Wow, a third of my theoretically-Shinteki Decathlon photos this year are actually of things that happened on the way to Shinteki Decathlon. That's a little silly, but that's how it goes. Of course, none of my photos covered the time after the puzzlehunt ended because I was just a big sleepyhead by that point.

DASH LAX 2013 photos

DASH5 was a couple of weeks ago, remember? I went to LA to help out. Along the way, I took some photos: DASH LAX 2013. One of the folks there, Francis Hsu, was volunteering in Los Angeles and then volunteered the next week in DASH London. Dude is hardcore.

You might expect more of a travelog beyond DASH photos, but that didn't happen. Since I was scouting puzzle locations for Octothorpean, most of the rest of my travelog was just "I went to [redacted] and took photos of things that had words on them." Or "I went to LACMA, but didn't get any anecdotes out of it." Or "I went to the Hotel Bonaventure and took two photos that turned out OK."

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Playtesting continues apace.

A small subset of the DRT (Demonic Robot Tyrannosaurs) tore through many, many puzzles, as you might expect. Of course, it was tricky figuring out how to transform their feedback for a puzzlehunt aimed at n00bs. Like when there was a puzzle with dozens of unintentional red herrings, but with some flavor nudging in the right direction if you noticed that flavor as you waded through the herring… Yeah, the DRT's didn't object to that, though I suspect a n00b would have kicked me in the shins.

Joe Fendel's kids solved some codes. On the one hand, they're just kids so you might expect them to get stuck. On the other hand, they hang out with Joe. So there were exchanges like
"OK, so, you see what's going on here is that these are sema—"
"Oh, it's that thing with the flags!"
"Uhm, yeah. You know this?"

How many codes did I know when I was 10? Not that many, I bet.

Now I have a long list of things to fix: puzzles to edit out*, puzzles to fix. (*The good news is that there's not a gut-wrenching feeling of "mudering darlings" to remove a few un-fun puzzles when there are scores of puzzles left in.)

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Want to Playtest the Octothorpean Game puzzlehunt 5/25, 5/26, 5/27 or 6/2?

Update: OK, that's enough responses to keep me busy for now. Thank you! (If you're from out of town, and June 2 was going to be a rare chance for you to do bay area stuff, then you should still talk to me. But if you're an SF local, you probably want to wait a few weeks to do anything.)

It's a great way to get your team "in shape" for Shinteki.^*

Experienced teams welcome! (In the past I only wanted n00bs, and n00b teams are still welcome playtesters. But experienced teams are also OK.)

You should be in the San Francisco Bay Area and have a place in mind to play—whether that's your living room or a cafe convenient to you or what-have-you. You should be a team or an individual. I'll show up and tell you to interact with a web site containing a whole mess-o-puzzles. You and your team will use your laptops and wits to solve puzzles. Some puzzles will be pretty easy; but as you progress, you will encounter some Real Puzzles®.

Interested? Yay! Talk/email/semaphore/something me.

^*This claim has not been verified.

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I played a @mastermindhunts public pub hunt and it was fun! I got to play with Tiffany Dohzen and Andrea Burbank. (I kinda think maybe Mystic Fish has been thrown together with Andrea's on some puzzlehunt; she seemed awfully familiar from somewhere? Anyhow.)

Some puzzlehuntists at work had gotten to talking, and then yesterday I noticed a tweet:

May's Mastermind Pub Hunt is tomorrow night! We'll be exploring the Hayes Valley/Civic Center area of SF. Please... fb.me/HQBKiGvv
— Mastermind Hunts (@Mastermindhunts) May 13, 2013

Wow, a chance to try one of their games, two blocks from the office. Co-worker Tiffany was game to try it and her friend Andrea was going to visit to play board games... but we wheedled her into puzzlehunting instead.

This was not so difficult. Andrea's a puzzlehuntist. (Her husband proposed to her via a puzzlehunt, something which I've stopped thinking of as super-unusual, but rather as sweet. As someone wise once said, a hunt with an audience of one isn't a totally new idea.)

