![[Scan: Feeling Good]](1_FeelingGood.png)
Like I said, I took a card. On it was printed a puzzle, "Feeling Good".
Feeling Good was a truly excellent puzzle, so pay attention.
It was a business card, except that it was printed with puzzly-looking stuff instead of something boring like contact information. There was the puzzle name "Feeling Good!", but the letters were printed in pairs, tipped sideways. And then there were the symbol pairs: DN YX &Y XL Q? XL &K YL $F Q? NN / $F YO XL !8 $F / XL DN YO XL !8 FC Q? YO WX
It was looking like a cipher. It was looking like something which would take some scribbling to solve. Team Fishstick Mess sprang into inaction and sat down on a nearby patch of sidewalk.
Some pairs of letters were repeated. Could we decrypt the message by brute force? (And by "we", I mean Alexandra and Dwight--I'd studied the history of cryptography, and had written some simple cipher-breaking software, but was no good at cracking ciphers "by hand".) They started to work, and I started to watch.
Alexandra thought that we might be faced with a Playfair cipher, perhaps with "felingod" as the keyword. But that theory didn't stand up to the "NN" pair, since doubled letters would never arise in Playfair. Also, the standard Playfair didn't have symbols like ?, $, and &. Could we really be expected to solve such a monstrosity? She put aside the Playfair theory.
Someone was working on the code. Someone started to look through our starting packet for inspiration. I stared at the puzzle, as if I could make meaning emerge through sheer force of will.
Looking through the starting packet was the right thing to do.
Do you remember the sheet of Useful Info? Do you remember that it had a Braille alphabet? That's all I had remembered about it. But it wasn't just an alphabet. It also had the Braille symbols for & ! and $--unusual symbols to include. But these unusual symbols also appeared in our puzzle.
![[Feeling Good: solution]](feeling_good_soln_tm.png)
The solution was more elegant than suggested by my shaky drawing.
Alexandra liked the lighthouse depicted on the card now. She said, "Braille... Lighthouse for the Blind!" I had been thinking about the mini-lighthouse close to the tip of Pier 39, but Alexandra's theory made more sense.
Dwight put it together. He drew some of the Braille. He talked about taking an overlay--I thought he meant the XOR. But actually the solution was to draw pairs of Braille characters tipped on their sides and on top of each other--as in the puzzle's title. Then look at the picture formed by the Braille--it would show a letter.
Alexandra and Dwight were ready to jump up and run to the intersection of Northpoint and Leavenworth to get the answer. Ever-lazy, I suggested checking our cheesy tourist map for an advertisement, but there wasn't any. And so we made our way to the B & B at Northpoint and Leavenworth.
What a great puzzle. Its solution was graphical, but was based on a language for the blind.
![[Feeling Good: solution]](np_and_leav_tm.jpg)
We stayed on this sidewalk a while.
We had solved Power Up!
We had finished (albeit with a hint) Black & White.
We had no obvious leads on what to do next. We sat next to the Bed & Breakfast, wondering what to do next.
You may have noticed that some of the puzzles which I've described led to other puzzles. Some puzzles had answers to write down on an answer sheet, for which we'd score points--but did not lead to other puzzles. Now we seemed to be running out of puzzles.
There was the "Three Words" transparency, but we had no clue where it fit in. There was the mysterious Ben & Jerry's coupon booklet, but we had no idea how it would be useful. There was the secret-code-looking message with the colored symbols labelled "You'll want to solve this later. You'll know when."
![[Screen shot: cryptogram]](cryptogram_clean_tm.jpg)
Maybe this was the time? We were running out of options. Alexandra started to solve it. She guessed that the first three words might describe an intersection: it was _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _. If it was an intersection, then the 3-letter word might be "and". That led to _ _ _ _ _ _ AND N _ _ _ _. (The first symbol of the third word was the same as the middle letter of the second word, suggesting the 'N'.) There was an alley with a 5-letter-starts-with-N name: Noble. Did we want to look for an intersection of (something) and Noble, and hope that we could fake our way through the rest of the instructions when we got there? It seemed like we only had received about half of this puzzle.
Alexandra chatted with other teams who came up to write down the phone number. She said that we were stumped about what to do next. One team said that a member of Game Control had visited the Poop-Bag site, and had suggested that teams which hadn't already visited Ben & Jerry's should do so.
We had been fooled by a non-puzzle. It never occurred to me that we should just go to Ben & Jerry's with no idea as to what we were supposed to do when we got there.
So we started walking to Ben & Jerry's, which was on the way from Ripley's to the sandwich sticker.
As we walked, Dwight talked about his previous day's orienteering adventure. He'd taken part in an orienteering challenge that a tricky guy had set up. This challenge was full of strange rule variations. I guess that normally in orienteering, you wanter around outdoors with a map and a compass (REMIND and an altimeter?), trying to find flags at goals that are marked on your map.
But in this challenge, there was a "phantom goal"--a goal on the map that was not marked by a physical flag on the course. So you couldn't be 100% sure that you'd found the right spot. And there were deliberate mistakes in the map. And there were other weird switcheroos. So as Dwight made his way, he was never sure how well he was doing. If he didn't see a flag, was it the phantom goal? Or was he in the wrong place?
He had reached the end, where he found out that he'd completed the challenge 100% correctly. He'd never been certain, but he had kept going. Dwight need never have worried about himself. Dwight had enough sand.
Outside was Elaine Bagley of Game Control. She handed us a big envelope. 90% of life is showing up, and all we had to do to "solve" the Ben & Jerry's puzzle was to show up. How much time had we spent figuring out what to do? I felt like the world's biggest chump.
The good news was that the envelope was full of puzzles. We were on Jefferson Street, which was very crowded. I started to make a little progress on a maze, but was blocking pedestrian traffic as I did so, as rude as any gawking tourist. One "puzzle" was actually a challenge: Go to the Pier 39 arcade and win 25 prize tickets. So we made our way to Pier 39, in search of tickets and a less-crowded solving area.
