MN0PQ7 Griping Redux; More Than You Want To Know
(Because cuthalion asked a question, and my reply swelled to dwarf the original post.)
Half my problems weren't the puzzles themselves, but ancillary parts of the experience. In summary:
+ 5 out of 5 to the authors for the ambition of their endeavor.
+ Also in its favor, none of the puzzles required "hints" in order to be solved. (Well, maybe #6, but I'm not sure.)
- Much of the theme-related color for the event obscured the requirements for victory in the race, denigrated the players, or both.
- About half the puzzles had a feature, either by design or by accident, which clever players could exploit to shortcut one or more of its parts. (I have no reason to think this ever happened; I didn't compare notes with other teams.) I like clever things like this, and I don't mind it when other teams figure it out and I don't, but the minipuzzle-avoiding shortcuts were, I thought, too prevalent for a game which sounds as if it is about solving puzzles. They were so prevalent that I frequently worried I was doing something dumb by trying to solve the puzzle.
Furthermore:
Each team had an allotment of coins with which they could buy hints and solutions; the winning team was the first team to finish the last puzzle. Two teams finishing the last puzzle within 15 minutes of each other was considered a tie; ties were decided in favor of the team with the most remaining coins.
* I'm so uncomfortable with the coin-hint system that I immediately abdicated all responsibility for decisions on this matter. Admittedly, I am very new to puzzle racing, having only tested once and played once (both used the same system). It may be that I just like puzzling much more than I like racing.
I have to wonder, though, what would have happened had we (or any team) immediately bought both hints before even looking at each puzzle.
--> If it saves you enough time, you finish first and no one finishes for at least another 15 minutes; you win, which seems dumb.
--> If it saves you almost enough time, you finish first, someone else (who spent fewer coins) finishes five minutes later, and you take second (or nth, if more people finish within 15 minutes of you), which also seems dumb.
--> If you get all the hints immediately and don't finish within fifteen minutes of the first team to finish, you haven't lost anything by spending the coins.
All of which suggests to me that if you are at all interested in the race aspect of the event, you should ignore the "puzzle" aspect of the event as much as possible.
Our team certainly didn't want to win and didn't feel competitive about the race... if anything, it felt like we had to finish puzzles so that we would have the opportunity to finish other puzzles.
The instructions about what to bring advised, "There will be opportunities to purchase food along the way, but plan to bring anything you'd need to keep puzzling for six hours," which seemed like sound and courteous advice. (It was a trick!)
The event had a Harry Potter theme, with the conceit that the participants were all students at the Minneapolis campus of Hogwarts, all of whom had lost their memory. The first puzzle assigned each team to a house and gave each team a house scarf. The introduction encouraged cooperation between teams within the same house, and it warned us that participants would be able to earn merits and demerits for their entire house (house points) throughout the event.
It never became clear whether the house points were A) fluff thrown in to establish the theme, or B) used in conjunction with the coins to break ties. It was also unclear whether this uncertainty was an oversight or a deliberate obfuscation by the authors of the game. Given my (limited) past experience with play-testing some puzzles for other PQ events and practicing on a few to get warmed up for the event, all of those possibilities seemed reasonable.
Puzzle 1 was okay, and it was one of the few for which each team received two copies (instead of one). Unfortunately, the "instructions" were printed on the front and part of the back, and the puzzle itself was on the back, which undercut the benefit of having two copies. On balance, it was probably okay. I might have enjoyed it more had our teamwork been more finely honed. As it was, I couldn't figure out the second half of the puzzle and the instructions didn't say its solution was required, so I thought it might be a ruse. I tried submitting our answer w/o the second half (in case it was a ruse), but that was insufficient.
Puzzle 2 would have been a little better if we had either two copies to look at or a space in which to read them aloud without interfering with other teams. Mostly, though, I think it was frustrating because we all immediately recognized it as a 7-way rochambeau, and then, for various reasons, all tricked ourselves into believing it was something else. I came up with a reasonable interpretation of the rules. There was a tricky part right before the end (which seemed like something we should expect), but we "figured it out" and found the one answer that satisfied the criteria.
