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
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.
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.
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.
In the past ten years or so, I've participated in a LOT of puzzle events: 9 MS Puzzle Hunts, 5 Puzzle Days, 3 Puzzle Safaris, 1 Iron Puzzler, 6 full-length Games, 4 half-day Games, 1 SNAP and a couple other local walking hunts, at least 7 other treasure hunts at various places, and probably some things I'm forgetting. That body of experience has given me a certain adeptness at recognizing how a puzzle will deliver its final answer. Once upon a time, realizing that a message was in Braille or Semaphore was a deeply rewarding insight. Now it's second-nature. Any matrix with a 2x3 aspect ratio suggests Braille now, and any angular configuration screams Semaphore. Likewise with all the other standard encoding systems-- Morse, binary, ASCII, etc. It's old hat, and recognizing these schemes is second nature to most players of similar experience unless they're craftily obfuscated. Shinteki: Decathlon II had a particularly fresh encoding of 5-bit binary, mapping colors in national flags to the corresponding Olympic rings, and making that connection was satisfying. But that's the exception more than the rule these days.
This represents a big dilemma for puzzle event designers. The Game and Puzzle Hunt communities both have a core group of dedicated, experienced teams and a large field of less experienced ones. How do you create a satisfying event for both groups? How do you use the familiar language of puzzle encodings in a fresh enough way that it's challenging and satisfying for veterans while still approachable to newbies?
Innovation in puzzle design is one answer. But creating entirely new paradigms is hard, and a lot to ask of people who put together an event in their spare time. Perhaps the answer is to change what we think of as a puzzle. More physical manipulation puzzles, interactive locations, computerized challenges. Puzzles where you're given the answer in exchange for accomplishing a task. Maybe we need to shift out thinking away from the traditional paper-and-pencil puzzle mold.
Maybe there is no answer. Perhaps it's a natural life cycle and eventually veterans become so well-versed in the language of event puzzles that their interest in the entire genre dies, extinguished in a kind of puzzler's Carousel ("Renew! Renew!").
I'll be reflecting on these and other mysteries, particularly those of the ancient Maya, for the next two weeks on the sunny Yucatan peninsula.
This weekend was the tenth Microsoft Puzzle Hunt (Puzzle Hunt A. A is 10 in hexadecimal. Oh, those crazy computer geeks!), the theme this time around being Atlantis (although the hunt was essentially unthemed, as aside from a beginning-, mid-, and closing-game skit, there was no Atlantean flavor anywhere in the body of the hunt). The puzzles were generally good, including some very nice metas and a nifty structure which, when assembled properly, caused a message to appear when quinoa was poured into it. The organizers did a fine job and produced a smooth, error-free event. Our team finished second, six minutes behind the winning team, with the third-place team a scant few minutes behind us.
Fifteen hours after the hunt began.
In fact, as I type this the hunt is still going on. I've had time to get a good night's sleep and eat a leisurely breakfast, and I'll be heading back to MS for the closing ceremonies in a few hours.
But I had a hard time getting to sleep last night, because I was a little depressed. Not because we finished second-- it was a close, good finish. In fact, throughout the hunt the top four teams kept flip-flopping positions, which is always more exciting than when a team pulls out to an unassailable lead. I was depressed because it was over so quickly.
The MS Puzzle Hunt used to be designed so that the winning team would finish in the late afternoon on Sunday. In truth, the first few hunts took things to the wire. Then things started to change. We reached the final meta of hunt five 8 hours before the event ended (and then banged our head against its inscrutable ambiguities for the next 7 hours and forty-five minutes). But nobody else was even close to us. When we ran hunt 6, the winning team was also far ahead of their closest competition, restoring the timestream early Sunday morning, but a few other teams also finished before the hunt was over. Hunt 7 had issues, and the winning team had to be pushed to the finish even as all the other teams were coming in for the wrap-up.
With PH8, hunt design took a turn for the easier. We won PH8 at 4:30 AM on Sunday morning (with other teams coming in throughout the day). The disappointment of finishing the hunt so soon was mitigated by the euphoria of, well, finishing the hunt so soon-- and by the superb quality of the hunt. We won PH9 around 11 AM, and that seemed about right to me. Other teams also finished before the 6 PM deadline, and we still got a full 24 hours of puzzle-solving in.
