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Puzzle Safari 2007
This year's Puzzle Safari, being as it was on July 7th -- aka 7/7/7 -- also accordingly had a James Bond theme as well as a casino theme going for it.
There were several new features this year:
1) answers did NOT necessarily solve directly to a location on the Microsoft campus -- mainly because it gets dull always expecting a XX/XXXX answer. So this year answers might be random phrases or words as well.
2) to facilitate that, there was actually a website where we submitted answers, rather than just the logbook. when you got a correct answer, it'd tell you the location of the stamp.
2a) occasionally, and leading into the next point, it'd also show you a picture of a place where some casino chips were located.
3) there was a casino in the building 9 cafeteria, where they had several "casino games" going on. The thing is, while from a distance it might have looked like people were playing the actual game, in reality, the games were just puzzles that you had to solve. You needed to have found the specific chips to play certain games, and you would "cash out" after solving the puzzle by handing in a sheet with the right answer on it, and they would give you a sticker, which had to be put in your team's logbook.
Usually with Safari, you have a four-person team, and will generally at any time have 3 people solving puzzles and one person, the "runner", running around Microsoft campus collecting stamps for the logbook. Your group has one book, and you turn it in twice during the day, and get an event score based on how many puzzles you solved from each puzzle wave at each timepoint in the day. So the runner's running around, and say we solve something and it says the stamp is in building 09, room 2357 -- and we know our runner is near there -- then we'd call that person on their cellphone and be like "hey, the answer to That Puzzle is 09/2357, can you go get that one?" and they go to that room, find the stamp, stamp the logbook, and keep going.
But because of the casino -- where you didn't actually need the logbook to get the stickers, you just needed a chip to play the game -- I think a lot of teams ended up doing what we did, namely 2 people solving puzzles, one person running, and one person in the casino. This might have been a bad idea, I'm not sure.
Our team was a subset of Liboncatipu, so we just used that as our team name. It was me and my favorite puzzlehunt buddy Mike Janney, and Ryan Roberts and Steve Henry. A few of the others from our last PH team were also in Safari in various ways -- Andy and Jamie and Matt were a team with their friend Arjun, Jeff was on a team with Jonobie and two other friends of theirs, Drew and Jason were actually involved in organizing the event and running the casino. (So wait, if I count correctly that means the only people from PHA Liboncatipu that weren't at Safari were Matt Lahut, who's in Pittsburgh, and Brian Railing, who's off climbing mountains. Wait, I forgot that Ryan actually missed PHA and was last in PH9 with us. I remembered him being awesome so I figured he must have been part of the most awesome Liboncatipu squad ever :) Our 12th PHA guy was Ajay, who I don't think did Safari this year.)
The event actually went a LOT faster than I thought it would, really -- every time I looked at the clock it was just like "holy shit, we have no time left". I'm trying to remember all the puzzles I worked on, but they're a blur, so I'll just highlight a few that I can remember and comment on:
"Ushi" -- diagrams of sushi, with letters missing from them, so you'd have a picture of wasabi and it'd say "WAABI" or something like that. If you matched the missing letters up to the order of the pictures it spelled out a word, which I think was Geisha, but honestly forget.
A mixed up music title one -- where you'd have stuff like "Everybody Hurts Wang Chung Tonight", or something, and you had to figure out that there were two song titles there and the overlapping word was "Everybody", for example. I forget exactly how we got the solution phrase, but it was "Stand By Your Maneater", with the overlapping word being "Man".
We had an obnoxious man-shaped crossword that I solved the entire crossword, got the hint of "answer in twos", and we never got anywhere with that. Which was frustrating. A similar one later was Drew's puzzle -- which I knew immediately, since it was a bunch of bridge hands. You had to count the high-card points in each one, and those corresponded to the letters of the alphabet, and you got the phrase "BEER CARD SUCCESSORS", and so we typed in "eights of diamonds", which was incorrect, and a few other things, and I guess I'm an idiot and so is the rest of the team, because even when I explained the beer card to them, we didn't realize you had to go find the cards IN the hands next to the sevens of diamonds. Ugh.
