Bang 7: Strongbadia Night Game

I looked at the Strongbadian Night Game puzzle. That is, I looked at four pages of mini-puzzles. There were seven paper wedge-shapes paperclipped to the front. Each wedge had six letters on its front and six letters on its back.

My first thought was not about solving the puzzle, but about the wedges. Lazy fellow that I am, I thought Why did game control snip those out for us? That must have taken forever. They told us to bring scissors. I totally would have made the players snip this stuff out. I snapped out of it and read the instructions. The instructions were in the form of dialog between some characters. These were the characters from the cartoons at HomestarRunner.com, but I didn't know that at the time. I think that ignorance helped me: If I'd slowed down to read the dialog with the appropriate funny voices, I would have slowed myself down laughing.

The starting instructions read:

SB: Tell me again why I'm on a stinkin' treasure hunt team with you losers.
SS: I don't know; it wouldn't have been my choice.
HR: Aww, c'mon, you guys, this is gowing to be wots of fun!
SB: Fun? Solving riddles is fun? Sticking paper wedgies on paper is fun? The only good wedgies are ones I give you dumpfaces.
HR: Oh, wight. I wemember that fwom this morwning.
SB: So anyway, after we solve each puzzle, we should have six letters. We then have to find the freaking piece with those letters on it and tape it on this sheet with those letters FACE DOWN.
HR: I told you guys it was gowing to be fun!
SB: Argh!

Geography

SS: Ahem. "Determine what this shape represents, which will lead you to three two-letter codes."
SB: I think it looks like The Cheat when we set fire to his hair tuft-like thing last month.
SS: Strong Bad, I don't think that's what they're going for.
HR: I think it looks like The Cheat wen his head was on fire.
SS: Sigh.
H: I can cross borders via antiquarian zodiac.
SB: Holy crap! Where did Homsar come from?

This was obviously the border between California, Nevada and... uh-oh. I didn't know what state was next to California and Nevada (maybe because I was an ignoramus). Okay, so the solution was six letters: C A, N V, and _ _. I looked at the wedges, and only one of them contained those letters. It also contained A Z, so the other state must be Arizona. I taped down that wedge. Then I grabbed a wedge which had started to blow away, and quickly got all of the wedges back into the paper clip. So far, this puzzle required physical dexterity more than mental dexterity.

Entertainment

SB: Oh, isn't this great. A pad of instructions that describe... dance moves?
HR: Hey guys, I can do it. Check this out.

H: I took a PE class, I got an E and it messed me up bad. I'll never sing again.
SS: Do we think this is some sort of code?
SB: I'll show you some sort of code!
SS: Ow!

The Entertainment puzzle showed a dancing guy. (With later research, I learned that this was Homestar Runner.) His legs looked like they might be semaphore. I didn't know semaphore. I knew we had semaphore on the code sheet in our starting packet. I looked up--our starting packet was currently buried under David and Alexandra's puzzle. OK, easy enough to come back to that. Wow, Alexandra and David had figured out most of the Presidential middle names already.

History

This was a long dialog.

SB: Ooh. Historical figures.
HR: Lemme see that...
HR: Borwwwwwwing! Stwong Bad, you can have it back.
SB: Let's see. They want us to find out the year E.T. premiered...
SS: 1982
SB: And the year Apple Computer was made...
TC: <cheat noises>
HR: Waaat?
SB: He said 1976. Next, Woodstock! They mean that bird, right?
SS: No, I think they meant the festival. That would be 1969.
SB: The year the Atari Lynx came out. 1989, baby!
HR: That's a wot of babies, if I can make a comment.
SB: You can't. Shut up. The year we landed on the moon.
SS: Easy. 1969.
SB: No, we already had one of those.
SS: So maybe there are two. I still don't know what we're supposed to do with this afterwards.
SB: And there's the creation of some holiday for some dreamer.
SS: What?
SB: Haha, finally one you don't know.
SS: Let me see that.
H: Ask and ye shall receive.
SS: Oh, "I have a dream." So that would be the Martin Luther King Day, which was first celebrated on 1984, so the creation would be... 1983.
HR: So, we have 82, 76, 69, 89, 69, and eighty-thwee. Whatever!