We submitted our answer and got a snarky rejection from the administrator, which really soured our mood. Then we had to do it all over again when we found out it really was the thing we thought it was all along.
That's probably a teamwork issue, but the snarkiness robbed our eventual victory over the puzzle of any enjoyment. Then, upon our victory, the administrator awarded our house 10 points for sticking with the puzzle instead of buying the solution, and gave us all candy bars. Receiving "points" of dubious utility as a reward for doing what we believed the event was about did not mollify us, but we plowed own, determined to start afresh at the next puzzle.
Puzzle 3 began by giving all the participants detention for their tardiness to a non-existent class. Someone must really enjoy being subjected to imaginary punishments for imaginary infractions (outside sexual fetish). I could accept that it was meaningless color, but their decision to make all the meaningless color negative and personally accusatory did not promote my entertainment.
The puzzle included a Morse code message delivered by cats mewling over a loudspeaker, looped continuously, the sound of which totally incapacitated one member of our team with nausea. I didn't mind the sound, but I understand why it was objectionable.
It also included a double-sided handout of vey dense text, of which we had only a single copy. We could only read it easily by the window, because the lights were turned off for the video projector.
The first hint told us that the Morse code we were hearing was Morse code.
We figured out how to solve the puzzle while our teammate was buying the second hint, which was irritating, but not really the fault of the puzzle.
Puzzle 4 was hard to find. The room in which it took place (one floor of the Student Union) was easy to find, and it was obviously full of puzzling teams, but the administrator was sitting in the corner opposite the entrance. We had no way to know that because there weren't any signs around him, we'd never seen him before, and, like every other member of the administration, there was nothing whatsoever to distinguish him from a participant or one of the multitude of civilians abroad on the campus. He eventually noticed us standing around looking lost and gave us two copies of the puzzle.
We fiddled with the first part for 10 minutes, whereupon I concluded there was a missing rule we had to figure out in order to solve it (which was false). While considering that, I realized that the second half of the puzzle told us the length of the answer and gave us a set of letter options for each character, and that it must be one of the five-letter names on our map. I quickly narrowed it down to two possibilities and decided to submit one to the administrator.
The administrator was nowhere to be found, and did not return for 15 minutes. As we continued working on the puzzle, discoflamingo got a bagel at the deli in the Union. When the administrator returned, he docked our house 10 points for "eating during class." Luckily, I was elsewhere at the time, so discoflamingo was merely annoyed with him. I think I would have thrown a fit.
We solved the puzzle (the way it was "intended") shortly thereafter and confirmed my second guess for the answer.
Puzzle 6 was special. It had several practical problems, any one of which would have made solving it unpleasant.
A) The space allotted for solving the puzzle consisted of a few wide spots in a hallway and a tiny classroom packed with desks, which would have been okay, except that the puzzle required participants to cut up lots of fiddly stuff and move it back and forth between the two locations.
B) It required us to use black lights to examine our scarf and a 3-foot long piece of paper. This meant we had to push desks around in a very dark room in order to make space to lay them out and compare them. We couldn't do it in the bigger, less cluttered hallway, because it couldn't be made dark enough.
C) The administrators had provided 5 or 6 hand-held black lights (4" long fluorescent bulb) for the 20 teams, 14 of which were attempting to use them simultaneously.
D) The scarves were marked with two different UV-reactive colors, one of which indicated the knots holding each colored stripe of the scarf to the stripes on either side. The other color seemed to correspond to one of the sets of symbols in the code book, but it was too faded to be more than smudges. (The black lights revealed we had the marking agent all over our hands from carrying the scarf around all day.)
E) Apparently, even if you did everything right (cut each stripe apart and unraveled it, then held the yarn from each stripe together in order and stretched it out beside the paper under the black light), manufacturing tolerances (variable length and stretching) meant that it would sometimes indicate the correct sequence of characters, giving you instructions which would procure the answer.
Fortunately, our earlier struggles meant we were late enough in arriving that we we only had to struggled through it for 40 minutes until, just before the time at which the puzzle was to have been closed (because the final puzzle was about to begin), the administrators announced that Puzzle 6 was canceled, because they had just discovered that half of the scarves had been assembled incorrectly.
