On the Road: So huh, the intended break-in to the (final draft of) the puzzle really was just "someone recognizes some of these as street names"? Wow. If I hadn't gone to grad school in Philly, we would have had no hope.
Trubled Monicas: Yeah, we had a bunch of misinterpretations about the nature of the transformation of the final clue string, partly because of interpreting ANKK as the star name ANKAA rather than the word AND, and partly because of a few wrong identifications of what number went with what clue. (The Utah Starzz aren't just a WNBA team-it's the former name of a WNBA team, whose name is now the San Antonio Stars, spelled correctly. The team is no longer even on the first page of Google hits of STARZZ for me!) Actually, if you don't mind me mentioning it, those wrong identifications are arguably indicative of a flaw with the puzzle; Allen, our team's principal graphic-design guy, said a lot of the numbers didn't match the design of the logos they were trying to clue very well.
Arthur: I think densely-themed rounds are tough to do well-the theme should feel pervasive, but not actually control the solving style or necessary knowledge base for all of the puzzles. It's more frustrating to feel blocked from a whole round than from a puzzle or two in each round. (Even in the Sports round in 2007, only about half the puzzles required sports knowledge to solve.)
Gravitational Pull: I'm glad the route we took was discovered as a possible solving path during testsolving!
Re: On the Road, my wife and I were the ones who got the A-ha on that one. I don't think it's too far out that we would take some of the weirder names on that list (America's Cup, Terra Firma, Oligocene) and Google them with the associated cities. It took about three tries with the weird ones for us to go, "Oh, these are all probably street names in these cities." However, I always hate the "locations on a map spell out a letter" type of puzzles. It never is as nice or as straightforward as it could be. We did about three cities and couldn't make heads or tails of the weird zigzags we got, and had to backsolve it. :(
We basically just brute-forced it. I think we started with America's Cup, Terra Firma, and Oligocene, and made our way through the list. I mean, with some street called "Oligocene" in Boston, that has got to be the mechanism.
I recognized Tasker and Dauphin too since I grew up in Philadelphia -- but, I mean, given one of the cities is Boston, were any of those streets recognizable to people around there? It is a hard leap but not impossible, along the lines of the Googling other people have done.
Oddly, Philly was one of the letters we didn't get (I had some weird figure-8-looking thing), but we had enough of the other ones that we were still able to get the final solution.
All of the Boston streets seem to be teeny tiny little side streets; I certainly never would have recognized any of them as street names. Tasker and Dauphin both have the advantage of being relatively major streets that run the width of South Philly, and Tasker has the additional advantage that it's not really anything but a street name, unlike most of the rest of these words. I don't think we ever traced out the letter on Philly map either, though-we didn't have enough clues solved to know all the Philly streets.
Trubled Monicas: Yeah, we had a bunch of misinterpretations about the nature of the transformation of the final clue string, partly because of interpreting ANKK as the star name ANKAA rather than the word AND, and partly because of a few wrong identifications of what number went with what clue. (The Utah Starzz aren't just a WNBA team-it's the former name of a WNBA team, whose name is now the San Antonio Stars, spelled correctly. The team is no longer even on the first page of Google hits of STARZZ for me!) Actually, if you don't mind me mentioning it, those wrong identifications are arguably indicative of a flaw with the puzzle; Allen, our team's principal graphic-design guy, said a lot of the numbers didn't match the design of the logos they were trying to clue very well.
Arthur: I think densely-themed rounds are tough to do well-the theme should feel pervasive, but not actually control the solving style or necessary knowledge base for all of the puzzles. It's more frustrating to feel blocked from a whole round than from a puzzle or two in each round. (Even in the Sports round in 2007, only about half the puzzles required sports knowledge to solve.)
Gravitational Pull: I'm glad the route we took was discovered as a possible solving path during testsolving!
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Oddly, Philly was one of the letters we didn't get (I had some weird figure-8-looking thing), but we had enough of the other ones that we were still able to get the final solution.
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