Hogwarts Inside Out: The Play-test: Sacramento, Afoot

When the train stopped in Sacramento, we disembarked. We had photos to guide us to the next location. We kinda followed the photos, and kinda followed our fellow players--we were all going to the same place. The teams split up when we reached the Downtown Plaza shopping center, but soon converged on a branch of the River City Brewing Company, the site pictured on our bottom-most photo. But there wasn't anything there that looked like a Defence Against the Dark Arts class. We poked around under tables, looking for a likely-looking clue envelope when Anna our observer told us the scoop: In the real hunt in two weeks, the next part of the game would take place at this restaurant. For this play-test, we should head upstairs to the food court.

There, folks from GC escorted us to various food court restaurants, where they bought us lunch. Thus, the teams had a chance to schmooze some more. Also, there were restrooms. It was as I was emerging from the restroom that my pager vibrated. Ah, my home email account had received a message from Alexandra Dixon. The pager didn't show the whole email--the program which forwards emails to my pager doesn't handle attachments well, and this whole email was an attachment. But the subject line came through: Fw: AOMS - Goodbye Sweet Libby. Uh, oh, did that mean that her dog Libby, sick with cancer for the past few years, had died? Or did it mean something completely different? What did AOMS mean, anyhow? A tactful person would have thought of a gentle way to call up Alexandra, ask how Libby was doing, and gone forward from there. I was not so tactful and thought only of conversation tacks that would probably not go well. I'd been planning to use Alexandra as a "Phone-a-Friend" during the game. Now I wasn't exactly sure what to do. If her dog had just died, she wasn't going to be in the mood to answer puzzle questions. If her dog hadn't just died, then I would be a danged fool to not take advantage of her help.

Back at the food court, we students had our first lesson: Defense against the Dark Arts. This involved magic wands. Our substitute Defence professor was Professor Guzzany (as played by Sean Gugler). He asked which of us had brought our own wands. I'd brought along a couple of fiber-optic light wands. Our professor was impressed with our preparedness and gave us some house tokens.

But the fiber-optic wands were not, in fact, magical. Fortunately, our school would provide us with practice magic wands. We received a wand that appeared to be made of wrapping tape wrapped around some serially-linked batteries with a line of LEDs sticking out the end. I thought of the electronic gizmos from the Justice Unlimited Game, and was prepared to be amazed.

To use a wand, one tapped waved it back and forth to "wake it up", tapped it, held it steady and level. If the wand was level, it would light up one LED close to its tip; if it wasn't quite level, it would light up other lights.

When you had the wand level, you would flick and loop it. The wand contained an accelerometer, could sense different patterns of flicks and loops. When you were done with a pattern, you would wait until the wand's LEDs stopped lighting up. Then, they lit up again. Waving the wand back-and-forth then revealed a persistence-of-vision message.

We'd been given a textbook of magic. It contained a phoneme->wand-motion dictionary. If we learned a magic word such as "cheese", and could spell it phonetically, we could then spell the word wand-ly. It required a steady hand. I never got the hang of it.

We received some words to try casting. This revealed some rough spots in the system: we couldn't agree on how to pronounce some words. Australians didn't agree with Americans, and not all the Americans agreed, either. Once, a wand message seemed to direct us to do something like Go make potions at TSA Library Galleria--but our instructor let us know that we'd cast the wrong spell. Other teams had finished their wand assignments and wandered off somewhere. Eventually, our professor told us that class was ending. He told us to hurry over to the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria--earlier, one of us had accidentally cast the spell that told us our next place to go. But now class was over, and we were still struggling to acquire wand skills.

We didn't know where this Tsakopoulos library was. We asked some passers-by. They directed us to the main Sacramento Library--whose name wasn't Tsakopoulos. Uh-oh. But our fellow play-tester teams were in there, waiting for us, so we were in the right place after all. Except, no, now we were all getting kicked out of the library. Perhaps someone hadn't appreciated having a lobby full of weirdos waving around home-brew electronic devices. Where was Game Control, anyhow?

Jan Chong called Game Control. For the real game, the next class would be at the Tsakopolous Galleria, an event room at the library. For this play-test, we wanted to head over a couple of blocks to a small plaza.

Our next class was potions, and Dwight Freund, normally of Team Mystic Fish, was playing the role of our professor. Dwight sported a strange accent and a cruel mien, making sure to penalize each team for some minor infraction, taking away some of our house points. Then the teaching assistant made an excuse to slip us our points back. Mostly, we concentrated on the puzzle.

