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Puzzle Hunt 12 / Puzzle Haunt 13 : Liboncatipu unangrams itself and wins second place!
What a totally overwhelming weekend.
The short: Team Liboncatipu, aka "Unclued Publication" for this event, consisting of me, Mike, Drew, Lahut, Jason, Jeff, Jonobie, Andy, Jamie, Jen, Dave, and Matt, managed to get second place in Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 12/13. Only one team solved the entire hunt, and they did it at 1pm Sunday -- we were on the verge of getting there at 5pm Sunday when it ended, having solved the meta but not the final problem. However, we solved enough puzzles and got enough extra points to place second in total score. After being with this team (at least the core few people) for 5 years and however many puzzling events, I can't even begin to express how cool it was to walk onto the stage as one of the top 3 teams in the biggest Hunt ever.
Here are photos in my Facebook album. I highly recommend, however, if you're going to read the long explanation, either read it alongside or before, because the photos will help a lot of the puzzle stories make sense.
The long:
I woke up at 8am on Saturday morning at![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jeffford and jonobie's house, since they were nice enough to let me stay over the night so I didn't have to cross the lake a bunch of times. They were in the kitchen eating waffles with garzahd, and so after I showered and changed, I also joined for waffles. Jeff did the NYT crossword in the paper in like 15 minutes -- it seemed like a good omen.
We drove over to Microsoft together and went up to our team's HQ -- we were NOT the first to get there though I forgot who beat us there exactly. I thinkkamendae was one of them because I seem to recall I managed to give him the random gift I'd bought for him in a games store in Tokyo, namely a 3-D cheeseburger puzzle (Mike likes burgers and puzzles, so when I saw a burger puzzle it reminded me of him). Most of our team got there before the opening ceremonies -- and most of us even went over there to watch.
The place was PACKED. I ran intosamildanach, and his team, which turned out to have kieferskunk on it -- weird coincidence, and their team leader Jason is in charge of the next SNAP event (and who I had met while playing board games at Jack and Llyne's place many many years ago). I looked around for other people but there were just too many there -- saw Kevin Babbitt and a few other CMU people and just gave up and joined my team.
The theme that we knew about for the hunt was Jeopardy, so they had Celebrity Jeopardy playing on the big screens, and then Peter Sarrett got up there and did his best Alex Trebek imitation to welcome us all to the event and tell us some rules and whatnot. Then he gave us the first puzzle, which involved a Jeopardy board with the categories "first letters", "second letters", etc -- with some letters -- which spelled out "locate ziploc baggie thirty garage". We asked for permission to go to the garage in building 30, and were off!
I forget which of us went exactly -- I think it was me, Mike, Andy, and Lahut -- and there were a ton of groups there, so it wasn't too hard to find the baggies located behind one of the elevator. They had Jeopardy cards in them, which we pretty quickly realized were going to be the solution for the first metapuzzle.
Went back up to the room and started solving puzzles!
I got involved in a lot of stuff - rather than taking a puzzle per se I tended to just look at what other people were doing and jump in with them. Dave and I started on one called Gene Splicing and never got anywhere with it; I then jumped to some other puzzle with other people... that's the funny thing, I don't remember exactly what I worked on for the first few hours, just that I worked on a LOT of different stuff. I remember going over to the one with the Crayola colors and being like "Let's color this in and see what we get?" and Andy saying "It's Homer Simpson!" which it wasn't, but it made me think of the Simpsons so I was like "Maybe it's Krusty the Klown?" which it was. I remember coming over to Jonobie who was working on one called "Pigpen" which involved putting together syllables through pictures and making animals -- like don knotts and a key made "donkey", or someone pouring something plus john delancey on star trek plus a tree made "Porcupine" -- pour-Q-pine. So we found a whole bunch of animals and solved it! Yay!
I definitely hung out working on the various other puzzles -- the movie puzzle, the monopoly puzzle, etc -- but only got so far with them. Then we had our first Daily Double, which was AWESOME. The entire team sat down around the projector to solve this one, and we had 20 minutes to do it and get double credit.
Basically, we were given these descriptions of movies that were just slightly weird compared to the real thing... I forget most of them but it'd be like, "A huge shark terrorizes a neighborhood full of Hassidim", which was "Jews" -- like "Jaws" but one letter off. Another one was "A hard boiled detective is hired to find a bird made out of pure sugar," which was the Maltose Falcon instead of Maltese. One more was something like "A group of four teenagers find themselves terrified at their Ebay escapades and refuse to speak of it", which was "I Know What You Bid Last Summer". And so on. Eventually we got a phrase about how "a bunch of people must continue to use fifty dollars a day at the mall or die", which was "Spend", one letter off from Speed. Cute.
Okay, so after that Mike and I sat down with a puzzle called "Picture Page", which basically involved a whole bunch of pictures of various things. With Jonobie, we figured out who all of the characters were... and then they said you had to make a path between them. I suggested we make a spreadsheet of the names and print them out, so we did that, and moved to the other side of the table to try to figure out the paths. As it is, all of the things were 5-letter words, and with Andy's help we realized that you had to take the bitmask of the difference between the names -- ie, "boros" and "bares" would be worth 21 because there were two uncommon and 3 common letters, and in order 10101. 21 is the letter U. And so on.