And so we trundled over to Civic Center plaza with its many flags. The Masterminds, Rob and, uhm, the guy who I didn't talk to as much as Rob told us the deal. They were going to give us a sheet of paper with four puzzles and a meta. Each of the regular puzzles solved to a location and had instructions on data to gather from that location.

They told us that usually the end location was a pub; whichever team finished first had a round on GC. This time, the end location wasn't a pub, but they thought we might like it anyhow.

They gave us puzzlesheets. They loaned us clipboards and pencils. And the frenzy was upon us.

I did some anagram-and-add-a-letters to get a street intersection; or rather the first three letters of each of the two streets. We Googled to get some trivia that turned out to be about Fulton; our instructions told us an address to go on that street. I wasn't involved with the other two puzzles: some tricky wordplay that would only work for the right street intersection; so you had to look over the neighborhood map to figure out streets that would fit the constraints. And, given three crosswordish clues, guess three rhyming words; cross them out of a big string of letters to reveal a location in the remaining letters.

The first location we went to was a photography exhibit in the library basement. This turned out to be lucky: the data we gathered here was about half of what fed into the meta.

I should explain the meta. This was important. This was like a wordsearch, except you found words bogglewise. The leftover letters would spell out our end location.

Andrea figured out our end location based on the half of the data we'd got from the library. This meant we could be smart when we picked out our route for the next locations: we knew where we wanted to end up.

(Did I mention that over the weekend I did Mastermind's Riddles of Pier 39 Treasure Hunt? Except I didn't go to Pier 39. Instead, I backsolved from the metapuzzle with the aid of the puzz wordsearch solver. I was kind of glad that the Hayes Valley hunt was handed to us instead of downloaded; it forced us to get out and about.)

Andrea's meta-solving didn't just get us moving in the right direction, it also got us moving faster. We were suddenly rather motivated: the end location was Smitten Ice Cream. At least two of us weren't drinkers, and ice cream sounded a lot better than some pub. We actually wanted to win now. After all Smitten was special, a place to drag visiting out-of-towner ice cream fans.

So we were back in the frenzy, walking fast, trying to figure out when traffic would let us cross busy streets. Hustle, hustle. Get to the spot, find the data, cross it out in the grid. Hustle, hustle. Do it for ice cream.

Reader, we came in first. It had taken us about 45 minutes. (Thus, while it was fun, I was glad that none of us had, say, driven an hour from south bay just for this; if you're going to travel from a distance, probably want to plan to have dinner in the neighborhood or something so you don't feel like you're spending all your time traveling. Tell your SF friends that they should take you out to dinner or something.)

We had a chance to chat with the organizers as we ate our hard-hustled-for ice cream. I asked about corporate team-building hunts. Did companies ever want any psychological team-building stuff? Any specific team-ish things to concentrate on? (I was remembering playtesting a Dr Clue activity which was supposed to point out the value of some particular aspect of teamwork.) But no, most teams just wanted an excuse to get out of the office for a few hours.

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Taking Shape (where the shape is #)

Months ago, excellent partly-puzzlehunt-naive team Drop_Table was the (brave!) first playtest team of the Octothorpean Game. It took a long time to incorporate their feedback. The game has many, many puzzles. Thus, when there's a fix-it task that starts "For each puzzle, make sure…" it might take weeks to finish. There were several such tasks; I'd overlooked things that were stumbling blocks to a puzzlehunt-naive team. Fixing those took weeks and weeks.

(If I'd had a better idea of what I was aiming for, I probably could have run a simpler playtest sooner, after having created fewer puzzles. Then those "For each puzzle…" tasks would have been quicker. But I didn't know what I was aiming for; to figure that out, I just kept filling in content.)

Last weekend, excellent puzzlehunt-naive team WBYeats playtested. The lovely feedback was plentiful; but there weren't any every-puzzle-must-change issues or even forty-puzzles-must-change issues. Just a bunch of fix-one-puzzle or fix-the-UI-flow-thusly issues. I finished fixing those just now.

