Shinteki Decathlon 4
If I was able to, I'd be counting down the days until the USPC (7? 9?). But I'm behind on blog updates so I figured I'd talk about the last puzzle event I participated in, about three weekends ago. Justin Graham was a no go this time, so our team was Charlie Graham, Nick Baxter, and a capable substitute in Derek Kisman. In lab coats and sunglasses, we were Blinded by Science for the second weekend of Shinteki's Decathlon event.
I'd heard a lot about the quality of Shinteki's events (except perhaps one story of a purposefully broken puzzle that seems to have really soiled one shinteki experience I heard about) and this was my first chance to experience first hand how they work. On checking in, we got our fifth teammate, a Palm Pilot with the application LEON that would accept answers from us (or partial answers along the way), with hints slowly unlocking if you cannot make progress in a puzzle. The ability to submit your progress and know you are on the right track is a cool addition to a puzzle hunt and the LEON application was a really good interface to complement the puzzle solving. When you had the final answer, it gave you a description of where to go next that quickly got input into the Van's GPS. While we never used LEON to buy a hint, at one puzzle site we certainly spent enough time to "earn" the hints we needed for free.
Decathlon featured 10 puzzle locations, and many of them had memorable challenges. We started with a game of Shintekimon where we were trying to evolve/name a Shintekimon so that it could defeat the reigning champion SUPERSTAR. A duel with another Shintekimon (on another team's Palm device) would give a number of rounds for a fight (0 to 5) and a W-L-T result for each round. Now, I was having a hard time jotting down the exact names of some of the weird Shintekimon we were dueling (at some point we were DOCTORSUDOKU), but more duels would open more hints, and this started to give us a story of the past champions who had fallen before SUPERSTAR took over like SCRAPPY LEPAGE. The puzzle I felt needed one more spacing hint than it had, as by the time I was really really interested in the letters SPREA and maybe some of the positions in names, it told us that the puzzle was actually (BLAH!). Well, I'll just tell you that R, P, and S were the critical parts of the names and maybe you can sort out how you'd get a win, loss, or tie from that. I think that would be better than telling you its "BLAH" but it was a fun puzzle with required team interaction to start the day. Here be Dragons had finished the puzzle before us, but we left second to go to our next site.
The next puzzle took us up a hill to grasp a bucket of dihydrogen oxide - or at least identify some reimagined nursery rhymes (all the words were changed to synonyms). Other puzzles had us sorting through some cryptic clues to identify Edward Gorey kids like Neville who died of ennui, figure out why some farm animals were making the noises of other farm animal in a semaphore-based large-sized See N' Say board, or work out how to drop letters from a list of words to anagram those words into members of a category (like colors or trees or Presidents), with those dropped letters making a superset of words with the same property. To get each puzzle, we had to do a "kid's game" like Ring Around The Rosie or Red Light-Green Light where Justin made an appearance as the traffic light and had all too much fun keeping Charlie from finishing.
We really only stumbled on one puzzle, a Connect Four challenge that mapped a Shakespearean sonnet onto a calendar, where the desired answer extraction method was what was really escaping us, but overall we were pretty efficient. One really excellent puzzle involved following a set of building instructions for a Jenga Tower. After Nick and Derek failed the first time to do it legitimately, I had them solve it on its side and then drew the constructed tower from two views on paper. I didn't shade the blocks well enough, but when Charlie started to build it we clearly saw some letters and our answer, YAHOO, was built out of one of the two sides of the tower. A simple but fun construction (given the event's theme was Child's Play, a lot of games were incorporated into the puzzles and this was one such case).
One of my favorite moments came on a challenge where we had a lot of untitled children's books that all had colors in their titles, and then eight pages full of paint-by-numbers items to sort out. We did a quick pass on the books, having about 10 of the thirty or so identified, and then sent Nick and Charlie to use the authors in the library we were parked at to get more data. Of course, in the interim, Derek and I started to color in the pictures and then extrapolate what all the colors must be from images that sort of looked like things (being able to see numbers as colors being a skill here I guess). Oh, that must be a jack o'lantern. Oh, that looks like the logo of Pepsi. Oh, that's a traffic light. Oh, that must be Elmo. With four letters in the acrostic ?H?PTE?? we got the answer word confirmed on Leon and then colored in the rest to confirm the four other letters. I walkie-talkied to Nick that we had the answer and our next location. They were just about finished getting the book titles confirmed, but back-solving colors can be a marvelous thing and makes your teammates very appreciative of their wasted effort.
