Untamed with the Lester Tang Conjecture: The Scramble in the Bramble

[Scan: the bramble puzzle was beautiful]

The Bramble puzzle was beautiful.

At San Anselmo Memorial Park, it was dark. It took us a while to find the bag of clues by an old cannon. And you didn't want to grab a clue too quickly, since they were wrapped around thorny vines. This clue was called bramble, and it was beautiful.

We did something right: we quickly checked to see whether the coded message from our initial bag of crap might be useful here. We counted the circles in the puzzle and compared them to the number of letters in the coded message.

I did something wrong: I mis-counted the number of letters in the coded message. So we didn't consider that again for a while, until a hint from the WOLF inspired a re-count. Anyhow, here is the message:

PURE SEQUENCE CODE IMPAIRED
YYXCAAMFNOCXFRKYHT
DETAILS HZIUL KNOT OVER
JZZUBEGAFOYJBGHTPNHQNNIJ
REQUEST CIA JOB IF LANGUAGE DECODED

This seemed like a good puzzle to solve on a table, and it was coming up on dinner time. So we drove to a nearby Jack-in-the-Box. Out in the parking lot was a white van with an anchor keeping it in its parking place: Team Briny Deep was here.

Folks who wanted food ordered food. We spread out the puzzle. Instead of jumping into solving, though, we mostly chatted with Briny Deep. The guy who did most of the talking seemed pretty grumpy, and I guess that by the end of the night he was still pretty grumpy.

At about the same time, Team Briny Deep left and the WOLF gave us a hint that boiled down to "No, really, look at the coded message, you totally miscounted the number of letters, jerk." So we worked on the puzzle some more.

It never came together for us. I forget why. Hey, give me a break. As I write this, it's three months later. I do remember that when I talked with people from other teams at the end of the Hunt, I realized that we'd come really close to solving this one (albeit thanks to the hints), but that we had messed up the execution. And that was too bad, because it was a rather elegant puzzle. Even as we failed to solve it, I enjoyed it.

We gave up on that one and let the WOLF tell us where to go next: Chicken Coop Hill at China Beach state park.

[&gt];

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