It feels like a milestone. It feels like this thing is at least roughly in the right shape now.

I can stop saying "No experienced playtesters, please!" Before, there wasn't much point fixing regular-playtester feedback: naive-playtester feedback was likely to change each puzzle so much that the relatively-fiddly fix-this-one-detail thingies were likely to get overwritten anyhow. But now I think I'm ready for the detail thingies.

I'm also looking at not-a-lot-of-unstructured-time in the next few weeks, so we'll see how soon I follow up on that thought. But this feels good.

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Looking for Group: Ravenchase Great America Hunt

Are you putting together a team for Ravenchase's Great America Hunt? I wanna play. You should pick me for your team.

The good news: Scurrying around all day solving puzzles seems normal to me.

The bad news: I don't know how to drive.

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Another San Francisco Octothorpean Puzzle Ahead of Opening Day

[Update: Don't play this puzzle; playtesting reveals that it wasn't actually fun.] I'm revealing another San Francisco puzzle from the Octothorpean Order online puzzlehunt: Bunny. No, the Octothorpean Order isn't ready for opening day yet, but I'm pointing out that puzzle anyhow. Why? Well, it's slated to be torn down in about a year. (Or maybe a year and a half? I'm not sure I'm understanding the stuff I'm reading. Anyhow.) Though I think the Order will be open by then, out-of-towners who don't get into SF often might want a chance to see this one without having to scramble.

As with the previous revealed-early SF Octothorpean puzzle, I dunno if I'd purposefully go far out of my way for this one, but if you're in the neighborhood, check it out.

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One San Francisco Octothorpean Puzzle Ahead of Opening Day

I'm not a super-duper expert about location-based puzzles. I don't know exactly when the world is going to change and thusly mess up a puzzle. But I know that it happens. This weekend, I found a nice location-based puzzle that fits the hashmarkish theme of The Octothorpean Order… but I wonder if the site will last. I'm not even that sure it will last a few months until the game properly opens. So I'm improperly jumping the gun with this one. Here's a link to Music Mural, a puzzle in San Francisco's Mission District.

If I were you, I wouldn't shlep all the way out to The Mission just to solve this. It would be a lot of shlepping for not-so-much solving. But the next time you're heading out there anyhow, swing on by…uhm, wherever this puzzle is. If it's still there.

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I'm just back from GC Summit 2013, in which Game Control folks talk about how to run games without going crazy...crazier than necessary. Folks presented on a cool variety of games this year. Well, they were all puzzlehunts of course. But there was the Doctor When weekend game, the MIT Mystery Hunt marathon conference-room game, BANG 33 the runaround and/or online game, and the JoCoCruise puzzlehunt on a boat. A lot of thinking about setting audience expectations, fitting the game to the audience. Since some of that was about fitting a game to a newbie audience, you better believe I was scribbling down ideas to steal^W use. It was really awesome, I learned a lot.

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Jotting Notes on Andy Rich's GC Summit 2012 Presentation: MSPH14 Simulcast Post-Mortem

It's a talk by Andy Rich, who was on GC for Microsoft Puzzlehunt 14. Well that link is a link to a video of his talk. This here is my notes. [My rambling asides are in italics] and I take some pretty egregious summarize|rephrase|totally-change-meaning liberties with other folks' words, too.