Fifteen hours, however, is just too short. I'm sure a lot of other teams will get to finish this hunt, which will be great for them. But it feels to me like we've reached the end of an era, and it saddens me.
I recognize the problem. The disparity between the top teams and the next tier continues to grow, which presents a genuine dilemma for hunt organizers. If they create a hunt that will keep top teams occupied for 24 hours or more, the rest of the pack will not get to experience the full event. It will continue to overwhelm the lower teams. Organizers don't want to spend time creating and testing puzzles that a small number of people will get to see. And the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few ("...or the one"). It's hard to argue with the notion that the right place to target is closer to the center (or right of center) of the bell curve. And so future hunts will likely continue to be shorter events for the top teams.
Top teams can shrug and say, "That's the way it is," adjusting their expectations. If I'd known it was to be a fifteen-hour event ahead of time, I'd have come into it with a different mind-set and reacted more favorably to its conclusion. Instead, I spent the past 15 months anticipating this event, and while it was qualitatively good, in the end if wound up being quantitatively less than I'd hoped for. To be fair, the organizers didn't expect it to be so short. Their playtests, with experienced solvers, bigger teams, and no loss of time for running around campus, still came up against the 6 PM deadline-- so even after streamlining further, we shattered their expectations. The timing of something like this is very hard to get right. The old-school philosophy was that if you make it hard, you can always make it easier on-the-fly by providing hints, but if you make it too easy there's nothing you do about it. That philosophy seems to have changed.
Perhaps the problem is that the top teams are just too good. Maybe we should just break ourselves up and form new teams with less experienced solvers. If the goal is to spend more time puzzling, that would probably do the trick. With fewer top players on the same team, each of them would also get to see and participate in more of the event's puzzles. But of course, people like to play with their friends, and they also like to play with people of comparable skill. If you're the superstar of your team, your experience of the hunt will change. You might spend most of your time helping other people instead of solving things yourself. You might get frustrated by slower progress. You might offend teammates by swooping in to help. Most of the people I'd want to play happen to be good puzzle solvers, and I suspect the same is true for many other top players. Breaking up the lead teams would just shuffle the top players around without leveling the playing field.
Am I in it to win it, or am I there to have fun? As long as the hunt remains a competition, I want to be on a competitive team (that's "competitive" in the sense of being of the same caliber as other top teams, not in the sense of being win-at-all-costs). The adrenaline rush of trying to outsolve other teams is one thing separating the hunt from a weekend with P and A Magazine. But I always want to be satisfied. I want to be materially involved in solving as many puzzles as possible. I want to collaborate with teammates and share the thrill of a great insight. I want to work through the night and rally the team at 4 AM to come together over a tough puzzle and push through the invisible wall. As the top teams become more experienced and adept, I want the event itself to grow with us and challenge us further.
But I'm not sure how that can happen. There are people like me who solve a Monday NY Times crossword in under 5 minutes (hell, there are people in the world who solve them in under two), and there are people who finish them in an hour. How do you accommodate both groups in the same event? How can you possibly slow a 5-minute solver down without being unjustly inscrutable, or speed a one-hour solver up without feeding him answers and taking away his fun? You could give the 5-minute solver Thursday-level clues, but now you're almost making two different puzzles, which of course takes much longer. Beginners could be given full instructions for every puzzle (which often come without any at all), or more hints.
The truth is, little is likely to change. This is only an issue for a fairly small percentage of players. The needs of the many. The real goal is to find simple, easily-made changes that create a better experience for the top teams while keeping the event accessible to the rest of the pack.
I've been extremely busy lately-- too busy even to blog. But not, apparently, too busy to devote an entire weekend to a new Seattle puzzle event, Iron Puzzler. Inspired by Iron Chef and a similar event in the Bay Area, in Iron Puzzler all the puzzles are created by the competing teams themselves. Four secret ingredients were announced at 9 AM on Saturday: CLOCK, L, MERCURY, and SPOON. Each team had 15 hours to create one paper puzzle and one non-paper puzzle, each using at least one of the theme ingredients. Sadly, neither Alton Brown nor Will Shortz was on-hand for color commentary ("I see a bunch of ones and zeroes on the challenger's side, I believe he's going to turn that into Morse, a fairly traditional but versatile preparation.").
