This page contains spoilers from the 2-Tone Game. If you haven't already played the game, you might want to do so before continuing reading this page.
March is a photo walk leading to some foreign language identification. By the time I was done, I'd convinced myself it was a metaphor for the—brace yourself—civil rights movement in the USA. No, really. This seemed appropriate; the 2-Tone music movement rose up in a time of racial unease in England's music scene; these new ska bands with both black and white musicians were making a statement by playing together. That black and white checkered logo probably ain't just a coincidence. So... it made sense to have the players march from Union Square (associated in San Franciso's history w/the USA civil war) to a MLK memorial. Made sense in some twisted, puzzly way. But that wasn't my first intent. The first version of this puzzle was titled "Stroll", and I didn't really see the Union-MLK connection until later.
Here's what it looked like at first:
After you have been thinking about the Two-Tone logo for a while, you see the black and white squares everywhere, even on a stroll starting from Union Square...
Where you reach the end of the stroll, this should make sense:
Filipino: 2
Japanese: (unused)
Chinese: (unused)
Korean: (unused)
Zulu: 7
Hebrew: (unused)
Arabic: (unused)
Russian: (unused)
Italian: 3
Gaelic: 5
Vietnamese: 1
Spanish: 13
This photo was a problem:
That's a parking meter. The first batch of playtesters played during the
holiday shopping season. There were bags over the parking meters, placed
by the city, encouraging more folks to park and shop. Thus, the playtesters
never had
a chance to see that meter. By some lucky instinct, they walked in the right
direction, but I couldn't count on other players being so lucky.
I swapped that photo out for one of a light post, and other playtesters had
an easier time.
The final answer extraction changed quite a bit: all of those "(unused)" pieces, the unthematic answer GYRATE. That got better. Also notice that I had a few of the languages wrong. This didn't mess up playtesters, since I gave the languages ordered the same way they appeared on the site. So if that "Vietnamese" plaque wasn't really Vietnamese, it wasn't that obvious, because it was pretty easy to just grab the first letter without paying much attention.
Since later versions of the puzzle forced the players to identify the languages, they pointed out when I had the language wrong. That "Russian" was Greek. That "Vietnamese" was actually an African language rendered in French letters. Along the way, I tried using some information from the internet, which got other things wrong... I had to redo this part of the puzzle several times just because the language identification was so tough. I'm still not 100% sure about the Dioula.