I guess it took around an hour, but we finally managed to map out all of the ways that words could or couldn't connect, and then we started making paths through it, with Mike figuring out a lot of the paths by rules, and my adding to them by writing the letters out and what made sense. The funny thing is we only got four of the paths -- "an axis of evil", "cub announcer", "pepper picker", and one other I forget, which went to "north korea", "harry caray", "peter piper"... so of course you needed to recurse and get the bitmask between those as well, and with the puzzle spelling out SME___L I said "Is it Smeagol?" and they submitted it and it was right! Holy crap. That was a really great feeling though.
Okay, so that unlocked a Hollywood Walk of Fame puzzle, and it turned out to be a "go to Building 9 and solve this" puzzle, and I wanted to go do something, so even though it asked for "teammates who can recognize pictures and like pop culture", neither of which are my strong suits, I went along... with Jason, Andy, and Matt Travis. We get there and of course, there's a huge walkway of cardboard stars with pictures on them, complete with another team already doing the puzzle -- we realized later they were Death of Dr. Zero, who were neck-and-neck with us for most of the night. Anyway, the stars had drawings on them, and you had to figure out that they were actually semi-rebus clues for real movie stars, by taking a letter out of each word on the star. So the first one was "Charlton Heston" by being a picture of a charm, of Elton John, of a chest, and of a number one (charm - m + elton - e + chest - c + one - e). Another one was like, "Hair Prison Fjord", which became Harrison Ford. I was surprisingly good at figuring these out, once we got the pattern. I was also writing down all of the words, the stars, and the taken-away letters as we solved them, as well as taking photos of every star.
The way we'd gotten there in the first place was by indexing into words depending on the tilt of the star in the original paper puzzle, and all of these stars were tilted, so we thought we'd index into the star names and into the gone letters. Except for some stupid-ass reason we had written down N instead of M as the letter taken off charm, so our gone letters sequence was spelling out "nalesta" which made no sense and we stopped. We thought about various stuff we could POSSIBLY do, to rearrange the letters, to do whatever. Must have been like 5-10 minutes of us sitting there like "OMGZ WE SUCK, WTF IS WITH THIS PUZZLE FAIL FAIL FAIL". Jason went off to the bathroom, Andy went to walk along the trail again, and I sat there being me, and was like "Oh fuck this, I'm going to just keep indexing the gone letters," and... and it started spelling out "nalestarofwalk"... and I'm like "GUYS! THERE ARE LETTERS AND WORDS IN THIS COME HERE COME HERE!" and it eventually turned into Male Star of Walk The Line, which was Joaquin Phoenix, which was the answer to the puzzle. Sigh. I felt both really useful and really dumb because I'm sure that initial N/M issue was partially my problem, I probably misheard Andy.
Woooo.
I came back and asked if there was anything I could work on and Jen was like "How about this Chemistry one?"
As it turns out, Chemistry ended up being my Puzzle Superstar puzzle of the evening. I don't know how many teams solved this one overall, but it was NOT many, and I believe we were the first or second team to solve it.
See, it was in this alternate universe where atoms had 3 electrons on one shell and 9 on the other, instead of 2 and 8 like we do here. So the periodic table was all fucked up.
They gave us a couple of equations to balance plus a bunch of atomic weight balancing equations with a whole ton of fake elements. With a little help from Jen and Jason I quickly figured out that G, T, and Tx were elements 1, 2, and 3... and then after that I kind of delved into the equations to figure out the valences of the different elements. The thing is, there were a few problems to tackle there. First, figuring out which were ionic and which were covalent bonds was a BITCH. Second, keep in mind that there are like, 9 possible valences, so... you get weird-ass shit happening in the +3, +4/-5, +5/-4, +6/-3, etc areas. Also, it seems like a compound that would be stable by binding to itself actually had to be a -3 instead of a -2 like in real life (ie, Oxygen at O2).
Amazingly, after about an hour on this I had started to fill out a periodic table, and I was like "I can see the words Will Movie but can't get anything else yet, it's all garbage..." so Mike came over and double-checked some elements with me, and Dave too I think, and eventually I put in another element and said "what if it just SAYS 'Willis Movie'?" and it turned out that it actually said Willis Movie, which was... periodic table pun intended... The Fifth Element. And the rest of the table WAS garbage. So there.
Anyway, we (read: Jamie) broke the first meta shortly after that, and got "Intermission", which involved a bunch of films of devil-related stuff, then there were some pictures to fill in, so it'd be like, Tower Records went with Devil's Tower. Or Dirt Devil went with Joe Dirt, and so on. Then we ended up in Double Jeopardy, which was a weird green board with 20 questions on weird triangles. AND some people from Puzzle HQ showed up to give us a bunch of meta pieces... they were dressed up as ghouls and I asked them, "Is this Devil Jeopardy?" but got no answer.
As we found out, what really happened is, Cracking Good Toast combined their Jeopardy hunt with The Usual Suspects' Puzzle Haunt, so we were suddenly in a Jeopardy round full of spooky Halloween crap. Pretty weird.
The second round started off really well. First we got a Daily Double which involved normal TV stars being portrayed in evil ways, like "He brings you into his den and forces you to view his psychotic fantasy world which is ruled by a crazy king and his runaway train" would be Mr. Rogers, and so on. Eventually we managed to get a phrase that evilly described Spongebob Squarepants. Okay. Moving on... Jen was working on a palindrome puzzle with Jonobie, and I was working on a ridiculous text puzzle with Dave that all we knew was it involved the letters RGB for three people speaking. (NOBODY SOLVED THAT PUZZLE. PERIOD.)