Fourteen teams participated, meaning each team had to turn in 30 copies of the paper puzzle (2 per team, including the organizers) and 15 copies of the non-paper one. Then, at midnight (as it turned out, closer to 1 AM), the puzzles were distributed and the 15-hour solving period began. Teams scored points for each puzzle solved (with a small bonus for being one of the first three teams to solve each puzzle), and each puzzle earned its creators points according to how many teams solved it (with the sweet spot at 10 teams). At the end of the event teams also awarded each puzzle points on quality/fun, presentation, and use of the ingredients.
Creating a puzzle by committee under time pressure proved to be a challenge. Our group largely focused on the physical puzzle first, because we knew we'd have no trouble putting together a paper puzzle. Meanwhile one member of the team went off on her own and produced a terrific paper puzzle independently. In the end, only two teams solved our physical puzzle (which was a solid puzzle that we overstreamlined, removing a couple of hinting elements that we should have left in place) while everyone solved the paper puzzle and voted it their favorite. A rather disheartening result, actually, since it undermines what for me is the most interesting aspect of the event-- creating puzzles collaboratively. These results suggest that we'd be better off splitting into individuals or pairs and developing puzzles independently, then coming together to test them and pick the two strongest. That's a less interesting challenge than producing puzzles as a group. On the other hand, we could also interpret the results as an indication that next time we should value elegance less than solvability and internal hinting.
As expected, there were a lot of puzzles that involved periodic tables and clock faces, but surprisingly little semaphore. I think most teams thought as we did: "Oh my God, CLOCK-- everyone's going to do semaphore, so let's do something else." Interestingly, that kind of reasoning resulted in two spoonerism puzzles presented as bags of plastic spoons with parts of spoonerisms written on each spoon. We also got no less than four crosswords (one involving spoonerisms!), but sadly none of them cryptic.
The overall quality of the puzzles was surprisingly high. One of the things I found most interesting about the event was the different interpretations of the ingredients. Quite a few puzzles incorporated the periodic table or other chemical elements, for example, but none focused on the planets or car manufacturers. Analog clocks were prevalent, but nobody made a digital clock puzzle. And regrettably, nobody did a superhero battlecry puzzle ("Spoooooon!"). As a constructor, it also seemed we could leverage the fact that everyone would view every puzzle through the CLOCK/L/MERCURY/SPOON filter, enabling them to make leaps that might otherwise seem unfair.
The event was put together in about a month. It was an undeniable success, but the rough edges show. The scoring system in particular needs some massaging. The number of teams solving a given puzzle does not seem like a good basis for awarding points. The premise that a puzzle with 10 of 13 teams solving it is more desirable than one solved by all teams is specious. I'd argue that a puzzle that everyone solves is more desirable than one only 75% of teams solve. The catch is that you want puzzles to be a challenge-- you don't want everyone to solve it immediately. Nobody wants to see teams submit a 6 letter anagram and call it done. But I don't think we need an entire scoring vector to capture that. If a puzzle is too easy or too hard, teams can reflect that in their ratings. If a puzzle is just right in difficulty but not fun to solve, teams can dock it points.
This event was created to fill a gap formed by the delay of the next MS Puzzle Hunt, but it was intriguing enough in its own right to warrant repeating. Since it requires far less effort to organize than traditional events, the chance of that happening seems high. In fact, if someone creates a back-end that allows teams to register their puzzles and answers and then allows teams to submit answers to solved puzzles electronically, organizers could play along, too. Allez cuisine!
Last weekend I escaped the Muggles to participate in Hogwarts and the Draconian Prophecy. This Game was run by Snout, the same team that ran the Justice Unlimited Game a couple of years ago. With such a richly themed subject and an experienced GC at the helm, we had high expectations for this event and were not disappointed. Snout hit many balls out of the park.