Our potions assignment was to recreate four award-winning potions. We were given some facts about these potions as a Smith-Jones-Robinson logic puzzle. Here my attention drifted. I don't enjoy Smith-Jones-Robinson puzzles, and sat back as the rest of the team solved. Once they'd solved the logic puzzle, we confirmed the answer with the T.A. Now we used the provided chemistry set to mix up our own potions. In each case, we mixed together two chemicals (that had been labeled as magical ingredients). Each pair formed a solution, precipitate, or giant foaming mass of some color.

The border of our assignment was made up of colored squares, some of them matching colors of our potions, some of them not matching. Justin thought that the pattern of match vs. not-match might form Morse. Rebecca pointed out that Justin always thought that puzzles were Morse. Folks tried Morse a little, garbled, decided it wasn't Morse, then got rat-holed trying to interpret as ternary. Once again, we found ourselves being approached by class officials--the other groups were done, class was almost over. Did we want a hint?

So we paid some house points for a hint--Chris the T.A. listened to what we'd done, and was curious to know how we knew it wasn't Morse. This was not a good reason at all--it was Morse. Soon we had it decoded, and were packing up to go to the location of our next class.

I called "time out" and went over to huddle with Dwight. Dwight knew Alexandra. Had he checked his email this morning? Did he know the contents of Alexandra's mysterious message? He hadn't; he didn't.

Our next class was in a park. Curtis addressed us: "I'm Rebeus Hagrid, and I'm still working on me accent." (For the game proper, a volunteer would play Hagrid.) We were going to learn how to identify monsters by their sounds. Our textbooks contained a list of 26 monsters. Suspiciously, each monster's name started with a different letter. One of the GC folks started up a laptop, whence strange sounds emerged. I carefully recorded the sounds with my audio recorder; this turned out to be a rather useless activity. The rest of the team jotted down descriptions of the sounds, looked at first letters, and decoding the message. We were to find a portrait at St Rose of Lima Park, a couple of blocks away.

This little park had some strange additions. There were three, uhm, stations set up. Each station had a toolbox locked by a combination lock; atop each toolbox was a portrait. The portrait showed a lady with a strange needlepointed necklace; from this necklace dangled eight strands of colored beads, each strand containing different combinations of colored beads. The photo was framed, and the frame was decorated with colored beads. Some of the beads had letters in them. We found bead-sequences from the portrait in the frame. The leftover bead-sequences in the frame were all labeled with letters... and we were stuck. I wanted to try all the lock's possible combinations, but the lock was jammed onto the handle such that this would be impossible. None of us knew how to pick a Master lock. We sat around listlessly for a while.

In reporter mode, I was curious to see what would happen next. We'd been staring at this portrait for a while since running out of ideas. If this had been team Mystic Fish, this would have been the time to ask for a hint. Alexandra's rule of thumb is to make sure that you've been cranking on the puzzle for an hour. I've heard from someone on another team that they ask for a hint if they haven't made progress for the last fifteen minutes. I didn't really figure out how Continental Breakfast figured out that it was time to ask for a hint. Maybe Erik, one of the visitors suggested it?

Crissy Gugler of Game Control listened to our questions. She said that the portraits who guarded the dorm rooms in the Harry Potter stories normally required a password. I asked, "Uhm, were we supposed to know that these portraits were the ones that guarded our dorms?" She had a pained look as she said that for the real game, this would be more clear. I guess other play-test groups had asked similar questions. Students in a House knew that house's password. Had we received a house password? Oh, our bandanas.

Plugging the letters of the eight-letter word "CHANTERS" on our bandanas into the places of the eight bead-sequences from the necklace into the beads of the frame gave us a spell to cast with the wand, which told us to cast HUFFLEPUFF (our house name), and that told us the lock combination. Whew!

Inside the toolbox was a set of instructions. Our student "dorm room" was in a nearby parking garage, specifically in section r-1 of that garage. Apparently, our "dorm room" was, in fact, a rental van. We had the remote & keys. There was also a CD labeled "animal noises A-Z"--perhaps a reference to the noises from Hagrid's class.