I looked at the palindrome poetry puzzle and immediately saw what was going on -- you had to separate out the palindromes, count the length, and turn them into letters via A=1, B=2 etc. It came out to the following phrase: SATORAREPOBLANKOPERAROTAS. Funny part: me being me, I thought "Satorare? Ehh? The hospital story? That seems obscure..." and then somehow we mentioned it to Jeff and he's like "Oh, my mom just told me about this weird Latin palindrome like two weeks ago. Go google Sator Arepo and you'll find it." So we did, we find the middle is "Tenet", and then we're like "Thanks, Jeff's mom!"
The second Daily Double happened shortly after that, and it proved to be more obnoxious. The theme was "Bus Hell", and you had photos where there were two things in it and you had to take out one letter and make a different word. Like a lamb and a dam was lambda, things like that. We got totally stuck on one that had a crown on top of a high-heeled shoe. With 3 minutes left I yelled "PUMPKIN!!" and happened to be right. Thank god. A bit later we took the resulting phrase "Playroom gender" and made "den sex", or "Dense". Just in time.
I'm forgetting the order of the next few things, but... Mike and I started working on a puzzle called "Pumpkin Roll" while half the team was out working on a sound puzzle or a scrabble puzzle. This one was really cute and involved these pumpkins with Charlie Browns around them in some spots, plus a big set of colored tracks full of letters. You had to "roll" the pumpkins on the various color tracks and you'd get 5-letter words. We did all of that and got a ton of words and then... and then hit a dead wall, we couldn't figure out what to do with them per se. They didn't spell anything out, though the red ones anagrammed to "rainbow herring". Oops. (Drew eventually ended up totally rocking that puzzle, though.)
Around the same time, we also found out about a puzzle called Creature from the Black Legoon, so instead, Mike and I went over to Puzzle HQ and got a baggie of Legos and came back and worked on that instead :) You had to assemble the thing in a certain way so that there was a blue creature inside a black box. The trick was, there were these rods that went between the pieces, so finding a way to make it all fit together was OBNOXIOUS because the rods were always in the way. I forget how long we spent on it, but basically we got to a really close stage where we had a creature inside a black box but we weren't using all the pieces, so we knew it had to be wrong. So we handed that off to Andy and Matt T and looked for other people to go help.
I ended up sitting down next to Lahut, who was working on the Tetris puzzle... as it turned out, the Tetris pieces, when landed in a proper order, started clearing lines with letters that started to read "In AD 2010 war was beginning..." and so he was basically tetris-building the All Your Base Are Belong To Us thing. Except he had some problems with the spreadsheet. So I basically ended up debugging his spacing for the AYB thing and helped figure out where pieces should land, and eventually when it was all said and done, if you cleared all the AYB storylines, you ended up with a grid spelling out a room location plus "call us for permission before you go!" So we called, they asked us who we were and where we wanted to go, and I said "We're Unclued... Publication! And we want to go to building 36-1211 to play Tetris!" and they said "Have fun!"
Unfortunately, neither Matt nor I had Microsoft badges, so we ended up making the other Matt take us over there to play Tetris. Eventually after playing for a while we finally got the damn thing to spell something out, and it was about a movie where the title character is afraid of things falling, so the answer was Chicken Little. Whee. On our way back I called in the answer and was told "Get back here! Andy has something to show you!" and it turned out he'd solved the Lego puzzle. Awesome.
The sun was starting to come up, and I was starting to fall down. Seriously. It was around that time that I started having spontaneous 15-minute naps all over the place. Fortunately, I guess, other people started waking up from their naps and being more effective, so they solved the second meta a bit after that, and getting into the third part of the hunt required some of us to go find stuff, so I gladly volunteered, and Mike and Drew and I went over to HQ to pick up the third round's 3-D assembly cards, this time pentagons. We also went to Building 18 to get a puzzle... basically an acrylic board with words and numbers on it, which were buried in the fountain outside building 18. One of the Hunt members was there watching over us, which was weird, but hey. We found the thingy, and then we went to Building 4 to solve a Clue puzzle.
It turned out that Mr. Boddy had gone nuts and killed all six of his guests instead of the other way around, so we basically had to wander around the building to certain rooms and find Clue clues and put them into a grid and not only figure out who was killed with what, but also what TIME they were killed at. Unfortunately the grid was not very complete and after you fill out everything you know, you have to kind of brute force a bit to figure the rest out, trying out a few different rooms. I suggested a vaguely Sudoku approach to it -- btw, I don't think there were ANY Sudoku puzzles, that's kind of cool! -- but what actually ended up happening is, I fell asleep again and Mike finished the Clue puzzle while Drew worked on the acrylic board puzzle.
Also while we were there in Building 4, some people from Death of Dr. Zero came by. What's weird is, Mike solved the thing and it said to go out back to the new room, which was the Patio, and as we were going out there, one of the guys from the other group was following us! He swore he wasn't, but it was really weird. We lost him eventually and got outside and wandered around the building until we found the Patio and it had Mr. Boddy's suicide note, which gave us the answer to the entire puzzle. It was cool. I felt guilty for sleeping.