He's from Team Liboncatipu. Oh hey, Liboncatipu isn't just the MSPH14 team. They were also the Seattle team who wrote Zombie SNAP. [I know they simulcasted that: I was on the Bay Area side of that simulcast, where we called it BANG 19.]
- Oh man, he said I put together the bay area simulcasters. [Actually, that was Alexandra Dixon and Joe Fendel. Those folks should write more so that far-away people remember their existence instead of attributing their deeds to me.]
- Someone corrected him: Actually that was Golden Golems (Joe) and Mystic Fish (Alexandra) [my memories are hazy, but that "someone" might have been me grabbing a microphone in Mountain View: That's why you need to attend GC Summit, to avoid getting mixed up in some kind of misattribution thing leading to some kind of blood feud. GC Summit: It could save your life.]
Shout-out to Dan Egnor and the Demonic Robot Tyrannosaurs (combo team of Burninators, Coed Astronomy, and other geniuses) for simulcasting MSPH14
MSPH is not The Game, not exactly. No locations, stuff happens on MS campus. More about the puzzles than the amazing experiences.
Bigger scale: more than 80 teams, a dozen people each.
- [That's something that made flying up to Seattle to help run a MSPH so amazing: standing at the front of an auditorium looking out at so many people.]
Finding simulcasters Ask around. If someone says they're not interested, ask if they know someone who might be interested.
Seattle puzzlehunters have a Facebook page, and it's a good place to start grapevine-ing.
Use your simulcasters as early playtesters! The bad news: the later they playtest, the later they can start on ther own preparations. So early playtesters.
- And especially use your simulcasters as playtesters if they're a combination of the Burninators, coed astronomy, and other geniuses because they're frickin' puzzle-designing geniuses.
Why is it hard to be a simulcast team?
- The crap-work, not the fun-work. Location wrangling instead of puzzle design.
- Relying on main GC [but too far away to grab them by the lapels and shake answers out of them]
Since Liboncatipu used Dropbox to store puzzles, nice side effect was that remote GC could also see latest versions.
Separate mailing lists so that, e.g., Californians didn't see tons of mail about reserving rooms on MS campus. But a couple of folks from each group would hang out in both mailing lists to make sure important stuff got relayed.
Oh man, we wrote special server software for this game, and that was late. I bet the simulcasters were nervous about that.
Communication during game, not just before game is good. Californians found bugs in puzzles during the event and were able to get word up to Redmond—but had a hard time because folks weren't checking the mailing lists during the event, had to scrounge up someone's personal contact info.
Content is King Don't just write down the puzzle, write down solution info, too. Simulcasters will want it. And you were going to need to write all that crap down for the hunt wrapup web site anyhow, right?
Portability Like Scott said, if you wanna simulcast your event, don't fill it up with location-specific puzzles.
Remote GC made an all-remote game. They only used the puzzles that could be delivered over the internet. This meant that they skipped a couple of puzzles. There were a couple of puzzles where they had "This is what you would have seen if you'd been there" to deliver "environmental" information.
Some puzzles solved to MS Campus stuff like Go to such-and-such conference room. Remote GC had to tell their teams: if a puzzle seems to tell you to go someplace on MS campus, call us instead so we can tell you what you would have seen.
Didn't want their hunt software up on "the site" while other Seattle events going on, because GCs of other games would thus have access to hunt data. [Wha? Not sure I follow this part. Do all Seattle GCs share the same machine for serving hunt answer checkers? That doesn't make sense.]
Wanted remote GC to serve their own copy of the site, so that load spike from one city wouldn't overwhelm the game for everybody. BUT game client (a silverlight app) had hardcoded URLs, so had to relative-ify those.
Original hunt software used players' MS corporate login to authenticate. Whoops, that doesn't work in the outside world where not everybody works for MS.
Don't be working on the hunt software the night before the hunt. That is not the path to a happy life.
- (Audience rueful chuckles from folks who worked on hunt software during the hunt)
Letting Go The remote GC is gonna need to change some stuff. You invested part of yourself into those puzzles, but you gotta step back and let them change it nonetheless.
Q&A
Dan Egnor of remote GC points out that something that helped a lot was having a single point of contact for each group. If you were in CA and needed to get word to "the right people" in WA (or vice versa), you'd talk to the WA "liaison" who would know who to pass the word onto: just mail arich and the right things would happen.
- Yeah, I think you pretty much need someone in that role. If you just tell folks to mail some mailing list, stuff falls through the cracks.

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RFP: Request for Location-Based Puzzles from Your Hometown

I encourage you to send me a location-based puzzle from your hometown. Or a few, even.