My favorite puzzle overall just for the "ohh, that's CUTE" factor was called "Wonder". It was a set of 5 sets of 6 dots which looked like braille letters except they were in a bunch of different colors -- and the clue "red first, green second, blue third" or something like that. Well, if you separated out the letters into which dots involved each color, you got a phrase that was "Sir Duke's Surname"... at which point you go "HAHAHA VERY FUNNY", realizing that they mean Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder, about Duke Ellington, which is the correct answer, and you're like "see, get it, Wonder? Braille? Stevie Wonder? Get it? AAAIIEIEIEIEIEEee."
I started one crossword and realized about 5 minutes in that the corner piece was going to be the word "lemon". Mike was sitting next to me and I told him this, along with the hint of "where would you find these corner words?" and he's like "hey, go submit 'Slot Machine'", and we did, and it was right.
Steve and I worked on one that involved figuring out which portrait of which presidents were which, and since they were split by lines, I suggested that we should divide the number of each president and that it'd spell something out. I was totally right, but we'd actually gotten Thomas Jefferson wrong, so it took a bit to straighten that out. The "oh, that's CUTE" factor there was that Hilary Clinton's picture was in one spot, supposedly to represent number 44.
I did two cryptic crossword puzzles all by myself! Go me!
I liked one that was called "Surrounded". At first glance it looks really crazy, but then you realize there are letters, and 0's and 7's, and if you color in those 0's and 7's it becomes really easy :)
There were a few that the trick was "this word is this other word plus one letter", like one involving jewels where I remember it was "polar = opal + r", for example, and one that looked like a chemistry set but was really all just shapes plus a letter.
Let's see, so I also went down to the casino right after the "lunch" break. I played two games -- one which I actually completely forget what it was called, but my mind is calling "Pad Thai", and which Wikipedia suggests is "Pai Gow". I sat down there because Drew was the dealer, and he left one hand later :P You had to figure out a phrase -- each card represented two possible letters, and essentially you'd put out a "poker hand" of cards, but you'd get a black pokerchip for each spot that was the right card in the right place, and a white pokerchip for each that was the right card in the wrong place. It took about 2-3 iterations, marking down on a clue-like grid, to figure out the proper order of cards, and then you had to take the possible letters and make the only phrase that made sense out of them.
Craps, on the other hand, was sort of annoying. There were 6 "games" on your sheet, each game had 2 6-letter words, and so each roller would pick out a "game" to play and a set of red dice or blue dice, each one corresponding to a word. So you'd play a game of craps as it were -- and would roll a point, and could also roll blocks, and if you rolled safe numbers between 4-10, you'd uncover a letter, and if you rolled craps, your turn was over, and the next roller had to pick a new "game". Eventually you'd figure out enough of the words... and eventually the dealer's big hint of "MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE LOOKING AT EACH NUMBERED GAME" caused you to realize you just needed the indexed letters to make a word. I felt pretty dumb, but the guy sitting next to me had also been there bloody forever, to the point that we were just sharing letters by that point. I took 50 minutes to do those two games, so I called up our group like "uhh... anyone wanna switch off? I think I'm kind of slow". In reality, I think it's just that some games were more tedious than others.
Anyway, to make a long story slightly less long, the day was over sooner than anyone thought it should be, we cleaned up our room, chatted for a while about various stuff, and went down to closing ceremonies, where I should have been looking at solutions and rating the puzzles, but instead I ended up talking too much and catching up with several friends that I hadn't seen in forever. Our team placed 24th out of 75, or so I was told. Everyone else from Liboncatipu did much better than we did. :( I blame being stuck on stupid metapuzzle hints like getting "brother" out of a phrase like "contra sister".
