...WARTRON SPOILERS... If you plan to play in the "re-run" of WarTron, then you don't want to read this page ...WARTRON SPOILERS...
The WarTron Game's story was inspired by the movies WarGames and Tron. I think of the story as divided into a prolog and three acts. The prolog Friday night. Act I was Saturday daylight. This was the part inspired by WarGames.
Team Los Jefes rode through the early morning in a white rental van towards a scenic overlook in the Columbia River gorge a ways east of town.
Cyndy Wessling drove. She drove the whole weekend. Donna Whitlock navigated. She navigated all weekend. Some teams take turns at those jobs; not the Jefes. They figured out who was best and they stuck to that.
Donna had a laptop running Microsoft Streets and Trips with a GPS dongle sucker-cupped to the van windshield. We got misdirected a couple of times on this game. By the time this game was done, I was glad most teams had given up on trying to navigate by laptop and used specialized GPS-map devices.
The Jeffs sat in the next row back. Jeff Wessling sat on the left, looking out and about. Jeff Phillips sat on the right, nose buried in laptop. He feels disjoint during events, looking up from laptop at the end of a ride someplace completely different from when he looked down.
Next row back was me and Nikhil. I sat on the left and stared out the window. Nikhil sat on the right-hand side, poking at his laptop. I come from a land of dry golden hills; Oregon's lush green trees were exotic to me. Nikhil lived near Seattle; lush Pacific Northwest trees were no big deal.
I was used to a lot of van chatter in between puzzles; but the Jefes van was quiet, people on the right-hand side of the van messing with laptops.
We talked about about SNAPs that had been re-run as BANGs. We talked about the difficulty of explaining puzzlehunt puzzles to civilians. These puzzles are not like what you're used to from the Sunday Jumble. The Jefes had asked directions from someone yesterday, who'd seen the van and asked, "So are you going camping?" "Well, not exactly."
Nikhil talked about his new job, engineering Zoomingo, a website that alerted shoppers to local sales on items/brands they cared about. The Jefes knew each other from Microsoft, a company with umpty-ump thousand employees. Now Nikhil was working at a startup, where he had to do all kinds of things. He and Jeff had worked on System Center, writing software so that system administrators could manage many many machines. Nikhil had understood his customers pretty well, since they were computer nerds. Now his customers were shoppers, so he had plenty to learn about them.
We drove up and up and up a hill. And then we were at our destination, a scenic overlook. We piled out of the van. GC wasn't there, but plenty of teams were. Teams milled around. We looked at the "burn down" charts that Jeff P. had on the back of his clipboard from Shintekis. For events with a known number of puzzles and a known endtime, he used charts to figure out how much time to spend on any puzzle. But we didn't know how many puzzles we'd face in the coming weekend, so no burn-down chart for us.
Curtis showed up, acting in his role as Professor Goto's chief flunky at GotoVision. We were ready to start! The crowd coalesced, contracted into a tight swarm around Curtis.
Curtis (acting? or as part of GC?) said he knew that some teams were having trouble with their BITE devices and that we'd need them for this activity. He encouraged us to share devices. He told us that this spot, the Portland Womens Forum, was also known as Chanticleer Point. He pointed out that from here we could see Crown Point, another vista, where there was a fancy old building called Vista House.
Various prepared folks brought out binoculars and started peering at Crown Point. I hadn't known we were supposed to bring binoculars. I thought back to the Midnight Madness Game when we'd overlooked a hidden pre-game hint that we were supposed to bring binoculars. Had we repeated a mistake? Well, we hadn't spotted any hidden instructions to bring binoculars and I hadn't brought binoculars, but the team overall was prepared: between us, we had a pair of binoculars.
Curtis apologized: we were supposed to be able to see something going on at Crown Point. He pulled out his phone... and that's when the Feds showed up. Here, by "Feds", I mean brave GC members acting like Feds.
Corby and Ana were at the edge of the crowd in their spiffy US Army Corps of SoftWare Engineers uniforms. They had a question for Curtis: Was he with those GotoVision folks out at Crown Point? Curtis said Yes he was. The Army wanted to know: were all these kids also GotoVision employees? Nope, they were just a bunch of gamers; the other event helpers were just folks that GotoVision had hired off of CraigsList, not actual employees.
So the army folks only arrested Curtis, they didn't arrest everybody. Curtis was devoted to his GotoVision duties until the last, bemoaning "But they don't even know what to do yet!" and he dropped the cards he was holding. The ones that gave us a code to type into the BITE.
