Leaving from platform 9 3/4....
You may remember that a few weekends ago I playtested the Hogwarts puzzle-hunt. Well, now the actual event has taken place, which means that I can finally reveal all. I wrote this back then, just after we got home.
As I said before, the SNOUT Hogwarts game was certainly the finest puzzle-hunt I've ever played in, but also it was the finest one I've ever heard described. (This was, after all, my first full-length game.) There were, of course, glitches, but this was the playtesting weekend, and besides, with the exception of one puzzle which they hopefully just scrapped (by the time I actually post this I guess I'll know whether or not they did) and the first serious wand-glitch, nothing actually reached, or even approached, the "I'm not having fun" stage. But I'm getting ahead of myself with that mention of the wand, so let me start at the beginning.
We knew that we had to meet them at the Emeryville Amtrak station. Even before we'd gotten the DVD that contained our starting location instructions, we'd been hypothesizing that they might stick us on a bus or a train, and once we saw Emeryville spelled out in the subtitles of the DVD, I said, "It's going to be the Amtrak station! It has to be!" and indeed it was. But while we did meet them there (so that we could leave our cars there all weekend), we didn't get on a train immediately. Instead, we went over to a nearby movie theatre to get sorted. Apparently on the real weekend they'll be inside the theatre, but for this weekend we were outside, with Sean's hand stuck up the Sorting Hat's backside. As tigupine and I had correctly predicted, coed astronomy was in Ravenclaw, Continental Breakfast was in Hufflepuff, and we (Get on a Raft with the Weasleys) were in Gryffindor. A digression on our name: usually we play as Get on a Raft with Taft, but since this was Hogwarts and we were playing in the playtest since we're too poor to play in the real game, we thought that Weasleys was much more appropriate.
After being sorted, we were indeed taken back to the train station and told that our train would be arriving at 10:15; as it was still barely 9:30, we sat around and chatted and solved the colored bandanas we'd each been given to mark us as being in our respective houses, quickly concluding that the word was CHANTERS and deciding that we'd just have to wait and see what it was for. (We actually have to thank Larry Hosken for alerting us that our bandanas were more than just bandanas. He came over and said, "So, can we collaborate to see if our bandanas say the same thing as yours?" My internal response? Uhh, there's a puzzle on my bandana? Oh, so there is! We'd all blithely tied our bandanas on to our persons as instructed and failed to even look at them.) I also caught lessachu up on the subsequent idiocies of the Brazil trip, such as the story about M. thinking that maybe I had dual citizenship.
When it came time to get on the train, we found out where we were actually going: Sacramento. We only found out because the conductor told us. They're going to try and get him to announce it as Hogwarts for the actual game, which would be totally awesome if they could. Once we were settled, we got copies of the Daily Prophet. There were some articles that set up the vague storyline that the game was going to follow (a missing teacher, etc.) and a crossword puzzle. So of course we all settled in to solve that, and it pretty much told us that we needed to ask someone for directions to our first class. Except we didn't know what our first class was. A little box in the corner of the paper told us that Hogwarts students get their class schedules from a flavourful source. Were there articles in the paper about candy? No... but shortly thereafter, someone came by with snacks, or more specifically, Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans. Since some of the beans were actually Jelly Bellies, and some were "real" Bertie Botts beans, and since we'd done a lot of bean-testing for the BANG 13 opening game, Ian and I were well prepared (though we were less prepared for the earwax bean tasting more like eggnog). We learned that our first class would be Defense Against the Dark Arts. For the rest of the train ride, we chatted with the other teams, and Ian produced puzzles for people to solve. (Well, he put onto paper ones that he had already produced.) We were also given a photo collage that we were told to study before our class; these were supposed to be directions, we decided, except we didn't know what to do with them. A few of the photos were of things in Berkeley, like the street downtown that has poems in various sidewalk tiles. Eventually we gave up, and then we arrived in Sacramento.