The online-puzzle-trail-in-the-making Order of the Octothorpe now has some location-based puzzles... but they're all from San Francisco.* That's kinda lopsided. It could use some puzzles from other places. E.g., wherever you are right now.

If there's one or more puzzles from your hometown in this thing, that could be a way to get your local puzzling community found by local puzzlers who are, y'know, unaware that there are such things as local puzzling communities. I guess? I'm just guessing, but it sounds realistic.

What's a good location-based puzzle? Basicly, it means that you give players half a puzzle and tell them "Go to the Golden Gate Bridge, look at the big plaque on the South Tower, east side, and then this will make sense." That plaque thus becomes the second half of the puzzle. The tricky part of writing these puzzles is that you don't control the text on that plaque.

In this case, you'll write a puzzle in some web-deliverable form (a "paper puzzle", a video, an audio file, ...), and puzzlehunters will, over the course of this puzzle trail, have a chance to solve it. If your puzzle is in Orlando and these solvers are in Chicago, they'll probably skip your puzzle for now... but they might remember it when they travel to Orlando.

Some reasons you might think that your puzzle won't work—but which aren't true

Our puzzle idea is tricky, and I remember that puzzlehunt is for newbs.
- In the puzzlehunt structure, these location-based puzzles are placed towards the end, so folks who see them will no longer be newbs.
We might not be free on the day of the hunt. When is the hunt?
- You don't need to be there on "the day of the hunt" to watch folks. There is no "day of the hunt." You're writing a puzzle that will be up on a web site for years.
The theme of the puzzle trail is the # symbol, and we have no ideas for a #-based puzzle.
- By this point, I've got some experience slapping a # on just about anything.

Legit reasons you might think that your puzzle won't work:

Our puzzle idea only works if we have someone there watching the spot and interacting with teams
- Yeah, that's probably not a good fit. It's not impossible; we can put a puzzle up on the web site one day and take it down the next. But you can probably find a better venue.

Have a puzzle? Have an idea? Not sure whether you have an idea? I'd love to hear from you. If you want to see a draft-version of how this online puzzle trail doohickey presents puzzles, you might look at the Sewn placeholder puzzle. There are hints. If you enter SEMAPHORE, you'll see that there are "partial" answers, so you can give teams feedback that they're on the right track.

*"all from San Francisco" Well, I have permission to use the Puzzled Pint puzzle archives, and each month they have most of a location-based puzzle: they have a puzzle telling folks where the party will be. But I still need a question to prove that teams actually visited the spot. Something like "The sign above the front door prohibits—what, exactly?" But since I haven't visited these places... Hmm, yeah.

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Link: advice for running a Mystery Hunt art team

It's a lot like design+art other web app projects but everyone's a volunteer and you also have to worry about, e.g., spoilers in your stylesheets.

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Resources for nerds who want in to MIT #MysteryHunt ?

I'm working on an online puzzle trail for newbs. Along the way, I try to point the newbs at, y'know, real puzzlehunts where they can put their new-found knowledge of Morse code to use. I'd like a page like that for the MIT Mystery Hunt. I could point newbs at the main site and say "Now figure out how to join a team... It's a puzzle!" But I'm wondering if there's a better place I could point them. Do the big mega-teams have recruitment pages?

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Jotting Notes on Linda Holman's GC Summit 2012 Presentation: Resurrecting Aquarius

It's Linda Holman talking about Resurrecting Aquarius. (If these "jotting notes" blog entries make no sense to you, that's because I'm jotting notes based on watching videos of lectures. That link back there is a link to the video.) This means dusting off the Shinteki Aquarius event that had run back in 2004, letting folks play it in 2011. I re-worded liberally, and when that wasn't quite obnoxious enough, I [added comments in square brackets]

