DC 2016: Saturday April 30th

The Rosslyn area of Arlington, as near as I can tell, is a bunch of business high-rises. Not much happens on the weekends. But that made it a great place to host a DASH puzzlehunt. Plazas which might otherwise have been full of lunching salaryfolk instead were empty and ready to hold lots of puzzle-solving nerds.

GC was:

Before things got started, there was an announcement: Todd Etter and Evan Davis got up to say they were working on a neighborhood-scale puzzlehunt for the fall. They were hoping it would turn into a series of hunts, a la BANG or SNAP or BAPHL or what have you.

DASH Intro Skit

Location 2

Handing out Miss'D Connections

Origami Folding at Rosslyn Mall

Handing out SPUR Cubes

The Meta at Freedom Park

Save the White House Escape Room

In the evening as the Meta site calmed down, most of GC left as there wasn't much to do. But some of us stayed. And player Rex Miller stuck around. (Remember Rex? He flew West and played in Dr When and Shintekis.) He'd played instead of GC'd today, but we had plans for this evening. Steve and Julie gently prodded Rex about Puzzle Boat 3. A while before the hunt officially ended, the last team finished.

Thus we remaining folks headed off to our next activity: Room Escape DC's Save the White House live room escape game. Despite the name, this wasn't in DC. We had to drive a ways out of town to Fairfax. We didn't do this because this was some famous room escape you'd go out of your way for. Rather, Steve and Julie and Rex had done all the nearby escape rooms. We had to drive out to this place to find a game they hadn't already played.

So we four folks teamed up with a half-dozen college-age kids to save the White House. You might expect me to be grumpy about solving with so many strangers, but these kids were on the ball. They were energetic, zipping all over the place. But this wasn't directionless energy; they solved things, too. And maybe their speed was inspired. I was moving faster than you might expect. GC kept exhorting us over the intercom: "You still have a lot to do! Go go go!" This turned out not to be the case; we tumbled out of the room with more than 20 minutes left on the clock.

While driving us back to civilization, Steve told us he'd played in the most recent Eric Harshbarger puzzle party. He hadn't gone to Auburn; apparently, you can play remotely as long as some of your team is in Auburn; sort of like the MIT Mystery Hunt except your team is more likely to have six people than sixty.

Sunday: Newseum, Wilhelms, American Art [^]

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