It quickly became clear that the photos were not actually of Berkeley, and instead they were all very obvious landmarks on our route through Sacramento. We ended up in a shopping mall where Snout bought us lunch and we had our first class. (A house elf cleared away our trays when we were finished eating.) At this point was introduced the Seriously Most Awesome part of the game. Each team was given a wand with five LEDs on the tip. (Binary? we thought.) We were also given a textbook, one section of which instructed us on how to cast spells with a wand. Phonemes were broken into groups, and each group had a different stroke. Consonants were flicks of the wand in all eight directions (up, down, left, right, diagonally up left, etc.), while vowels were some number of clockwise or counterclockwise (excuse me, anticlockwise) loops. So casting the spell CHEESE, for example, was a flick to the lower right followed by two upside-down and counterclockwise loops travelling leftward, followed by another flick to the lower right. (Once you finished casting a spell, you waved the wand back and forth, and if you had successfully cast the spell, the moving LEDs told you that you had cast the spell. If you cast it incorrectly, it told you that it didn't recognize the spell.) Only, every time I tried to cast CHEESE, I ended up casting PRINTS/PRINCE. Except I didn't, because there was a typo. So in fact, every time I tried casting CHEESE, I actually ended up casting PTINTS. This was the source of much amusement. Kenny and Michael actually ended up getting very good with the wand, because most of our answers to puzzles had to be cast as spells with the wand in order to get directions to our next location. Every so often throughout the game, I tried to see if my skills had improved by trying to cast CHEESE again. Usually I still ended up casting PTINTS (though I occasionally got CHEESE). The best point came when we actually did have to cast PRINCE... so I tried casting CHEESE. And, more to the point, our ruse worked. Also, because we were Gryffindor, I decided to be very Hermione-esque as the only girl on the team, and the first time the professor asked a question, my hand shot up and I answered the question correctly. (Admittedly, this was because I actually managed to look up the answer more quickly than the other students, so it was entirely appropriate.)
After DADA, we had Potions. Dwight was playing the potions teacher (not Snape, though), and he was excellent. He was capricious, taking points away from everyone; Ian was busy eating a chocolate frog in class (he'd splurged and bought some chocolate-dipped frog-shaped cookies at Whole Foods the night before), and Dwight came over and took points away from us for eating in class. (Oh, points were little flat tokens in different shapes and colors, possibly actually blank dog collars or some such.) And Dwight was also dressed like a wacky professor, wearing various medals and some sort of helmet with a candle stuck on top. We also did get to mix potions, one of which used an expanding polymer that bubbled up when we mixed it with another ingredient. That was great fun.
Our third class was Care of Magical Creatures, and Curtis did a pretty good imitation Hagrid accent. It occurs to me that not being able to find our way around Sacramento even when we knew where we were going is actually very thematically accurate, because of all the moving staircases at Hogwarts. But we didn't think of that then; it was just a bit annoying. I don't know if GC will change it. Anyway, we had to identify animals out of the A-Z bestiary in our textbook by sound. (Literally an A-Z bestiary: there was one animal per letter of the alphabet.) Speaking of the bestiary, we had been told during our previous class, after we solved the puzzle a bit early, that there was an extra-credit assignment of making a 3D model of our favorite creature in the textbook. It didn't take much consideration to choose the Vegetable Lamb, which is not only the cutest thing ever, but also is a real thing. Apparently, the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary was the result of people mistaking either cotton or some sort of fern for a lamb growing out of a flower. This makes what we (okay, I) eventually designed doubly appropriate. Kenny suggested that empty banana skins (he'd just been eating bananas) looked a bit like petals, and I took that idea and ran with it. While we were at the next clue site, and taking forever to solve that clue, I spotted a hair and nail salon across the street. I excused myself and dashed over there. "I'm sorry, but do you happen to have any cotton balls?" I was so polite and urgent-seeming that they did look -- they didn't have any cotton balls, but they did have a bit of cotton wool. I was sure they would, especially after I noticed that they did nails as well as hair. I tucked it away for later.