But the sleeping only got worse. We got back and everyone was already working on the final puzzles, and I tried to work on a weird age-logic vampire puzzle but kind of got nowhere, and left it to Dave. And then I fell asleep again. I did eventually end up helping out with about half of one of the final puzzles, but in reality I don't think I contributed a damn thing to our team for the most part after around noon Sunday, and I feel terrible about it. I just couldn't stay awake or focused on anything; I felt dizzy and my stomach hurt a bit and suddenly all of the puzzles just seemed impossible. It was weird. I tried to work on the sound/video puzzle for a while, which also didn't help. I could stay awake as long as I was doing something, but as soon as I got stalled I tended to fall asleep, especially staring at that stupid RGB bits puzzle. Fortunately, everyone else on the team rules and they got through almost all of the final round puzzles and didn't even get angry at me for slacking off and sleeping. (I suppose everyone naps at a point, just they don't usually nap by falling asleep sitting up in front of everyone.)
I threatened to be a catalyst and as soon as I came over to people trying to assemble the final meta, I swear the phone rang and it was Puzzle HQ like "What is taking you guys so long?" and it turned out that the dodecahedron was just a globe of the Earth... with the land and water inverted. SHEESH. I got out of the way because only so many people could really work on it, and I watched Mike assemble the cheeseburger puzzle, and finally, at around 4:30pm we had the final dodecahedron assembled. People read off three-letter thingies from it and were trying to anagram/etc, and Jeff's like "hello, I can SEE what it says, it says something about land in ice water", and eventually we get the phrase "largest natural body of land in ice water" or something like that, which of course you have to invert to largest natural body of WATER in Iceland, so we google that, type it in... and it's incorrect?!!?! Eventually we call PH HQ and it turns out we just didn't get THEIR spelling of it.
Great, so we've got this thing solved and it's 4:45pm for a 5pm-ending hunt.
Thing is, there was a NEXT STEP. You had to take apart all of your 3-D items and build them into one huge rhombicosadodecahedron. No, seriously. ALL of the items. And they'd make a board for playing "Mortal Chess".
We started to try to put it together based on the words, but it just proved to be way too far over our heads for us to do in 15 minutes. If the hunt had ended at 6 as usual we would have totally done it, but this? No way. I convinced people to please stop and go to the wrap-up.
And, we were in 2nd place. I felt kind of bad being angry that we hadn't solved the whole hunt -- when we met up with Death of Dr. Zero, all of us exchanged our bitter stories from the evening and being annoyed that we placed so high without finishing, etc. And SCruBBers sat behind us. It was really kind of weird being in the middle of all the top puzzlers in the event, but also kind of cool. I have trouble thinking of us as being one of the elite teams, but I suppose that this Hunt we really did try to get the most dedicated people we could from our Liboncati-pool, as it were. Plus Toast and the Suspects were hosting instead of playing, of course.
So, the wrap-up was great. They called us up to the stage for the second place prizes, we got to pose for a picture (wonder if I can get a copy, I took photos of the 1st and 3rd teams but not us obviously) and to get these adorable Jeopardy boards as trophies. And as I mentioned before, it was amazing to walk up onto that stage, even though there were like 1/3 as many people at the wrapup as at the intro ceremony, obviously. (Through the night, the number of competitive teams went down to like, 40ish if that.)
I remember watching teams come up at the end of my first Hunt, five years ago, and thinking how great they must all be at puzzling and how cool it would be if our team someday managed to win a Hunt. I kind of figured it was going to be a heck of a struggle given how many totally awesome teams there were out there, plus how we always seemed to run into random problems and walls. But whatever. This was a long, tough Hunt, and somehow we managed to be second place. All (or almost all) of the "but we didn't FINISH!" bitterness pretty much faded away the minute we got onto that stage.
Then the puzzle debriefing. There were some spots where they actually didn't have solutions or writers to explain things, which was sort of sucky, but overall it was good to find out how things worked, even if sometimes they were totally ridiculous (like the RGB puzzle that nobody solved). It was amusing when they mentioned the acrylic boards hidden in the fountain in building 18 -- "and by the way, there are 86 more of them still there, if you want to go get one..." I guess that goes with the way there were still tons of legos there, as well as how they said at one point "No matter how late you thought you were to get to 30 Garage for the first meta pieces, someone was later -- I believe one team showed up at 3pm today..."
Anyway, it was neat, although I was finding myself falling asleep again by the end. UGH. Talked to a few people there and then we wandered back to the team room -- the Fords went off to get dinner together, and Mike and Lahut and I went back to our team room, found Andy and the other Matt there cleaning up, finished cleaning up, and left. Mike gave us a ride back to the Fords, and Drew & Jason said they were going to come get us and go to the Celtic Bayou for dinner, so we dragged (well, he was driving so it's not really dragging) him along to dinner and the 5 of us all had a "OMG SECOND PLACE!!!" dinner, although we were all so totally tired, too.
Got a ride back to Casa Ford and was handed off to Zach and Carl, my housemates who had gone down to Southcenter to have dinner with another friend. Lahut went inside to fall asleep and Mike left to go home, and that was the end of PH12/13 for me, I suppose. I fell asleep in the car going back to the west side and pretty much kind of came home and fell asleep, with visions of tetris pieces dancing in my head. Or not.
We're totally hosting the next (or N+1) one. I just have to come back from Japan of course. :(
And speaking of Japan, I've been writing this entry while staying up all night to recalibrate my brain to Japan time -- gonna go nap for an hour or two and then go off to the airport. Whee.
