SNAP 3

Here’s another slightly belated blog post about SNAP 3, which Cyndy, Jeff P., Jeff W., Nikhil, and I did a couple weekends ago. This was a Seattle offering of Coed Astronomy’s mini-game that was held in San Francisco that weekend. The Seattle organizers adapted the event to be held on the University of Washington campus by providing teams with answer sheets that redirected them from the original answer (the San Francisco location for the next puzzle) to a location on the UW campus.

The event started in Red Square where an initial puzzle with multiple choice trivia questions pointed us to the first location. The puzzle at that location was Lego pieces with words on them which had to be constructed into a triangle such that each row spelled out a calculation that produced the numbers 1 through 12 reading from the top of the triangle to the bottom.

The third puzzle took us to a nearby grassy area where we received a bunch of colored foam cutouts with letters on them. One piece conspicuously contained the letters Y A R, which made Jeff P. and I speculate that the puzzle was made by Yar Woo of Coed Astonomy (turned out it was). We wound up needing the 5 point hint on this question to nudge us towards constructing 3-color country flags from the squares where the letters on the 3 squares anagrammed to the country’s name. This puzzle led us to an interesting rebus puzzle outside the Allen library where rebuses of San Francisco neighborhood names led us to an alphabet encoded answer using the neighborhoods’ zip codes.

The next puzzle was a reverse-crossword which started as a word weave to construct the completed grid and then we had to determine the list of words that composed the clues and use them to form the final phrase that gave the answer. This was an interesting puzzle, but definitely required a lot of process and I think we were losing steam partway through. Fortunately, this was followed by a quick, fun word search puzzle themed around a mural at a San Francisco school.

The metapuzzle was located at the Suzzallo library and included something that I hadn’t seen before – instead of using the results of each puzzle, the meta incorporated techniques used in each puzzle. It started with crossword clues that resolved to words that had been on the Lego triangle we constructed. Taking the Lego pieces from those words gave us colors that could be used to compose flags to get further along in the puzzle. Unfortunately, we were blocked on this step for a long time and wound up paying for all of the available hints which didn’t help at all with individual steps of the meta but instead just hinted that we needed to use the information and locations of earlier steps, which we already knew. The final step used the zip codes of the neighborhoods where each puzzle had sent San Francisco teams. We realized after solving this that we could have jumped ahead to the final step and just applied zip codes here, which we heard some teams did. It’s unfortunate the puzzle was short-circuitable in this manner, but overall it was really cool how each of the earlier puzzles was so tightly integrated into the meta.

On the whole, the puzzles travelled well. There were cases where the experience might have been slightly better in San Francisco (e.g. we later heard that the neighborhood rebuses puzzle was found hanging among the art at San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, which would have made it interesting to find), but the puzzles were still very satisfying to solve in a different location. The Seattle organizers did a good job of providing any contextual information that was needed (e.g. for the mural word search puzzle, an image of the mural was included on the back of the answer sheet that led us to the puzzle location). I hope we’ll see more of that type of event sharing back and forth. It’s a whole lot easier to drive to UW than it is to fly to the Bay Area and it allows more teams to enjoy a particular event.