It turned out that the clue that we were having so much trouble with would have been a lot easier if we'd remembered about the puzzle-y bandanas that we all were wearing. Or if we'd realized that the gem-studded portraits that we were looking at were the portraits guarding our respective house common rooms. Unfortunately, the latter wasn't made at all clear (we actually thought it might be a Quidditch-related puzzle, since the Ravenclaw portrait was of a Quidditch player), and the bandanas that we had solved so quickly earlier had been absolutely forgotten. But that's why this was a playtest. And even after we finally solved the puzzle (after rather a lot of prompting from GC), and after Kenny successfully cast ARCHSTONES with the wand, he and Michael failed for forever to cast our house name with the wand. And when I say forever, I mean it; we eventually just had to get the combination from our invisible observer (one member of Snout was tagging along with each team, taking playtest notes). Our observer happened to be Acorn, who had designed the wands, so every time there was a wand-glitch it was hilarious to watch him looking dreadfully concerned over why exactly the wand was doing that.
And if solving the puzzle and casting GRYFFINDOR had taken forever, it didn't take much less time to find our van. I mean, our dorm room. This is partially, to Snout's credit, because we wanted to find a bathroom first, and that took us WAY out of the way, but even so, "the nearest moving staircase" doesn't actually help much toward finding the right escalator in the right parking lot. We did eventually get there, though, and we all bundled into the minivan, and as soon as I turned on the car (I was driving, and I ended up driving throughout the entire game, apart from the end when I was busy building our Vegetable Lamb), a CD started playing. First it played the opening to "Once More, With Feeling," which made me very happy, and then it played a message from our DADA professor, telling us to sneak out of our dorm rooms and find him in Hogsmeade at the Hog's Head Inn. There was a Marauder's Map in our glove compartment, along with a bundle of other maps (the rest of them being standard issue from AAA). The map showed a secret tunnel that we were supposed to take into Hogsmeade, and we were instructed not to let any of the Hogwarts staff spot us on our way. This was very exciting. We headed out. Hogsmeade turned out to be Old Sacramento, which was very cool, and the secret tunnel was an underground tunnel leading from not-Old Sacramento into Old Sacramento. What was less cool was that by this time we were running so late that just before we reached Professor Guzzany in his hiding spot, GC phoned us to make sure we weren't completely lost, or dead, or something. The Forbidden Forest was on the Marauder's Map -- maybe they thought we'd ended up there! :) Anyway, once we made it back and solved the puzzle, we set off in our dorm room, which had been magically enchanted to take us outside the walls of Hogwarts and wherever we needed to go.
I don't recall the exact order of puzzles, but we headed progressively further and further eastward and northward; we got almost all the way to Nevada City. I'll give some highlights, in something approximating the correct order. We picked up a broomstick containing a clue at 2000 Nimbus Road. We had to tap out the rhythm to Puff the Magic Dragon on a magic mirror with our wands. We went to the Cozmic Café in Placerville to make a withdrawal from Gringotts: it turned out that the Cozmic Café actually contains part of an old goldmine. We visited a municipal dump on Throwita Way. Yes, that's the real name of the street. We drove through the town of Cool. We learned why "pimp" means "five." We encountered some frighteningly gigantic statues of Amazons carved by the sculptor-dentist Kenneth Fox in Auburn. We hiked through a beautiful national park of some description at around 7am in the glorious morning.
In the middle of the night, coed astronomy was the first to arrive at one clue site. We were ahead of them puzzle-wise but had been delayed by a slow-down puzzle, which served its purpose admirably. They arrived and then promptly left, before even getting out of their van: apparently there was a couple copulating, stark naked, on the hood of their car. After sensibly fleeing, coed called Game Control, which then phoned us other two teams and asked how our sexual encounter was. "Uhh, just fine," said Greg, speaking for our team rather confusedly. When we arrived at that clue site, fortunately the couple was gone, and we didn't know for a while what had happened. This didn't stop some sex-related humor: Greg, talking about the puzzle we had received, asked how many positions there were. "I don't know, do you have a copy of the Kama Sutra with you?" I replied. This led to discussions of using couples having sex as an actual puzzle, which led to someone coining the term "semaphornication."