It's like re-using materials from another Game Control team, except they're you from seven years ago. So when you make fun of them, you're not exactly insulting them so much as being self-deprecating.
Weren't even sure it was going to be a good idea. Wondered how much work it would be, what tweaks needed—and would folks sign up? Old-timers had played already; could noobs get themselves organized into teams? Had kicked around the idea for years
The original plan was: re-run Aquarius and run Decathlon 7 later in the year. Because of course re-running a game would be so easy. Except you'll notice that Decathlon 7 didn't happen until 2012. Because resurrecting Aquarius was not so easy after all.
Two Shintekians on this project: Brent and Linda.
- Brent likes to design puzzles.
- Linda likes to scout locations.
This meant: the fun part was mostly already done! Most of what was left was the grind. Aw man.
The grind:
- Puzzles were in old file formats. If you want to tweak them at all, the first step is... import into Illustrator and get the puzzle working there.
- Permits and logistical arranging. That permit from that day seven years ago, you can't re-use it.
Felt like about 70% of the work of running a game from scratch. Not as much as running from scratch, but plenty of work.
The puzzlehunt world has changed in seven years: GPS, mobile Google, solving apps. Some locations went away.
Life before GPS Anecdote from 2004: Team LowKey didn't know their way around Palo Alto. One of the puzzles involved driving to a few locations in Palo Alto. An hour into this, they decided to buy a map. It took them a few hours to finish this puzzle. In 2011, everyone's got their electronic map-GPSs, they spend their time solving instead of spending it wandering the streets.
One puzzle's gimmick was anagramming. Back in the day, most teams didn't have anagram solving apps. If they had 'em, someone on the team had probably written that app by hand. Nowadays, anagramming isn't so much about shuffling letters, it's picking choices off of the list your app shows you.
- In 2004, one team, The Burninators was much faster on that anagramming clue than other teams. GC, wondering if this team had some super-app asked: how did you anagram so quickly? Did you write some awesome computer program? But Wei-Hwa answered, "Oh, I called Will Shortz."
2004 game used gallery Half to Have It as a location: cool place with a front yard "graveled" with smooth glass fragments. In 2011, that gallery... was gone, a dirt lot with some remnant glass bits. But it turned out the place had moved with a new name, was now The Nest. So that's where we went in 2011.
2004 game started in Palo Alto's Aquarius theater, but it was only big enough to hold 14 teams each weekend. But wanted to accommodate 20 teams each weekend for 2011 game, so went to a bigger space, changed activity to match.
The game players have changed, the games change to adapt Nowadays, more puzzling, fewer non-puzzly activities. Nowadays, shorter drives.
GC has changed, too. More experienced, arguably wiser. Tweaks to logistics and team-management that make things much easier. Also, the LEON (answer-checking app that tells teams where to go next) app is much improved nowadays.
Message in a bottle example In 2004, the paper was far enough down in the bottle such that teams had to smash to get the message out. But in 2011, we're all more sedate, so paper was easy to ease out w/out smashing anything. So: less non-puzzly activity. The puzzle on the piece of paper was tougher in 2011: no instructions, used state capitals instead of just states, had to count dashes... Which makes it a nice, elegant puzzle by today's standards but would have been waaaay to weird for 2004.
A non-puzzly activity that stayed in and stumped some modern-day teams A puzzle consisting of a piece of paper painted on with watercolor... a nice nature scene, but no obvious code. But if you think to wash off the watercolor, another picture is revealed underneath. [I loved this!] Some teams were really stumped—they're used to puzzles, not destroying stuff. "Maybe we should have had a note that told you to ruin it." [Wha– no! Where's the fun in that?]
More activities: wading in a fountain, burying your teammate in sand. Some teams grumbled, but most were into it.
Back in 2004, there were traditional game locations: Gates of Hell at Stanford's Rodin statues; South San Francisco sign park. Those traditions don't hold true today; players would have asked "Why are we at these non-watery places for this water-themed game?" [Yeah, I would have asked. It's not like SF lacks for watery places.]