Their biggest success was with theming. The world of Harry Potter is rich with detail and flavor, and Snout leveraged that to create an intensely thematic Game experience. We were Sorted into Houses, rode the Hogwarts Express, attended classes, used wands (by far the coolest thing about the Game, and described in detail below), snuck into Hogsmeade, collaborated with other teams in our House, mixed potions, withdrew funds from Gringott's, and evaded Dementors. Surprisingly, however, there was no quidditch. Some kind of faux sporting event involving all sixteen teams would have been a blast, and this seems like a real missed opportunity.
The entire staff remained in character throughout the Game-- headmaster Curtis never once slipped from his faux British accent. In their last Game, I felt like Snout dropped the putative premise of the Game-- that we'd been recruited as substitute superheroes in the wake of the disappearance of the more established ones-- almost immediately and instead just presented us with puzzles that incorporated references to established Marvel and DC superheroes. With Hogwarts, they let the theme inform the Game design and incorporated it thoughout the event. And they did so without once using any of the established Hogwarts characters but Hagrid (if Curtis' headmaster was Dumbledore, I don't recall ever hearing the name used).
The second area in which Hogwarts excelled was in story. The Game wasn't just themed as Hogwarts, but followed the basic outline of a Harry Potter novel. Imagine our surprise to discover that the Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor had gone missing even before the Game began, or that the substitute turned out to be evil! The flow of the Game followed the story very well, and while not every puzzle made strict "in-story" sense, a remarkable number of them did. The plot actually advanced and got resolved in a dramatic and entertaining way.
By dividing teams into Houses and awarding House points, Hogwarts was the first Game I've played in which encouraged collaboration among teams (Our Mooncurser's Handbook Game encouraged interaction among teams, but not cooperation to this extent). We've competed with The Burninators in past Games, but at Hogwarts they were in our House and we wound up collaborating with them on many puzzles. Our playing styles are very different, so it's unlikely this would ever have happened under other circumstances. We enjoyed getting to know them better. I particularly liked the one puzzle where all four teams in each House needed to work together to get the solution, and wish there had been more such collaborative moments in the event.
The clues in Hogwarts were perhaps the least successful element of the Game. Most were perfectly fine, but none were especially innovative, surprising, or delightful (although the wand device was amazing). We often referred to a textbook given to us early in the Game, and in fact this crutch was overused. Having only two copies of the book also limited the number of teammates who could actively participate at times. On the other hand, very few clues came on paper-- Snout did a great job of delivering interesting materials to manipulate.
Snout didn't get everything right (more on that below), but the magnitude of their successes far outweighs the things that could have been done better. This was a stellar Game and a terrific experience. All involved should feel exceptionally proud.
Now for the play by play.
Sorting Hat: The Game began at platform nine and three quarters of the Emeryville train station, where we checked in and walked a short way to a movie theater. The sorting hat ceremony was supposed to happen inside the theater, but a snafu with the management forced the staff to go to plan B and we had the ceremony outside instead. A computer-animated sorting hat sang a unique sorting song for each of the sixteen teams, placing us in the four Hogwarts Houses (my Briny Deep teammates and I chanted "Anything but Hufflepuff! Anything but Hufflepuff!" as we appeared before the sorting hat, and to our relief were placed in Slytherin). There was much cheering as each team was sorted and given red, yellow, blue, or green bandanas as House identification to wear during the Game (all of the bandanas also had a simple semaphore puzzle giving us our House password). We were then given our breakfast, which is the first place Snout went awry. The Game began at 7:30 AM, which means we were up by 6:30 and had a long day ahead of us. We'd been promised breakfast, however, so we didn't grab anything before we left. The breakfast they provided-- a bottle of juice, a shrinkwrapped danish, and a string cheese-- was woefully inadequate. When we provided teams with a bagged breakfast in Mooncurser's, we gave them fresh bagels and cream cheese, milk, cereal, juice, and fruit, in ample quantity. So when Snout promised a bagged breakfast, we expected we'd be well-fed. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw how meager their bagged breakfast was, and my heart sank a little.
