9th
Great Urban Race: recap
Game season is starting with a bang.* A few days ago I posted about Coed Astronomy’s leisurely mini-game, in which Meat Machine participated on April 19th. Last Saturday, Chris (friend from Stanford and former eBay colleague) and I competed in the Great Urban Race. (… and tomorrow, if we can field our team, Meat Machine will be playing in Shinteki.)
The Great Urban Race is sort of a cousin to a “true” Game. You get all of the challenges at the start, and they tend to be easy by Game standards. (In fact, most of them turned out to require nothing more than intermediate Googling skills; others weren’t puzzles at all, but were items to collect, in the vein of a traditional scavenger hunt.) You solve as many puzzles as you can, and then plot the most efficient route to complete the challenges, and then complete that route as fast as you can.
It’s also a national competition: for 8-9 months, the GUR team travels to a different city every two weeks to hold local events, and the top teams from each city qualify to compete in the national finals (this year, they’re in Vegas on November 8).
Chris and I arrived at the starting point - a park a couple of blocks SW of Fisherman’s Wharf. We made some good decisions before the race started: 1) get MUNI passes beforehand; 2) travel light (eschewing many usual Game tools); 3) even though it was heavy, do bring a laptop with a wireless connection. There were 185 teams competing - some with funky costumes, others in serious racing gear.
We solved all of the puzzles in the first 25 minutes or so. Our route was pretty clear: hit Pier 39, go down the Embarcadero to the Market and Mission locations; then travel north to Union Square and Jackson St. to get back to the start. Our biggest strategic decision involved which clue to skip (we were allowed to skip one clue). One location was Fort Mason, which would take about 10 minutes of extra round-trip travel time at the end of the race. Another was a find-a-needle-in-a-haystack clue: we were to get a picture of the two of us in front of a particular banner for a nightclub, which was somewhere in a specific 3x3 block area.
One of the lessons that fans of the Amazing Race should appreciate: needle-in-a-haystack clues increase variance. Thus, if you are desperate - or if it’s a winner-take-all sort of Game, or you need to increase volatility for any reason - you should aim for that sort of challenge. If you’re confident in your ability to do well (in Chris’ and my case, “do well” = “qualify for the national finals”), you should avoid them. It turned out that the nightclub was on the way to our next location - Pier 39 - so we decided to run by the club to see if the banner was at the club, or nearby. No luck, so we kept going and committed to skipping that clue.
One of the scavenger-hunt challenges was a choice: 1) get a picture of both teammates holding a non-CA driver’s license, or 2) get a (real) $2 bill. As we jogged toward Pier 39, we saw a couple that looked like they were tourists, so we accosted them and asked if they were from outside California.
Woman: “We’re from Australia!”
Man: (looks suspiciously at us)
Me: “Do you have your driver’s license? We need to take a picture of it!”
Man: (looks REALLY suspiciously at us: who are these crazy San Franciscans who are probably going to steal his license and then mug him in broad daylight?)
Chris: “No, really - we’re in this scavenger hunt - see, here are our shirts, and our race bibs, and here’s the thing that says we need the picture of the license…”
Without too much delay, we convinced them that we were just geeks, not crazy muggers, and we got the photo we needed.
On to Pier 39, where we went to the Riptide Arcade, and needed 10 coupons - presumably the kind you get when you score well at Skee-Ball or something like that. After a brief debate with the lady behind the counter about whether those were “coupons” or “tickets”, we decided they qualified, and she was nice enough to simply give us a bunch of tickets. (Thank goodness, since my Skee-Ball skills are a little rusty…)
We hopped the MUNI and rode to the Ferry Building, and then, in order, got pictures of us at a scary spider sculpture, a statue in SoMa called Smile, and in front of the address for the Shaklee Terraces building. (There had been simple puzzles to figure out each of these.) Then came a crucial moment: the second scavenger-hunt clue was to either 1) get a $500 bill from Monopoly, or 2) get a picture of ten people within arms-reach of an ad for Grand Theft Auto IV. Chris knew of a toy store about a half-block off our path; I rushed in and was able to buy a pack of Monopoly money. (The GTA IV ads were all over the place, but we judged that getting 10 people to pose simultaneously would prove hard - the $500 bill ended up taking about 3 minutes and costing $4.32.)
We ran north to Union Square, where we got another statue-picture, and then further north to Jackson St., where we got a banana from a grocery store in Chinatown. Running up the hills was tough; we caught up to a cable car at one point, but they were full.
We caught a MUNI to Fort Mason. We had an amusing encounter with three other teams on the bus:
Other Team 1: “Look, there’s an ad of Grand Theft Auto IV on the side of that other bus across the street!”
Other Team 2: “Let’s all go take the picture!”
Other Team 3: “Yeah!”
Us: “… we’ve already done this challenge (Monopoly money)”.
Other Teams: (don’t notice, since they’ve already jumped off the bus and are now standing in the middle of the street, next to the other bus…)
You can see how this ends: both buses pull away from the stop, leaving those three teams in the street with cars honking, no picture of Grand Theft Auto, and no bus.
At Fort Mason, we had to find the statue of Congressman Philip Burton. Using Google Earth on the bus, we could just barely see an overhead view of a statue in the middle of the Great Meadow, which turned out to be our target; we ran for that, then ran back to the starting point. The final challenge was a cute little obstacle course - kind of like those bouncy-castle things, but with lots of tight squeezes - and we were done.
We finished in 2 hours and 6 minutes, placing 9th and qualifying for the national finals. We were pretty pleased with our performance, though we’re astounded at how fast the winners finished (1:37!). We probably ended up running a good four miles - over some nasty hills - during the course of the race; Chris and I have committed to getting in better shape before the finals in Vegas. :)
Shinteki is tomorrow; this is a more traditional Game, with some hard puzzles and driving from location to location, though there will probably be 2-3 challenges that aren’t real puzzles. (E.g., last year there was a “time & space” challenge, where teams split into pairs: one pair had to try to estimate the duration of 100 seconds, and another had to walk blindfolded to a target 100 yards away; you got more points the closer each pair was.) The scoring system is pretty rigorous, in contrast to, say, Coed Astronomy’s game 3 weeks ago.
*For insiders that’s a (pretty bad) pun - BANG is the acronym given to the Bay Area Night Game, a tradition of short puzzle hunts that’s been going on since 2002. It’s been dry recently - there hasn’t been one since April 2007.