Each team had a card. Teams scattered to places where they could gather around laptops. We plunked down a laptop on a patch of stone fence, hooked it up to the BITE, got things fired up and entered the code.
The BITE showed us an ASCII art world map and eight six-letter words: BODEGA, REARMS, and more. And that was it. So, concentrate on the words. They all had As in them. They shared some letter-pairs. Changing a letter and anagramming got nice words for some... but Puzzle Pal quickly told us that we weren't getting nice words for all of them.
Why were they showing us the ASCII world map with these words? Should we be trying to make something geographical? I didn't think so: In WarGames, when the kids played "Global Thermonuclear War" over the terminal, its display had been an ASCII world map. (Thus I nudged us away from the answer.)
Minutes passed. Ideas came along, didn't pan out. More minutes passed. The ideas weren't coming along so fast anymore. There were periods of silence. About 15-20 minutes had passed before someone noticed that one of these words consisted of three two-letter country codes.
The BITE had some "reference" information, sort of like a reference book. You could give it a command to show you a reference and it would display a page of useful data. One of its references was a list of country codes. The very fact that BITE had a list of country codes was a hint that we'd need them.
BODEGA was actually Bolivia-Germany-Gabon. Three map locations: we could make semaphore from that. One group of folks looked up country codes, another Googled locations of the obscure countries. Making semaphore letters on the map gave us AWJMSONG. Promising ending, but looked like we'd messed up the beginning. Oh maybe AW was a two-letter country code—no it wasn't in the BITE's list, never mind.
Re-do. Re-check. Minutes passed. We tried other ideas, none of them panned out. More minutes passed. Not many teams were still here. The GC members were gone.
We called the GC hint line. They couldn't hear us and hung up on us. We called back... and they could hear us! They said that AWJMSONG was on the right track, not actually a mistake. We thanked GC, hung up, and stared at AWJMSONG.
We tried entering it as an answer. No dice. Someone brought up the idea of recursing again; someone else pointed out how discouraging it was that AW wasn't a country code. You could tell the BITE to play a song, so we tried that: it played us the theme from Tron. The BITE had a reference for music: but it wasn't anything like AWJM SONG. It was a list of musical notes and the Hertz-frequencies associated with them. A 440, etc. Was there a Doubleclicks song with initials AWJM? A Madonna song? (Professor Goto loved Madonna.) The ideas petered out. Minutes passed.
We called up the GC hint line again. They said use country codes some more. OK, we agreed to do that. We hung up. So what to do? AW wasn't a country code. Maybe we should look for countries on the map that semaphorically made an A then a W and then... Instead of looking at BITE's list of country codes, one of us Googled [AW country code]. It was a country code—for ARUBA. Oh no, we'd trusted the BITE list to hold all the codes that we'd need. That mistake had cost us half an hour of struggle. JM was JAMAICA. ARUBA JAMAICA SONG. The answer to the puzzle was Kokomo. When we entered that, we got a note of congratulations and directions to our next location.
We headed east along the Columbia River Highway to Multnomah Falls. On the van ride, I asked Nikhil how he'd gotten into The Game and Los Jefes. He'd been an intern at MicroSoft and had been cool enough to play the MicroSoft Intern Game. He knew Jeff P because they worked together, so he'd joined up. He'd been playing with Los Jefes for a few years now. He liked the game because of The Moment When It All Makes Sense.
Jeff W liked The Game more than conference-room games because of the physical challenges. It's fun to have to boat down a river. It's fun when GC messes with your van. More folks had fun stories about the fun of showing up at strange Seattle locations, often at 3AM.
At Multnomah Falls, we hopped out of the van and made the short hike up to a bridge in front of the falls. There, Ana in her role of an USAC SWE told us that she had some classified information that she needed passed along to Wikileaks: a big grid with a list of crossword-y looking clues. But we pulled an Adrian Lamo on her: instead of keeping her confidence, we decided to use the information ourselves.
Walking back down towards the van, we got a spot to sit and solve when another happy team finished solving the puzzle and hopped up from a bench. It was gorgeous spot, so I was glad to get a photo of the team ignoring the scenery and buried in a puzzle.
