Puzzle Safari 10: Survivor Puzzle Island

After a 2-year hiatus, I did Microsoft Puzzle Safari today with a subset of Liboncatipu. Mike and me and Jamie and Ryan entered as Liboncatipu (and Jeff and Jonobie and Chris and Jen entered as Seven of Diamonds).

Ryan was our runner in the morning. What was weird was that we seemed to be just MOWING through the puzzles. I mean, it was like, I'd grab a puzzle and do it in a few minutes and by the time I was done, everyone else had finished their puzzle as well. And then repeat. And repeat. And then Ryan went out.

My first few, I did one that involved making 9-letter words with 3-letter chunks in a circle, and then I oddly took a logic puzzle that involved a Survivor-like voting history where you had to determine the order the people were eliminated. I did a puzzle that involved reality TV show names with another word attached to combine it with a movie or TV show (think "Real World of Warcraft" or "Dirty Dancing With The Stars"), and I grabbed a Chutes and Ladders game that took all of like 2 minutes to solve. Another silly one was called "Gordon Ramsay's F-Word" and it was basically a crossword that involved lots of words starting with F that I had to figure out the proper locations for. (This was amusing in that Mike and I thought Feather Fall isn't a 1st-level D&D spell. Also, does anyone know an F----- F----- that would be a "candied popcorn and peanut snack like Crunch'n'Munch"? I solved the puzzle without actually solving all of the clues, as usual, and forgot to check this one.)

Mike and I did a meta together called One Rack Scrabble, where you basically have to reinact a Scrabble game. Since we had all of the racks (they were meta clues), it was really easy.

I finished up the first round by doing a puzzle called Patchwork, which I thought was actually one of the best puzzles in that round in terms of being new and different (to me, anyway). You had a grid shape (kinda like a #) to put words into, some colored squares as hints, and clues for words, with the words being broken up into shapes that you then had to fit into the grid and find the overlapping letters. I got stuck just because I had one wrong answer, it turned out I really had done 95% of it just right. I showed Mike what I'd done, he corrected the wrong answer and BAM, finished puzzle.

Jamie and I worked out a puzzle involving sign language finger-spelling -- he was really close and then when I went to look at it with him, and asked him tons of questions like "wait why do you go that way?" or "why is it that letter?" he realized where his mistake was and we solved! Yay.

In the lunch break, we solved a treasure map metapuzzle and we also ran out to get slices of a circle for another puzzle that we'd neglected to notice that morning. By the time the dust cleared we basically had exactly one puzzle remaining from the morning bunch (and it was kind of embarrassing when we solved it at 5:15pm, too late for a stamp anyway).

Lunch break did not actually involve lunch. All we had for food during the day was Krispy Kremes, cherries, strawberry cookies, and Jamie brought granola bars that we never touched. Brilliant we are not exactly.

Mike was our runner in the second half. So the first hour of that part, he was with us solving stuff and rewriting our logbook (we forgot which stamps Ryan didn't get of our solves in the first round, whoops) and he left around 3:30. I think I was about 3-4 puzzles up by then -- my first one was a Set puzzle which I snagged in the "DUDE SET PUZZLE" phase before anyone else got to it. My second one was a math one -- a variation on the game 24 where you had 3 sets of 4 numbers, and had to figure out which one could NOT make 24 using their new precedence rules which were simply left-to-right, no parentheses, and all operations had to make whole positive numbers. It was surprisingly simple and surprisingly difficult all at once :) I also did a logic puzzle (why was I taking all the logic puzzles? who knows) that involved, again, figuring out the lineups of teams of Survivors and who their alliances were with, and drawing a word out of their alliances.

Mike did one called "Moon" which turned out to be a text adventure in the freaking answering system. You just had to basically keep submitting words from the return "hints" you got for your "incorrect" answers and eventually you got to a phrase that you could get the real answer from. Moon. Just type it.

I have just been informed that there was a puzzle where the text says "There's an immunity idol hidden on campus. If only I had a map..." and the idol was marked in the map in the logbook and we forgot to write down to ACTUALLY GO THERE :(

Somewhere around this point, with Mike out running, and us already having 6 tickets to the Challenges from the first round, I said we should go do some challenges, so Ryan and I headed off to do that.

There were 6 of them. Two involved two people:
- A water-throwing thing where you had to fill a cup with water... by having two people about 15 feet apart and one of them throwing water from the fountain at the other person's cup so they could put the water in the other cup. This SUCKED because the way they had it set up, you had to use your right hand to do it, and both Ryan and I are left-handed. I kept bashing my right hand into the fountain side because I have less coordination over there, and as a result I tore my right thumb open and went into the cafeteria bleeding. Not cool. I guess we coulda insisted on switching it but by the time I realized the problems inherent in the system it probably would have taken too much time to switch.

- A Tangrams thing where you had one person blindfolded and making the tangram picture, and the other person could see but couldn't touch the pieces and had to direct the first person how to put the pieces down. Stupidly, Ryan was blindfolded and he is good at tangrams. I am not good at tangrams and kept screwing up which piece you were supposed to use in the first place. The guys "judging" kept pointing at pieces and mouthing to me "use THIS one".