Oh, other funny story: so they announced that Puzzle Hunt 11 is going to be on October 6-7, and Mike and Ryan immediately went to go reserve rooms for it, and were already finding that several places they wanted were taken -- by people on Safari staff, heh -- and anyway, they were all picking on me because I won't be here for it, there's just no way I can fly back from Japan for it. But then I realized a few things:
Puzzle Hunt starts at 10am Saturday, which is 2am Sunday in Japan.
Puzzle Hunt ends at 6pm Sunday, which is 10am Monday in Japan.
My "weekend" days off are Sunday and Monday
There's no rule saying all of your PH teammates have to actually be on Microsoft campus
I think we were totally kidding about it, but I told Mike that if anyone ducked out of Liboncatipu at the last minute or something, feel free to Skype or IM me and I'd somehow figure out a way to net-conference in to help solve puzzles :) The best part is, if our team hit what's usually our "dead time" at 1am, that'd be 5pm for me!
Anyway, it's a little disappointing a result for what'll be my last puzzling event for a while, but I'm glad I got to do it and see everyone. I'm really lucky that I totally adore pretty much everyone in our Puzzle Hunt circle, so I always have a blast at these things.
There were several new features this year:
1) answers did NOT necessarily solve directly to a location on the Microsoft campus -- mainly because it gets dull always expecting a XX/XXXX answer. So this year answers might be random phrases or words as well.
2) to facilitate that, there was actually a website where we submitted answers, rather than just the logbook. when you got a correct answer, it'd tell you the location of the stamp.
2a) occasionally, and leading into the next point, it'd also show you a picture of a place where some casino chips were located.
3) there was a casino in the building 9 cafeteria, where they had several "casino games" going on. The thing is, while from a distance it might have looked like people were playing the actual game, in reality, the games were just puzzles that you had to solve. You needed to have found the specific chips to play certain games, and you would "cash out" after solving the puzzle by handing in a sheet with the right answer on it, and they would give you a sticker, which had to be put in your team's logbook.
Usually with Safari, you have a four-person team, and will generally at any time have 3 people solving puzzles and one person, the "runner", running around Microsoft campus collecting stamps for the logbook. Your group has one book, and you turn it in twice during the day, and get an event score based on how many puzzles you solved from each puzzle wave at each timepoint in the day. So the runner's running around, and say we solve something and it says the stamp is in building 09, room 2357 -- and we know our runner is near there -- then we'd call that person on their cellphone and be like "hey, the answer to That Puzzle is 09/2357, can you go get that one?" and they go to that room, find the stamp, stamp the logbook, and keep going.
But because of the casino -- where you didn't actually need the logbook to get the stickers, you just needed a chip to play the game -- I think a lot of teams ended up doing what we did, namely 2 people solving puzzles, one person running, and one person in the casino. This might have been a bad idea, I'm not sure.
Our team was a subset of Liboncatipu, so we just used that as our team name. It was me and my favorite puzzlehunt buddy Mike Janney, and Ryan Roberts and Steve Henry. A few of the others from our last PH team were also in Safari in various ways -- Andy and Jamie and Matt were a team with their friend Arjun, Jeff was on a team with Jonobie and two other friends of theirs, Drew and Jason were actually involved in organizing the event and running the casino. (So wait, if I count correctly that means the only people from PHA Liboncatipu that weren't at Safari were Matt Lahut, who's in Pittsburgh, and Brian Railing, who's off climbing mountains. Wait, I forgot that Ryan actually missed PHA and was last in PH9 with us. I remembered him being awesome so I figured he must have been part of the most awesome Liboncatipu squad ever :) Our 12th PHA guy was Ajay, who I don't think did Safari this year.)
The event actually went a LOT faster than I thought it would, really -- every time I looked at the clock it was just like "holy shit, we have no time left". I'm trying to remember all the puzzles I worked on, but they're a blur, so I'll just highlight a few that I can remember and comment on:
"Ushi" -- diagrams of sushi, with letters missing from them, so you'd have a picture of wasabi and it'd say "WAABI" or something like that. If you matched the missing letters up to the order of the pictures it spelled out a word, which I think was Geisha, but honestly forget.