The short: Team Liboncatipu, aka "Unclued Publication" for this event, consisting of me, Mike, Drew, Lahut, Jason, Jeff, Jonobie, Andy, Jamie, Jen, Dave, and Matt, managed to get second place in Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 12/13. Only one team solved the entire hunt, and they did it at 1pm Sunday -- we were on the verge of getting there at 5pm Sunday when it ended, having solved the meta but not the final problem. However, we solved enough puzzles and got enough extra points to place second in total score. After being with this team (at least the core few people) for 5 years and however many puzzling events, I can't even begin to express how cool it was to walk onto the stage as one of the top 3 teams in the biggest Hunt ever.
Here are photos in my Facebook album. I highly recommend, however, if you're going to read the long explanation, either read it alongside or before, because the photos will help a lot of the puzzle stories make sense.
The long:
I woke up at 8am on Saturday morning at
jeffford and jonobie's house, since they were nice enough to let me stay over the night so I didn't have to cross the lake a bunch of times. They were in the kitchen eating waffles with garzahd, and so after I showered and changed, I also joined for waffles. Jeff did the NYT crossword in the paper in like 15 minutes -- it seemed like a good omen.We drove over to Microsoft together and went up to our team's HQ -- we were NOT the first to get there though I forgot who beat us there exactly. I think
kamendae was one of them because I seem to recall I managed to give him the random gift I'd bought for him in a games store in Tokyo, namely a 3-D cheeseburger puzzle (Mike likes burgers and puzzles, so when I saw a burger puzzle it reminded me of him). Most of our team got there before the opening ceremonies -- and most of us even went over there to watch.The place was PACKED. I ran into
samildanach, and his team, which turned out to have kieferskunk on it -- weird coincidence, and their team leader Jason is in charge of the next SNAP event (and who I had met while playing board games at Jack and Llyne's place many many years ago). I looked around for other people but there were just too many there -- saw Kevin Babbitt and a few other CMU people and just gave up and joined my team.The theme that we knew about for the hunt was Jeopardy, so they had Celebrity Jeopardy playing on the big screens, and then Peter Sarrett got up there and did his best Alex Trebek imitation to welcome us all to the event and tell us some rules and whatnot. Then he gave us the first puzzle, which involved a Jeopardy board with the categories "first letters", "second letters", etc -- with some letters -- which spelled out "locate ziploc baggie thirty garage". We asked for permission to go to the garage in building 30, and were off!
I forget which of us went exactly -- I think it was me, Mike, Andy, and Lahut -- and there were a ton of groups there, so it wasn't too hard to find the baggies located behind one of the elevator. They had Jeopardy cards in them, which we pretty quickly realized were going to be the solution for the first metapuzzle.
Went back up to the room and started solving puzzles!
I got involved in a lot of stuff - rather than taking a puzzle per se I tended to just look at what other people were doing and jump in with them. Dave and I started on one called Gene Splicing and never got anywhere with it; I then jumped to some other puzzle with other people... that's the funny thing, I don't remember exactly what I worked on for the first few hours, just that I worked on a LOT of different stuff. I remember going over to the one with the Crayola colors and being like "Let's color this in and see what we get?" and Andy saying "It's Homer Simpson!" which it wasn't, but it made me think of the Simpsons so I was like "Maybe it's Krusty the Klown?" which it was. I remember coming over to Jonobie who was working on one called "Pigpen" which involved putting together syllables through pictures and making animals -- like don knotts and a key made "donkey", or someone pouring something plus john delancey on star trek plus a tree made "Porcupine" -- pour-Q-pine. So we found a whole bunch of animals and solved it! Yay!
I definitely hung out working on the various other puzzles -- the movie puzzle, the monopoly puzzle, etc -- but only got so far with them. Then we had our first Daily Double, which was AWESOME. The entire team sat down around the projector to solve this one, and we had 20 minutes to do it and get double credit.
Basically, we were given these descriptions of movies that were just slightly weird compared to the real thing... I forget most of them but it'd be like, "A huge shark terrorizes a neighborhood full of Hassidim", which was "Jews" -- like "Jaws" but one letter off. Another one was "A hard boiled detective is hired to find a bird made out of pure sugar," which was the Maltose Falcon instead of Maltese. One more was something like "A group of four teenagers find themselves terrified at their Ebay escapades and refuse to speak of it", which was "I Know What You Bid Last Summer". And so on. Eventually we got a phrase about how "a bunch of people must continue to use fifty dollars a day at the mall or die", which was "Spend", one letter off from Speed. Cute.
Okay, so after that Mike and I sat down with a puzzle called "Picture Page", which basically involved a whole bunch of pictures of various things. With Jonobie, we figured out who all of the characters were... and then they said you had to make a path between them. I suggested we make a spreadsheet of the names and print them out, so we did that, and moved to the other side of the table to try to figure out the paths. As it is, all of the things were 5-letter words, and with Andy's help we realized that you had to take the bitmask of the difference between the names -- ie, "boros" and "bares" would be worth 21 because there were two uncommon and 3 common letters, and in order 10101. 21 is the letter U. And so on.
