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We followed their directions to the American River confluence. (I wondered what this was the American River confluxified with here. Later research revealed that this was the confluence of the North Fork American River and the South Fork American River.) We ignored the part of the directions that told us to turn left when we really wanted to turn right--that's why you run play-tests. The directions said that we were looking for another trail-head parking lot. They also said to beware of a "couple in coitus" and that that was not part of the Game. coed astronomy had encountered the couple and no-one had been too happy about that.
As we pulled into the parking lot, there was another vehicle there. As we pulled together headlamps and clipboards and prepared to exit the van, the other vehicle powered up, backed out, and left. Perhaps that was the former couple in coitus, surprised that their out-of-the-way trysting spot was so busy.
Team Get on a Raft with the Weasleys caught up to us on the trail. They'd been ahead of us, but Game Control had slowed them down with an extra puzzle. Or perhaps we'd been going too slow and Game Control had skipped us over a puzzle. Or perhaps both. Now we were all together, exchanging speculation about couples in coitus.
Soon we found a bag full of clues. Soon we were back at the vans. We were looking at a stack of 17 cardboard coasters. On the top, each one had a pattern of four concentric circles; some circles were connected by lines. On the bottom, each coaster had a photo and some piece of trivia leading to an English city. We were able to identify four cities with our pooled knowledge and our map of England. We needed trivia help and it was... almost 3 o'clock in the morning. I could imagine calling up Alexandra for help at 3 a.m.--but not if her dog had just died. (Her dog, unfortunately, had died the night before. Later on I would learn this.) No-one else had a phone-a-friend that was available this late. At least we had a guess of what to do with the cities: this would probably allow us to order the coasters, perhaps from north to south.
What did the circles mean? A photo of Big Ben on the bottom of one coaster had its clock face replaced with a set of four concentric circles. OK, so the lines connecting circles probably represented clock numbers from 1-12 or 1-60. Most of the coasters had a couple of lines connecting circles, but they were always connecting different circles--what did that mean? Maybe they represented numbers from 1-12 and we were supposed to add them up? Some numbers from 1-12, some from 1-60 and we were supposed to add them up? Some of the lines between rings seemed to "break" other rings in between. What did that mean?
What were the cities? What was the system of the circles? We were awash in uncertainty. In the end, we called Game Control. They told us the remaining cities. They told us the system of the circles: Lines represented numbers in the 1-12 range. If they touched the same circle, add the numbers. If they touched different circles, subtract the numbers. If a line "broke" a circle, that meant to multiply its number by the number of circles it bridged.
How the heck were we supposed to figure that one out? Team Snout play-tests all puzzles before using them in live play-tests. Apparently, the play-testers for this puzzle had been geniuses. I don't think any of the live play-tester teams figured this one out without help.
Once Game Control gave us the city names and the encoding method, we followed their instructions to "solve" and get a message: GO TO KENNETH FOX DDS. Calling up Game Control let us know that this dentist had an office on Auburn Ravine Road in Auburn. We were going to Auburn! I looked at a clock. Would Ikeda's be open and serving pie at 4 o'clock in the morning? Probably not. What else was there to do in Auburn?
There was plenty of kvetching about the Coasters puzzle during the drive to Auburn. Kvetching after a puzzle is a time-honored tradition. In hindsight, maybe we should just have said "Well, that's why we play-test, right?" But even for a play-test, folks need to reassure each other: It's not that we're dumb; the puzzle was just messed up.
We kept talking at Jim Keller until he relented on his observerish shell and talked back. He said that he'd come up with a puzzle for this hunt. But GC said it was too hard. It was harder than the Coasters puzzle. Jim thought it was easier, but other folks had been flummoxed.
Kenneth Fox, DDS, of Auburn had a huge female nude statue out in front of his office building. It seemed like a Snoutish place to hide clues, but there weren't any. We searched around some more. There was a nearby creek, a nearby park, a bridge, a parking lot... We searched around a lot. Team Get on a Raft with the Weasleys showed up. Eventually someone noticed another, even larger statue a little down the road. It concealed our next puzzle.
