLEDGE, AIM, etc). The Shinteki symbol appeared on the back of each card, with each color of the symbol matching the color of a question category. Coloring in only those sections matching the colors of questions resolving to synonyms, and leaving the antonyms blank, created (highly stylized) letters spelling the answer. The trivia fell easily and we found the bonus in no time. We realized each card had two groups of answers quickly, but the puzzle answer eluded us. We took longer than we should have because when we first tried the correct approach we didn't see them as letters, so we spent a lot of time trying to make the data into binary values.

Teamwork: A set of four mini-puzzles at Golden Gate Park. Three were easy: a set of digital clocks with their states inverted, a word puzzle with a spiral grid and overlapping answers, and a table holding objects whose cross-sections form letters. The stereocube-- four stereograms taped to each side of a central square, was what gave us trouble. The images popped easily for me, and gathering the data-- each stereogram showed a 4x4 grid with circles at four different heights, spelling the word DOWN-- was simple. Interpreting it, on the other hand, was a problem. It was presented as a cube, which suggested to us that the four sides would work together somehow. We wanted to project the depth information back into the cube, but nothing we tried made any sense. Once we finally caved and took a hint to tell us to treat each side separately, we were able to see that if each side was a physical object and you looked down on it from above, the projections formed another set of letters. We were essentially doing the right thing, but we were only looking at the combination of all the data instead of each side separately. By the time we got to the final puzzle, a series of clue pairs to phrases with POINT, LINE, PLANE, SPACE, or TIME in them (representing 0-4 dimensions) our time for the entire site was nearing expiration. We tried creating a 5x5 alphabet grid and using the values as coordinates, but when that didn't work we took hints rather than waste more time. I'm not sure if we'd have hit upon the right approach-- base 5-- on our own, since base 5 is rarely used in puzzles (but it's totally fair game). So we finished this site wondering when we were going to bring our game, because we'd clearly left it somewhere else thusfar.

Enigma: Volunteers grilled hot dogs for everyone at a park while we solved a contraption made of PVC pipes holding various colored marbles. By picking up the object and rotating it freely, we could see the marbles pass by small holes in the pipes. Each marble was locked into a letter-shaped subsection of the maze-like device, and we needed to figure out those letters. This was really just a two-person puzzle, with one person rotating the maze and another inserting a pen into a hole to trap marbles as they rolled past and record the data. But while two people worked the gizmo, the other two could eat. Andrew and Dave developed a system and got irritated when Jeff and I tried to help, so I broke out TEA and started plugging in letters as they got found. The order of the letters was given to us by a string of balloons nearby, so once we had 5 letters we fuzzed the other 3. We might have been done sooner, but the orange and red balls got confused under the gray skies and our data was corrupt until we sorted that out. I didn't love this clue. Physical puzzles are always good, but this one suffered from two main problems-- it wasn't possible for all of us to work on it at once, and there wasn't much of a puzzle. We knew from the get-go what we needed to do, we just had to go through the process and do it. That's fine when the process is fun or interesting, but this was more tedious than entertaining. Something bigger that required two people to manipulate, one to trap marbles in holes, and a fourth to record the data would have been more successful, I think.

Classic: A packet of four mini-puzzles and a bag of interlocking plastic cubes. Each mini was a three-dimensional variation on a classic puzzle form: a maze, paint-by-numbers, minesweeper, and crossword. Solving each was fun in itself, and then we needed to recreate each solution's shape with the cubes and fit them together to determine how to use the leftover pieces to make a final shape to complete the cube. That final shape, when viewed from three different angles, formed three different letters (HAT). Very Gödel Escher Bach. I really enjoyed this clue. The minis were fun individually, the cubes were fun to play with (and we each took home a set!), and the finish was both elegant and thematic. Our team crushed this one, and finally seemed to be gathering some momentum.

Orienteering: Located on the top of a hill with a stunning 360-degree view of the Bay area, this was a great use of the environment. This hilltop featured a number of ~8 foot concrete circles in the ground, each one crosshatched into a 3x3 grid. Seven of them were numbered by GC, and then further annotated with many numbers in tri-colored chalk. Each number was oriented toward one of the four cardinal directions of the grid. The puzzle was called Conferencing, and given grid on each circle it wasn't hard to leap to phone-spell. We were decoding in minutes. At each circle, you had to stand on each side of the grid and look at only those numbers that were right-side-up from that vantage point. Each orientation contained an unbroken sequence from 1 up. The location of the number indicated a phone key, and the color indicated a letter from that key. Each circle therefore yielded a four-word clue, like CRUSTACEAN FRIED INTO PATTIES (CRABCAKES). Highlighted letters in the answers spelled BUTTONS. This, to us, seemed like the final answer, but it was just a partial. We were stumped about where to go next. Fortunately, the next hint became free after a few minutes and got us on the right track. Each answer contained the letters from a phone key (CRABCAKES). Using different letters from the same keys, we could form a different word which was the final answer. This last step was certainly tightly related to the rest of the puzzle, but since the entire puzzle involved phone buttons the partial of BUTTONS felt more like a final answer than a clue. I'd have liked it much better if the clue had been something like FIND BUTTONS or USE BUTTONS. That said, this was a terrific puzzle and an excellent example of how to incorporate the features of a location into puzzle design. We rocked it.

