It was a little after 9:00 on April 15, 2006. Team Mystic Fish was playing in "The Apprentice: Zorg", a puzzle hunt hosted by the team Taft on a Raft. The Taft on a Raft people had teased me about my past attempts to short-circuit games by guessing likely locations. This game hadn't started yet, but I knew where the ending location was. I'd found out by chance--but considering my history, I was starting to think it was fate.

Elementary School of Fish: At the Start

Zorg addresses his apprentices

Mystic Fish was playing short-handed and short-headed. We were Dwight Freund, Brian Larson, and me. Alexandra Dixon, our captain, was watching over her mother in the ICU. Wesley Chan was out of town. Dwight thought he'd lined up his puzzler daughter Rachel as a stand-in Fish--but she had gotten sick at the last minute.

We'd met at the North Berkeley BART station and loaded up Dwight's wife's van with gear and reference books. We'd picked up coffee at the original Peet's on Walnut and Vine. We filled up the cooler with ice from the nearby drug store. We drove past the Marin St House where I used to live, through Albany, and out to the Albany bulb, a strange bit of landfill next to the Golden Gate Fields racetrack. Today, it was stranger than usual--the area by the keyhole statue was full of gamists. The Apprentice: Zorg game was going to begin soon. We parked, made our way over to join the crowd.

The Apprentice: Zorg was an instance of The Game, which is to say that it was a long treasure-hunt game. Teams would solve puzzles. If they solved them correctly, they would get told to go to some location--where there was another puzzle to pick up and solve. To ease the administration of this process, Taft on a Raft was using some Palm PDAs running software developed by the Just Passing Through folks for their Shinteki games. This program would let you enter puzzle answers. If a puzzle answer was "PILTDOWN" and you entered that word, the program would say something like Congratulations, you solved the puzzle. Now go to Taft and Broadway in Oakland. If you entered a wrong word, it beeped at you. Also, as you worked on a puzzle, the device would offer hints every so often.

I picked up Team Mystic Fish's device. I turned it on to make sure that it was working. I saw a screen that said something like

Game Over!

something something Come to Eudemonia something something

Eudemonia was a game store in Berkeley--I'd walked past it just a few weeks before. I knew where the game was going to end. Was it luck? Was it fate? I didn't know. I sheepishly brought the device back to the Taftians so that they could reset it.

I sought out Team Sharkbait, the other fish-themed team in this game. But I didn't want to talk about piscine matters. I wanted to hear about SNAP (Seattle and Neighboring Areas in Puzzling). Team Sharkbait was from Seattle, and they'd just run a game up there called SNAP2. This seemed like something BANG-level in the Seattle area. That is to say, building up a community of not-too-serious gamists and puzzlers to play and host afternoon/evening games. That is to say, Team Sharkbait had done an awesome thing and I wanted to hear what they had to say about it.

Being from Seattle, they didn't gush about their awesomeness, but they had been pleased with how SNAP2 went. I asked them if they thought that SNAP would continue. They said that they'd told the winning team that it was now that team's responsibility to host the next SNAP. And the winning team seemed OK with the idea, so there was hope.

There was some more schmoozing with other folks. There was some schmoozing with the rest of Mystic Fish. And then the game began: Ian Tullis of Taft on a Raft got up on a mound to bring things to order. He introduced Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg. Zorg was the smarmy executive who would order us around in The Apprentice--and occasionally try to kill us.

Zorg introduced us to the amazing powers of a device called the ZF5. There was a call for Team Captains to pick up a ZF5 for their teams. Our team's captain was at the hospital watching over her mom. I nudged Dwight forward. I leaned over to Brian Larson. "I just elected Dwight captain. OK?" Brian seemed OK with this.

Soon we had a ZF5. This was two plastic cups taped together, containing glue, an alcohol swab, marker, multicolored dirt, matches, and... stuff. Though it wasn't a bag, we referred to it as "the bag of crap".

We also had a puzzle: a bunch of numbered, captioned photos. And a grid with many blank squares--and with a few squares containing numbers. Those numbers seemed to correspond to the photos. Each photo showed a two-letter acronym thing: Cheney the V.P., I.R. spectrum, ... As we worked through identifying these, the Palm beeped to tell us that we were looking for two-letter acronyms. Yay, we were on the right track. The grid was soon sparsely populated with squares containing two letters each. Someone noticed that all the squares in one column had a letter in common. Actually, that was true for each of the columns. And if you looked at each row, it had a letter common to its squares. Writing those letters down in sequence showed a word in the middle. We entered the word into the Palm--and it told us to go to Albany Hill Park. It told us that we'd know the street to use when we saw it.

Soon the van was in motion. We stopped off for gas, then headed back towards the park. I looked on the map and saw Hillside Street. That must be the street we were meant to use. But as we climbed the hill we saw Taft Street. As in Taft on a Raft. We turned onto that street, and soon we were at the next clue site.

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