A mixed up music title one -- where you'd have stuff like "Everybody Hurts Wang Chung Tonight", or something, and you had to figure out that there were two song titles there and the overlapping word was "Everybody", for example. I forget exactly how we got the solution phrase, but it was "Stand By Your Maneater", with the overlapping word being "Man".
We had an obnoxious man-shaped crossword that I solved the entire crossword, got the hint of "answer in twos", and we never got anywhere with that. Which was frustrating. A similar one later was Drew's puzzle -- which I knew immediately, since it was a bunch of bridge hands. You had to count the high-card points in each one, and those corresponded to the letters of the alphabet, and you got the phrase "BEER CARD SUCCESSORS", and so we typed in "eights of diamonds", which was incorrect, and a few other things, and I guess I'm an idiot and so is the rest of the team, because even when I explained the beer card to them, we didn't realize you had to go find the cards IN the hands next to the sevens of diamonds. Ugh.
My favorite puzzle overall just for the "ohh, that's CUTE" factor was called "Wonder". It was a set of 5 sets of 6 dots which looked like braille letters except they were in a bunch of different colors -- and the clue "red first, green second, blue third" or something like that. Well, if you separated out the letters into which dots involved each color, you got a phrase that was "Sir Duke's Surname"... at which point you go "HAHAHA VERY FUNNY", realizing that they mean Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder, about Duke Ellington, which is the correct answer, and you're like "see, get it, Wonder? Braille? Stevie Wonder? Get it? AAAIIEIEIEIEIEEee."
I started one crossword and realized about 5 minutes in that the corner piece was going to be the word "lemon". Mike was sitting next to me and I told him this, along with the hint of "where would you find these corner words?" and he's like "hey, go submit 'Slot Machine'", and we did, and it was right.
Steve and I worked on one that involved figuring out which portrait of which presidents were which, and since they were split by lines, I suggested that we should divide the number of each president and that it'd spell something out. I was totally right, but we'd actually gotten Thomas Jefferson wrong, so it took a bit to straighten that out. The "oh, that's CUTE" factor there was that Hilary Clinton's picture was in one spot, supposedly to represent number 44.
I did two cryptic crossword puzzles all by myself! Go me!
I liked one that was called "Surrounded". At first glance it looks really crazy, but then you realize there are letters, and 0's and 7's, and if you color in those 0's and 7's it becomes really easy :)
There were a few that the trick was "this word is this other word plus one letter", like one involving jewels where I remember it was "polar = opal + r", for example, and one that looked like a chemistry set but was really all just shapes plus a letter.
Let's see, so I also went down to the casino right after the "lunch" break. I played two games -- one which I actually completely forget what it was called, but my mind is calling "Pad Thai", and which Wikipedia suggests is "Pai Gow". I sat down there because Drew was the dealer, and he left one hand later :P You had to figure out a phrase -- each card represented two possible letters, and essentially you'd put out a "poker hand" of cards, but you'd get a black pokerchip for each spot that was the right card in the right place, and a white pokerchip for each that was the right card in the wrong place. It took about 2-3 iterations, marking down on a clue-like grid, to figure out the proper order of cards, and then you had to take the possible letters and make the only phrase that made sense out of them.
Craps, on the other hand, was sort of annoying. There were 6 "games" on your sheet, each game had 2 6-letter words, and so each roller would pick out a "game" to play and a set of red dice or blue dice, each one corresponding to a word. So you'd play a game of craps as it were -- and would roll a point, and could also roll blocks, and if you rolled safe numbers between 4-10, you'd uncover a letter, and if you rolled craps, your turn was over, and the next roller had to pick a new "game". Eventually you'd figure out enough of the words... and eventually the dealer's big hint of "MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE LOOKING AT EACH NUMBERED GAME" caused you to realize you just needed the indexed letters to make a word. I felt pretty dumb, but the guy sitting next to me had also been there bloody forever, to the point that we were just sharing letters by that point. I took 50 minutes to do those two games, so I called up our group like "uhh... anyone wanna switch off? I think I'm kind of slow". In reality, I think it's just that some games were more tedious than others.
