DASH 3: Fremont Fractured Fairy Tales

Lenincatipu posing by the statue.


Most of us from Liboncatipu went down to Fremont on Saturday to participate in DASH 3 ("Different Area, Same Hunt", a day puzzle hunt event being hosted among 12 cities -- see playdash.org). Though, the actual team registed as Liboncatipu was me, Mike, Drew, Ryan, and Jamie. (The Fords and Adam and Rehana played as 7 of Diamonds, Jen and Chris entered with Chris's sister and brother-in-law, and Andy played on Sports Racers (with Shane and other IG people).

Short version: We came in SECOND PLACE!!!! The only group ahead of us was "Briny Deep", which is basically one of the most stacked teams in the event, and they only beat us by 10 minutes.

The meeting up spot in the morning was right by the Impinj/etc building off 34th and the bridge. I saw tons of random people I know there, and also various people I don't really know but know their faces, at least.

Things got underway a little after 9am. The way things were organized this year, different teams had different numbered maps, so while we'd all be going to the same places and doing the same puzzles, we wouldn't be doing it in the same order. I think several groups did have the same loop -- there were definitely a few teams we saw at most of the places we ended up -- but overall mostly we just passed friends we knew along the way in various places, randomly.

Also, the way things worked for this event, your score was your solve time, so at each place you had to sign in and sign out with stuff so they could log how long it took you to solve things. Travel time didn't matter (probably to compensate for the differences in travel routes for the various groups).

So like, we were literally one of the first groups, if not THE first, to get out of the original puzzle. The theme was fairy tales and the first puzzle was a bunch of "poems"; we had to extract various numbers of things from the lines, like punctuation or number of S's or number of words or whatever. It spelled out a phrase "shooting star", we had to then figure out a corresponding thing in this numbered nursery rhyme book we had, and go off to the next location. We started running for all of about 10 seconds before realizing... hey... we don't need to run... travel time doesn't matter.

Our second location was "Rapunzel", under the Fremont bridge. We were given two papers, one of Rapunzel's "hair" and one of her "combs", which we had to cut out and assemble; when done properly you'd see letters in each comb, and there were plusses and minuses. At first we did not realize that we had to add or subtract the number of tines in the comb, but we got that pretty quick and got our answer and went on our jolly way.

Third stop was "hansel and gretel", which was basically a little further down the canal, slightly past Google's building, by a cement circle clearing. This was a word find that apparently stumped a whole bunch of other groups. You got a whole bunch of candy clues with several missing in alphabetical order, and as you found those words in the word find, some had missing letters... and you also found the non-clued words in there, which were all kinds of breads (hinted as "bread crumbs that we left to help us get out of the forest" in the flavor text). We managed to find all of the candy words and all of the bread words fairly quickly -- then the issue was figuring out what to DO with them. It was clear that they made a path from the house to the forest exit... and that there were missing letters at intersections... so it was just a matter of connecting that all together. But the letters didn't make sense. It was only when I grabbed another paper to write them down, and did so by writing down the intersection single and paired letters and was like "HEY GUYS IF YOU TAKE OUT USELESS LETTERS THIS STARTS SPELLING SWEET SOMETHING" and they were like OMG SWEETBREAD and that was the answer. Shrug. The "useless" letters were the ones in the grid instead of the missing ones, basically, you just had to substitute them.

Onwards down the canal a bit more until we got to the Dinosaur Garden (a place where they have mad topiary skillz and have made these huge plantform dinosaurs), where we got Cinderella's "wandagons", which were these hexaflexagons or whatever, with up to 6-letter words, but you could fold them in several ways to see several different words. The puzzle was not particularly complicated as long as you knew that there were a whole buncha words to get out of it, basically, and we solved this one pretty quickly and moved onwards.

The next stop was by the statue of Lenin, outside the cafes on that corner. We also got a photo with the statue, which we were supposed to tweet as part of the event, basically. Then we got the puzzle that probably took us the most time of any at the event. It was a combination word ladder and tantrix puzzle (the things where you have to put hexagons together to make paths; I forget if there's a better name for that). The theme was Jack and the Beanstalk, so the words at the bottom were beans, and you put together stalks to go up to the clouds. Each step, you changed or added a letter and then anagrammed the word. Assembling the stalks wasn't trivial, but we were able to do that in a reasonable amount of time. The problem was what to do with them once they WERE assembled. We were at this place long enough to be given TWO hints when we asked -- of course, the hints were USELESS to us at that point. But I guess we were there half an hour total. We were trying to figure out how to fill in the clouds at the top... eventually Ryan noticed that one of the stalks, if you took the letters that were being changed in each word, you got "Shenanigan", and we're like "HEY THAT CAN'T BE A MISTAKE LET'S TRY AGAIN" and Drew, who had gotten "ORSEGOD" for one of the stalks suddenly realized it was actually "NORSEGOD", or Thor... whoops. So we solved it and left, feeling kinda silly.