Also, they apparently "ran out of paper clues" about the time we arrived, although I don't think we actually wanted any.
Half my problems weren't the puzzles themselves, but ancillary parts of the experience. In summary:
+ 5 out of 5 to the authors for the ambition of their endeavor.
+ Also in its favor, none of the puzzles required "hints" in order to be solved. (Well, maybe #6, but I'm not sure.)
- Much of the theme-related color for the event obscured the requirements for victory in the race, denigrated the players, or both.
- About half the puzzles had a feature, either by design or by accident, which clever players could exploit to shortcut one or more of its parts. (I have no reason to think this ever happened; I didn't compare notes with other teams.) I like clever things like this, and I don't mind it when other teams figure it out and I don't, but the minipuzzle-avoiding shortcuts were, I thought, too prevalent for a game which sounds as if it is about solving puzzles. They were so prevalent that I frequently worried I was doing something dumb by trying to solve the puzzle.
Furthermore:
Each team had an allotment of coins with which they could buy hints and solutions; the winning team was the first team to finish the last puzzle. Two teams finishing the last puzzle within 15 minutes of each other was considered a tie; ties were decided in favor of the team with the most remaining coins.
* I'm so uncomfortable with the coin-hint system that I immediately abdicated all responsibility for decisions on this matter. Admittedly, I am very new to puzzle racing, having only tested once and played once (both used the same system). It may be that I just like puzzling much more than I like racing.
I have to wonder, though, what would have happened had we (or any team) immediately bought both hints before even looking at each puzzle.
--> If it saves you enough time, you finish first and no one finishes for at least another 15 minutes; you win, which seems dumb.
--> If it saves you almost enough time, you finish first, someone else (who spent fewer coins) finishes five minutes later, and you take second (or nth, if more people finish within 15 minutes of you), which also seems dumb.
--> If you get all the hints immediately and don't finish within fifteen minutes of the first team to finish, you haven't lost anything by spending the coins.
All of which suggests to me that if you are at all interested in the race aspect of the event, you should ignore the "puzzle" aspect of the event as much as possible.
Our team certainly didn't want to win and didn't feel competitive about the race... if anything, it felt like we had to finish puzzles so that we would have the opportunity to finish other puzzles.
The instructions about what to bring advised, "There will be opportunities to purchase food along the way, but plan to bring anything you'd need to keep puzzling for six hours," which seemed like sound and courteous advice. (It was a trick!)
The event had a Harry Potter theme, with the conceit that the participants were all students at the Minneapolis campus of Hogwarts, all of whom had lost their memory. The first puzzle assigned each team to a house and gave each team a house scarf. The introduction encouraged cooperation between teams within the same house, and it warned us that participants would be able to earn merits and demerits for their entire house (house points) throughout the event.
It never became clear whether the house points were A) fluff thrown in to establish the theme, or B) used in conjunction with the coins to break ties. It was also unclear whether this uncertainty was an oversight or a deliberate obfuscation by the authors of the game. Given my (limited) past experience with play-testing some puzzles for other PQ events and practicing on a few to get warmed up for the event, all of those possibilities seemed reasonable.
Puzzle 1 was okay, and it was one of the few for which each team received two copies (instead of one). Unfortunately, the "instructions" were printed on the front and part of the back, and the puzzle itself was on the back, which undercut the benefit of having two copies. On balance, it was probably okay. I might have enjoyed it more had our teamwork been more finely honed. As it was, I couldn't figure out the second half of the puzzle and the instructions didn't say its solution was required, so I thought it might be a ruse. I tried submitting our answer w/o the second half (in case it was a ruse), but that was insufficient.
Puzzle 2 would have been a little better if we had either two copies to look at or a space in which to read them aloud without interfering with other teams. Mostly, though, I think it was frustrating because we all immediately recognized it as a 7-way rochambeau, and then, for various reasons, all tricked ourselves into believing it was something else. I came up with a reasonable interpretation of the rules. There was a tricky part right before the end (which seemed like something we should expect), but we "figured it out" and found the one answer that satisfied the criteria.
We submitted our answer and got a snarky rejection from the administrator, which really soured our mood. Then we had to do it all over again when we found out it really was the thing we thought it was all along.
