![[Scan: Box]](4_box_tm.jpg)
![[Scan: some poked cards]](4_cards_redbg_tm.JPG)
Note: I am not giving you all of the information you need to solve this puzzle. Because I am too lazy to scan in a deck of cards, that's why.
We went along the creek until we came to a street. Then we were back in the business park proper, walked past boring office buildings and the usual landscaping.
By now we'd figured out why some teams had left the starting courtyard in a different direction: the clues were in a cycle. Different teams had been slightly different starting packets. Everyone's Strongbadian Night Game puzzle led to an envelope of transparencies, but there was more than one such envelope hidden. We'd started out with Earl's Peers; other teams started out with other paper puzzles. This was a clever way of staggering the teams, serving a similar purpose as BANG V's branching puzzles.
Soon we saw groups of people with clipboards. Team Fishstick Mess had arrived in its element. They were gathered in a sort of plaza in front of two buildings. And between those buildings was a big envelope containing boxes of playing cards.
We grabbed a box of cards and found a free spot of lawn to sit on. On the box was a label saying "Her Face" and with some little card diagrams. We'd learned from our Garfieldwork, and held the transparency up to this label. This revealed a new title "Poke Her Face" and filled in some of the card diagrams. What were we supposed to do?
First, Alexandra looked at the order of the cards in our deck. We were about to mess up the deck, and it would be good to note the initial order. Its order held no hidden messages: the cards were ordered by number and by suit. The 2 through 8 of diamonds, were missing.
Each card had one hole poked through it. I imagined the people of Game Control punching holes through cards. These guys had worked hard. Our transparency showed the outline of a card with nine circles. Suddenly, I had a vision of exactly what we should do. One person should hold up each card to the transparency and see which of the nine circles its hole corresponded to. They should call out the number for that hole and hand it to a team-mate who maintained nine piles.
But that was a false vision: the cards' holes didn't line up to the circles on the transparency. Ten lined up nicely, others were a little off, others were way off. Was there something special about the ten cards whose holes lined up nicely? Were they marked? What were we aiming for? (At this time, I didn't know that there were seven cards missing from the deck. Since 52 didn't divide into nine, I was expecting to ignore some cards--but not 42 of them.)
I admitted I was stumped, and was ready to seek help from a hint. Alexandra and David kept plugging away. I studied the transparency--had we missed some bit of orange ink? No. I looked at the cards and let my thoughts drift; they did not alight on any brilliant ideas.
Then Alexandra and David were ready for a hint, too. We tore open the enveloped, read the hint. The hint said that we were trying to form poker hands, one of each kind: straight flush, four of a kind, ... ace high. There were nine hands to form, thus the nine circles. (Seven cards missing from the deck left 45 cards, enough for nine poker hands.) Though the holes drilled in the cards didn't match up to the circles on the transparency, we should still be able to find sets of five cards whose holes matched each other. The hint said that after we'd formed the poker hands, we should order the cards as indicated by the box label.
It didn't say how we could map this to a message, but this was pretty obvious: 5 cards suggested using 5-bit binary, forming numbers between 1 and 26, each number the ordinal of a letter of the alphabet.
It took us longer than we should have to find the cards that matched each other. In hindsight, we should have created something like that transparency, tracing the holes onto a piece of paper that we could have used as a sorter. Anyhow, we got them sorted.
Then we got them into poker hands and figured out that the binary code was based on whether or not the card had to be flipped over to get its hole to match the other holes (which "Face" was "Poked"), and we figured out whether faces or backs were 1s. Soon we had the word.
And so we found the word "biangular" on the game board. on the big board, and looked up the next location on the map--a field? The next clue was in a field?
As we set off, I reflected: that had been a cool puzzle. Though we'd needed a hint, there was still a glow of satisfaction just from having spent time looking at such an elegant puzzle. And that glow sustained me as we made our way past the bleak parking lots and plazas of this business park.