The other four involved one person. I did two:
- Horse dressing, which basically, you had paper clothes with letters on them, but different letters for different papers of clothes to cut out. You had to "dress" a horse legitimately, the horse still had to stand up and be recognizable as a horse, and your outfit had to spell out a word of at least 5 letters long that was related to either fashion or horses. (Mine was "finish", which could be either.) Amusingly, when I was getting the explanation, I said "Let me confirm this: a horse is defined as having four legs and a head, correct?" "Correct, although there's no particular restriction on what items count as a hat..." "So tailshoes are okay?"

- Prison Break -- they had these plastic "keys" hanging on a wall about 7 feet away, and gave you 5 dowels and some masking tape. You couldn't step over a particular line (your jail cage) but you could reach over it (like through the bars) and you had to retrieve the key. Most people made long sticks and reached through the key ring to get it off the hook. Me, I made a long stick, then put tape on the end of my stick and jabbed the key to stick it to my stick and brought it over that way, which got a look of "I'm not sure whether to be impressed or disqualify you." from the guy watching. Then you had to use the "key" to read a secret code, which meant super-imposing it over a quote and getting another question.

Ryan did two. One involved watching a TV screen for some quotes or things being spoken and then you had to fill them into a grid. He was one or two letters off and came over to me like "hey, can you think of a word that would fit if I had this and this letter wrong?" and I figured it out. And fortunately it was okay. The other one he did was "sing for your supper", where you had to actually sing a song with a carrot as your microphone, and then eat something they gave you. Like the guy before us had to sing a three-little-piggies song or something and was given some "pig snout" to eat. Ryan had to sing "Hungry like the Wolf" and was given "eyeballs" to eat, which he said were just grapes.

Then we went back...

I quickly did one that involved chat acronyms that were missing letters. About 2/3 I knew off the top of my head, then there were a few that I had to confirm, then there was one I'd never seen before -- using "9" for "parent is watching"? Anyone actually know that one? I'm probably simply too old to have ever seen it, back when I was 11 and started on BBSes my dad and I didn't tend to look over each other's shoulders anyway.

Then I quickly also did one that involved a bizarre menu. It was another one where looking at it on the wall I wasn't sure how to do it, but as soon as I sat down with it it was obvious. We had a few of those where I'd deliberate which puzzle to do for 5 minutes, then spend like 2 minutes actually doing the puzzle I chose... another one involved finding little chunks of words to add "real" to either on the front or end. I did about half the clues and then just used a word solver to get the final answer.

The last one I worked on, which we solved around 5:15pm but was too late to get the stamp for, was an audio puzzle. I usually hate them, but this one involved music I actually knew! Like Beatles, TMBG, Police, B-52's, even School House Rock. Ryan figured out the hook, which was that you had to take the repeating word in the lyrics -- you didn't even need to look up the actual info about the songs. Though we did need to look up the answer that was spelled out by the repeating lyric we got as a solution.

At that point, we realized we should just start gathering up stuff and meet Mike at the cafeteria with the stickers from the challenges. So we did.

The wrapup started at 6:20 or so. In the 50 minutes interim, we walked around, saw solutions to puzzles, rated them by green and red stickers for good and bad, compared notes with friends. We saw the Fords and it sounded like they had a similar experience to us, what with solving a ton of puzzles and getting almost all the stamps for them too, and I ran into my friend Brian M, whose team was in "we did a lot of puzzles but we don't feel like particular superstar" state. And Derek Leung was there too, so we chatted with him for a bit.

One weird thing about this event was how OLD I felt. I mean, the typical older puzzlehunters were there, of course, and at 33 I was by no means the oldest person there, but I would bet the average age of people in the room was more like around 27ish. Maybe I am underestimating.

Oh, so anyway, we tied for 5th place out of 80-something teams... we were listed 6th but we had the same amount of points as the 5th place team. It was kinda scary because I thought there was a vague chance we MIGHT have finished 3rd, given how we'd solved like all but 3-4 puzzles and gotten so many stamps. But then another group was called 3rd, so I figured we were out. In a bizarre twist of fate, The Brute Force actually finished 2nd, and they've won Safari for like the last 238943824983 years or whatever. The first-place team was called S-Words, I forget what Puzzle Hunt team they are parts of.

Seven of Diamonds placed 9th. We had 665 points and they had 649. It was pretty close. So both of the Liboncatipu teams did pretty well, really.

Embarrassingly, I heard some people saying things like "no no, the whole weekend thing is called Puzzle Hunt. I have no clue when the next one is going to be, we haven't heard anything..."

Afterwards we just cleaned up the room and headed our separate ways. I guess it makes sense, after Safari half our team will be pretty sweaty/tired. So, we went home so Mike could take a shower, and a bit later headed out to Whole Foods to get salad bar (seemed like a good idea after all the junk food).

Overall I enjoyed Safari this year, if anything it actually seemed too short -- like we were going home and it was a feeling of "already?" We did so many puzzles that it seems like it should have been a longer time, but it wasn't.

I brought my camera and completely forgot about it, so I have zero pictures. Though I believe they probably have footage of me doing stuff in the challenges, I know they took a photo of me building my horse if nothing else.