Bang 7: Post-Game

And now it was time to go to the next location. We headed across trackless parking lots. We wandered among nearly-identical buildings. We got a little lost, not helped by art features too small to show up on our sattelite maps. I was getting pretty angry at this business park. You might think I didn't like it because we were lost, but mostly I was mad because I didn't like business parks.

We jogged and jogged. Everything looked alike. It was as if we were in a poorly animated cartoon, something from a Scooby-Doo mystery: The characters were running, while a repeating background looped behind them. Ah, there's the office building again. There's the debris box again. There's the wide patch of parking lot again. Why had Google moved to this awful place? Why had Openwave moved to the Pacific Shores business park? Why wasn't there some great software firm at, say, Fifth Avenue and Clement Street in San Francisco who wanted to hire me?

Fortunately, I was freed from these thoughts when we reached the next clue site, where there was a sign saying that Game Control had closed down the clue, and that the game was over. (And thus we missed out on a maze which had been set up in an office building.) It was almost 11:00.

We made our way back to the Googleplex, to a big room next to the courtyard--was it the main Google cafeteria? Let's say it was the main Google cafeteria. We stumbled in as other teams were leaving.

Wei-Hwa had thought that all of the score sheets had been graded, and he was entering teams' times and scores into a spreadsheet. Alexandra told him which hints we'd taken and that we hadn't done the maze puzzle.

There had been a "bonus puzzle" activity to keep early arrivals busy: a page of six fake Trivial Pursuit cards each with seven statements to mark True or False. Most of it looked like pretty impossible trivia. I looked at the hints while Alexandra struggled against adversity and David wandered off somewhere.

You can try to solve the puzzle.

Soon Wei-Hwa had the results: we'd come in 21st out of twenty-six teams. We'd taken a reasonable number of hints, but had taken a long time. By now, most of the teams had left. Alexandra chatted with the Burninators, talking about which puzzles she'd liked.

I let my brain wander off into more thoughts about group solving techniques, and puzzles that would lend themselves to group solving. Soon I was lost in a pleasant mixture of daze and abstractions.

| comment? | | home |