That's probably a teamwork issue, but the snarkiness robbed our eventual victory over the puzzle of any enjoyment. Then, upon our victory, the administrator awarded our house 10 points for sticking with the puzzle instead of buying the solution, and gave us all candy bars. Receiving "points" of dubious utility as a reward for doing what we believed the event was about did not mollify us, but we plowed own, determined to start afresh at the next puzzle.
Puzzle 3 began by giving all the participants detention for their tardiness to a non-existent class. Someone must really enjoy being subjected to imaginary punishments for imaginary infractions (outside sexual fetish). I could accept that it was meaningless color, but their decision to make all the meaningless color negative and personally accusatory did not promote my entertainment.
The puzzle included a Morse code message delivered by cats mewling over a loudspeaker, looped continuously, the sound of which totally incapacitated one member of our team with nausea. I didn't mind the sound, but I understand why it was objectionable.
It also included a double-sided handout of vey dense text, of which we had only a single copy. We could only read it easily by the window, because the lights were turned off for the video projector.
The first hint told us that the Morse code we were hearing was Morse code.
We figured out how to solve the puzzle while our teammate was buying the second hint, which was irritating, but not really the fault of the puzzle.
Puzzle 4 was hard to find. The room in which it took place (one floor of the Student Union) was easy to find, and it was obviously full of puzzling teams, but the administrator was sitting in the corner opposite the entrance. We had no way to know that because there weren't any signs around him, we'd never seen him before, and, like every other member of the administration, there was nothing whatsoever to distinguish him from a participant or one of the multitude of civilians abroad on the campus. He eventually noticed us standing around looking lost and gave us two copies of the puzzle.
We fiddled with the first part for 10 minutes, whereupon I concluded there was a missing rule we had to figure out in order to solve it (which was false). While considering that, I realized that the second half of the puzzle told us the length of the answer and gave us a set of letter options for each character, and that it must be one of the five-letter names on our map. I quickly narrowed it down to two possibilities and decided to submit one to the administrator.
The administrator was nowhere to be found, and did not return for 15 minutes. As we continued working on the puzzle, discoflamingo got a bagel at the deli in the Union. When the administrator returned, he docked our house 10 points for "eating during class." Luckily, I was elsewhere at the time, so discoflamingo was merely annoyed with him. I think I would have thrown a fit.
We solved the puzzle (the way it was "intended") shortly thereafter and confirmed my second guess for the answer.
Puzzle 6 was special. It had several practical problems, any one of which would have made solving it unpleasant.
A) The space allotted for solving the puzzle consisted of a few wide spots in a hallway and a tiny classroom packed with desks, which would have been okay, except that the puzzle required participants to cut up lots of fiddly stuff and move it back and forth between the two locations.
B) It required us to use black lights to examine our scarf and a 3-foot long piece of paper. This meant we had to push desks around in a very dark room in order to make space to lay them out and compare them. We couldn't do it in the bigger, less cluttered hallway, because it couldn't be made dark enough.
C) The administrators had provided 5 or 6 hand-held black lights (4" long fluorescent bulb) for the 20 teams, 14 of which were attempting to use them simultaneously.
D) The scarves were marked with two different UV-reactive colors, one of which indicated the knots holding each colored stripe of the scarf to the stripes on either side. The other color seemed to correspond to one of the sets of symbols in the code book, but it was too faded to be more than smudges. (The black lights revealed we had the marking agent all over our hands from carrying the scarf around all day.)
E) Apparently, even if you did everything right (cut each stripe apart and unraveled it, then held the yarn from each stripe together in order and stretched it out beside the paper under the black light), manufacturing tolerances (variable length and stretching) meant that it would sometimes indicate the correct sequence of characters, giving you instructions which would procure the answer.
Fortunately, our earlier struggles meant we were late enough in arriving that we we only had to struggled through it for 40 minutes until, just before the time at which the puzzle was to have been closed (because the final puzzle was about to begin), the administrators announced that Puzzle 6 was canceled, because they had just discovered that half of the scarves had been assembled incorrectly.
Also, they apparently "ran out of paper clues" about the time we arrived, although I don't think we actually wanted any.