This is a puzzlehunt story; if you were hoping for more travelog-ish bits, you might want to move along elsewhere. Actually, this story starts a little before I traveled to New York.
I've got a standing blog search for "puzzlehunt" piped into a feed reader. It's a pretty easy way to find out when someone on the internet mentions something relevant to my interests. Mostly, it tells me about puzzlehunts happening far away from me; a sort of self-torment like a kid from Meridian, Mississippi looking at PuzzleHuntCalendar.com.
But a few days before my trip, it turned up something more useful:
some photos of a little book. You could tell from the photos:
that little book was a puzzle trail in and around central park.
You could also figure out that this had been made by someone
with design sense. Things page elements
fit together in a way you'd expect from
coed astronomy.
This was a book put together with art; an artifact
such as you might expect from Team Lowkey,
but in a different style.
This was Sunday in the Park with Margaret. This was pretty cool.
Spoiler Warning! If you're going to play Sunday in the Park with Margaret, you don't want to keep reading. I'm going to talk about its puzzles. I'm going to give stuff away. If you want to solve as much as you can based upon the photos, you might want to click on those instead of reading further.
I was determined: somehow I was going to get ahold of this book and play through this game. I was half right. By clicking around on teh internets, I found the web site of the book's creator: Margaret Maloney, a professional book editor who'd worked on some art-heavy books. Aha, that explained the high quality of the book's, you know, design.
I wrote to ask: OMG where can I get this book? She wrote back: the book wasn't some mass-produced thing that I could "find" in stores. She'd made this as a present for her sweetie. She only had two copies. Her sweetie had one, but she could send me the other. And she thought she might send her friends on the hunt later, so playtester comments might be useful.
This was great news! I asked her to send the other copy of her book to the hotel where I'd be staying. I did not tell the people at the hotel to keep an eye out for mail for me. That was probably a mistake: When I arrived in NYC and checked in at the hotel, no book was waiting for me. Uh-oh. When I asked again the next day, still no book. Nor the next day. (A few weeks later, I tried sending some 2-Tone puzzle printouts to the hotel of visiting out-of-towner Todd Etter. Those printouts got through OK; maybe because Todd asked the hotel folks to keep an eye out for them.)
Tuesday night, I gave up on the mail. I'd solve as much as I could from the online photos. They might not be as aesthetically cool as a physical book—but they had the relevant data. OK, new plan: I'd prepare tonight; tomorrow, I'd head into Central Park.
Was some photos of business signs with the words painted out. There were blanks in which to write the words. Where were the photos from? One showed street signs: Lenox, Malcolm X. Another photo showed a subway station: 110th St. Were all the photos from the same area? On Wednesday, how far would I need to walk to see everything? Hmm. I got onto Google Streetview, looked around. There, I was able to spot a few of the signs. Not all, but some. I wrote those down. Hmm, those fed into an acrostic, a quote. It occurred to me that a Malcolm X quote would be an elegant answer for a puzzle using Malcolm X Street locations. I filled in what I could of the acrostic, got a couple of words, Googled Malcolm X quotes with those words... and had an answer.
OK, maybe I didn't have the book, but things were looking up.
This puzzle featured a photo of park trees and skyline; it used crows' flight. The instructions said to go to Belvedere Castle, a spot in Central Park that Brett Rogers had shown me as he scouted locations for DASH 3. The instructions: look at a certain compass direction to spot a statue of a dude who was a friend to birds. Then use his name to solve a cryptogram: the cryptogram was a poem with this dude's name as a title. Since the title was encrypted, that would give you part of the key. Hmm, a dude who was friend to birds who was famous enough to have a statue in Central Park: because I am a well-informed genius, I immediately thought "Audubon". But that didn't fit the encrypted title, which didn't have identical 2nd and 4th letters.
Oh man, I was going to have to find this statue and then sit in Central Park and solve the cryptogram. I am not Team Mystic Fish's smart code person; this was going to be a grind... Or maybe not. I had a long cryptogram. Dan Egnor had talked about a long cryptogram... in a presentation about computer tools for puzzle solvers and designers. There are cryptogram solvers out there, and this poem was long enough to be solveable by one of those. I went on the internets, found a solver, typed in the encrypted poem... and got the answer back! (And found out that the guy's name is spelled "AudObon". D'oh!)
