Bang V: First Packet, Power Up!

A booklet of gift certificates for ice cream

Soon we were sitting down. Someone opened up our first envelope of clues, and soon Team Fishstick Mess was busy snatching out interesting sheets of paper.

There was a puzzle named "Power Up!" which I'll write about later.

There was a puzzle named "Black & White", which I'll write about later.

There was a sheet of paper that looked like a coded message: it was mostly covered with colored symbols: red drop-shapes, yellow stars, green skulls. At the bottom, written in plain English was "(You want to solve this later. You'll know when.)"

There was a packet of coupons for the Ben & Jerry's ice cream parlor chain, with a store location circled. It wasn't clear what we were supposed to do with these coupons. I hoped that the "Black & White" puzzle's solution would instruct us to go to Ben & Jerry's to ask for "black and white" milkshakes. (Dwight pointed out that "black and whites" were sundaes, not milkshakes. Whatever, I had hopes for a clue involving ice cream. (Yes, it's been done.))

Useful Information

There was a sheet of paper with a Braille alphabet, which would no doubt be useful in solving some future clue. It also had a miscellaneous hint and some reminders of game rules.

Three Words

There was a transparency showing three famous buildings from the San Francisco skyline: Coit Tower, the TransAmerica Pyramid, and the Bank of America Building. There was also a mysterious blob and a circle labelled "Three Words". If we were standing in the right spot and held up that transparency, no doubt we would see that the circle contained three words from a billboard or something. I was worried--I didn't think it was possible to see those buildings from Fisherman's Wharf, weren't there hills in the way? (I was wrong, of course.)

There were also several small sealed envelopes. Greg of Game Control had explained these during his introductory lecture. Each envelope was labelled with the name of a puzzle. If we ran into trouble on a puzzle, we could open up the associated envelope, and there would be a big hint inside. But at the end of the treasure hunt, each team would get a time penalty for each opened envelope.

We'd pawed over this stuff long enough. It was time to get started on some puzzles. We started scrambling for writing implements and getting to work.

Power Up!

The Power Up! puzzle was on a piece of paper. Towards the top were a number of repeated graphic symbols. There were five symbols, each repeated several times. At the bottom was a numeral two and one instance of each symbol.

As a computer programmer who'd mucked around with plenty of assembly language, I saw the trick to this puzzle pretty quickly. These were binary numbers, like those used by almost all computers. The puzzle needed 5 symbols to encode the 26 letters, just as a computer would need 5 bits--any less silicon would have been "not enough sand".

Here, bits were represented by the presence/absence of symbols instead of by the stored charge in some transistors. Each symbol represented a power of 2: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. Adding up the numbers associated with those symbols gave a number.

We tried figuring out the numbers for a few of these clusters and tried a simple theory: each number corresponded to a place in the alphabet: 1=A, 2=B, 3=C, etc. Sure enough, it was starting to spell out something.

Alexandra and Dwight were pleased that I'd spotted the trick, but then they did something much more impressive.

We'd figured out the trick used to encode our clue, but we still had to crank out the solution. Here, I would have figured out each number and written them down. Then I would have written down an alphabet with numbers:

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z

Somewhere in these scribbles is the solution to Power Up!

Alexandra and Dwight didn't need to do that. They had this table memorized, they had this information at the tips of their fingers. They looked at a 9 and wrote down 'I' while I was still counting on my fingers. I sat and gaped at this display of prowess for a while, but eventually snapped out of it and started working on another puzzle.

Much more quickly than I would have thought humanly possible, we had the solution:

Go to RIPLEYS Find the PRISONER What's his number?

But Team Fishstick Mess was not ready to run off to Ripley's Believe it Or Not! museum yet. It made sense to work on the "Black & White" puzzle first. If that puzzle told us to go somewhere on the way to Ripley's, we wanted to know about that before we went to Ripley's.

(We were working on these puzzles simultaneously. handing them around. We did not carefully work our way through "Power Up" before picking up "Black & White". But we did want to know the solutions to the puzzles we had in hand before we started running around.)

Black and White

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