Next stop: Troll.

The funny part about this was... we got there and the staffers weren't there yet! Oops! So Mike climbed the troll and I took a photo.

The puzzle there was Rumplestiltskin, which was basically a movie actor rebus type thing with pictures and letters and stuff. This didn't give us much trouble, we all contributed to it, solving the names and then finding them in the thingy. They just all made letters, which spelled a word. Cute puzzle. Onwards.

The next location was the Big Bad Wolf, aka Matt Lovell, who gave us this Three Little Pigs puzzle which was basically a crossword with a sudoku-like thing. Embarrassingly, Jamie and I completely couldn't do our sudoku (we'd split them up) because we forgot there were zeroes involved. Instead, we solved about 2/3 of the crossword before people figured out what to do with the solutions. Then we had words and we had numbers, and the directions said to pair the diagonals together. Which took us a while to figure out what to do with... this was all Mike, who noticed that the letters and numbers corresponded, and got a word from 0-9.

(The memorable things at this location for me were that there was this guy unrelated to the event who had a really cute dog hanging out... and gave up and left after the puzzlers took over the area. Also, Andy and Shane's group showed up and we got to be like "Haha you guys are slow" as we ran off to the next location.)

The last stop was at Dusty Strings. It was also after noon by then, so we decided to stop for lunch. Because, OMG HUNGRY AND OMG LAST PUZZLE. Drew didn't want to get lunch, but the rest of us did. We went to Blue Moon Burgers, where I had a salad and milkshake, which was a mistake -- the salad was disgusting and full of bacon. (Shush.) The milkshake was good and the waffle fries were good, though.

And so, the last puzzle was an audio puzzle. We downloaded it to our various smartphones and listened -- and it was basically a combination of songs done by bands with animals in the band name (ie, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Sheryl Crow, Def Leppard) and then along with the track was also animal noises. We had a paper that had animals in two lines of points, and letters in the middle, and essentially if you could pair the animals into a chain, you'd get a bunch of letters to spell things out. Once we had "orche" we just ran back and submitted "orchestra" and were right. Onward!

We'd received square papers at every puzzle, sometimes two squares, as well as once or twice these other clues (which were basically from puzzles that had been cut, so gimme answers needed for the meta), and so we came full circle to the original location, found a patch of cement, and went to work. You had to make a "path to the tower" on one side of the squares, by using the answers to all the puzzles from beforehand to connect symbols by a "legend" that we were given -- it gave you hints for words, which you could take out of the answers. Ie, if you had a word that hinted at "you need something to ward off vampires" and "you need a vegetable found in salad", we might look at the answer word "CELEBRATING" and take out "GARLIC" and "BEET" and be left with the letter "N" and write that in the intersection between the two symbols that were hinted, and tape those squares together. We figured this out very quickly as a pair and then had to go just find the clues -- and somehow we just came up with them all very quickly as a group. The path to the tower said "SHUN GIANTS" as a clue; we turned it over and got this maze with letters and symbols in it. On the "codes you may need" paper, these symbols were there representing planets -- with hints saying the planets were "terrestrial" or "gas giants" or so on. So, taking out the planets that were "giants", we had a path through the maze. We stared at this for a few minutes, with the flavor text saying "When you get to the tower you will know how to defeat the guard there", wondering exactly what that meant, until Jamie's like "HEY THERE ARE 17 SYMBOLS AND 17 NUMBERS ON THE PATH". Indexes are easy! Jamie went from the end and got "him", we went from the beginning and got "throw the b" and then said "THROW THE BOOK AT HIM!" and ran up and submitted that. We were done at 1:50pm. For an event starting at 9am and going until 5:30pm, I guess that's not bad, especially with our lunch break.

And overall, I was pretty happy with the puzzles in this event. I really liked the way they fit the theme and also were fun to assemble, weren't ridiculously difficult but weren't trivial for the most part either, were all actually possible to work on with 4 or 5 people at a time, etc. I thought the meta was really clever, and even was thinking how I wish we had some stuff as cool as that for our event. The locations were also pretty good, most had reasonable places to sit down and work on stuff. The fact that it was in Fremont and so we passed by a lot of food places and other neat things was also a bonus. Good times. And I'm not just saying that because WE KICKED ASS.