Ian slept through a single clue (though he was fading as we finished up on reading some tea leaves), but it meant that just as dawn broke over Griffiths Quarry I, together with Greg and Michael, got to actually solve a clue successfully and without too much difficulty, which made me feel much better. It was also very fortunate that Michael was as skilled as Kenny at using our wand, because we needed to cast the answer to that clue, and Kenny, just like Ian and Andrew, was asleep in the van.
One of the only puzzles I haven't mentioned is the puzzle that we got from Cassandra Cross when we found her (she was the missing Dark Arts instructor who had been replaced by Professor Guzzany). It was supposed to be a prophecy about the Draconis Device (a plot point -- we were searching for the pieces of that device, which we needed to destroy), but in fact each of the sentences was describing the results of a Harry Potter-based spell. (Most of them were actually from the books, though I'm not sure all of them were.) There were a bunch of spells described in our textbooks, so we had to read these to figure out which ones they were. It was a pretty simple puzzle, but I really liked it.
We learned to identify the magical creatures in our bestiary by the sounds they made, from a CD with each of them identified carefully, but unfortunately that puzzle had technical difficulties (known in engineering circles as "magic smoke,"), so we didn't ever get to put our knowledge to use. But I promise you, I can tell a glumbumble from a mapinguari and a basilisk from a lindworm. (Though I may warn you that a xiphias is near when in fact there's nothing there at all.) Amusingly, Andrew was wearing a shirt with the silhouettes of animals labelled A-Z, and the animal representing X was... a xiphias. But we're sure that hearing a bunch of mysterious animal sounds in the pitch black night somewhere off of Highway 49 would have been marvelously eerie.
It turned out that our Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor was the villain. How... surprising. (As Curtis-as-Dumbledore said at the end-of-year banquet, they never could have guessed that their DADA instructor would be evil.) Before the big reveal, when we encountered him again, Ian immediately said: "We think you're evil." This was particularly funny because he'd replaced Acorn as our invisible observer halfway through the night, so we'd been spending an awful lot of time with him! But when he was cackling evilly, and said his full name, it turned out that the M. in his name, Bernard M. Guzzany, stood for Macalbie. This was a total shoutout to our team: when we had received our DVD via MugglEx, I had noticed that there was a barcode on the address label, and since it was clear that they had made the label, it seemed natural to try and solve it. After reducing it to four-bit binary, Ian solved it as reading Macalbie, which seemed highly significant. We eventually decided that just possibly it was a fusion between shortened versions of (Minerva) McGonagall and Albus (Dumbledore). We were gently informed by Curtis, however, a day or so later (once Ian updated him on our progress on solving the DVD), that in fact it was "an actual Muggle technology known as a 'postal bar code,'" and that we probably shouldn't read too much into it. Turns out that MACALBIE can also be read as 94705.... Actually, come to think of it, that's probably also why they included instructions on how to read barcodes in the textbook. :)
On the final leg of the trip back towards Sacramento, I constructed our Vegetable Lamb. Actually, I finished constructing it -- I'd started it at dinner back in Placerville, while the others were working on solving the gold coins that we'd gotten from Gringotts. I took the banana skins that had been saved and cut them short and into curved petal shapes. Then I pulled off pieces of cotton wool, wadded them up, and stuffed them into the banana stubs. There had been a piece of papery tape stuck to the cotton wool, so I tore off pieces of that and used them to delineate a "neck" on the lambs, so that they had both a body and a head. I vaguely colored on eyes and noses with a Sharpie, and twisted little bits of the cotton balls into "legs" with black "hoofs," but they weren't very visible. I used straws from our dinner drinks to make stems: I snipped holes in the back-ends of the bananas and stuffed the straws into them. I also took the foil from the gold coins and wrapped it around the backs of the bananas and over the straws to make sure they stayed on the straws; the foil also served as sepals. I even made a budding lamb, up at the top. Then I taped the three straws together and stuck them into a Styrofoam to-go box from dinner, in which I'd been storing the Vegetable Lamb supplies. I think that by the time I presented them with the model, they'd completely forgotten about assigning us that extra credit project.