An excellent puzzle followed at the life-sized Monopoly board that has previously been used in a BANG. Here, we first had to just roll someone onto free parking to get the puzzle and our whole team, standing on four different squares, totally failed in the first eight to ten circuits of the board to get someone in. A miracle 12 when I was the only one who could reach free parking got us to the promised land finally. The puzzle that followed, which had a bunch of trivia clues that mapped to the colors/types of the properties with bigram associations to the properties themselves (YELLOW RIBBON describes the three yellow properties with RI/BB/ON as what you wrote down) then gave us a set of die-rolls that mapped to the bigrams then eventually got us to draw a picture that pointed to a final phrase. The words were nicely constrained and the puzzle formatting with color made the steps, although not always immediately obvious, sensible and not big leaps. We needed no hints, except with what to do with the final phrase, but once we got that we were off to the final (and best) puzzle.
We stopped at a candy shop and picked up our clue. Actually, it was 9 clues, with 9 separate pieces of candy/chocolate having a puzzle attached to each. Eight were mini puzzles, and then apparently the box of Tic-Tacs, with just a tic-tac toe board on it, was the "meta" puzzle. We split these up and started in different ways. I did the certs (all the clued words used the letters in certs in a binary counting fashion (S, T, ST, R, SR, ...) with Charlie finishing it up as I wasn't seeing etc. as an answer there. I also did the skittles, which gave a long list of numbers that represented pins in bowling throws as clued by the flavor text. I didn't know skittles stood for ninepin bowling, but I could get all the letters I needed from using the 1-10 pin arrangement as well because I can solve a self-broken puzzle like that. We co-solved the peeps and I helped give some suggestions to Nick to solve the nice Starburst puzzle. There was also a NIM puzzle on a chocolate bar and while Derek solved it, I was more than willing to act out the role of a NIM player by eating a lot of chocolate squares.
We had about six of the answers when I started looking at the meta and also looking at this M and M puzzle we had in the front of the van. There were green M and M's with the custom messages arshall and athers on them (3 of each separate word), and then a bunch of M and M's of other flavors. I'd quickly clued eminem as an answer choice knowing that is Marshall Mathers, but that told us to go farther on LEON. So, I studied the distributions of candies for a long, long time. We had 4 of one color, 9 of another, 24 of green, .... In rainbow order with brown at the front, it looked like DDMIXX which was all Roman Numerals but that DD doesn't work out well. The word MIX seemed to work musically but what is a DD MIX X? Dance Dance MIX X? Then, after five to ten minutes of wondering what was going on, and basically just switching over to and solving the meta cause I was bored, Charlie in the front seat reveals the bag also had a single paper circle with the number 4152 which directly indexes into EMINEM to give the unlikely answer NEEM. Now, we at first discounted the answer, or maybe had mistyped it into leon, but I had the solved meta in hand so I'm like NEEM works really well guys. It ended up fine. That DDMIXX M and M count? Apparently just the result of pure chance. There was not meant to be any message in the other candies in the bag at all.
The Tic-Tac meta was a really nice construction. That piece of candy just gave a Tic-Tac-Toe grid with an X already in the center. The answers to the other puzzles in no particular order were SEES, ETC, WIN, NEEM, SWAN, NTH, N WON, and SDI. Figuring out what to do with these is a challenge left to the reader, but is a satisfying result. An excellent final puzzle round to conclude the Decathlon event. We reached the final destination, a pizza place, in first! WOO HOO!
But just finishing the main puzzles (which had a hint structure) was not enough to win. This event had bonus puzzles for all of the clues which had a huge variance in answer difficulties. You got a bonus book with a lot of weird pages at the start, but after doing a puzzle you could figure out what corresponded to what rather well (it was a nice design to be honest). So for the next 4 hours we banged our heads on the ones we had left. The Monopoly puzzle and RPS puzzle from Shintekimon had real nice conclusions although it took us awhile to get to what we needed to see there. The remaining two puzzles (the EIEIO See 'N' Say bonus and the Tic-Tac bonus puzzle) did not fall as easily. Nick bypassed the puzzle and solved EIEIO brilliantly (although not as brilliantly as Wei-Hwa had the week before, where he got LEON to confirm an answer that on checking his work was nowhere near possible to even be there at that point). But Tic-Tacs weren't falling. It was a lot of tic-tac toe boards with X's and O's filled in. We constructed four or five really solid versions of TTT puzzles that could, but did not, fit there. Having applied the rule used to solve the meta, we actually had bad data on the page and I think Charlie finally cracked through when there was about 2 minutes left before the organizers wanted the Palm Pilot back. In a rush to make sense of the answer phrase, I had to find my skittles puzzle work and explain it to them as they couldn't explain their message to me. Somehow a common language arose and we got AFTER EIGHT just in the nick of time to get a perfect score from the event. Here Be Dragons, who arrived maybe 40 minutes after us at the final site, had finished the bonus puzzles earlier than us at the restaurant so we were second for that weekend.