Wild Card: Masters of Space and Time. More an activity than a puzzle, this site had teams split in half. The masters of time needed to count to 100 seconds without the help of a chronometer. The masters of space had to walk to a target blindfolded. The former was pretty easy for Andrew, our man with rhythm, who used Stars and Stripes Forever as his mental metronome. The latter would have been close to impossible if the target hadn't been set up on the edge of a patch of dry grass, which let us "feel" our way to the right place. Meh. It was what it was, and I was happy to move on after each half of our team got a perfect score on our third tries.

AIM: Though we were given a copy of the game Laser Battle with this clue, we wound up not needing it. Cards depicted a game board configuration of mirrors and an arrow showing where the laser was firing. We needed to add a mirror somewhere to create a 10-bounce sequence ending at the indicated target. The locations of these mirrors mapped to letters on a final grid, spelling FLAGS OVER X. There was only one X on the letter grid, and each board's laser path crossed it. Treating the laser beam at that spot as semaphore gave us our final answer. We solved this in an hour at Red Robin, including eating time. Since the puzzle was so solveable without the game, I think including the game formed more of a distraction than an asset and made the whole thing seem less elegant.

Manipulation: Construct a polyhedron from a set of numbered squares and triangles. Put on the supplied 3-D glasses and see a path connecting the faces. Read Braille on the tabs connecting the faces in the order of the path. Done. This puzzle was something of a let-down. There was nothing about the 3D in this puzzle that couldn't have been done with a stereogram (which we'd already seen earlier in the event), so it felt anticlimactic. If you're going to use 3-D glasses, the payoff should be better. The path was visible even without glasses, so the 3-D effect added nothing to the puzzle. This was another case of being told exactly what to do and then just needing to plug through it, with very little creative thinking required. This would have been a great opportunity to hand us 3-D glasses and tell us to review our past puzzles, where we could have discovered 3-D data popping out all over the place that we hadn't been equipped to see before. The puzzle just wanted some better reason for using 3-D.

Endurance: Two lists of clues for 9-letter answers, two fill-in grids. The answers in each list were in alphabetical order, an essential aid in disambiguating possibilities. Once the grids were filled, nine words remained. Flavor text suggested these words would go "between dimensions" and connect the two grids, and sure enough at nine key intersection points you could bridge the grids with the leftovers-- some running from grid A to B, others from B to A-- and read the letters in the third positions of the resulting dimensional bridge. A solid, thematic puzzle, you say? Absolutely, but it gets better. All of the answers that fit horizontally had exactly one D. All the answers that fit vertically had exactly two Ds. And the nine answers bridging the grids had exactly three Ds. A brilliant bit of highly constrained puzzle design, to not only find enough nine-letter words with the correct properties but to arrange them so the grid could be completed unambiguously even if the solver didn't know about the 1-D / 2-D / 3-D property. Our time management fell apart here-- as we neared the end of the event, we should have started taking hints to ensure we finished in time. Instead, we were so focused on solving that the idea didn't occur to us until it was too late to capitalize on the information. We finished about 30 minutes after time expired. If we'd taken the hints right away, we might have solved it in time, which would have given us the points we needed to take first place. D'oh! After all the spatial puzzles, I was thrilled to finally get a meaty word puzzle squarely in my wheelhouse and only wish it had come a little earlier in the event so we'd have had the satisfaction of finishing before the deadline. Despite its familiarity-- it was essentially a standard fill-in puzzle with an impressive construction constraint and a final twist-- this was probably my favorite puzzle of the event.

Kudos to Just Passing Through for another terrific event. It's been years since Jackpot, folks-- aren't you itching to run another full-length Game? We'll be the first to sign up.

On June 9-10, the gf and I went to sunny CA for PiratesBATH. Although she'd played in past Puzzle Hunts, this was the gf's first Game. She didn't play with Briny Deep, however, but with The Bonny Wenches, a new team comprised of various lady friends of Briny Deep. I'll not comment on the Wenches' experience, since I wasn't in their van, except to say that at least two of them, including the gf, had enough fun that they're now talking about playing in the next Shinteki event in August.

This Game distinguished itself from others in three main ways. First, most of the main puzzles were contributed by the teams themselves, each of whom was invited to submit one for inclusion. The advantage for doing so, aside from having an opportunity to impress fellow teams, was that when you encountered your own puzzle you'd get to skip ahead to the next clue immediately. Second, clues were provided not via live phone support from GC or a PDA, but an ultra-low-tech scratch-off and envelope system wherein teams purchased pre-canned hints for points. Third, there was no overnight leg; instead, teams roughed it at a campground (we were told in advance to bring tents and sleeping bags).

Things have been so crazy busy since returning from the Game that it's taken me this long to find time to write about it. So please forgive me for resorting to bullet lists.