So, yeah. Good game. Good weekend.
Starting from the Emeryville Amtrak station, photos are now up on Flickr!
As I said before, the SNOUT Hogwarts game was certainly the finest puzzle-hunt I've ever played in, but also it was the finest one I've ever heard described. (This was, after all, my first full-length game.) There were, of course, glitches, but this was the playtesting weekend, and besides, with the exception of one puzzle which they hopefully just scrapped (by the time I actually post this I guess I'll know whether or not they did) and the first serious wand-glitch, nothing actually reached, or even approached, the "I'm not having fun" stage. But I'm getting ahead of myself with that mention of the wand, so let me start at the beginning.
We knew that we had to meet them at the Emeryville Amtrak station. Even before we'd gotten the DVD that contained our starting location instructions, we'd been hypothesizing that they might stick us on a bus or a train, and once we saw Emeryville spelled out in the subtitles of the DVD, I said, "It's going to be the Amtrak station! It has to be!" and indeed it was. But while we did meet them there (so that we could leave our cars there all weekend), we didn't get on a train immediately. Instead, we went over to a nearby movie theatre to get sorted. Apparently on the real weekend they'll be inside the theatre, but for this weekend we were outside, with Sean's hand stuck up the Sorting Hat's backside. As tigupine and I had correctly predicted, coed astronomy was in Ravenclaw, Continental Breakfast was in Hufflepuff, and we (Get on a Raft with the Weasleys) were in Gryffindor. A digression on our name: usually we play as Get on a Raft with Taft, but since this was Hogwarts and we were playing in the playtest since we're too poor to play in the real game, we thought that Weasleys was much more appropriate.
After being sorted, we were indeed taken back to the train station and told that our train would be arriving at 10:15; as it was still barely 9:30, we sat around and chatted and solved the colored bandanas we'd each been given to mark us as being in our respective houses, quickly concluding that the word was CHANTERS and deciding that we'd just have to wait and see what it was for. (We actually have to thank Larry Hosken for alerting us that our bandanas were more than just bandanas. He came over and said, "So, can we collaborate to see if our bandanas say the same thing as yours?" My internal response? Uhh, there's a puzzle on my bandana? Oh, so there is! We'd all blithely tied our bandanas on to our persons as instructed and failed to even look at them.) I also caught lessachu up on the subsequent idiocies of the Brazil trip, such as the story about M. thinking that maybe I had dual citizenship.
When it came time to get on the train, we found out where we were actually going: Sacramento. We only found out because the conductor told us. They're going to try and get him to announce it as Hogwarts for the actual game, which would be totally awesome if they could. Once we were settled, we got copies of the Daily Prophet. There were some articles that set up the vague storyline that the game was going to follow (a missing teacher, etc.) and a crossword puzzle. So of course we all settled in to solve that, and it pretty much told us that we needed to ask someone for directions to our first class. Except we didn't know what our first class was. A little box in the corner of the paper told us that Hogwarts students get their class schedules from a flavourful source. Were there articles in the paper about candy? No... but shortly thereafter, someone came by with snacks, or more specifically, Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans. Since some of the beans were actually Jelly Bellies, and some were "real" Bertie Botts beans, and since we'd done a lot of bean-testing for the BANG 13 opening game, Ian and I were well prepared (though we were less prepared for the earwax bean tasting more like eggnog). We learned that our first class would be Defense Against the Dark Arts. For the rest of the train ride, we chatted with the other teams, and Ian produced puzzles for people to solve. (Well, he put onto paper ones that he had already produced.) We were also given a photo collage that we were told to study before our class; these were supposed to be directions, we decided, except we didn't know what to do with them. A few of the photos were of things in Berkeley, like the street downtown that has poems in various sidewalk tiles. Eventually we gave up, and then we arrived in Sacramento.
