McGuffin Ho! Significance of Significance

Outside the Chabot Space & Science Center, there was an overlook. This overlook had a safety barrier, a barrier which was Swiss-cheesed with holes in a hexagonal grid. Game Control had used this grid to set up some colored configurations, with one letter per hexagon. There were also 16 English words with one letter per hex:

• THESE
• SEMIPHORE
• KEYWORDS
• ENCODED
• DEXTROUSLY...

There was also a biiiig swath of grid sparsely populated with letters.

The word "SEMIPHORE" stood out--a mispeling of "semaphore"? Were we looking for a variation of semaphore code? Soon we were making paper copies of the color blobs so that we could work on this puzzle back in the van. It was during this time that the hint arrived.

This game had a clever hint system. When a team picked up a puzzle, the puzzle's package had a six-digit number on it. Teams called up a Game Control phone number and touch-tone-entered this six-digit number. This let Game Control's computer know that you'd arrived at the clue site, weren't lost, etc. etc. It also started a timer on the Game Control computer. At some pre-determined time after you entered the code, the computer would call up all of the teams' mobile phones. When someone answered the phone, a voice message played. This system was technically sweet.

So everyone's phone started ringing, and someone played the message on speakerphone: It warned us that the words meant nothing. Wow, it was a good thing it warned us about that--we had totally been concentrating on what "semiphore" might mean. But probably this word had been chosen for its pattern of letters instead. Why would changing "semaphore" to "semiphore" make the word more interesting for this puzzle? What was the difference between an "a" and an "i"?

We had no idea. Or rather, we had several half-baked ideas which led nowhere. We struggled. Night fell. We struggled some more.

More hints came in. And then another hint which talked about the difference between semiphore and semaphore--and it mentioned signal flags. As in semaphore flags. Oh no. That first hint had led us away from the solution. The rest of the hint then told us exactly how to solve the puzzle. This was probably the low morale point for the team.

We drove to the next clue site, some intersection elsewhere in the Oakland hills.

Next: Blink and You'll Miss It

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