I guess it took around an hour, but we finally managed to map out all of the ways that words could or couldn't connect, and then we started making paths through it, with Mike figuring out a lot of the paths by rules, and my adding to them by writing the letters out and what made sense. The funny thing is we only got four of the paths -- "an axis of evil", "cub announcer", "pepper picker", and one other I forget, which went to "north korea", "harry caray", "peter piper"... so of course you needed to recurse and get the bitmask between those as well, and with the puzzle spelling out SME___L I said "Is it Smeagol?" and they submitted it and it was right! Holy crap. That was a really great feeling though.
Okay, so that unlocked a Hollywood Walk of Fame puzzle, and it turned out to be a "go to Building 9 and solve this" puzzle, and I wanted to go do something, so even though it asked for "teammates who can recognize pictures and like pop culture", neither of which are my strong suits, I went along... with Jason, Andy, and Matt Travis. We get there and of course, there's a huge walkway of cardboard stars with pictures on them, complete with another team already doing the puzzle -- we realized later they were Death of Dr. Zero, who were neck-and-neck with us for most of the night. Anyway, the stars had drawings on them, and you had to figure out that they were actually semi-rebus clues for real movie stars, by taking a letter out of each word on the star. So the first one was "Charlton Heston" by being a picture of a charm, of Elton John, of a chest, and of a number one (charm - m + elton - e + chest - c + one - e). Another one was like, "Hair Prison Fjord", which became Harrison Ford. I was surprisingly good at figuring these out, once we got the pattern. I was also writing down all of the words, the stars, and the taken-away letters as we solved them, as well as taking photos of every star.
The way we'd gotten there in the first place was by indexing into words depending on the tilt of the star in the original paper puzzle, and all of these stars were tilted, so we thought we'd index into the star names and into the gone letters. Except for some stupid-ass reason we had written down N instead of M as the letter taken off charm, so our gone letters sequence was spelling out "nalesta" which made no sense and we stopped. We thought about various stuff we could POSSIBLY do, to rearrange the letters, to do whatever. Must have been like 5-10 minutes of us sitting there like "OMGZ WE SUCK, WTF IS WITH THIS PUZZLE FAIL FAIL FAIL". Jason went off to the bathroom, Andy went to walk along the trail again, and I sat there being me, and was like "Oh fuck this, I'm going to just keep indexing the gone letters," and... and it started spelling out "nalestarofwalk"... and I'm like "GUYS! THERE ARE LETTERS AND WORDS IN THIS COME HERE COME HERE!" and it eventually turned into Male Star of Walk The Line, which was Joaquin Phoenix, which was the answer to the puzzle. Sigh. I felt both really useful and really dumb because I'm sure that initial N/M issue was partially my problem, I probably misheard Andy.
Woooo.
I came back and asked if there was anything I could work on and Jen was like "How about this Chemistry one?"
As it turns out, Chemistry ended up being my Puzzle Superstar puzzle of the evening. I don't know how many teams solved this one overall, but it was NOT many, and I believe we were the first or second team to solve it.
See, it was in this alternate universe where atoms had 3 electrons on one shell and 9 on the other, instead of 2 and 8 like we do here. So the periodic table was all fucked up.
They gave us a couple of equations to balance plus a bunch of atomic weight balancing equations with a whole ton of fake elements. With a little help from Jen and Jason I quickly figured out that G, T, and Tx were elements 1, 2, and 3... and then after that I kind of delved into the equations to figure out the valences of the different elements. The thing is, there were a few problems to tackle there. First, figuring out which were ionic and which were covalent bonds was a BITCH. Second, keep in mind that there are like, 9 possible valences, so... you get weird-ass shit happening in the +3, +4/-5, +5/-4, +6/-3, etc areas. Also, it seems like a compound that would be stable by binding to itself actually had to be a -3 instead of a -2 like in real life (ie, Oxygen at O2).
Amazingly, after about an hour on this I had started to fill out a periodic table, and I was like "I can see the words Will Movie but can't get anything else yet, it's all garbage..." so Mike came over and double-checked some elements with me, and Dave too I think, and eventually I put in another element and said "what if it just SAYS 'Willis Movie'?" and it turned out that it actually said Willis Movie, which was... periodic table pun intended... The Fifth Element. And the rest of the table WAS garbage. So there.
Anyway, we (read: Jamie) broke the first meta shortly after that, and got "Intermission", which involved a bunch of films of devil-related stuff, then there were some pictures to fill in, so it'd be like, Tower Records went with Devil's Tower. Or Dirt Devil went with Joe Dirt, and so on. Then we ended up in Double Jeopardy, which was a weird green board with 20 questions on weird triangles. AND some people from Puzzle HQ showed up to give us a bunch of meta pieces... they were dressed up as ghouls and I asked them, "Is this Devil Jeopardy?" but got no answer.
As we found out, what really happened is, Cracking Good Toast combined their Jeopardy hunt with The Usual Suspects' Puzzle Haunt, so we were suddenly in a Jeopardy round full of spooky Halloween crap. Pretty weird.
The second round started off really well. First we got a Daily Double which involved normal TV stars being portrayed in evil ways, like "He brings you into his den and forces you to view his psychotic fantasy world which is ruled by a crazy king and his runaway train" would be Mr. Rogers, and so on. Eventually we managed to get a phrase that evilly described Spongebob Squarepants. Okay. Moving on... Jen was working on a palindrome puzzle with Jonobie, and I was working on a ridiculous text puzzle with Dave that all we knew was it involved the letters RGB for three people speaking. (NOBODY SOLVED THAT PUZZLE. PERIOD.)