It quickly became clear that the photos were not actually of Berkeley, and instead they were all very obvious landmarks on our route through Sacramento. We ended up in a shopping mall where Snout bought us lunch and we had our first class. (A house elf cleared away our trays when we were finished eating.) At this point was introduced the Seriously Most Awesome part of the game. Each team was given a wand with five LEDs on the tip. (Binary? we thought.) We were also given a textbook, one section of which instructed us on how to cast spells with a wand. Phonemes were broken into groups, and each group had a different stroke. Consonants were flicks of the wand in all eight directions (up, down, left, right, diagonally up left, etc.), while vowels were some number of clockwise or counterclockwise (excuse me, anticlockwise) loops. So casting the spell CHEESE, for example, was a flick to the lower right followed by two upside-down and counterclockwise loops travelling leftward, followed by another flick to the lower right. (Once you finished casting a spell, you waved the wand back and forth, and if you had successfully cast the spell, the moving LEDs told you that you had cast the spell. If you cast it incorrectly, it told you that it didn't recognize the spell.) Only, every time I tried to cast CHEESE, I ended up casting PRINTS/PRINCE. Except I didn't, because there was a typo. So in fact, every time I tried casting CHEESE, I actually ended up casting PTINTS. This was the source of much amusement. Kenny and Michael actually ended up getting very good with the wand, because most of our answers to puzzles had to be cast as spells with the wand in order to get directions to our next location. Every so often throughout the game, I tried to see if my skills had improved by trying to cast CHEESE again. Usually I still ended up casting PTINTS (though I occasionally got CHEESE). The best point came when we actually did have to cast PRINCE... so I tried casting CHEESE. And, more to the point, our ruse worked. Also, because we were Gryffindor, I decided to be very Hermione-esque as the only girl on the team, and the first time the professor asked a question, my hand shot up and I answered the question correctly. (Admittedly, this was because I actually managed to look up the answer more quickly than the other students, so it was entirely appropriate.)
After DADA, we had Potions. Dwight was playing the potions teacher (not Snape, though), and he was excellent. He was capricious, taking points away from everyone; Ian was busy eating a chocolate frog in class (he'd splurged and bought some chocolate-dipped frog-shaped cookies at Whole Foods the night before), and Dwight came over and took points away from us for eating in class. (Oh, points were little flat tokens in different shapes and colors, possibly actually blank dog collars or some such.) And Dwight was also dressed like a wacky professor, wearing various medals and some sort of helmet with a candle stuck on top. We also did get to mix potions, one of which used an expanding polymer that bubbled up when we mixed it with another ingredient. That was great fun.
Our third class was Care of Magical Creatures, and Curtis did a pretty good imitation Hagrid accent. It occurs to me that not being able to find our way around Sacramento even when we knew where we were going is actually very thematically accurate, because of all the moving staircases at Hogwarts. But we didn't think of that then; it was just a bit annoying. I don't know if GC will change it. Anyway, we had to identify animals out of the A-Z bestiary in our textbook by sound. (Literally an A-Z bestiary: there was one animal per letter of the alphabet.) Speaking of the bestiary, we had been told during our previous class, after we solved the puzzle a bit early, that there was an extra-credit assignment of making a 3D model of our favorite creature in the textbook. It didn't take much consideration to choose the Vegetable Lamb, which is not only the cutest thing ever, but also is a real thing. Apparently, the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary was the result of people mistaking either cotton or some sort of fern for a lamb growing out of a flower. This makes what we (okay, I) eventually designed doubly appropriate. Kenny suggested that empty banana skins (he'd just been eating bananas) looked a bit like petals, and I took that idea and ran with it. While we were at the next clue site, and taking forever to solve that clue, I spotted a hair and nail salon across the street. I excused myself and dashed over there. "I'm sorry, but do you happen to have any cotton balls?" I was so polite and urgent-seeming that they did look -- they didn't have any cotton balls, but they did have a bit of cotton wool. I was sure they would, especially after I noticed that they did nails as well as hair. I tucked it away for later.