What I liked

Nobody seems to talk about P&A Magazine anywhere, so... consider this the official thread for issue #9, which was released last weekend. Please be sure to preface any spoilers with a warning.

The gf and I are starting to work our way through it, and while we've solved puzzles 2-5, 7, and 8, we're currently stuck on 1 and 6. We've got the center hive filled in for #1, but haven't extracted anything from it. We have all the answers for #6 and have done the next obvious thing, but can't figure out where to go from there. We haven't yet started on the others.

We've stared at our data for #6 for quite a while and have no inspiration-- anyone have a nudge to give?

Last Sunday night I landed in Seattle around 11:30 PM after a weekend of sleep deprivation, and seven hours later I headed back to the airport for a day jaunt to Las Vegas to testify in a civil case against one of the organizers of Shelby Logan's Run. For some reason the idea of flying from San Jose to Seattle and then to Las Vegas seven hours later seemed better to me than taking an extra bag with me to No More Secrets and flying directly to Vegas from San Jose. It actually worked out fine, and I can report that the desert is far more allergy-friendly than California.

Shelby Logan's Run was a Game run in Las Vegas in 2002 by some Microsofties. It was, in many senses, the Game to end all Games. While this event had puzzles, the focus was on over-the-top experiences (and where better to offer them than Vegas?). In the course of the event some or all of us camped in a dry lake bed during a torrential thunderstorm; powerboated and scuba dived on Lake Mead; shimmied up a rock chimney; captured, cared for, and ultimately scanned a living rat; fired a semi-automatic weapon; drove ATVs across sand dunes in the black of night; rode a free-fall ride atop the Stratosphere tower; performed a song in drag at a gay bar; got pierced ears; explored an abandoned prison by flashlight; and more. It was my first Game, and no Game since has delivered anything close.

The Game ended prematurely when one player fell thirty feet down a mine shaft and became paralyzed from the neck down. A clue sent teams to a site where there were multiple abandoned mines, and in plain, unencrypted text told teams to enter a specific number and no others. This player entered the wrong mine (without a flashlight, I believe), and fell. A very real tragedy.

Inevitably, perhaps, lawsuits followed. I don't know who exactly sued-- the player, his family, or his insurance company-- but all organizers of the event were named in the suit, and all but one settled out of court. The last holdout finally got to trial, and I was asked to testify for the defendant which I was only too happy to do.

Every player signed a waiver when they sent in their fee to participate. A scary waiver. It explicitly called out that players might be called upon to perform strenuous activities (and listed many examples), with possible consequences including death. I remember talking about that waiver with my teammates before signing it-- it was hardcore. I don't know how that waiver holds up under Nevada law, but it wasn't vague and it wasn't perfunctory. I took notice.

I was in the van when the unfortunate player's team arrived, and the defense wanted me to testify as to their behavior and to provide the jury with a first-time player's perspective about the Game. I agreed for many reasons, the most important of which being philosophical-- people in our society don't take enough responsibility for their own actions. Were there things the organizers could have done to prevent the accident? Yes. But ultimately, the tragedy was the man's own fault. Americans don't like saying that. We like pointing fingers and finding someone else to blame. But every single player signed that waiver. They knew the event involved operating on very little or no sleep. They knew physical activity was involved.

Earlier in the event I drove an ATV at night and opened up the throttle a bit-- until I hit the next dune. I sailed over the crest and my headlight illuminated... nothing. I had absolutely no idea where the ground was. I could have been catapulting into an abyss for all I knew. It was terrifying. Not in the casual sense the word is commonly used, either-- I mean heart-stopping, pit-of-my-stomach, images-of-snapping-my-neck raw terror. When my wheels touched down, I immediately eased up on the throttle and took a safer, more sedate pace. I took personal responsibility for my own safety. Nobody told me how fast to go. That was up to me. I chose the level with which I was comfortable.

Players were given specific, explicit instructions about where to go at the mine site. What happened was terrible and tragic, but ultimately someone didn't follow instructions, went somewhere he'd been told not to go, did so alone and entered a dark tunnel without a flashlight. People in our society need to accept more responsibility for their own actions, even when those actions are tragically wrong. And in this case, I didn't believe the event organizers should be held responsible.

Philosophically, I wish that all the organizers had gone to trial instead of settling. I understand the desire to just have it all be over with, though, and not wanting to endure the stress or risk of a trial. The one defendant who went to trial was mainly responsible for programming the hand-held electronic device used throughout the Game, which had nothing to do with that particular clue site. My understanding is that, while the plaintiff attacked the waiver, the defense strategy had nothing to do with it but rather that the defendant simply had no part in planning, organizing, or executing that particular clue or clue location. Yesterday I found out that the jury returned a verdict that the defendant did not act negligently, which I assume means he's off the hook.

I understand the plaintiffs are still going after the owners of the mine, and there I think they have a much stronger case. Why on earth wasn't that mine shaft sealed? It seems so obvious. And so, while I think the plaintiff bears responsibility for what happened, the mine company unquestionably shares in it. I hope the plaintiff has better luck going after those deeper, and more culpable, pockets.