So we made our way back to the Downtown Plaza mall, into the parking garage, section r-1. Clicking the remote turned on a nearby vehicle's lights. We'd found our dorm room. We weren't sure exactly what to do next, so we fiddled with the van. In the trunk, there was a big blue insulated bag labeled "BREAKFAST" but with no obvious clues. Hmm, they'd given us a CD. What would teams naturally do if they had a CD? Put it in the CD player. Maybe there was already a CD in the player for us to discover? Erik powered up the van. (Erik would be our driver for the remaining 24 hours of the hunt. What a mensch.) Sure enough, the CD player said that it contained a CD. Playing it revealed a wizardly-sounding voice. It took a while to get everyone to hush and listen. And then it took longer to figure out how to rewind this vehicle's CD player. But eventually, we got it working.

This CD was a message from Professor Guzzany, our substitute Defence Against the Dark Arts instructor. He wanted us to sneak out of our dorm room on foot and stealthily proceed to Hogsmeade, staying out of view of any professors. There, we were to meet with him at the indicated spot on our Marauders Map--which was in the glove compartment.

Sure enough, the glove compartment contained several maps--AAA maps covering areas from Sacramento up towards Tahoe, a AAA map of England/Scotland/Ireland, and a Marauder's Map of downtown Sacramento and its neighboring Old Town. Apparently, Old Town was Hogsmeade in this game-ish metaphor.

This was tricky because it wasn't clear where we were supposed to avoid professors. If we'd known the Harry Potter books better, it would have been quite clear. There were footsteps drawn on the map. We ignored these, t hiking they were decorations, but they showed the location of people to avoid. Despite our ignorance, we mostly avoided professors as we made our way through the parking lot and the mall.

Soon we emerged from a pedestrian underpass into Old Sacramento. Crissy of Game Control was across the street, walking towards us--but perhaps she didn't spot us. She turned and walked away from us. We had dodged one professor. To avoid Crissy, we cut over to another street, walked up the block, and nearly ran into Professor Guzzany, who was standing off to the side talking with someone else from Game Control. The other GC person wandered off and Professor Guzzany gave us another puzzle:

He'd been working with Cassandra Cross, trying to research something called the Draconus Device. She'd disappeared. He and other wizards & witches weren't having much luck tracking her down--their powers were severely reduced, matching symptoms of Mugglium poisoning. He had some of Cassandra's notes. He passed them to us. If we could figure out her whereabouts, we should call up the Ministry of Magic to let them know. Professor Guzzany wandered off, no doubt to greet the next team.

We were looking around for a good place to duck off of the street to solve this puzzle. We looked for about thirty seconds before the Game Control dude who'd been talking to Guzzany earlier wandered over. (Later on, I'd learn that his name was Daniel.) Apparently, he was another wandering professor. He told us to hurry back to the dorms.

We headed back towards the shopping center, but were pretty sure we didn't want to try to head all the way back to the "dorms". What were our chances of making it through Old Sacramento and the shopping center without being spotted? And what if this next puzzle directed us somewhere else in Hogsmeade? We'd have to sneak back again. So we ducked down an alley and started to solve the next puzzle, the FLOO Network.

We were looking at a diagram of a graph. That is, we were looking at a collection of nodes; some nodes were connected by lines. Each node was labeled with the name of a city in Britain. We also had five "audit trails", each of which was a slip of paper with a date, time, and a long sequence of letters. Surely each letter corresponded to a city name on the graph--but there were multiple cities that started with the same letter, and not all of the trails' letters appeared as city name initials. I think it was Justin who noticed that each letter-sequence's length was a multiple of three. Perhaps if we grouped the letters in each sequence by threes, like airport codes, that would show a path of travel through the network? Sure enough, that worked.

And then Professor Daniel was standing in our midst. He was disappointed in us: Hadn't we agreed to head back to the dorms? Now he penalized us some house points. We paid up and packed up. We snuck back through the mall to the garage and our "dorm room".

We finished identifying the graph-path in the puzzle, and thus had a sequence of cities. But what to do with them? Someone noticed that looking at the minutes-part of the times on the audit trails, and treating the numbers as letters (1=A, 2=B...) yielded a message: UNDER. Huh? Oh, and treating the hour-parts as 24-hour times and then mapping to letters (2PM=1400=N, ...) gave us the word CROSS. Hmm, each graph-node label in the diagram had a cross under it. Looking at the city names in sequence, taking the letter that was right over the cross yielded a message: NIMBUS TWO THOUSAND ROAD FOLSOM. That was pretty funny--in the suburbs east of Sacramento, there was a road called Nimbus. In the Harry Potter books, the "Nimbus 2000" was the model number of a flying broom. Apparently, it was also a street address somewhere in the suburbs of Sacramento.

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