Puzzle Hunts: DASH #1

DASH #1 was a fun hunt, and also a darned impressive piece of logistics: DASH is a "potluck" game in which several GCs from several cities each put in one puzzle. My simulcast experience was: wow, coordinating with a GC in another city is not as straightforward as you'd think. If folks in another place are relying on you for a puzzle, and you want a last-minute tweak in your puzzle, you can't just make the tweak and print up 20 copies to bring to the game. You have to let people know that you're making the change; they might not have time to incorporate your change, it's a muddle. Now I'm trying to imagine doing that with a bunch of groups scattered over half a dozen cities... Oh man. I'm impressed.

I don't have a narrative for this game. Just some scattered notes.

On the way to the Game, I thought I spotted a team. A group of four people, not walking together, but obviously a group--each of them looking at each other, making sure they were all moving together. They looked like a hunt team--geeky, but not chattily ambling, instead moving with a focus, a purpose. But they were going the wrong way--away from Civic Center. Oh, they hopped on a streetcar.

Sure enough, they showed up at the hunt. They were a puzzlehunt team after all. Using my awesome powers of deduction, I eventually figured out that they must have had breakfast at the nearby Squat and Gobble, then caught a streetcar to the game start.

The 5 Blind Dashers hit a snag: for the poker puzzle, they made a bad guess on how to extract an answer. But instead of getting nonsense, they got a word. This seemed to correspond to one of the places on the map ("a kind of dance"). So they ran several blocks out of their way, only to realize they were on the wrong track.

I still like this hunt's way of confirming answers and sending you to the next location (basically the scheme from the San Francisco leisurely mini-game). I hope this false-positive was just a one-time thing. But if stuff like this keeps happening, I guess I'll have to re-think my liking.

One of the clues was a music clue. These are usually pretty tough. Part of the problem is that you're not usually in a place where you can listen to the music. There's probably a lot of background noise. But this time, the clue was in a fancy stereo store. Wow, you could really hear the music. That was pretty cool.

A photo from the Final Pun-ishment Cemetary:

Mystic Fish: Robert Au, Alexandra Dixon, Paul Chou (obscured), Darcy Krasne (I'm not in the photo; I took the photo)
My Three Dads: David, Brent, John
GC: Jesse, Greg

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