The puzzle was called Battleships, but it wasn't a battleship logic puzzle. Instead it was a grid accompanied by some crossword-y clues Someone spotted quickly that one of the crossword clues made PEE-KNUCKLE, which sounded like pinochle, a game. A minute later, we had HOPS-KOCH, which sounded like hopscotch, we were on track for something. We weren't knocking down these clues super-quick, but we were knocking them down.
The puzzle grid had some letters filled in. Words like PINOCHLE didn't fit inot the grid, but "words" like PEEKNUCKLE did. We'd figured out about two-thirds of the "words" when we spotted a promising column: reading downwards made BONE_VEIN___. But we were having no luck figuring out what might come after VEIN.
We'd put TWISTSTIR in one row of the grid, but it also fit in another row. We tried moving it. With that moved, the BONE VEIN column looked like it could almost make BONNEVILLE My cousin Rae had told me we'd be near Bonneville Dam. Someone figured out we could get BONE EVIL DAMN, which fit the soundalike theme. And that was the answer.
Jeff P ssh'd into BUGME to enter BONE EVIL DAMN. It said that the phrase wasn't recognized. Oh no. Would we have to figure out all of the clues? Some of them were pretty gnarly; STRUT EAGLE for Stratego had been about as much of a stretch as we could handle.
Oh hold on... after BUGME had said not recognized it had said more: buffer overflow error. Go to the Bradford Island visitor center at Bonneville Dam. We'd solved the puzzle!
Back in the van, I wondered what to do with the puzzle. I spotted an accordion file on the floor of the van and asked: was that where we put solved puzzles in case we needed them for a meta at the end? Yes it was—although to date, the team had never needed to pull puzzles out of the accordion file.
There was a gate to get into the Bonneville Dam complex. There, a guard asked us if we had any arms or ammunition inside the vehicle. No, no we didn't. Then he went around to the back of the van to make sure we weren't smuggling any bad stuff amongst our snacks. He was thorough, even dropping a bunch of bananas on the ground. The guard warned us that we couldn't bring any backpacks into the dam building. We didn't ask him the policy on awkward armsful of clipboards, pencils, and mysterious BITE devices.
The visitors center had a ig US Army Corps of Engineers logo. We were apparently at the lair of the feds who had arrested Curtis. A couple of Jefes quickly trotted up to the door from the parking lot. When the rest of us caught up, we got the scoop: We'd received some papers. Two of them had "recon photos"—photos of Bonneville Dam view plaques with strange word labels on them. We also had a sort of matching puzzle; but instead of words on each side, there were dam features and blanks; at the top, some text telling us that we were taking a psych test as part of our application for Corps SWE jobs showing that we wouldn't "rush in" to anything; at the bottom, flags of some foreign countries and the strange text "Count on us crossing nations to solve problems"
On the roof, it was too hot but there were breezes and labeled plaques. Thus, on the matcing puzzle, when we saw "Spillway Gate" (or what-have-you), we could find that on a plaque, find the corresponding word on our photo and write in CHECKERS (or what-have-you) in the blank.
When we'd gathered data from the plaques, we squeezed into a shady spot to work on the puzzle. With words in the blanks, we could make matches: these were words associated with names of countries. So if we saw CHECKERS and LANTERN, we could match them as Chinese. Once we'd drawn all of our matching-lines, count the crossings... What should we do with that? When we had the solution to the puzzle, we were supposed to see Major Anderson, down by the fish ladder. We decided to head down and show him what we had so far and see if that was the answer. Also, we guessed that a spot by a fish ladder might be cooler than this roof.
The fish ladder viewing area was in the building's "basement"; when we emerged from the elevator there, the cool was wonderful. USAC Major Corby Armstrong was questioning Curtis the chief Gotovision flunky. Armstrong wanted to know about the BIGMAC virus, but Curtis of course didn't know about that. We showed Corby our sheet, but he said that we weren't finished with it yet and we should come back when we were ready. We wandered over to some benches by a viewing station while another team visited with Major Anderson.
Back to the matching puzzle. I had a wrong idea: count on US crossing must mean to count the number of times that the American line crossed each other country's. But that was silly; each country had just one line, so how could the number of US-crossings ever be more than one? Fortunately, someone smarter figured out that the right way to count crossings was that, e.g., if the matching puzzle's China line crossed three other lines, that meant we should write the third letter of chIna above the chInese flag on the bottom of our sheet. Putting together those letters gave us our answer: INGREDIENT.
