Shinteki 4 - Child's Play

This past weekend, Los Jefes (along with several other Seattle teams) flew down to the Bay Area for Shinteki Decathlon 4. This was our second Shinteki and it was every bit as good as Shinteki 3-D, with puzzles that were consistently high-quality and fun. This year’s theme was Child’s Play, so Jeff P. and I were particularly happy to have Cyndy and Jeff W. joining us so we had some parental experience on our team.

The Puzzles

Superstar – Run a “battle” app on LEON (the Palm device each team uses to submit answers during the event and an excellent Midnight Madness reference) where a "Shintekimon" character whose name you enter battles other teams and eventually battles Superstar (played by Rich Bragg with fabulous sparkly glasses and a wand). After completing battles, the app gave hints that gradually revealed the pattern of the name required to defeat Superstar (based on rock, paper, scissors battles between the R’s, P’s and S’s in the character names).

Hike to Find the Children’s Songs – This involved hiking up the Lookout Trail at Montalvo County Park and finding signs that displayed obfuscated children’s songs. At the top of the hill we got a sheet where the titles of the songs could be filled in acrostic-style to get the final answer.

Connect 4 – Thanks to this puzzle, I had a certain Common Market song stuck in my head all weekend. This was one of my favorite puzzles from the event. It started as a dropquote written on Connect 4 pieces that could be dropped into a Connect 4 game to spell quotes from Shakespeare's sonnet 18 on each side and to form a large "15" out of the red pieces. Once we'd solved the dropquote, we had a free hint come available that indicated the pieces represented a calendar for May and June, 2008. At that point, we knew June 15th should give us the answer but we wound up having to pay for a hint because none of us made the connection that that was Father's Day (not even the actual father on our team, Jeff W.).

Stop, Stop, Go Solve Some Anagrams - While Cyndy and Jeff W. parked the van, Jeff P. and I played a game of Stop Stop Go to get the next clue. I never really thought about it as a kid, but I think the real fun of that game is the thrill of being sneaky and getting away with something (or maybe that just reveals something about my character). The clue consisted of eight sets of eight anagrammed words where each anagram had an extra letter. This was a fun puzzle and a nice setting.

B is for Basil, Assaulted by Bears - Earlier in the day, we'd driven by the Winchester Mystery House and I commented that I'd always wanted to see it. As it turned out, I only got to see their gift shop, where we retrieved the next clue, a set of quotation balloons that had to be matched to pages in The Gashlycrumb Tinies, by modifying the balloon text using each child’s means of death.

Jenga – As you might imagine, this was a Jenga game, which in this case came with an algorithm for playing Jenga that produced a tower that read YAHOO down one side’s profile. Cyndy and Jeff W. manipulated the tower skillfully. I was just happy to have team members with good physical dexterity, because that is definitely not a skill that I bring to the team.

Rooster Row – Start the See and Say, enjoy the entertainment and interpret semaphore characters (just make sure you know which end is up). ‘Nuff said.

Colorful Books – This was a booklet of children’s book covers with missing titles, retrieved from under a big mosaic book at a San Jose library branch. Each title contained a color which could be colored in on the back pages of the book to produce well-known images.

Monopoly – This puzzle provoked our only (minor) gripe about the event. The puzzle itself was cool – letter bigrams mapped onto a Monopoly board at a park that had an actual Monopoly board in the ground with properties sponsored by San Jose Chamber of Commerce members. We were off on one of our bigrams for extracting the final answer, but had enough of the message to think we were looking for the sponsor of the Go tile, which was the Children’s Discovery Museum. However, LEON did not acknowledge that answer. We eventually decided to scratch on the puzzle after getting partial credit for the earlier steps so we’d get a chance to see the final puzzle. At the wrapup, we learned the correct answer was “Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose”. If we hadn’t been pressed for time, we might have thought to try that too, but a “keep going” message from LEON definitely would have helped here.

Candy Store - The final puzzle was a set of eight mini-puzzles, each themed around a particular candy. We managed to solve half of them and a remaining bonus puzzle before time ran out. Our favorite was Dots, which was a box of Dots candies where each color represented a Morse character that could be made using - you guessed it - dots.

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.

Puzzles from Down Under

Los Jefes did the online Melbourne University Puzzle Hunt again this year. I find this an interesting event in a few ways, the first of which is the timing. The puzzles are released every day over the course of a week at noon Melbourne time, which is 7:00pm PST, so every evening we get a fresh wave of five puzzles that take over our evening and various other bits of non-work time the next day.

Another interesting aspect of the event is the nature of the puzzles, which tend to be somewhat oblique. These puzzles would annoy me if they appeared in the events we do regularly, but in an event that happens over a longer time span and where we take a more recreational approach, I find them entertaining. They tend to stick with me through the day and often provoke interesting, though totally unintended, trains of thought. For example, Steve Googled the text from the first panel of Barn Dance and found a totally unrelated, but very distracting video. Similarly, when we (and nearly all other teams, based on the standings) were blocked on Pocket Monkeys, Nikhil started wondering if it was based on the QBasic Gorillas video game, which led to a few of us playing around with that for a while. Jeff and I found that Offhand's message could be interpreted to include the phrase, "Russian space potato", which first sounded improbable, but then became intriguing when we discovered there is in fact a Chinese space potato. Alas, it turned out the puzzle was merely intended as reference to Sputnik, which was much less interesting.

Jeff's favorite unintended result from this Puzzlehunt was the audio file which he created while trying to solve Tracks after Jay and Michelle had solved the first half of the puzzle. He knew he needed to interpret the numbers from the first half of the puzzle as music and this is what he wound up with by interpreting the numbers as positions on a music scale. According to the answer page, the numbers were supposed to be guitar tablature for the opening to Stairway to Heaven, so it sounds like we were a bit off...

Some puzzles also cause you to learn quite a bit more about Melbourne that you otherwise would. As a result of Orientation, I can now tell you the exact location of all the ATM's at the University of Melbourne. I even checked out parts of their campus on their 3D campus tour. It looks nice. And, as a result of International Relations, I can tell you each of the sister cities of Melbourne, as well as that Osaka is home to the regional snack takoyaki. Take a close look at the second image in the left column of that puzzle and perhaps you will notice the subtle shading of octopus meatballs. Those are no mere meatballs, as our team had thought throughout the event.

Overall, it was a fun distraction for most of my non-work waking time during the week, but by the end I was happy to have some spare time again to catch up on all the things I should have been doing that week instead!