Operation Justice Unlimited: Box Full Of Stuff, Oh Yeah

Did I mention Ilse the Talking GPS Unit? Wesley brought a talking GPS Unit. It sat on the dashboard and saved Team Mystic Fish a lot of time. Where other teams might struggle with paper maps, we just let Ilse tell us where to go.

But Ilse didn't know about the Ring Mountain Open Space Preserve in Tiburon. So we tried following some driving directions from Game Control. And when those directions led us astray, we asked a landscape worker. And when he didn't know where to point us, we got more directions from Game Control. We were pretty glad when we saw a bunch of team vans parked by the side of the road. Maybe that meant we had fallen back in the pack, but at least we weren't lost in the wilds of Marin County.

I piled out of the van with the rest of the group, ready to go after the clue. At the gate to the preserve was a member of Team XX-Rated. She pointed out that the Ring Mountain Open Space Preserve was hilly (as you might have guessed from the name). She said that she was letting her more energetic teammates run after the clue while she stayed behind. This seemed sensible. I stayed back and let my athletic colleagues run up the preserve for our next clue.

Batman, otherwise known as Tushar Moorti of the team Red 5, came running down the hill in full costume and jumped over the Preserve's gate. I lost a few seconds gaping at the majesty.

In theory, the DRUID was supposed to help us locate the clue. There were infrared transmitters placed at forks in the trail, showing which path to take. However, the DRUID sensors did not work very well, and did not detect these. A member of our team eavesdropped on a team that was coming back with a clue box--and heard the clue's location. So our runners knew where to go.

I was not running. I was impressed by the hot sun, and tottered back to our van, where there was shade. I straightened the vehicle up a bit, clearing away the debris from our last few puzzles. Then I caught up with Alexandra who was schmoozing a bit with teams in other vans. But there was not much time for schmoozing. Our walkie-talkies sprang to life: our teammates were on the way with our next clue.

It was a box full of crap. That is, it was a box full of little trinkets and gee-gaws. We figured that most of it would come in handy later. But a couple of pieces looked immediately interesting and puzzle-y.

One was a sheet of paper with eight shapes on it; it looked like we ought to be able to fit the shapes together to form a rectangle. The other was a grid of letters. Each row of the grid had a different background color--matching one of the colors of the shapes. Soon the team had a few copies of these to play with.

Some folks snipped out shapes and pushed them around, figuring out how to fit them together. They wouldn't form a gap-less rectangle. There were going to be holes. So it wasn't so easy to figure out which shapes would end up fitting together--you couldn't just look for a perfect fit.

The sun was beating down pretty hard, and we worked huddled in the van's central working area with the doors open. When a breeze blew, it gave some respite from the heat--it also threatened to carry off our paper shapes. I tried using cellotape to keep them from flying away. But this tape was too sticky, and shapes got tangled and stuck together.

(Lesson learned: next time, bring transparent Post-Its or little paperweights or something.)

Instead of working with the physical shapes, Eric wrote down the characteristics of each shape on a chart, to mathematically figure out which ones could fit together. That was a smart approach. But a couple of the less spatially-oriented, more mathematical puzzlers had taken a different approach. They'd created tables to keep track of which pairs of pieces could match up. And they came up with the only possible way that the shapes could fit together. Soon we had our eight shapes arranged into one rectangle.

The letter grid had eight columns, each column having one row per color. Our shapes had given us a sequence of eight colors. So for each column, we took the letter whose background color was the same as the corresponding shapes, and this yielded a word: VILLAINY. Morale was running high: we'd hit this solution with no snags.

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