This time, Corby acknowledged that we'd finished our application. He stepped away to grade our "psych eval," leaving us alone with Curtis. Curtis gave us the scoop: Major Anderson had been questioning him about BIGMAC and servers, but Curtis didn't know about any of that stuff. Professor Goto knew about the servers, but she was working someplace remote. Curtis gave us Goto's email address and told us to contact her to find out how to get the servers reset.
Corby came back. He had graded our psych evaluation and found it disturbing. He dismissed us and resumed his interrogation.
Back in the van, Nikhil sent mail to Professor Goto's personal email address. To make sure that she wanted us to visit her, I suggested that we tell her that we were a team of deposed Nigerian princes who wanted to give her a million dollars. I don't know if Nikhil took my suggestion, but he soon had an auto-reply telling him to look for her helpers at Picnic Area D at Rooster Rock State Park. If we could figure out their message, we'd be on our way to figuring out where she herself was.
The van trundled off. Jeff W. wasn't sitting in the second-row bench. Instead, he was in the normally-empty back bench, the sandwich assembly station. As the van rolled, he took sandwich orders and passed sandwiches forward. Some teams might take time out to seek lunch lunch in restaurants; some teams might subsist on whatever food they could pack. Team Los Jefes made (and ate) sandwiches in motion.
We had a strange alert from BIGMAC, something about how we were in his world. It sounded like a Tron reference, like when Jeff Bridges gets zapped into the computer. But we hadn't been zapped into a computer, had we? Later on, we got a message from GC: this was a bug in the game. We weren't supposed to get the message until later. (They didn't explain it that way: they blamed it on a botched collaboration with Doctor When.)
Navigation got tricky, though we didn't realize it. Streets and Trips sent us onto the scenic Crown Point Highway. To reach Picnic Area D, we knew that we needed to turn north; but since the Crown Point Highway didn't actually go near Picnic Area D, turning north sent us onto a gnarly little local country road. The road twisted; the van could just barely take the turns. I don't know what we would have done if we'd met a vehicle coming the other way.
Then we turned onto an even narrower road. We now figured out that we'd gone the wrong way. But this narrow road, lined with hedges, had trapped us. Finally, Cyndy had to drive our van backwards along this narrow winding road to get back to the only-somewhat-narrow-and-windy local road. I was glad that our best driver was driving, because that @^*% was nasty.
On our way back to real roads, I learned about the founding of the Jefes. Everybody worked at MicroSoft then. Donna and Cyndy worked together and were discussing a recent MSPH; they hadn't played, since they didn't have a team. But putting together a puzzling team seemed like a good idea. Fortunately, Microsoft has a variety of puzzle events. There was a Puzzle Safari soon after; Cyndy, Donna, and the two Jeffs formed a team and played in that. The team grew to six members, half named Jeff. Thus the Jefes name. (Jeff Bell was the team's third.) For the next MSPH the team expanded to 12 people, enough to participate. And they had enough fun together that they'd kept at it.
At the Rooster Rock State Park picnic areas, we hopped out of the van and remembered that it was incredibly hot outside. Part of our puzzle was a music CD. Our best CD player was back in the van, the nice air-conditioned van. We hopped back in the van to work on this puzzle.
We had a music CD and some necklaces made of colored beads strung on yarn. The music CD had Madonna songs. The beads were in resistor colors, except that they were separated by clear beads, some of which had a dot. That gave us short sequences of numbers like 493.9. We remembered that the BITE had a reference frequencies mapped to musical notes. Thus each, necklace's sequence of numbers described a sequence of musical notes. If we played the notes on some app or other, we just had to recognize which Madonna song the notes came from. There was a leftover number on each necklace. No doubt when we got the songs, this number would tell us how to extract an answer: Nth letter of the title, Nth word of the lyrics, something like that.
We set up up assembly lines; wrote numbers; decoded to notes. This took a while. Communication wasn't so great when the team was sitting in the van with the A/C going. They talked quietly; they couldn't always hear each other over the A/C. There were a few puzzles where my "big contribution" to the group solve was to bellow, "Hey, did you hear what so-and-so just said? They said it looks like such-and-such."
We downloaded various apps that purported to play notes; one actually did. I disrupted our progress a bit. A few weeks before, packing up my office, I'd pulled a muscle in my leg. Now my leg was twinging, unhappy at sitting still. So I made everyone between me and the door get up so that I could step out of the van and stretch... out in the incredibly hot heat-wave air. I immediately wanted to crawl back into the air-conditioned van. But not if that meant that my leg was just going to seize up again. So I stood and stretched and tried to figure out the minimum amount of stretching necessary so that my leg would be OK.
