Brave Whacktagonal Knights: Westerly

When we reached the fountain, it was clear we were in the right place: some Coed Astronomers were gazing into the waters. We gazed into the waters. Floating there was a plasticky-looking writing surface with writing on it. It was a grid of letters, each letter encircled by a circle. There were arrows connecting some circles. Some circles were connected by crossed lines. "Oh, it's like male and female symbols. See, circle-arrow for the guys, circle-cross for the girls." Except that the arrows weren't all pointing northeast and the crosses weren't all pointing south. Someone noticed that the arrows formed a path through the grid. Reading the letters along that path revealed a message telling us to look at the other gender. So we tried looking at the circles that were connected by crosses. Putting all of those together yielded nonsense. Someone thought to conisder only the women: only read the circles that had crosses south of them: ignore crosses to the north, east, and west. That was the right thing to do: the letters in those circles spelled out a message REMIND. We gave the answer to the lady of the lake. (She was not in the lake, but rather sitting on a bench off to the side.) She said that was correct. Yay, progress.

Looking at our map, our next stop was the Hermit, stationed just in front of Haviland Hall. We set off downhill. Close to the creek we ran into team Tweedledee and Tweedledumber, otherwise known as the Graham brothers. Justin asked Andrea: "Are you coming from Camelot?" Andrea stammered something. Justin said "Nevermind, I bet it's this way." The Tweedles' map looked kind of strange--they had a few lines that looked right, but this one area that was covered with a sort of double-starburst. In hindsight, I think that they'd drawn a line for each word in the wordsearch. I asked Justin if they wanted a hint, but they figured they'd just keep heading up the hill.

We arrived in front of Haviland Hall. There wasn't any obvious puzzle there. We entered the building--the front door was wide open, which was a little unusual for a campus building on a weekend. The entryway was at a stair landing--not much there, but we could go upstairs or downstairs. Which did we want? We split up. We looked up, down, in the halls. We circumnavigated the building. This puzzle mentioned a hermit. Were we playing hide-and-seek with someone? We looked around some more. There was some "wiggle room" in the map--we'd figured out he alignment of paper and overlay based on a small compass rose, and for each puzzle site, there was a big circle to consider. So we walked around/through the building, considering.

Eventually, we gave up.

Westerly

We found the dragon-slaying quest, but not where we expected it to be based on the map. It was at around this time that we figured out that we'd mis-handled the map. We were supposed to align the paper and overlay by aligning their edges--we'd been imagining the subtle angle suggested by the compass rose. Also, we were wrong to think that the big circles drawn on the map represented puzzle shapes. These circles were actually the bulby bits of teardrop shapes--and the pointy bits of the teardrop shapes indicated the correct map locations. (Further muddying the waters, GC had been forced to set up Camelot in the wrong place on campus--there was construction going on at the planned site, construction that had started that very day.)

The dragon-slaying quest was a deck of printed cardboard cards, each with a picture of a dragon and a word--the dragon's name. Someone pointed out "Lots of double letters in those names". We read off the double letters. This gave us something like "S_LAY HORINEDXONFES", like a slightly-garbled "slay horned ones". Many of the card illustrations had horned dragons. We moved those off to the side, but it wasn't clear what to do next. OK, so we'd found a garbled message telling us to remove some cards. All of the garbles were extra letters and blanks. Maybe we were supposed to have found another message first, telling us to remove something else? We restored the deck, looked at the first letters of the names--and sure enough, they told us to slay dragons without wings. OK, moved those off to the side. Moved the horned dragons off to the side, too. Now we had a set of eight or so dragon cards. It wasn't clear what to do next. We looked for patterns, didn't spot them. "Some of these drawings look like letters." Maybe the next step was going to tell us to slay some of the dragons, and the pictures leftover would spell a word? It was a long shot, but we weren't coming up with other ideas. But the word we were coming up with seemed incredible "TOTS". I said "Pseah. I'll go give this answer to GC. Meanwhile, keep trying to figure out how this is supposed to work." The nice GC lady said that TOTS was indeed correct. I whooped. Ran back to the team for high-fives. I think I may have babbled something about us having an "instinctive feel" for these puzzles. We never did find out how we were supposed to solve that one.

Photo by DLoft

At the eucalyptus grove was The Shrubbery Quest. There were several paper signs tied to trees. One said "We are the knights who say 'Ni'!" Another said something like "We are no longer the knights who say 'Fo'! We are now the knights who say 'Pla-on-a-Fo-Te'!" It is a tribute to our team's dedication to excellence that we did not devolve into quoting Monty Python routines at this time. Eventually, someone noticed that the weird hyphenated words like Pla-on-a-Fo-Te were abbreviations for phrases like Players-on-a-Football-Team. And syllables like "Ni" and "Fo" were abbreviations for "Nineteen" and "Four". I forget exactly how this puzzle fit together. I think that we ordered the signs to make a chain: "Se" and "Dwa(rves)-In-Sno(w)-Whi(te)" weren't on the same sign, but suggested how to chain the signs together. And maybe using the numbers as indexes into the alphabet gave us letters? That sounds right. I remember we had a tough time figuring out how many players were on a football team. Of course there was a temptation to run over to the GC volunteer and ask: this football team: American or European? (OK, maybe we riffed on Monty Python routines a little.) We had some wrong guesses about how many players there were. But we eventually figured it out.

The Black Knight was a physical challenge. The Black Knight and a member of our team faced off with padded "swords". If you tapped any of your opponent's limbs with a sword, that limb was out of commission. If had tapped all of your opponent's limbs, he was dead. If you tapped a non-limbish part of your opponent, you were a jerk. Andrea was our representative. She managed to take out the Black Knight's right arm before he killed her. Next, I was up. The Black Knight's left arm remained disabled. Oh, that was interesting. That suggested that it was worth it to sacrifice one's life if you could knock out one limb--eventually, a teammate would finish him. The Black Knight (one-handed!) managed to disable my right arm, but I was able to knick his right--leaving him swordless. His end came swiftly. He wrote down our answer word: NIGH.

The Chivalry Conundrum was a logic puzzle. It involved about thirty steps involving multiple rules. We got about 10% of the way through it, realized that we'd spent 15 minutes arguing about how to interpret the rules, and decided to save it for later.

Next: Easterly 

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