Anyway, to make a long story slightly less long, the day was over sooner than anyone thought it should be, we cleaned up our room, chatted for a while about various stuff, and went down to closing ceremonies, where I should have been looking at solutions and rating the puzzles, but instead I ended up talking too much and catching up with several friends that I hadn't seen in forever. Our team placed 24th out of 75, or so I was told. Everyone else from Liboncatipu did much better than we did. :( I blame being stuck on stupid metapuzzle hints like getting "brother" out of a phrase like "contra sister".
Oh, other funny story: so they announced that Puzzle Hunt 11 is going to be on October 6-7, and Mike and Ryan immediately went to go reserve rooms for it, and were already finding that several places they wanted were taken -- by people on Safari staff, heh -- and anyway, they were all picking on me because I won't be here for it, there's just no way I can fly back from Japan for it. But then I realized a few things:
I think we were totally kidding about it, but I told Mike that if anyone ducked out of Liboncatipu at the last minute or something, feel free to Skype or IM me and I'd somehow figure out a way to net-conference in to help solve puzzles :) The best part is, if our team hit what's usually our "dead time" at 1am, that'd be 5pm for me!
Anyway, it's a little disappointing a result for what'll be my last puzzling event for a while, but I'm glad I got to do it and see everyone. I'm really lucky that I totally adore pretty much everyone in our Puzzle Hunt circle, so I always have a blast at these things.
no subject
I thought the braille / light thing was cool, but somehow we ended up with numbers instead of letters in some positions. I'm still not sure what went wrong.
After Puzzle Hunt it took me a while to get back into the habit of randomly anagramming things. I wish Safari had the same rule of no unclued anagrams.
The Casino was weird. I did all 7 of the games for our teams. (We never found the 8th chip.) This took about about an hour and 45 minutes. I was at a craps table with people who had no idea what was going on, and who weren't happy when I intentionally called game numbers they already had. Our croupier said something like "You have to find the slant in this game." That and the right 4-5 letters was enough to guess the rest.
Baccarat had a rebus with parentheses that were not marking word boundaries, and the "words" weren't all words, so I found it very confusing and spent a very long time there. If the next game (the sudoku blackjack) hadn't been substantially easier I probably would have ditched the casino. As it was, I felt like pointwise we had to do the games because they were faster points than stamps, but that they were much less interesting than working on the regular puzzles.
On, and Pai Gow was extremely fast if you got there with 4-5 other people since you could use all the information they had.
Who wrote what
Jason wrote a surprising number of the ones you mention: "Slot Machine" answer crossword, presidential fractions, Surrounded, and one of the cryptics.
It was funny, in the post-mortem, everyone walks up and puts red or green stickers on the puzzles they didn't like or liked. Hillary Clinton had a dense circle of red stickers around her, though I think there were a couple of green stickers in there two that kept getting covered over.
Re: Who wrote what
Always Something in the Air There to Remind Me
Midnight Peace Train to Georgia
Comin’ to America the Beautiful
Nightswimming in White Satin
Mary Jane’s Last Flashdance
Walk on Eleanor Rigby
I Hope You Can Dance; Call Me Al
I Wanna Be Loved by Your Woman
Into the Great Wide Open Arms
Land Down Underneath Your Clothes
Purple Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head
You Send Me and Bobby McGee
On the Road Against the Wind
I’ve Got a Horse With No Name
I Only Have Eyes of the Tiger for You
Castles in the Air that I Breathe
Old Summertime Rock ‘n’ Roll
Every Little Body Kiss Hurts
Rocky Mountain: High Raccoon
Re: Who wrote what