Got back in the van again. Got back on the assembly line. Crank crank crank on the data. We had a couple of strands' worth of notes figured out. Jeff figured out how to enter them onto the music-playing app. We played the CD's provided Madonna songs so that we could compare... and we didn't agree on which song the notes corresponded to. That was just among the folks who had opinions; I was just sitting there with no idea.
What to do? We could ask GC to confirm our data and approch. If our approach was wrong, that would explain why we were having trouble recognizing Madonna songs. So a couple of us hopped out of the van, and almost immediately ran into a couple of GC members who were lugging a cooler of cold drinks around to vans. GC was worried about how were were enduring the heat wave, I guess. They couldn't have been having an easy time lugging that cooler around in the heat. So we gave them an excuse to put it down: we told them what we were doing.
Brave GC member JD listened to us and nodded. We were doing the right thing! He said that he'd playtested the puzzle and had found that recognizing the music was the hardest part. For that original vesion of the puzzle, there hadn't been just six strands of music to match up; there had been 18. (Actually, he didn't totally say that we were doing the right thing; when I said that we thought we'd index into the title of each song, he'd made a face; so we figured out that we'd need to get a letter from the appropriate lyric of the song.)
We went back to the van and reported: Good news! GC said that we were on the right track! We were wrong, though. If we (by which I mean "I") had thought things through more clearly, we would have realized that this was bad news. Our data was good. We were using the right approach. Our problem was that we couldn't recognize Madonna songs. There wasn't something broken in our method that we could fix; our problem was that we lacked a necessary skill.
But we didn't figure that out. We kept cranking out data, listened to more strands... and eventually figured out that we were going to have to call up GC anyhow. So we called up and told GC what we'd done. They said we were on the right track. Jeff fired up his music-playing app and played one of our tunes; GC laughed. Our app didn't sound much like Madonna's backup band, I guess. We begged for lyrics, which GC happily gave us. It didn't feel great to call up GC for such a big "gimme" after an hour and a half of working on a puzzle, but life is like that sometimes. With the lyrics, indexing into them was pretty easy. Soon we had our answer. Soon we had our next destination: we were headed back out of the woods to Portland proper.
On our way we talked about the puzzle. What should we have done differently? Should we have called GC sooner? We stopped at a store for a restroom break and so that Nikhil could pick up some eyedrops—some weird plant-stuff had blown into his eye at the waterfall and he'd been trying to un-irritate his eye ever since. Irrigation might work for un-irritation. Soon enough, we were on our way again. Peter W asked Nikhil how things were going with his Scottish Highland Dancing. It was a good Seattle activity; you could dance outside in summer and inside in darker seasons.
Our next stop was Rocky Butte Natural Area in Portland. We parked and walked uphill to the butte-top. For a Natural Area, it didn't look super-natural. The butte had a decorative wall around its perimeter. It was also quite hot. The heat wave hadn't forgotten us. There were some trees. There were some shady spots under trees, mostly occupied by teams. Cyndy pointed out an unoccupied shady spot and joked that we should plant someone right there to claim it. Melting in the heat, I lazily volunteered.
I stretched out my leg and looked at a bit of the puzzle that I could see. The park had been enhanced with art. There were arcade game propaganda posters in frames leaning against the "castle" walls. Each poster had been "defaced" with some l33tspeak phrase like "J.W. WAS H3RE!!". Each piece of l33tspeak had one number in it. While I lazed in the shade, the rest of the team carefully gathered data, identifying which game each poster depicted, noting down defacer initials. The team started trickling back. One poster had been different; it wasn't so clear what to do with it. I went to take a look at that one: Mario's suspenders.
We tried many things that didn't work. We made a spreadsheet to show each poster's game, character, initials, number. Used the number as an index into text; used the number for a rotation cipher; applied to the game name, character name, initials; ordered by game name, character name, initials. Nothing worked. Looked for patterns in the initials. Thought about platforms that the games had ran on.
