5th
Game Recap
So, Shri reminded me that I had promised details on the first Game of the year (Coed Astronomy’s “leisurely mini-game” on April 19).
If you want full information, see this page - I’ll be referring to it in the overview below…
We started in Duboce Triangle, a park in San Francisco. Our intrepid team: Melissa (my lovely wife), Chris (a friend from Stanford and eBay), and Allen (a friend). The format: 6 primary puzzles, taking you from place to place in the city, with 5 intermediate “travel puzzles” to entertain you in between. (I’m not normally a fan of travel puzzles; I like to use the time in between primary clues to take a breath, talk to my teammates about non-Game stuff, etc. In this case, the puzzles were interesting and not too hard, so I was okay with them.)
Puzzle #1: a bag full of Legos of different colors, with words on them (some of the Legos were glued together), and a slip of paper saying “This quaint neighborhood is made up of 12 layers, each with a different story to tell”. Okay: there were 78 Lego bricks in total, so the “12 layers” combined with the fact that we were in the Duboce _Triangle_ suggested that we should make a triangle out of the Legos, with 1 brick at the top, 2 bricks in the next layer, and so on, all the way down to 12 Legos for the bottom layer.
There were also suspiciously many references to numbers and math operations of various kinds, giving us the idea that each layer might describe a number. In fact, Layer X might describe number X - e.g., “regionals in NCAA basketball” is four, and that’s the fourth layer (one word per brick, four bricks).
After assembling several bricks, it started to appear like the colors would be grouped together also, which made solving the solution even easier. Once fully assembled, we noticed an asterisk on one of the Legos. Maybe if we assumed the assembled triangle was Duboce Triangle, the asterisk pointed out our next location? Checking the map (in a booklet Game Control had provided) suggested that this was the US Mint. Unfortunately, the solution sheet suggested that the answer should be in the form (blank) (blank), No. (blank), and the US Mint didn’t fit that pattern.
Another attempt: starting from the asterisk, and reading the outermost letters around the edge of the triangle, revealed the message “BELDEN PLACE NO FORTY MINUS THE TOTAL NUMBER OF SIGNS IN EITHER THE CHINESE OR WESTERN ZODIAC”, or Belden Place, No. 28. Off we went.
At Belden Place, we were given a bunch of foam squares of different colors with random letters and a few small numbers on them; a sheet of paper with a list of international calling codes; and a slip of paper with a list of several country names. We quickly deduced that we were supposed to fit the tiles together such that the letters in 3 consecutive tiles could be rearranged to form a country name (e.g., F N, C R, and A E could be France) - but each tile would be used for 3 countries (e.g., that last A E tile could also be used for Ireland).
We further realized that the three tiles that would spell a country’s name would also have the three colors shown on that country’s flag. (Game Control had told us to bring an almanac, so we had pictures of all the flags). It was a quick matter to assemble the tiles, which formed the outline of a “plus” sign. Now we looked at the numbers, and it seemed pretty clear that we were supposed to create country codes from them, and the names of the countries with those calling codes would probably spell something out.
… except we couldn’t get it to work. Some of the numbers had plus signs in front of them (as calling codes do); others didn’t. Did that mean we were supposed to add some of the numbers together, but not others? Was the “plus” sign that the tiles formed a reference to the Swiss flag? We tortured ourselves for a good 30-45 minutes with various arithemetic contortions to create a meaningful message, but… nothing.
Finally, in frustration, we called Game Control and explained what we had tried. We were overthinking it, clearly; perhaps we had the grid wrong? Reading out our tiles, it turned out that we had the thing assembled _backwards_. The letters worked correctly, and the colors did indeed match the colors on the flags - but the colors were supposed to match in position and orientation as well. Cursing, we assembled the tiles in reverse order, and now all of the little numbers lined up, and the corresponding calling codes yielded countries the first letters of whose names spelled “CARTOON ART MUSEUM.”
A good Game lesson there, by the way: whenever there’s a physical thing that you have to assemble that effectively goes in a circle, always check to see whether you might have constructed it in reverse.
We walked to the Cartoon Art Museum (most of this Game was by MUNI, but this leg was short enough to walk). Inside, we discovered a piece entitled… “Clue #3 (2008), by Coed Astronomy” - nicely framed and presented as if it were actually a piece in the Museum. (Great thanks to the museum for letting us invade their space for a few hours, by the way!)
The “art piece” had a number of little pictures - a caricature of Fidel Castro, a sunset scene. After a few minutes, we realized they were all San Francisco neighborhoods. We deciphered them, and then started some more: maybe if you drew a line from one neighborhood to another, it gave a picture of some sort? Nope - just a bunch of random lines. Thinking out loud, I said, “something with zip codes? No…” to which Allen responded, “Yes! That’s Zippy the Pinhead in the upper right” - a clear signal from GC (Game Control) that, in fact, zip codes were involved. In fact, taking the pictures in order and the last two numbers of the zip code for the neighborhood in question, and assigning 01=A, 02=B, etc., a message was spelled: CREPEVINE ON CHURCH. Ah - the lunch clue. :)
Good Game Controls will organize their Games so that you arrive at certain spots at appropriate times - a cafe (or at least a neighborhood where food is available) at meal times, perhaps a beach or a scenic overlook at sunset, and so on. In this case, we anticipated a hard clue to work on over lunch, and we weren’t disappointed. Clue #4 was a reverse crossword: a crossword puzzle where the puzzle itself is filled in, but you have to figure out the hints. This is really hard to describe concisely, so check it out on GC’s website if you like (but note that we weren’t in the “crazy” division, so we received a completed crossword, instead of a bunch of crossword pieces).