I looked at the palindrome poetry puzzle and immediately saw what was going on -- you had to separate out the palindromes, count the length, and turn them into letters via A=1, B=2 etc. It came out to the following phrase: SATORAREPOBLANKOPERAROTAS. Funny part: me being me, I thought "Satorare? Ehh? The hospital story? That seems obscure..." and then somehow we mentioned it to Jeff and he's like "Oh, my mom just told me about this weird Latin palindrome like two weeks ago. Go google Sator Arepo and you'll find it." So we did, we find the middle is "Tenet", and then we're like "Thanks, Jeff's mom!"
The second Daily Double happened shortly after that, and it proved to be more obnoxious. The theme was "Bus Hell", and you had photos where there were two things in it and you had to take out one letter and make a different word. Like a lamb and a dam was lambda, things like that. We got totally stuck on one that had a crown on top of a high-heeled shoe. With 3 minutes left I yelled "PUMPKIN!!" and happened to be right. Thank god. A bit later we took the resulting phrase "Playroom gender" and made "den sex", or "Dense". Just in time.
I'm forgetting the order of the next few things, but... Mike and I started working on a puzzle called "Pumpkin Roll" while half the team was out working on a sound puzzle or a scrabble puzzle. This one was really cute and involved these pumpkins with Charlie Browns around them in some spots, plus a big set of colored tracks full of letters. You had to "roll" the pumpkins on the various color tracks and you'd get 5-letter words. We did all of that and got a ton of words and then... and then hit a dead wall, we couldn't figure out what to do with them per se. They didn't spell anything out, though the red ones anagrammed to "rainbow herring". Oops. (Drew eventually ended up totally rocking that puzzle, though.)
Around the same time, we also found out about a puzzle called Creature from the Black Legoon, so instead, Mike and I went over to Puzzle HQ and got a baggie of Legos and came back and worked on that instead :) You had to assemble the thing in a certain way so that there was a blue creature inside a black box. The trick was, there were these rods that went between the pieces, so finding a way to make it all fit together was OBNOXIOUS because the rods were always in the way. I forget how long we spent on it, but basically we got to a really close stage where we had a creature inside a black box but we weren't using all the pieces, so we knew it had to be wrong. So we handed that off to Andy and Matt T and looked for other people to go help.
I ended up sitting down next to Lahut, who was working on the Tetris puzzle... as it turned out, the Tetris pieces, when landed in a proper order, started clearing lines with letters that started to read "In AD 2010 war was beginning..." and so he was basically tetris-building the All Your Base Are Belong To Us thing. Except he had some problems with the spreadsheet. So I basically ended up debugging his spacing for the AYB thing and helped figure out where pieces should land, and eventually when it was all said and done, if you cleared all the AYB storylines, you ended up with a grid spelling out a room location plus "call us for permission before you go!" So we called, they asked us who we were and where we wanted to go, and I said "We're Unclued... Publication! And we want to go to building 36-1211 to play Tetris!" and they said "Have fun!"
Unfortunately, neither Matt nor I had Microsoft badges, so we ended up making the other Matt take us over there to play Tetris. Eventually after playing for a while we finally got the damn thing to spell something out, and it was about a movie where the title character is afraid of things falling, so the answer was Chicken Little. Whee. On our way back I called in the answer and was told "Get back here! Andy has something to show you!" and it turned out he'd solved the Lego puzzle. Awesome.
The sun was starting to come up, and I was starting to fall down. Seriously. It was around that time that I started having spontaneous 15-minute naps all over the place. Fortunately, I guess, other people started waking up from their naps and being more effective, so they solved the second meta a bit after that, and getting into the third part of the hunt required some of us to go find stuff, so I gladly volunteered, and Mike and Drew and I went over to HQ to pick up the third round's 3-D assembly cards, this time pentagons. We also went to Building 18 to get a puzzle... basically an acrylic board with words and numbers on it, which were buried in the fountain outside building 18. One of the Hunt members was there watching over us, which was weird, but hey. We found the thingy, and then we went to Building 4 to solve a Clue puzzle.
It turned out that Mr. Boddy had gone nuts and killed all six of his guests instead of the other way around, so we basically had to wander around the building to certain rooms and find Clue clues and put them into a grid and not only figure out who was killed with what, but also what TIME they were killed at. Unfortunately the grid was not very complete and after you fill out everything you know, you have to kind of brute force a bit to figure the rest out, trying out a few different rooms. I suggested a vaguely Sudoku approach to it -- btw, I don't think there were ANY Sudoku puzzles, that's kind of cool! -- but what actually ended up happening is, I fell asleep again and Mike finished the Clue puzzle while Drew worked on the acrylic board puzzle.
Also while we were there in Building 4, some people from Death of Dr. Zero came by. What's weird is, Mike solved the thing and it said to go out back to the new room, which was the Patio, and as we were going out there, one of the guys from the other group was following us! He swore he wasn't, but it was really weird. We lost him eventually and got outside and wandered around the building until we found the Patio and it had Mr. Boddy's suicide note, which gave us the answer to the entire puzzle. It was cool. I felt guilty for sleeping.
