Deanna ([personal profile] dr4b) wrote2017-10-18 05:21 pm
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Puzzle Boat 4

So many things I want to write about but as usual I just don't have the energy to do it.

I was kinda lazy in organizing Puzzle Boat 4 this year but I somehow ended up getting a decent team of 8 anyway (me, Chris, Eric M, Eric T aka Koi, Ken, Richard, Corey, Melinda). The only requirement I had was that people were able to attend in person on the first Saturday, and Richard attended via videochat because he was in Reno for an escape room crawl.

I can't write much about it without spoilers, obviously, but the structure of the hunt this time was similar to last time (100+ puzzles, lots of metas, gotta figure out which puzzles go with what meta) but had some extra twists. I'm looking at http://www.pandamagazine.com/island4/index.php?f=FM_About while not logged in to see what I think is fair game to mention. You can see that the theme is the Amazing Race, so we were going around the world. Most puzzles were "Route Info", and metas were Pit Stops, and then the two new things this time were Roadblocks and Detours. Detours, you would get at a special place and get a choice of two puzzles, and do one of them, to progress further. (And later on you'd get U-Turned and have to do the other one). Roadblocks were non-puzzley activities that you had to do, that would result in some letters and a photo; the catch was that each member of your team could only do N of them (where I'm assuming N was determined by team size, which is why you couldn't add team members after starting). N was 2 for our team, and I unfortunately took the first roadblock just to see what it was, which meant I had to bother people to do a lot of the other ones all the time because I didn't want to use up all my roadblock slots.

Pace-wise, like I said, everyone was around on Saturday, and we officially went from 10am to 8pm (this is mostly because Ken and I were going to contra dance, Richard was doing escape rooms in Reno, Eric was going to the Stanford football game, and Corey and Melinda had a babysitter until early evening) and we made pretty good progress, solving around 50-60 things on the first day? Though some of those were roadblocks/detours.

Sunday was slightly less attendance -- me, Chris, Koi, Eric until mid-afternoon and Ken from mid-afternoon onwards. But, we pushed through a lot in spreadsheets, and Richard did a bunch remotely too as stuff would just show up solved suddenly. By the time I went to sleep on Sunday -- and by the way *I* solved our first meta by guessing the right phrase with the letters given -- we had about 100 puzzles solved and 2 metas.

Monday night we got together in a conference room at Google, where "we" was really me, Koi, and Richard. Ken was there for a little while but we basically solved like one puzzle together and then he left. We attacked metas with a vengeance and got through almost all of them -- by the end of the evening we only had 3 metas left.

I spent a bunch of time taking bronze/silver hints on puzzles to try to get some more answers to fill in metas while others stared at metas.

We only had one meta left by Tuesday evening. Nobody got together in person that day but we all were on a spreadsheet (I didn't get home until 10pm or so from contra dance that evening even) when the final meta fell, and then we got the final final meta meta, and stared at it for a few hours, before Chris figured out what was going on, and we finished around 12:09am Wednesday morning, putting us at 10th place overall.

I can't say much about the puzzles themselves, of course, or even really about any specific solving, which is hard. But I wanted to remember that we did this event and people managed to come together surprisingly well even though a lot of it was remote solving in a spreadsheet (well, a lot for me). I also suspect we spent a lot more time together in person than a lot of teams did as well, and I really think that time together was a lot more valuable for solving, because bouncing ideas off people really works well (like, for one of the metas, no spoilers hopefully here, but say, one of the aspects was a kind of word, and one of the aspects was a pattern in the words, and another was how to fit those into the paper puzzle given with it, and literally, Richard noticed one part, Koi noticed another, and I noticed another. I think any of us could have figured it all out on our own but together it went really quickly.)

Next weekend we're doing the Hunt for Justice puzzle box (likely just me and Chris...) on Saturday and then the Palantir Hunt at Stanford on Sunday and then that might be it for puzzles until MIT Mystery Hunt? I guess we have some escape rooms in the area to look at sometime but I feel so lazy about it. It's sounding like Chris and I will be here over Thanksgiving so maybe I'll see if I can get a group of people together to do some rooms then or something, who knows.