Hogwarts Express: Escorted by prefects dressed in robes of their House colors, we walked back to the train station to wait for the Hogwarts Express. Speculation abounded as to where we were going. Some people thought Tahoe was likely, while our team felt UC Davis-- a school campus that could act as Hogwarts, especially since classes were not yet in session-- was a top candidate. The mystery of where we were headed was unfortunately spoiled when an Amtrak employee got on the loudspeaker to ask, "Will the leader of the Hogwarts group to Sacramento please come to the ticket counter?" The waiting players let out a collective groan at the unintended spoiler. This is the second place I thought Snout miscalculated. The Game began at 7:30, and there was quite a bit of waiting around before the sorting ceremony began. The train didn't leave until 9:15, and there was more waiting before that. Almost two hours into the Game, we'd done a lot of waiting and hadn't yet received a single puzzle. Some delay at the start is inevitable as teams arrive and check in, and obviously Snout needed to make sure they had enough time to complete the sorting ceremony before the train departed. But at the start of a Game you're primed and ready to go. Some kind of puzzle to work on before boarding the train would have been welcome. Perhaps the bandanas were that puzzle, but they were cracked so quickly it's hard to think of them that way.
Once the train got underway an owl traveled the aisle to deliver that day's Daily Prophet which brought us up to speed on the story so far. Professor Cross, the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, was missing and wanted for questioning by the Ministry of Magic. Wizards and witches were losing their magic. Mugglium, an element hazardous to wizarding folk and thought to be a myth, had been discovered. And oh, look-- a crossword! Solving it told us our class schedule would come from a flavorful source. A little while later, we received a huge package of Bertie Botts' Every Flavor Beans. Teams had been divided into third, fourth, and fifth-year students, and each year received a different package. We needed to sort the flavors (which included such treats as Sardine, Upchuck, and Garlic) and count them to create an order, then read the first letters of the flavors in that order. In the case of the fifth year students, however, the flavors were already listed on the package in the correct order, so no puzzle solving was actually necessary. So far as we know none of the fifth-year teams noticed, however, until well into their sorting process, so this didn't wind up spoiling the puzzle (except that we didn't "solve" the puzzle so much as we "noticed" the answer was already there for us).
Upon arrival in Sacramento we followed a picture trail to lead us to the location of our first class.
Care of Magical Creatures: Hagrid (who looked and sounded the part quite well) welcomed us to class and gave us our textbooks-- custom-made books with information about creatures, spells, potions, wand use, encoding schemes, wizardly lore, and the like. Over the course of the Game we'd refer back to the book frequently and repeatedly. After quizzing us on the properties of various creatures, which we'd answer by searching through the book's bestiary, we moved on to the class assignment. Hagrid played a recording of weird sounds, and we needed to identify which creatures made them based on the descriptions given in the bestiary. The bestiary listed 26 creatures, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, so identifying the creatures gave us the location of our next class. Matching the sounds to creatures was an inexact process. Which one might sound like a ratchet on steroids? Which one like an underwater gurgle? When finished, we received a CD with a complete study guide of all 26 animals and their sounds, which we expected would come in useful later. Andrew spent the remaining class time listening to the guide and learning what everything sounded like.
Defense Against the Dark Arts: Our substitute, Professor Guzzany, taught us the fundamental of wandcraft. Each team was issued a wand, which was an incredibly cool device building on the basic concepts of the DRUID and Bat Blinker from Justice. The wand had five red LEDs at the tip, and was turned on by tapping it against something. Built into the wand was an accelerometer which enabled the wand to detect and recognize gestures. Our textbook had a lexicon of phonemes and the corresponding "mwanemes"-- looping or flicking motions with the wand. Stringing together the proper sequence of mwanemes "cast" a spell and generated a response from the wand which could be seen by waving the wand back and forth to create a persistence of vision optical illusion of scrolling text. Answers during the Game often took the form of spells we needed to cast with the wand. Upon casting the correct spell, the wand would then supply us with instructions on where to go or what to do. This device alone brought the theming rating to 11. Some teams had difficulty mastering the wand and found it very frustrating, but Andrew mastered our wand quickly and we loved it. Sure, it took longer than typing an answer into a Palm and sometimes required multiple attempts to get correct, but the coolness factor and thematic rightness trumped any such quibbles. The varying degrees of wand mastery among teams created additional opportunities for collaboration, as teams with lesser ability at wanding would assist others with puzzles in exchange for the information yielded by casting the result successfully.
The wands also had built-in clocks with preprogrammed skip schedules for clues. Solve a clue beyond a certain time, and the wand would