Because I was a computer geek, I knew that those were ASCII values. Meanwhile, David and Alexandra had figured most all of the Presidential middle names, and were trying to wring a message out of what they saw. They were looking at the code sheet. So I looked at the code sheet, too, getting the ASCII values: R L E Y E S. Found the wedge, taped the wedge.

Sports and Leisure

SS: So according to this, we have to put the five Lego groups together into a rectangle, and then it will decode to something.
SB: Well, the code had better be on our sheet like all the other codes so far.
HR: I wike Wegos!
H: I found E but I am lost, ah! Walking! Kindling veal!
KOT: Excuse me, did somebody say "veal"?
SB: Man, I can't wait for this stupid hunt to be over.

This looked like something that someone else would be better at. I skipped it. You can solve it if you'd like to.

Science and Nature

SB: Not another friggin' trivia puzzle!
SS: Why, Strong Bad, science not your strong suit? Hahaha.
SB: I am an expert in, uh, chemology.
HR: That's not a word!
SB: You're not a word!
H: I'm in an awful Funk and Wagnalls.
SS: So I think that each shape is some name, and we need to find the first letter of each one.

I solved these pretty quickly, found the wedge, taped the wedge.

David and Alexandra were tired of wrestling with presidential middle names. They had tried looking at the presidents' ordinal numbers, the presidents' parties. They had tried many things. Now they were ready to look at the mini-puzzles.

First, the semaphore. With the code sheet, we got NRSAGN, found the wedge, taped the wedge. Once again, the wind tried to take away our papers.

Art and Literature

Alexandra and David handily solved the Sports and Leisure question while I failed to solve the Art and Literature question. You can solve it if you'd like:

SB: Hey, Homestar, I bet even you can deal with the pictures on this one.
HR: It wooks wike some sort of psychotic modewn art.
H: I sniffed Andy Warhol.
SS: Hey! Don't say bad things about Warhol!

Puzzle Hunts

I got tired of failing to solve the Art and Literature question and let my eyes drift down the page. I read the Puzzle Hunts question:

SS: 6 wedgies taped. What next?
HR: It says here, after we've taped aww seven pwieces down, there should be a word in the middle wing. That will be ouwr word fow the next cwue.
SB: So what's the clue for the last piece?
HR: Oh, awso it says to save the wedgies for a later cwue cawwed "The Hiwwls are Awive."
SB: Yes, but what's the clue for the last piece, doofus?
H: Cannibalistic capitalistic cynic.
SS: You guys ever get the feeling that Homsar is actually trying to say something?

Okay, maybe we didn't need to solve the Art and Literature question (which Alexandra and David now struggled with). Maybe we could just tape down the wedgies^W wedges we knew, figure out the word, and figure out the last wedge from that. "Cannibalistic capitalistic cynic" was obviously pointing at that wedge that had C C C C C C. I looked for the wedge. It wasn't there. I thought about those wind bursts. Uh-oh.

Maybe we could still figure it out.

Looking at the inner circle, we had RUFFL, plus two blanks. Alexandra guessed "TRUFFLE". "Or 'RUFFLED' or 'RUFFLES?'" I said. Where had that come from? I remembered that I had seen one of those words on the Game Board. How had I remembered that? That was not the kind of thing I was likely to remember.

After BANG V, I'd joined Team Mystic Fish. Since then, I'd spent a plurality of my free time thinking about puzzles and treasure hunts. Maybe it was paying off. Maybe my short-term memory for weird words was improving. Too bad I hadn't remembered where on the game board I'd seen the word--but we eventually found it.

The game board pointed us to a place on the map close to Highway 101. This was a bit worrisome--I'd seen some other teams go the other way. But maybe they'd figured out the Earl's Peers puzzles. (They hadn't.) We set off.

Earl's Peers

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