Thus we soon had a treasure to bring back to the van: a small electronic device hanging from a strap. Messing with it didn't seem to do anything--until someone squeezed it just right and the lights started blinking. Redredgreen (pause) Greengreengreen (pause) Redgreenblue (pause)... It glowed one color at a time, quick bursts of three blinks in sequence. There was a sequence of seven bursts. Hmm--ternary notation, perhaps? It wasn't so easy to see how this thing was blinking--it was so fast. But eventually we had a message: AMERICA.
Various folks tried waving the wand to sound out "AMERICA". The wand kept saying "Nope, I don't know that spell." Finally, we called up Game Control to say that we were having no luck with the wand. Game Control gently pointed out that AMERICA wasn't a wand word--and that we still had to solve more of the puzzle. Hmm.
Squeezing the blinky light again made it stop blinking. Squeezed it again, and it started blinking again--but now with a new pattern, yielding a new word: REALTY. Aha. We squeezed and further squeezed until we had the message: a realty office on the highway. We called up Game Control, who said that was indeed the answer. They gave us an address to go to, and more importantly told us to keep an eye out for a car parked by the side of the road with blinky lights in the windows.
We never did spot the Realty office, even later when we were parked next to it, but we did spot the car with the blinky lights just fine. When we parked the van, hopped out, and made our way over to that car, there were a couple of GC folks there to meet us. As I walked up, one of them handed me a cup of tea. Someone said, "Hey didn't the textbook have a section on reading tea leaves?" And the GC folks smiled as they handed us more cups of tea and a box of biscuits. The teacups were transparent plastic. I held mine up to the light--there were marks on the bottom. Then one of the GC people said something about courtesy. Eh? Then they said that they were tired of being out in the cold and would like biscuits. Didn't they have plenty of biscuits? Nevertheless, we opened up our box of biscuits and shared them around.
Soon we were back in the van, looking at marks on the bottom of some empty teacups. These were little pictures made up of repeated images of the letter "t". What an awesome idea. There was a pig, an axe, a bull's head, and other symbols. The textbook's instructions on how to read tea leaves were pretty clear, but we didn't do it quite right. We thought we might be on the right track, but our message had a Q, a G, and a couple of Fs, and wasn't looking like much. We tried some other things and they looked even less promising. In the end, we called up game control, got straightened out. For a little while, we'd been on the right track, but we'd mis-identified a few pictures, and had mostly been on the wrong track. For example, that picture that we thought was an acorn was really supposed to be a lock, a lock with a key sticking out of it. I was glad we'd asked for help. Soon had our next destination: GRIFFITH QUARRY.
The sky was lightening up. Sunday had dawned. We drove down from the mountains, back down to the flatlands just outside Sacramento. I felt queasy. What was in that tea? I tried not to think about it. We were at Griffith Quarry Park. The sun was up.
As we pulled into the parking lot, the van jounced . "Nothing like a good, bumpy parking lot to wake everybody up," said Erik. And sure enough, the main body of Continental Breakfast was yawning and stretching, rousing to wakefulness in the back seats.
As we stumbled out of the van, Team Get on a Raft with the Weasleys was just packing up to leave. They had some useful advice for us: "A lovely campsite and I recommend it highly, but be careful of the wasps." "Yeah, there are some wasps that are starting to... frolic." Greg deBeer said, "Don't forget your wand!" "Uh, do we have our wand?" We didn't. Someone went back in the van to get it.
We wandered around the park, dodging wasps, finding glow sticks. (Probably the glow sticks would have been useful if we'd found this place at night.) On a picnic table, we found a bag with puzzles. We took a puzzle and headed over to a nearby picnic table.
It was a piece of cardboard with a rectangle drawn on it. The rectangle was mostly blank--except for some small shapes drawn in the corners. And a couple of strange small shapes on the edges. And a couple of strange small shapes in the middle. Each of the strange small shapes was marked with a number. What the heck? It looked geometrical, which suggested the engrams in our book.
Our book contained some "n-gram" pages showing strange geometrical creatures--drawn with bold lines, with some extra light lines drawn in to give cute faces to the shapes. They looked sort of like tangram puzzles--but not as we know them. These creatures were all different sizes. So it wasn't like these were tangram puzzles using a different set of shapes, since tangram puzzles use all seven pieces. Justin and Prasad set about measuring the sides of n-gram puzzles in the book. They did seem to be made up of a certain set of triangles and squares. "Here's that triangle again." "Here's that 2-and-a-half by 5 triangle again." Two and a--oh, those wacky Australians were measuring in centimeters.
