| Arrived: 09:14 | Solved: 10:30 | Hints? Yes | Official Game Control site: Gambit's_Card_Trick |
Occasionally, Ilse the talking GPS unit said "Doot." Occasionally, she said "Doot, doot." This commanded attention. She had done this during all of our travels. We had figured out that she would say one of these things when it was time for us to turn the van. But how did she decide whether to say "doot" versus "doot doot"?
Someone figured it out: "Doot" meant that we should turn left; "Doot doot" meant that we should turn right. "Someone call Game Control, and tell them that we've solved our GPS unit." But we didn't call up Game Control. Instead, we made our way through East Palo Alto.
On a barge, we picked up our next clue: a deck of cards. On the outside of its box, there was a picture of a superhero named Gambit, with an added caption: "Life in Las Vegas! Starting January 1, 2006!"
The cards were in a mixed-up order. Some of them had one or more stickers on the back. This puzzle had a lot of data to look at. There was not much point making color copies of all of the cards. We wanted all of our information in a grid; and since we might want to test the effects of re-ordering the cards, we wanted to be able to sort the rows of our grid. In short, we wanted to enter information about the cards into a simple spreadsheet.
Unfortunately, what we had on our laptops was Microsoft Excel. This program had slowed us down some on other clues. It terrible for text entry. It tried to automatically fill in text boxes, always distracting and mostly wrong. If you went to correct the text in the text box, Excel would not let you place your cursor directly in the text--instead it selected the whole cell.
So we started entering information about the cards into Excel. It went slowly. Then we wanted to print out our information. Excel dorked the formatting. Amusingly, its Print Preview was wrong. We lost time watching the printer print out not-quite-entire tables.
(Lesson learned: Find a better spreadsheet program. Better for text entry. Never mind if it has a built-in mortgage calculator function.)
This is shameful but true: when I didn't spot a pattern in the data after a minute, I stopped trying. I was sulky: what if we spent all of this time looking for patterns, and in the end Game Control told us that we should have entered "GAMBIT" into the DRUID? This was not fair of me.
Eventually, we called in for a hint. This "hint" pretty much gave us the whole puzzle. When I heard about the puzzle's solution, I started to perk up. It was a clever mapping of cards onto the calendar. Time to stop moping and start paying attention, I thought.