It turned out that the clue that we were having so much trouble with would have been a lot easier if we'd remembered about the puzzle-y bandanas that we all were wearing. Or if we'd realized that the gem-studded portraits that we were looking at were the portraits guarding our respective house common rooms. Unfortunately, the latter wasn't made at all clear (we actually thought it might be a Quidditch-related puzzle, since the Ravenclaw portrait was of a Quidditch player), and the bandanas that we had solved so quickly earlier had been absolutely forgotten. But that's why this was a playtest. And even after we finally solved the puzzle (after rather a lot of prompting from GC), and after Kenny successfully cast ARCHSTONES with the wand, he and Michael failed for forever to cast our house name with the wand. And when I say forever, I mean it; we eventually just had to get the combination from our invisible observer (one member of Snout was tagging along with each team, taking playtest notes). Our observer happened to be Acorn, who had designed the wands, so every time there was a wand-glitch it was hilarious to watch him looking dreadfully concerned over why exactly the wand was doing that.
And if solving the puzzle and casting GRYFFINDOR had taken forever, it didn't take much less time to find our van. I mean, our dorm room. This is partially, to Snout's credit, because we wanted to find a bathroom first, and that took us WAY out of the way, but even so, "the nearest moving staircase" doesn't actually help much toward finding the right escalator in the right parking lot. We did eventually get there, though, and we all bundled into the minivan, and as soon as I turned on the car (I was driving, and I ended up driving throughout the entire game, apart from the end when I was busy building our Vegetable Lamb), a CD started playing. First it played the opening to "Once More, With Feeling," which made me very happy, and then it played a message from our DADA professor, telling us to sneak out of our dorm rooms and find him in Hogsmeade at the Hog's Head Inn. There was a Marauder's Map in our glove compartment, along with a bundle of other maps (the rest of them being standard issue from AAA). The map showed a secret tunnel that we were supposed to take into Hogsmeade, and we were instructed not to let any of the Hogwarts staff spot us on our way. This was very exciting. We headed out. Hogsmeade turned out to be Old Sacramento, which was very cool, and the secret tunnel was an underground tunnel leading from not-Old Sacramento into Old Sacramento. What was less cool was that by this time we were running so late that just before we reached Professor Guzzany in his hiding spot, GC phoned us to make sure we weren't completely lost, or dead, or something. The Forbidden Forest was on the Marauder's Map -- maybe they thought we'd ended up there! :) Anyway, once we made it back and solved the puzzle, we set off in our dorm room, which had been magically enchanted to take us outside the walls of Hogwarts and wherever we needed to go.
I don't recall the exact order of puzzles, but we headed progressively further and further eastward and northward; we got almost all the way to Nevada City. I'll give some highlights, in something approximating the correct order. We picked up a broomstick containing a clue at 2000 Nimbus Road. We had to tap out the rhythm to Puff the Magic Dragon on a magic mirror with our wands. We went to the Cozmic Café in Placerville to make a withdrawal from Gringotts: it turned out that the Cozmic Café actually contains part of an old goldmine. We visited a municipal dump on Throwita Way. Yes, that's the real name of the street. We drove through the town of Cool. We learned why "pimp" means "five." We encountered some frighteningly gigantic statues of Amazons carved by the sculptor-dentist Kenneth Fox in Auburn. We hiked through a beautiful national park of some description at around 7am in the glorious morning.
In the middle of the night, coed astronomy was the first to arrive at one clue site. We were ahead of them puzzle-wise but had been delayed by a slow-down puzzle, which served its purpose admirably. They arrived and then promptly left, before even getting out of their van: apparently there was a couple copulating, stark naked, on the hood of their car. After sensibly fleeing, coed called Game Control, which then phoned us other two teams and asked how our sexual encounter was. "Uhh, just fine," said Greg, speaking for our team rather confusedly. When we arrived at that clue site, fortunately the couple was gone, and we didn't know for a while what had happened. This didn't stop some sex-related humor: Greg, talking about the puzzle we had received, asked how many positions there were. "I don't know, do you have a copy of the Kama Sutra with you?" I replied. This led to discussions of using couples having sex as an actual puzzle, which led to someone coining the term "semaphornication."
