Bang V: 5x5, After-Party

After failing to solve two puzzles in a row, you might think that Team Fishstick Mess was the lousiest puzzle-solving team on the planet, but in the next puzzle, Dwight and Alexandra shone. We found a "Take 1!" box that was surrounded by people with clipboards, pencils, and flashlights.

Inside, there was a 5x5 grid. Around its periphery were symbols that we recognized from the encrypted message in our first envelope. Now we knew it was time to solve that.

We were faced with a 5x5 grid plus a couple of extra letters. There were 10 clues listed below in two columns, perhaps for across and down. (Though as it turns out, that was not true.) So we started coming up with five-letter words that matched the clues. I helped with was "chocolate substitute". Someone said "soy," but I piped up with "Nope, 'carob'," silently thanking my mother for inculcating me with a thorough grounding in health foods. I also helped with "Jamaican sometimes," and said "rasta". And then I wanted to say, "Even though I knew those two words, I claim that I am not a hippie," but I didn't.

I remember those two words because I came up with them, but Dwight and Alexandra came up with many more words. I couldn't follow most of them. But they wrote words on the grid, disproved the clues-are-organized-into-across-and-down hypothesis, and kept coming up with more words and ways to arrange the words that we had.

Eventually they had a couple of across-words and a couple of down-words and things were looking like they were getting solid. I suggested that we start plugging their answers into the cryptogram. And then the cryptogram might suggest the values of other symbols, which we could plug back into the grid. But they said, "Nope" and "I think we've about got it."

I was all set to say, "Impossible, you couldn't possibly have that grid all worked out," but I had only got as far as saying "Imp--" and there was another word scribbled in the grid. I shut my mouth. Another word appeared and another and in less than a minute, the grid was done. A chill ran down my spine--these people were good.

We plugged the letters from the grid into the cryptogram. And we had to plug a lot of them in, because it wasn't making a lot of sense: "BARNES AND NOBLE CLASSICS INTRODUCTION". Alexandra laughed: our earlier wild guess of "______ AND NOBLE" had been correct.

So we quick-stepped to the local Barnes and Noble. Out in front was a cluster of people with clipboards and flashlights. They were, of course, another team. Alexandra chatted with them, asking which puzzles they'd liked and which gave them trouble. Then Alexandra and I went inside the store in search of a "classics introduction".

You might think that we had to search the classics section or that we had to ask some clerk for help. But Alexandra said, "go upstairs" and pointed out someone to follow. She'd recognized a fellow hunter at the store's information desk; she had seen the clerk point him upstairs, he had pointed his teammate upstairs, and now we were following them.

There was a box of pamphlets advertising^W Introducing us to Barnes and Nobles' own publishing imprint of copyright-expired^W^W Classic works of literature. We took one to prove that we had solved the puzzle.

Alexandra looked around: "Where's Dwight?" she asked. But she never had to worry about Dwight. "He stayed out front," I said, "He said he didn't want to freak out the store clerks by having us all wandering around." Alexandra concurred with this: Game Control had encouraged us to "be cool" when visiting local businesses. I said "Yeah, it must be disconcerting for them to have a bunch of people wandering in, acting very alert." Then I made my super-alert ninja-walk moves. She seemed to enjoy that.

Last-Ditch

We never got here.

Out in front of Barnes and Noble, we made one last effort to figure out the Pirate Puzzle. We failed. We didn't think to open up the hint envelope. Then again, we were already running late for getting to the finish line. If we'd opened the hint envelope, we would not have had time to go to the puzzle's destination. Our hourglass had not enough sand.

If we had opened up the hint envelope, we would have seen that the extra symbol was an "F" from an "I [heart] SF" store ad. And we would have seen that we should find the locations of the symbols on the tourist map, and drawn an X. That would have led us to a giant relief map of the bay near Pier 41, whose northeasternmost spot was Mare Island.

