Elementary School of Fish: Trashy Trivia

At Albany Hill Park, a roustabout for Taft on a Raft handed us a trash-bag containing some random-looking pieces of paper. He also let us jot down the phone numbers of Game Control in case we ran into trouble. This pointed out some trouble for our team: two of us had hopped out of the van to pick up the puzzle, but neither of us had brought a writing implement with us. We ended up snapping photos of the phone numbers.

Anyhow, we hauled the trash bag back to the van. Most of these contained disguised references to the most recent nine presidents--in mixed-up order. E.g., one sheet had names like Jenna, Amy, Patti, ... names of recent Presidents' daughters. We also received a partially-filled-in sudoku grid.

Did I mention that we were playing short-handed? Mystic Fish usually has more than three players in attendance. Here, our small numbers worked against us. Figure that to solve each page of presidential trivia, you'd like to have two people--one person calling out "Jenna?" and writing down answers, a second person looking up those answers in some information source. Maybe someone entering information into the sudoku grid and using sudoku skills to feed back-solve information back to people working on the mini-puzzles. We didn't have enough people for such an approach and we were pretty slow at this stage. This was true in general when we received "waves" of puzzles.

Still, though we weren't at our most effective, we were having fun. We tested each others' knowledge of presidential trivia. I was Mister Preparedness with some presidential trivia I'd downloaded to my laptop ahead of time, so we could get a list of Presidential pet names without seeking a WiFi connection.

Soon we had a filled-in sudoku grid. Along its SE diagonal, there were plus signs and minus signs placed between squares. Maybe this meant we were supposed to add and subtract numbers along that diagonal? Some swift arithmetic came up with the number 12. We entered that into our PDA. No, that wasn't it. We re-checked our arithmetic. We re-entered 12. Still no love from the PDA.

Finally, someone thought to take the steps from our arithmetic problem, and map them to letters:

10         = 10 J
10 + 5     = 15 O
10 + 5 - 7 =  8 H
...

...and got John Hinckley Hinkel. Entering this into the PDA told us to make our way to John Hinkel Park in North Berkeley.

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