After about half an hour, we wandered over to talk to the GC volunteers. They gently told us that we were missing some puzzle data. We'd found all the posters OK, but there was something else in the park that we needed: We should wander around and when we saw it, it would leap out at us. We thanked them and looked around, making our way through the heat. Ah—there was a memorial plaque. It listed several folks, always with first initials and last name: J.W. Hill. OK, instead of indexing into a game name, we were supposed to index into last names: that gave us letters. Alphabetize the game names to order the letters. This gave us a strangely garbled message. Fortunately, other folks on the team understood Mario-speak, read the message and entered MUSHROOM while I was still trying to "solve" the extra letters-a at-a the end-a of all the words.
We had another message from Professor Goto: we should go to her Portland Home, also known as Union Pine, where her butler Alfred would let us in so that we could look around. Time to get back in the van. Jeff W was in the back again, serving up sandwiches. And our BITE was exhibiting new behavior. It wasn't blinking Alert; but it had a red LED shining. When Jeff P hooked up the laptop, instead of the usual prompt he saw a new prompt: save ram or boot. He messed with it and got it back to its old state, and the BITE hadn't forgotten our state. Whew! Our mapping software got us lost again; we spent some time wandering the freeways of West Portland before we figured out that we really really wanted to be in East Portland. But we got there.
Union Pine turned out to be a sort of warehousish event/gallery space or maybe a live/work space for an artist. There was a sunken area in front laid out like a living room; a bar area; a stage; a kitchen, two bathrooms. A GC volunteer gave us a sheet of paper containing 31 numbered squares connected by letter-labeled arrows; one square was labeled GRAPEFRUIT. The GC volunteer told us to look around. There were QR codes around: taped to lampshades, taped to table legs, and stranger places. We had another piece of paper: a big grid, mostly blank but some squares were blacked in: the corners of a QR code. So we were puzzling through QR codes to figure out how to fill in another QR code.
There was no air conditioning. What little perkiness I'd regained during the van ride fled. There was a suspiciously large number of electric fans scattered around, as if GC had scrounged together every fan they could find and brought them to this building. I bet those fans helped. But I was still melting.
We sought out QR codes. QR codes hid in books, in boardgame boxes, under lamps. We found and cataloged several. Each QR code had a drawing superimposed on it. A glove, a medusa-head, a grapefruit, etc. When we scanned each code, it scanned to a piece of text like "A X.XXX.X.X.X.X.X.X.X.X" a letter followed by 21 characters, each of those characters either a . or an X. Aha, our blank QR grids were 21x21. If we could collect and order 21 messages, we could use the X.X stuff to blacken squares in a QR grid and then scan that. I found out that the iPhone's barcode app was nicer than the Android one: it "remembered" a list of things it had scanned recently, saving us from having to transcribe so much.
When we'd found 21 QR codes, we sat down to figure out the next step. We looked at the 31-square piece of paper. Maybe the paper was a map of the physical space and we should note down where we'd found the QR codes? Some folks got up to wander around the gallery with this sheet of paper, trying to find the correspondence between map and territory; but while doing this, they found more QR codes. We'd assumed there were just 21 to find, Once we'd found the 22nd, we figured that we'd probably need to find 31 codes. When we had 27 codes and the others didn't seem easy to find, we sat back down again to do what we could with what we had.
When I say "we" here, I really mean "they". Other folks on the team were wandering the physical space, mapping. I was sitting on the concrete floor feeling overheated and sluggish.
31 was an interesting number; puzzlehunting traditions include 5-bit binary. Someone pointed out that the lines between squares on our 31-square sheet were labeled with vowels. There were five vowels. Someone pointed out that one of the QR codes we'd found was illustrated with a picture of a cAUlIflOwEr, a word which had each vowel exactly once. What if we were looking for a binary code based on the presence or absence of vowels? If grApEfrUIt was connected to another square with an arrow labeled O, maybe that meant that cAUlIflOwEr went in the next square. It was a shakey plan: the squares were numbered 1-31, not 0-31 as you might expect from binary; this although we'd found a drawing that we guessed was a FLY, having no AEIOU.
I liked this idea a lot for one big reason: it gave me something I could do even though I was brain-dead from heat. I listed the 5-bit binary numbers from 00000 to 11111 and figured out which word went with which numbers. If there was just one word per number, that was a good sign. The rest of the team, less heat-addled, did the hard work of figuring out the correspondence of vowel patterns to the "map". Others searched of overlooked QR codes or discussed alternate theories. We moulded our words to fit the scheme: We'd called one drawing a "palm tree", but "tree" was our only word with a repeated vowel; so we called that drawing PALM instead. "Parchment" became SCROLL because another word used AE, but we had no O-word. These tweaks felt shifty, done to fit a shaky theory, but our other theories were even shakier.