But the sleeping only got worse. We got back and everyone was already working on the final puzzles, and I tried to work on a weird age-logic vampire puzzle but kind of got nowhere, and left it to Dave. And then I fell asleep again. I did eventually end up helping out with about half of one of the final puzzles, but in reality I don't think I contributed a damn thing to our team for the most part after around noon Sunday, and I feel terrible about it. I just couldn't stay awake or focused on anything; I felt dizzy and my stomach hurt a bit and suddenly all of the puzzles just seemed impossible. It was weird. I tried to work on the sound/video puzzle for a while, which also didn't help. I could stay awake as long as I was doing something, but as soon as I got stalled I tended to fall asleep, especially staring at that stupid RGB bits puzzle. Fortunately, everyone else on the team rules and they got through almost all of the final round puzzles and didn't even get angry at me for slacking off and sleeping. (I suppose everyone naps at a point, just they don't usually nap by falling asleep sitting up in front of everyone.)
I threatened to be a catalyst and as soon as I came over to people trying to assemble the final meta, I swear the phone rang and it was Puzzle HQ like "What is taking you guys so long?" and it turned out that the dodecahedron was just a globe of the Earth... with the land and water inverted. SHEESH. I got out of the way because only so many people could really work on it, and I watched Mike assemble the cheeseburger puzzle, and finally, at around 4:30pm we had the final dodecahedron assembled. People read off three-letter thingies from it and were trying to anagram/etc, and Jeff's like "hello, I can SEE what it says, it says something about land in ice water", and eventually we get the phrase "largest natural body of land in ice water" or something like that, which of course you have to invert to largest natural body of WATER in Iceland, so we google that, type it in... and it's incorrect?!!?! Eventually we call PH HQ and it turns out we just didn't get THEIR spelling of it.
Great, so we've got this thing solved and it's 4:45pm for a 5pm-ending hunt.
Thing is, there was a NEXT STEP. You had to take apart all of your 3-D items and build them into one huge rhombicosadodecahedron. No, seriously. ALL of the items. And they'd make a board for playing "Mortal Chess".
We started to try to put it together based on the words, but it just proved to be way too far over our heads for us to do in 15 minutes. If the hunt had ended at 6 as usual we would have totally done it, but this? No way. I convinced people to please stop and go to the wrap-up.
And, we were in 2nd place. I felt kind of bad being angry that we hadn't solved the whole hunt -- when we met up with Death of Dr. Zero, all of us exchanged our bitter stories from the evening and being annoyed that we placed so high without finishing, etc. And SCruBBers sat behind us. It was really kind of weird being in the middle of all the top puzzlers in the event, but also kind of cool. I have trouble thinking of us as being one of the elite teams, but I suppose that this Hunt we really did try to get the most dedicated people we could from our Liboncati-pool, as it were. Plus Toast and the Suspects were hosting instead of playing, of course.
So, the wrap-up was great. They called us up to the stage for the second place prizes, we got to pose for a picture (wonder if I can get a copy, I took photos of the 1st and 3rd teams but not us obviously) and to get these adorable Jeopardy boards as trophies. And as I mentioned before, it was amazing to walk up onto that stage, even though there were like 1/3 as many people at the wrapup as at the intro ceremony, obviously. (Through the night, the number of competitive teams went down to like, 40ish if that.)
I remember watching teams come up at the end of my first Hunt, five years ago, and thinking how great they must all be at puzzling and how cool it would be if our team someday managed to win a Hunt. I kind of figured it was going to be a heck of a struggle given how many totally awesome teams there were out there, plus how we always seemed to run into random problems and walls. But whatever. This was a long, tough Hunt, and somehow we managed to be second place. All (or almost all) of the "but we didn't FINISH!" bitterness pretty much faded away the minute we got onto that stage.
Then the puzzle debriefing. There were some spots where they actually didn't have solutions or writers to explain things, which was sort of sucky, but overall it was good to find out how things worked, even if sometimes they were totally ridiculous (like the RGB puzzle that nobody solved). It was amusing when they mentioned the acrylic boards hidden in the fountain in building 18 -- "and by the way, there are 86 more of them still there, if you want to go get one..." I guess that goes with the way there were still tons of legos there, as well as how they said at one point "No matter how late you thought you were to get to 30 Garage for the first meta pieces, someone was later -- I believe one team showed up at 3pm today..."
Anyway, it was neat, although I was finding myself falling asleep again by the end. UGH. Talked to a few people there and then we wandered back to the team room -- the Fords went off to get dinner together, and Mike and Lahut and I went back to our team room, found Andy and the other Matt there cleaning up, finished cleaning up, and left. Mike gave us a ride back to the Fords, and Drew & Jason said they were going to come get us and go to the Celtic Bayou for dinner, so we dragged (well, he was driving so it's not really dragging) him along to dinner and the 5 of us all had a "OMG SECOND PLACE!!!" dinner, although we were all so totally tired, too.
Got a ride back to Casa Ford and was handed off to Zach and Carl, my housemates who had gone down to Southcenter to have dinner with another friend. Lahut went inside to fall asleep and Mike left to go home, and that was the end of PH12/13 for me, I suppose. I fell asleep in the car going back to the west side and pretty much kind of came home and fell asleep, with visions of tetris pieces dancing in my head. Or not.
We're totally hosting the next (or N+1) one. I just have to come back from Japan of course. :(
And speaking of Japan, I've been writing this entry while staying up all night to recalibrate my brain to Japan time -- gonna go nap for an hour or two and then go off to the airport. Whee.
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Have a safe trip back! I guess you're probably at the airport by now, huh...
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