On Hint Envelopes

And so we headed to the finish line. Alexandra talked strategy along the way. She said that on one level, it was often smart to use hint envelopes. Maybe that hint costs you a ten minute penalty, but it saves you 15 minutes of solving. But on another level, if you win contests by using hints, other people grumble about you and call you names. "Why don't game organizers have a harsher penalty for hints, then? If people think it's so bad?" Alexandra had no theory on this.

(And when Alexandra saw an early draft of that paragraph, she explained:

That's a bit simplistic. The essence of what I was trying to get across is that while using hints may be a good strategy if your goal is to get your team across the finish line sooner and have a high placement, some teams think it's unaesthetic. Some teams are about results, and will take hints early and often, and some teams are about process, and will want to solve the clues on their own.

The only perfect test of skill would be a game without hints. But in these point-to-point games, that would mean that some teams would get stuck on the first clue and never get past it. So all GC's employ a hints system. Some will assess time penalties per hint, and others won't. In the Stanford game, some GC's will post results and finishing order (raw and adjusted) and others won't bother. Even in the games where no scores are posted, teams know who crossed the line first, and GC's talk, so teams also know which teams called for hints a lot, and which didn't. If you cross the line first but you called for a lot of hints, other teams are not necessarily going to think of you as a top team.

Scoring varies, but *generally* you can do well if you take hints early and often. In other words, hints don't usually penalize you as much time as they save you.

Calling names? No. but teams have playing styles, and over time they get known for their styles, and we'd rather be known as a team that takes fewer hints, and takes them later, even if it costs us in the rankings.

So people think about qualitative differences more than quantitative differences? This is getting more interesting, more like real life.

Coming Down

And then we were outside of 1329 Columbus Avenue, and if we hadn't already been sure that we'd solved the finish-line puzzle, we would have been vastly reassured to see some people out in front with clipboards and headlamps.

We went up some stairs, and were soon in a clubhouse. No, really, we were in a private club with a clubhouse. In this case, there was a sort of entry hall containing a table laden with snacks. And there was a den in which Game Control had just given away prizes to the winners and was about to start going over the solutions.

We were late. We had missed a sound-based puzzle which had taken place here. We had missed the awards. Exhausted-looking teams were filing out. Dwight didn't stick around--he had a long drive back to Sacramento. Tomorrow was a school/work day. These people were sane. I stuck around to listen to the answers. (But I won't go over them here, because I think I've talked about all of them.)

Then Alexandra talked with Game-Control Greg about the game: what she'd liked, and what she hadn't. Alexandra and Greg were planning on running a BATH (i.e., Game-Controlling a game) together later that year. I thanked Greg for a great game. The adrenalin was starting to wear off. I was starting to pause and reflect. I realized that I had had a great time.

Why You Want to Join Urban Diversion

Alexandra was on the lookout for a place to hold an after-party for treasure hunts that she hoped to run in the future. When Greg mentioned that the people in charge of this private club had given him a big party-space-rental discount in hopes of raising awareness, Alexandra's ears picked up.

She wandered over to talk with the people from the club who were watching over us. She was soon chatting with them. The club was called Urban Diversion, and they organized many, many activities for their members.

It was mostly Alexandra talking with their business developer. One thing we learned is that this lady remembered names of all club members. That was her talent. (And I immediately forced myself to memorize the name of everyone in that conversation, though I am normally not great with names. Kumiko, Wendy, Blake. I'll probably never meet those people again. Ah, another set of neurons wasted...)

The thing that impressed me is that this club organized puzzle events. I mean, they organized all kinds of things: movie outings, sushi nights, rock climbing, ... But part of the reason they had been interested in this event is that they ran their own treasure hunts. They talked about a previous hunt in which they'd flown the participants to Las Vegas. The participants were divided into teams--but didn't know who their teammates were. So on the plane to Vegas, they had been forced to seek each other out. Things got weirder from then on.

Was everyone in this town running puzzle games?

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