![[Scan: prize tickets]](3_Tickets_tm.jpg)
Our second envelope contained a pirate puzzle, a maze, and a line-graph puzzle. It also contained instructions for a "challenge". There was a bag containing four arcade tokens. There was a little sheet of instructions:
BANG! V: FISHERMAN'S WHARF / March 14, 2004
You need to turn your 4 tokens into 25 tickets. We suggest Skee Ball, but any game will do. You will be penalized 2 minutes for every ticket under 25 you return with.
Tips: It's a smallish place--if everyone goes at once, there will be some waiting.... The arcade closes at 8:00
And so Team Fishstick Mess scrambled and made our to Pier 39. We soon spotted the signs for the arcade, and followed them-- to a closed metal gate. We checked our watches--it was a quarter to eight, and the arcade was theoretically still open. We wandered over to another entrance, and found it barricaded. This barricade had a door in it, but the door only opened from the inside. There were two flustered-looking people locked outside with us. Alexandra recognized them. They were, of course, fellow treasure-hunters.
We conferred and commiserated: Yes, the arcade appeared to be closed. There were, however, still some people playing inside. Maybe the owners stopped letting people in a little early on a slow Sunday night? Justin Graham (a gamer Alexandra recognized) banged on the exit door and convinced some kid to let us in "just for a few minutes." He maintained a stream of pleading and cajolery that seemed to go on for a minute straight. I wanted this guy lobbying for my causes in Washington DC. Finally, the kid opened up the door and let us in.
Alexandra begged out of playing Skee Ball, and instead started to work on the maze puzzle. And so Dwight and I started to play Skee Ball (poorly): we put in a couple of tokens and played. We scored perhaps 8 tickets. We put in our last pair of tokens and started on our next game. Figuring that at our current rate, we'd need more tokens, I left Dwight playing Skee Ball and made my way to a token machine.
I was about to put a dollar coin into the appropriate slot when an arcade worker stopped me. "You know, we close soon." "Yeah, in a few minutes." "OK, I just didn't want you buying a lot of tokens, and then sorry that you couldn't use them." "Sure, thanks." He turned away to help a customer exchange tickets for a prize. I inserted my coin. No tokens emerged. Son of a-- I looked over at the arcade worker. He was still talking with the customer. I calculated times--how long would it take to grab this guy, explain the situation, and get him to hand me tokens? Too long. I looked back at the machine, tried inserting a quarter. A token popped out. I turned the rest of my quarters into tokens, abandoned the dollar, ran back to the Skee Ball track.
Dwight's Skee Ball was improving, and so was mine, and yet at the end of that second round, zero new tickets emerged. Did we need to get our points in special combinations? It seemed unlikely that we'd totally avoided all of those combinations. Was the machine broken? I thought about the token machine: not totally broken, but sporadic.
Dwight wanted to work on puzzles instead of playing more Skee Ball. I handed him our tickets and inserted a couple more tokens. I continued playing.
A rival gang of puzzlers noticed what I was doing. One of them pointed out "Hey, you can't keep going. You can only use the four tokens they gave you at first." No-one seemed to have the instructions handy. I grabbed our tickets from Dwight. "OK, these are our legit tickets." I shoved them into my front pocket. "I'm going to keep going for 25 tickets, in case that's okay with the rule." I grabbed some tickets from the machine and stuffed them into my back pocket: "These are our bogus tickets." As it turned out, there was no you-can-only-use-four-tokens rule. (As it turned out, Game Control didn't insist on using just the provided tokens, though you can see why the guy thought so. I kind of wish I'd believed him, though, because solving puzzles is more fun than Skee Ball.
While I was playing Skee-Ball, Alexandra and Dwight solved a couple of easy puzzles. Alexandra solved the maze. Dwight solved the line-graph puzzle.
Now we knew that the finish line was at 1329 Columbus Avenue.
Now we knew to look in a "TAKE ONE" box between Taylor and Jones on Jefferson (where many commercial boats take tourists out for bay tours and have "Take One" boxes with tour brochures).
But before we went running off to Jefferson Street, there was another puzzle to solve.