Ian slept through a single clue (though he was fading as we finished up on reading some tea leaves), but it meant that just as dawn broke over Griffiths Quarry I, together with Greg and Michael, got to actually solve a clue successfully and without too much difficulty, which made me feel much better. It was also very fortunate that Michael was as skilled as Kenny at using our wand, because we needed to cast the answer to that clue, and Kenny, just like Ian and Andrew, was asleep in the van.
One of the only puzzles I haven't mentioned is the puzzle that we got from Cassandra Cross when we found her (she was the missing Dark Arts instructor who had been replaced by Professor Guzzany). It was supposed to be a prophecy about the Draconis Device (a plot point -- we were searching for the pieces of that device, which we needed to destroy), but in fact each of the sentences was describing the results of a Harry Potter-based spell. (Most of them were actually from the books, though I'm not sure all of them were.) There were a bunch of spells described in our textbooks, so we had to read these to figure out which ones they were. It was a pretty simple puzzle, but I really liked it.
We learned to identify the magical creatures in our bestiary by the sounds they made, from a CD with each of them identified carefully, but unfortunately that puzzle had technical difficulties (known in engineering circles as "magic smoke,"), so we didn't ever get to put our knowledge to use. But I promise you, I can tell a glumbumble from a mapinguari and a basilisk from a lindworm. (Though I may warn you that a xiphias is near when in fact there's nothing there at all.) Amusingly, Andrew was wearing a shirt with the silhouettes of animals labelled A-Z, and the animal representing X was... a xiphias. But we're sure that hearing a bunch of mysterious animal sounds in the pitch black night somewhere off of Highway 49 would have been marvelously eerie.
It turned out that our Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor was the villain. How... surprising. (As Curtis-as-Dumbledore said at the end-of-year banquet, they never could have guessed that their DADA instructor would be evil.) Before the big reveal, when we encountered him again, Ian immediately said: "We think you're evil." This was particularly funny because he'd replaced Acorn as our invisible observer halfway through the night, so we'd been spending an awful lot of time with him! But when he was cackling evilly, and said his full name, it turned out that the M. in his name, Bernard M. Guzzany, stood for Macalbie. This was a total shoutout to our team: when we had received our DVD via MugglEx, I had noticed that there was a barcode on the address label, and since it was clear that they had made the label, it seemed natural to try and solve it. After reducing it to four-bit binary, Ian solved it as reading Macalbie, which seemed highly significant. We eventually decided that just possibly it was a fusion between shortened versions of (Minerva) McGonagall and Albus (Dumbledore). We were gently informed by Curtis, however, a day or so later (once Ian updated him on our progress on solving the DVD), that in fact it was "an actual Muggle technology known as a 'postal bar code,'" and that we probably shouldn't read too much into it. Turns out that MACALBIE can also be read as 94705.... Actually, come to think of it, that's probably also why they included instructions on how to read barcodes in the textbook. :)
On the final leg of the trip back towards Sacramento, I constructed our Vegetable Lamb. Actually, I finished constructing it -- I'd started it at dinner back in Placerville, while the others were working on solving the gold coins that we'd gotten from Gringotts. I took the banana skins that had been saved and cut them short and into curved petal shapes. Then I pulled off pieces of cotton wool, wadded them up, and stuffed them into the banana stubs. There had been a piece of papery tape stuck to the cotton wool, so I tore off pieces of that and used them to delineate a "neck" on the lambs, so that they had both a body and a head. I vaguely colored on eyes and noses with a Sharpie, and twisted little bits of the cotton balls into "legs" with black "hoofs," but they weren't very visible. I used straws from our dinner drinks to make stems: I snipped holes in the back-ends of the bananas and stuffed the straws into them. I also took the foil from the gold coins and wrapped it around the backs of the bananas and over the straws to make sure they stayed on the straws; the foil also served as sepals. I even made a budding lamb, up at the top. Then I taped the three straws together and stuck them into a Styrofoam to-go box from dinner, in which I'd been storing the Vegetable Lamb supplies. I think that by the time I presented them with the model, they'd completely forgotten about assigning us that extra credit project.
So, yeah. Good game. Good weekend.
Starting from the Emeryville Amtrak station, photos are now up on Flickr!