We really cranked on this clue. It was labor-intensive, which I usually don’t like in Games, but we did have a continual sense of progress. We got a few hint words, then a few more, and then we switched (we were working in pairs - one pair on the Down hints, one pair on the Across hints), and did some more; and at some point, we recognized that the index of “hint words” was in alphabetical order, which allowed us to go much faster and even guess certain words without even looking at the corresponding clues (e.g., a two letter word that’s alphabetically in between “this” and “track” is pretty clearly “to”). Once we got enough words, we switched to the final part (written with words from the hints), and managed to spell out the answer even before getting the index entirely done: SIXTEENTH AND MARKET.
We walked to that location, and started looking around, since the clue that GC handed us said not to leave the location until we had “an idea what to do next”. We saw a nearby building with a colorful mural, and realized that the colors matched those on the paper; the mural also had writing on it in various languages - English, Italian, Japanese, etc. We wrote those down and rushed to a nearby cafe, since it was freezing cold.
The clue itself was a grid of letters, plus each of the colors in the mural with a word, such as “query”, “insect”, “tolerant”, etc. Looking at the grid, we saw that we could make some of the names of the languages by going from letter to letter (not in straight lines, but as if we were playing Boggle). In fact, we saw that we could continue after the word “Russian” with “Revolution” - and the color of Russian on the mural was blue, and the word in the blue box on the clue was “uprising”. Aha, this is easy: English Patient (tolerant), Spanish Fly (insect), and so on. The only issue was that GC got Japanese and Chinese mixed up on the mural, but the right phrases were clear nonetheless.
The second part of the clue was finding grids of specific patterns based on colors, so we filled in the grid with the right colors (blue for Russian, etc.) and found the right pieces of the grid. (Again, this is hard to explain - see the GC site to see how this worked). Each grid subpiece was a word: for instance, the first was “delight”. Aha again: Turkish Delight. Pie: American. Muffin: English. Reading the first letters of each “nationality” revealed “Tea Garden” - and, in keeping with the clue so far, we headed to the Japanese Tea Garden.
(As an aside, I appreciated GC using the same “trick” at each stage of this puzzle: adding the country name at the front each time, even including the final step to get Japanese Tea Garden, was very elegant.)
On our way to the final clue, we solved the third and fourth travel clues - the third was a nice combination between a paint-by-numbers puzzle and a minesweeper puzzle, and the fourth was a very cute Jeopardy game.
At the tea garden, we met a very cold-looking GC representative and gave him some food. He rewarded us by helping us find the clue itself, which was hidden under a bush. This was a “meta-clue”, which Games sometimes have at the end - a clue that uses information and/or techniques from prior clues.
One sheet of paper was reminiscent of the crossword puzzle, but also suggested words that seemed to come from the very first (Lego) clue. Each word was associated with a weird symbol on the next page, which were combined in groups of three - some vertical, some horizontal. Aha - just like the colors of the flags in clue #2: and, going back to the Legos from clue #1, each word had an associated color! Thus, each group of three symbols was really a set of three colors - a flag, which went with a country, which went with a calling code.
Those calling codes then mapped to words from the index in clue #4, the reverse crossword, which spelled a message: Over the ____ (not young) (4), with the answer clearly being HILL. Since this was surrounded by a blue box (blue = Russian), and we hadn’t used clue #5 in the meta-clue yet, we’re looking at Russian Hill, which is also reminiscent of Clue #3 (SF neighborhoods). Plugging that into the space provided and rearranging letters as indicated by the numbers yielded “use solution phrases”, so we looked back at the six answers from the six clues, put them in the order indicated, and used the Clue #3 technique - since that was the only one we hadn’t used yet - and looked at the zip code for each location, the last two numbers each spelling out D-I-N-N-E-R. :)
Games traditionally end with some kind of “afterparty”, where the teams hang out, eat, share stories, and thank Game Control profusely. That’s where we headed, which ended up being a pizza place a few blocks south of the Tea Garden. We finished the last travel clue, too - see the GC website, though I’ll warn that that puzzle would be very hard to solve if you can’t read music.
All in all, a very nice “leisurely mini-Game”, with high-quality puzzles, and a good performance from Meat Machine (that’s the name of our team). No real theme, which I usually like (some Games are heavily thematic; others are focused on the puzzles, and this was the latter), but the experience was so nice that I didn’t mind.
Coming later this week: a recap of the Great Urban Race, in which Chris and I competed this last weekend…