There was noise from the parking lot. coed astronomy had arrived! We warned them about the wasps. I drank some apple juice, ate some almonds. The wasps chased me around until I licked the last sweet juice off of my lips.
It seemed pretty clear that we were supposed to somehow associate the n-gram creatures in our book with this shape-sprinkled rectangle somehow--but how? Some of the creatures had concave "mouths" which seemed to fit around the little shapes.
What did it mean that we could subdivide the n-gram creatures into shapes? "There's a kite. There's two kites. There's a kite." "We're dividing it into triangles and squares?" "No we're dividing it into these--shapes." "There's a five centimeters." "This is crazy." "This is five centimeters. That means I've got to go down here by two and a half. There it is. I do that, then I join it up. I do it again. There's that shape again." "Augh."
coed astronomy packed up and headed back to their van. Had they solved the puzzle already? They had probably solved it.
Maybe we were supposed to lay these big shapes on top of the rectangle? They would more than cover the rectangle. But perhaps we could lay a little of each shape on the rectangle, with leftover voids where the rectangle's little shapes were? We had some theories. We made tracings of engrams from the book, cut them out, shoved them around on top of the rectangle. The math-camp alumni measured sides and tried to measure angles. We kicked around theories, occasionally testing them. Time passed.
When a person on one team talks with a person on another team to learn the difference in character between the teams, a question that comes up is "When do you take hints?" The Mystic Fish rule of thumb is to struggle with a puzzle for an hour before asking for hints--and only ask for them if it doesn't feel like anyone's made any progress in the last several minutes. This is perhaps towards the anti-hint side of the spectrum. I remember talking to someone on another team who said that they'd call up game control if they ever went for fifteen minutes feeling like they weren't making progress--of if they felt like they'd found too many possible approaches to take and wanted to find out which ones they could eliminate.
I never figured out the Continental Breakfast rule of thumb for hint-taking. I'm not convinced that they'd settled on one yet. So far, they'd played in several Bay Area Night Games, which usually have a hint-taking mechanism built in. They'd played in one longer game Paparazzi, so they'd probably had a chance to think a little about when to ask for hints.
So far this game, we'd taken hints on puzzles when Erik or I instigated it. That is, when the two visiting players had suggested it. I'd suggested it once, and regretted it--I wanted to see how these people operated. I didn't want to interfere with their process beyond providing one more brain to apply to puzzling. The regular Continental Breakfast folks didn't seem to object to taking hints. They seemed to like the idea--when someone else suggested it.
Erik had suggested hints once or twice, but he wasn't doing so now. He might have been thinking "I'm d*mned if I'm going to be the who admits to wanting a hint again." Or maybe he was sleepy. Or maybe something different was going on. But we were foundering with no end in sight. I settled back and observed.
What finally happened was: Jim Keller said, "[The current theory] couldn't possibly be it." Erik: "So we're going to drive you crazy?" Prasad: "Do you know this puzzle?" Jim: "No, I haven't seen it before." Me: "But as an educated observer of past games..." Erik: "We're floundering" Jim: "As an educated observer, at this point, I think you're stuck." Me: "Plus, [I just tested part of our latest theory and it isn't working]. I can double-check the arithmetic, but--" Erik: "It's OK, [a variant on the theory might save us]." Prasad: "[The current theory won't work. We're ignoring an important part of the puzzle.]" Erik: "I think that [the current theory is salvageable]. But I agree that we should call Game Control."
And so we called up and asked for a hint. Jim had saved us. Game Control was able to get us steered in the right direction.
The little shapes on the big rectangle were meant to show points. If we cut the rectangle up, from point to point, it would form squares and triangles--those squares and triangles which formed the n-gram creatures. We wouldn't use all of the pieces to make each n-gram creature. If we summed the numbers on the pieces that made up each n-gram creature, the resulting sequence of sums would give us our message.
And that worked. It was good that Justin and Prasad had already figured out how to divide the n-gram creatures into triangles and squares. Once we knew what to do with that data, we made quick progress.
This gave us our magic word, which we totally failed to cast with the wand. After several minutes, we called up Game Control to find out what the wand would have told us--we were heading to Maidu Regional Park in Roseville, on the outskirts of Sacramento.