We spent the next few hours playing board games in Ballard; first hanging out at the Ballard House and then once Seven of Diamonds finished, we went to Adam and Rehana's and played Seven Wonders with them and the Fords. They all went to some bridge party and we went back for the wrap-up, where we confirmed that our posters were up, although -- they were a little TOO subtle given that the wrap-up was in the History House. Seriously, they looked like they belonged there for something else, not for something special, and we actually had to hint at people "HEY LOOK AT THIS... CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT IT MIGHT BE FOR?"

But yeah, the wrap-up was short, and they announced the top 3 teams -- and WE WERE SECOND! Our solve time was 3 hours. Briny Deep's solve time was 2 hours and 50 minutes, and they won overall. We don't feel too bad because they're basically the best of the best -- Jeff and Merrie from ScruBBers, Peter Sarrett, etc, superheroes of the puzzling scene.

Actually, we went up to talk to Jeff W and Troy and Pavel and some others, and Jeff told us that their team used a listening room at Dusty Strings to do the music puzzle. I'm betting anything that they gained 10 minutes on us there -- our problem was that we checked in, got the puzzle, and then left the store, crossed the street, found a place to sit down, got out our phones, had to deal with background noise... if we could have gotten the puzzle and just walked 10 feet to a room and had silence and so on, we probably would have solved it a lot quicker too!

But anyway, we talked to them about the entire OMG NEXT PUZZLE HUNT factor. And now that we've announced a date, I hope we can get our acts together in time...

Oh, for those wondering: September 10-11. Coming to a train platform near you.

Here's a bunch of photos. Would it help if I interspersed them with the text more?

( I have been asked to put in an LJ-cut )

Things besides DASH

So, after DASH ended, we went to dinner with Jason and Drew at Chinook's. It seems they'd never been there, and after those terrible salmon cakes at Pomegranate, I wanted to justify my existence, I suppose. And sure enough, Chinook's was great.

(Actually, earlier in the afternoon was kinda funny -- I'd gotten Jason and Drew to take me to Zach's house. Which I have a key to. And I'd called Carl, who wasn't home, and tried to call Zach, who didn't answer his phone. So I just kinda burst in there like "Hi! I'm uh, going to use your bathroom, and then Jason and Drew and Mike are going to come here, and uh... sorry?" Zach was playing Dragon Age and not really wanting/expecting guests, but in the end I think it worked out -- we hung out for about half an hour so Jason could eat lunch and we could wait for Seven of Diamonds to finish up DASH so we could usurp Adam and Rehana's place to play games instead.)

So a very Ballard-heavy day.

We went back east-side, to Jen and Chris's house after that, and ate pie and ice cream, and talked about puzzles. Good times. I took photos of their cats to use in my cellphone contacts list. I've managed to get about half of my friends linked to photos of their pets now.

Sunday morning we got up early to meet people for brunch at Pomegranate but then Jen and Chris had to cancel due to a cranky baby. Drew and Jason still came out there, but were later than expected, so Mike and I took a walk around the area there and I figured out where the 269 bus stops around there, so I could theoretically walk the 5 miles there, and take a bus back within a mile of here... if I was feeling crazy and the weather was nice...

Breakfast at Pom was better than dinner at Pom; my chicken'n'waffles were decent. I dunno.

After that we adjourned to Microsoft. Well, kinda. Mike and I went out to the fields near the Studios and played catch for about 30-45 minutes because I want to get my arm back in shape. There was a big group playing cricket; I hope they didn't think we wanted to try out for their team or anything. I mean, we had baseball gloves and a softball and all.

D&J met up with us after an hour or so and we went to a conference room and basically discussed a bunch more puzzle stuff and/or cranked out some details. I was actually pretty productive in working on a puzzle myself, but I'm not going to say anything about it, just that I feel clever.

We did Claim Jumper for dinner. Which was good, but bad in that I became so stuffed that by the time we came home, all I could do was sit in front of my laptop and half zone out, half work on writing DASH, etc. I've still got stuff to actually take care of, but... eh.

So now it's Monday. I dyed my hair this morning, though hopefully nobody should notice. I would have gone for a long walk, but it's raining. And I would have thought about volleyball tonight, but my arm hurts from catch. Whoops. Instead, I am working on Japanese college baseball statistics, which amuses me much more than it should. (But my hunch on EXACTLY how good Hayata Itoh and Koji Fukutani have been this semester so far, along with how Yohei Tachi is actually raking, bizarrely, it's nice to actually have the numbers to back these things up.) I was kinda following the Rikkio-Waseda game over text-only game updates last night, and as Rikkio POUNDED Waseda 13-2, I still felt pretty happy, despite that I'm not there and that undoubtedly the things that made Waseda so annoying these past few years are not there either. It's their own damn fault for only using the Golden Three for so long and not preparing for them graduating.

Hmm.