At the end, there was one collision that I couldn't handwave away. We had a "faucet" and a "medusa" that both had AEU as vowels. Maybe the "medusa" was a "gorgon"? No, double-O wouldn't fit our scheme. Maybe the "faucet" was something else? A couple of us walked over to look a the faucet drawing, hoping to convince ourselves it was really something else. We discussed: Was it a faucet? Was it a tap? A GC member walked past. We asked her for confirmation: was this a faucet? A tap? (I was hoping for something whose only vowel was I, since that would have fit the theory nicely.) She said it was a faucet. So we'd had a nice theory for 15 minutes, but faucet and medusa had teamed up to sink it.
Alas, that GC member had made a mistake. That "faucet" was actually a DRIP. We thought our vowel-pattern theory couldn't work, though it was actually the right approach. For the next hour and half, we sat and sweated and failed to solve this puzzle. We got surprisingly close, simultaneously working on the right approach, though we "knew" it was wrong. But in the end we had a filled-in QR code that wouldn't scan. The GC folks figured out what happened, took mfercy on us, and gave us the puzzle solution.
Soon we were back in the lovely air-conditioned van. I thought about the GC volunteers and few teams still back in that oven-like building. I didn't envy them.
Our next destination was to ride the Canby Ferry from the west side to the east. That sounded close to water. That sounded cool. That sounded great. That sounded complicated: we wielded several different mapping devices to figure out exactly where the Canby Ferry was. But soon enough, we were on our way. The sun was getting low in the sky. We'd lasted through the worst of the day's heat.
We had some more instructions: once we found the ferry, we were to look for the Tele-Tales sign there, and enter a word from that sign as a "guess". The folks with their laptops out started Googling for pictures of the sign. We found one. Did we want to enter the word early? Did we want a head start on the puzzle, or would that just mess us up? In-van conversations are often disjoint and as one bench of folks decided that we should wait, another bench was entering the information: it told us a phone number we could call and the URL of something we could download that would tell us the same as the phone. After a while, we called up GC to ask: if we listen to the phone message early, will that mess things up? And they said no.
So we downloaded the audio file, which was... DTMF tones. Some tones, a dial tone, more tones, a dial tone, more tones... We had some idea of what to do with this. From our previous explorations of the BITE device, we knew it could listen to DTMF tones. We told it to listen. When we held the device next to a laptop playing the DTMF tones, the device displayed digits—digits of the phone number it was hearing. This BITE now seemed like the most amazing device ever.
If this had been WarGames the movie, we would have arrived at the ferry dock seconds after the day's last boat had left; we would have been forced to jump our van off of the ramp to land gallomp onto the ferry at the last second. As it was, the ferry ran pretty often—it was a roll-on roll-off ferry across the river, a short ride. We waited just a few minutes. The ferry came to pick us up; we rolled on with the sound of touch-tone. Ours was not the only Gamist van on the ferry; ours was not the only vehicle emitting tones. I kind of wonder what the ferry operator thought was going on.
On the other side of the river, we drove off the ferry and rolled through farmland, looking for a good spot to stop, sit, and solve. We saw a sign for a state park and soon found ourselves in a mostly-empty parking lot surrounded by fields and trees.
10 strings of digits. No A, B, C, or D. No # or *. Just digits. Was it phone-spell? I brought up PuzzlePal's phone-spell mode. A short sequence of digits, 258, gave me "ALT". Oh, that sounded like a computer-keyboard key, which was kind of topical. And another string of digits contained a 0 and a 1, neither of which could be used in phone-spell. Dang.
My leg was screaming again, so I asked to be let out again. I braced myself for a wave of heat—but it was cooler out. The rest of the team piled out, and we sat and solved at a picnic table.
Someone brought up an idea that had been mentioned early on but forgotten in the excitement of transcribing and correcting data: what if we drew phone pad grids and "colored in" the keys mentioned in a string? I tried 258: they were all in a column and made an I. Hmm, interesting. Another string, 4235789 gave... a big blob. Another string gave another big blob. But someone had the right idea: instead of just coloring in keys, we should draw lines between them. 258 still gave an I. 4235789 gave a Z or a number 2. Oh, maybe that 258 made a 1, not an I. Sure enough, soon we had drawn 10 digits, a phone number to call; the area code was from the Pacific Northwest.