This page was all National-Geographic-decorated and had
a rebus based on exhibits from the Museum of Natural History.
Once I was done marveling at the theming, I settled down and
looked at the rebuses. The first one, a bird's skill with a
÷2. Haha ha cool, that must be dodo.
Hey, maybe I could solve this thing without going to the museum after all.
Apparently, this rebus made a Teddy Roosevelt quote: got a few words,
googled for T.R. quotes, and done.
On Wednesday, I went to the Met. I was looking at little photos of pieces of art, each with a three-digit number. From previous visits to the Met, I remembered that its rooms had three-digit numbers. Maybe I wouldn't have to search the whole Met for these art pieces, just those rooms.
At the Met, I paid my entrance donation and grabbed a map—and saw that most of the art pieces I was supposed to find were featured on the map. I wouldn't need to search the whole museum to find these pieces, but GC did so that she could use just these pieces.
Sure enough, those three-digit numbers were room numbers, marked on the map. I made my way through the museum. The Met is a great place, full of wonders. I like to take a day, maybe a day and a half, to stroll through it. But today, I was in Game mode: focused on objectives. I hustled from room to room, wriggling around knots of gaping tourists.
And you might think: What a waste. Why not linger? Why not take time to appreciate the exhibits? And you'd have a good point. On the other hand, I'd already seen most of this stuff. I mean, sure, go ahead, stick your head in The Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio, make sure it still looks the same. I love the mind-set of a stroll through the museum. But I also love the rush of focused, directed action of the game. Move through the space; navigate; go around obstacles; find the art; get the data; confirm the data; move on. Unfortunately, the Temple of Dendur was closed. Can you imagine such a nice place to sit and solve?
(And later in this same trip, I'd game-ishly move through another museum, without even having the excuse of having already visited it...)
I couldn't figure out how to solve Act V from just the part of the puzzle visible in its online photo: there were eight cards with words; only two of those cards' words were visible. I was stumped.
I typed up my solving notes so far, trying to follow the timeline style of the excellent Solving Really Hard Puzzles blog. I sent those notes off to GC, and mentioned that I was stumped on Act IV, because the puzzle book had never made it to me. Margaret took mercy on me and sent me a PDF of the book (thus revealing Act VI of the puzzlehunt: the meta) and another PDF of the cards. Now I was back in business!
When the cards arrived on Friday, I hurriedly walked back to my hotel from the Pratt Institute. I didn't have much time to solve them: if I couldn't solve it today, my last chance would be Sunday; if I ran into a problem then, Margaret couldn't help me, I'd be flying back on Monday.
Figure out what I could so that I'd be ready to solve quickly when I got to Frederick Douglass Circle. Each of the eight cards had a picture on one side and some words on the other. Hmm, of all the words, only one had five letters: "world". I was supposed to use these cards to fill in some blanks to make a Frederick Douglass quote. That quote had only one five-blank word: and the other words from the "world" card fit with the other blanks around that. So I knew where that card fit. And with that in place, there was only one place where this card could fit, which forced the placement of that card, and a few cards later, the quote was complete.
[Flash forward to Saturday: Before the DASH Game started, I went to Frederick Douglass Circle to see the site. I supposed that the eight cards might be at eight points on the compass, that the answer was somehow in sempaphore. But that wasn't it: carvings in stone gave a short biography. The cards illustrated events in Douglass' life for which the carvings gave a chronological order.]
This was a metapuzzle: grab letters and numbers from other puzzles' answers and put them together to make a phone number. Hmm, a Manhattan number that looked promising. Maybe I'd solved this thing.
I sent off a last batch of solving notes. I sat back and reflected: That had been a lot of fun! Just sat and smiled a bit. Then I sat up and stopped reflecting: I didn't have much daylight left if I wanted to see the Brooklyn Museum today and find my way back not-in-the-dark. It was time to get up, time to resume focused and directed action.
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