Also used a new location: battleship memorial at Land's End. Had the side effect of changing the driving route to be much shorter, nice for teams who don't like driving.
2004 game had a blinky-lights puzzle. But you could only see it at night, so fast teams had to wait for it. And if too many teams got there at the same time, they were all scrunching in to see the data—kind of a mess for the 14 teams of 2004, would have been worse for 20 teams each weekend of 2011.
2004 game had a remote-control boat activity at Stow Lake. Turns out that's illegal, whoops. So didn't do that in 2011.
Would teams play? Oh man, lots of folks were spoilered on that "little fish" clue that had been a sample on the web site for years. What if nobody was both qualified to play and motivated enough to put together a team?
- Wow, two weekends' worth signed up! Thanks, game community!
More teams each weekend, but original game had 5 core GC and 2011 game had just 2 core GC (and a lot of volunteers). [Wow.]
Overall, a good thing
- good Lots of people got to play. [Yeah! Since this meant that I got to play, I think it was totally worth it.] An excuse to improve some things. Many folks who'd played in original volunteered.
- not-good Folks who played in original didn't get a new event. High ratio of grind:fun stuff.
Proof it's worth it: Ran Shinteki Disneyland again in 2012. And ran Shinteki Decathlon 7. Dare to want it all.
Questions
I asked: OMG how did you figure out where the glass-gallery place had moved if all you had to go on was the empty lot with some glass fragments?
- There had been an antique shop next to the outdoor gallery; that was still there, and the antique shop people knew where the outdoor gallery had movied.
JeffWa in Seattle asked: Hey we still do destroy-the-clue stuff for Microsoft Intern events. But yea, you don't see them in other contexts? Why not?
- I dunno. Afterwards, nobody fills out a survey and says "my favorite activity was when we weren't solving puzzles, but were running around acting silly." [Maybe it's because interns are more awesome than fogeys who worry about destroying data?]
Corey asked: Did you still have all of your notes from back then? Or did you have to re-solve some of your puzzles to remember what the answers were?
- I'm going to let Brent answer this one.
- Brent: oh man, we had this old puzzle that Martin wrote, and I just banged my head against it for hours trying to solve it. We had some notes from then, but not about everything. Nowadays, we're much better about keeping notes. Because you re-use ideas: we might re-use a decathlon idea for a corporate event. You want to be able to get back into what you were thinking quickly
- Corey: any advice on how to take notes that make sense seven years later
- Linda: Playtester notes help a lot, because they can remind you of the process.
- Brent: Also, Linda puts together notes for the location volunteers; those notes are great, and they've often got the gist of the puzzle. For dealing with old file formats: keep a pdf of the printout. PDF hasn't changed meanwhile, nor is it likely to change much in the future.
Bearded dude in Seattle who I kind of recognize but I don't know who he is: How much work is it going to be to revive Shinteki Disneyland?
- Hopefully, not as much as Aquarius. It will have been just three years since the original (versus seven). Disneyland hasn't changed as much as the world-at-large.
Disembodied voice who might be Sean Gugler: Other games from that era you might revive? Decathlon 1?
- Yeah. But not this year. This year for sure: Decathlon 7. [And she kept that promise, yay]
- Brent: and we might even go further back. We ran a bunch of weekend-length games back before we ran these one-day events. And teams of today could probably get through the puzzles of a 90s-era 30-hour event in just 10 hours. [Hmm, maybe if there was a lot less driving?]
JeffWa in Seattle asks: So you were pleasantly surprised at the level of demand? Is this a sign of lots of new people playing?
- Sure. Then again, Brent points out that a lot of those 2004 teams have dissolved, so the level of interest might not be zooming up as fast as you think. And seven years is a long time to let new folks come along.
- Brent: Demand for Shinteki Disneyland 2012 has been higher than expected, tho.

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Jotting Notes on Scott Blomquist's GC Summit 2012 Presentation: Designing Portable Puzzles It's Scott Blomquist talking about Designing Portable Puzzles. This means "portable" as in "works well for simulcasting." As in "If your puzzle doesn't require a giant troll statue under a bridge, ma...