We called—a number not in service. We double-checked and found we'd mis-read one digit. We called—and got a message that wasn't a number-not-in-service message but which seemed unhelpful: "The unintelligible you have called is unavailable." Had we made another mistake? Had we called the right number and were now getting a code hidden in a fake "error message"? Were too many teams calling this number at once and overloading a server somewhere?
We called up GC to confirm the number. GC said we had the right number. Then Nikhil really impressed me. With GC on the line, he conference called the answer-number. That's right, Nikhil had learned how to use conference call. So GC listened in as we this time got through to... a message directing us to the Canby Motor Inn in nearby Canby. We packed up our laptops and staggered back to the van while the speakerphone was squawking directions at us.
After a quick van ride, we piled out of the van, went to the lobby and asked for Professor Goto's room. The desk clerk sent us over. We arrived there at about the same time as the Boxfort Brigands and one other team.
A GC member marched us and the Boxfort Brigands over to another room. We saw other teams walking along the balcony heading from room to room. I figured that we were heading into a Bureaucratic Maze that would send us from room to room, but I was wrong: in other rooms, other teams were solving separately. We'd have our own room, they'd have theirs.
When we arrived at the room, the nice GC lady gave us our instructions. We were sharing with the Boxfort Brigands, and collaborating was OK. Kind of tough not to collaborate in a tiny hotel room. We were to ransack the room; not breaking anything, not stealing anything, but searching was fair game. We were searching for clues. Once we had our "data" we were to bring it back to the room where we'd started.
Lately, USA puzzle folks had been playing and talking about the "Real Escape Game". "Escape Game" was a genre of puzzle flash game with the theme of escaping a room; playing these games usually involved looking behind couches, under rugs, etc. Some people played these games using real-life setups; but in the USA, these real-life games hadn't been held in spaces amenable to ransacking. Players had kvetched about this. Now WarTron was letting us ransack a room. And the next weekend, the Ravenchase Iron Raven (a.k.a. Great America Race) also had a puzzle letting teams ransack a hotel room.
Searching for clues was fun! But after that... we were in a room with insufficient air conditioning sitting around and trying to concentrate on the things we'd found. The room had been heating up all day. I just sat around and stared.
We'd found a diagram showing a sort of two-way electric motor, a locked box, a piece of wood labeled with colors, some colored disks with numbers on them, batteries, and a short length of wire. The color labels told us three colored disks' numbers to use to open a lock on the lockbox, revealing another locked container. The remaining disks gave us the combination to use for the second lock. Meanwhile, we learned that each combination lock has two combinations, one left-right-left and one right-left-right. Inside the second locked container was another piece of paper with colors from our disks in new combinations. We needed to figure out how to apply our newfound two-equivalent-combinations knowledge to encode these colors. So we did that.
By "we," I mean "they," the members of Los Jefes and the Boxfort Brigands who weren't knocked out by the heat. That was a few folks, maybe four. Unfortunately, none of those four had heard the GC instructions, the ones that said that when we had our data, we should bring it back to the first room. The folks solving this puzzle thought they were supposed to enter it their answer into the BITE device. When the BITE didn't recognize the number, our intrepid solvers thought they were supposed to keep going.
Eventually, brave GC member Acorn came to visit us. We said we were making progress. He was telling us things, but we'd already moved past them. But he told us the important thing: that if we thought we had an answer, we should go with him back to the first room. Oh.
It took a while to reconstruct the numbers, but soon we headed out of the room and showed Acorn our numbers: He looked them over, we were done. He told us to go to another room here in the Canby Motor Inn: We'd found Professor Goto! Finally we could talk to her about BIGMAC and ask her how we might get it to stop playing Global Thermonuclear War!
We walked outside, along the balcony to Professor Goto's room. As we walked, we went past air conditioner vents; they blasted out hot air. It felt like walking through an oven. The good news was that when we entered Professor Goto's room, her room's air conditioning worked. We perked up a bit and were able to listen to what she told us:
The GotoVision servers were all borked; GotoVision's IT folks were all arrested. It was up to us to restart the servers. We were to drive to a spot in Oregon City, tell the valet parkers "LASER focus," then take the elevator down to the server room.
We headed out, past the superhot air conditioning vents, out into the parking lot, back out into the relative cool of the parking lot. The sun was down. Things would be cooler soon. We headed out. Jeff W. was manning the van sandwich bench. Things were looking up.
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