Overall lessons from the event: The LEON interface is an awesome one to use while solving puzzles or giving gentle nudges while a team is struggling with a puzzle. I hear a similar auto-entry interface is used at some of the Microsoft Hunts and I think it is a good innovation to use, just to confirm to people that they are on the right track at times. It requires no puzzle HQ input during the event, so LEON is a real time-saver for everyone involved. Answer spamming was slightly penalized, but I appreciated the recognition of partial answers to tell you you were on the right track. We never bought hints, but a hint would unlock every say 15 minutes you didn't make any progress, so a team that wasn't super-charged like we were could still get through the event (or just buy hints) if they were frustrated with a puzzle. Four people was the perfect number for this event and Derek and Nick and Charlie and I worked well as a team. Not well enough to win, but then maybe it is the case you need both Grahams to conquer a puzzle challenge. I wish some of the bonus puzzles had hints, or at least that my last memory of the event was the front half of the Tic-Tac puzzle (the meta) and not the back half (the bonus) of the Tic-Tac puzzle.
I'd heard a lot about the quality of Shinteki's events (except perhaps one story of a purposefully broken puzzle that seems to have really soiled one shinteki experience I heard about) and this was my first chance to experience first hand how they work. On checking in, we got our fifth teammate, a Palm Pilot with the application LEON that would accept answers from us (or partial answers along the way), with hints slowly unlocking if you cannot make progress in a puzzle. The ability to submit your progress and know you are on the right track is a cool addition to a puzzle hunt and the LEON application was a really good interface to complement the puzzle solving. When you had the final answer, it gave you a description of where to go next that quickly got input into the Van's GPS. While we never used LEON to buy a hint, at one puzzle site we certainly spent enough time to "earn" the hints we needed for free.
Decathlon featured 10 puzzle locations, and many of them had memorable challenges. We started with a game of Shintekimon where we were trying to evolve/name a Shintekimon so that it could defeat the reigning champion SUPERSTAR. A duel with another Shintekimon (on another team's Palm device) would give a number of rounds for a fight (0 to 5) and a W-L-T result for each round. Now, I was having a hard time jotting down the exact names of some of the weird Shintekimon we were dueling (at some point we were DOCTORSUDOKU), but more duels would open more hints, and this started to give us a story of the past champions who had fallen before SUPERSTAR took over like SCRAPPY LEPAGE. The puzzle I felt needed one more spacing hint than it had, as by the time I was really really interested in the letters SPREA and maybe some of the positions in names, it told us that the puzzle was actually (BLAH!). Well, I'll just tell you that R, P, and S were the critical parts of the names and maybe you can sort out how you'd get a win, loss, or tie from that. I think that would be better than telling you its "BLAH" but it was a fun puzzle with required team interaction to start the day. Here be Dragons had finished the puzzle before us, but we left second to go to our next site.
The next puzzle took us up a hill to grasp a bucket of dihydrogen oxide - or at least identify some reimagined nursery rhymes (all the words were changed to synonyms). Other puzzles had us sorting through some cryptic clues to identify Edward Gorey kids like Neville who died of ennui, figure out why some farm animals were making the noises of other farm animal in a semaphore-based large-sized See N' Say board, or work out how to drop letters from a list of words to anagram those words into members of a category (like colors or trees or Presidents), with those dropped letters making a superset of words with the same property. To get each puzzle, we had to do a "kid's game" like Ring Around The Rosie or Red Light-Green Light where Justin made an appearance as the traffic light and had all too much fun keeping Charlie from finishing.
We really only stumbled on one puzzle, a Connect Four challenge that mapped a Shakespearean sonnet onto a calendar, where the desired answer extraction method was what was really escaping us, but overall we were pretty efficient. One really excellent puzzle involved following a set of building instructions for a Jenga Tower. After Nick and Derek failed the first time to do it legitimately, I had them solve it on its side and then drew the constructed tower from two views on paper. I didn't shade the blocks well enough, but when Charlie started to build it we clearly saw some letters and our answer, YAHOO, was built out of one of the two sides of the tower. A simple but fun construction (given the event's theme was Child's Play, a lot of games were incorporated into the puzzles and this was one such case).
One of my favorite moments came on a challenge where we had a lot of untitled children's books that all had colors in their titles, and then eight pages full of paint-by-numbers items to sort out. We did a quick pass on the books, having about 10 of the thirty or so identified, and then sent Nick and Charlie to use the authors in the library we were parked at to get more data. Of course, in the interim, Derek and I started to color in the pictures and then extrapolate what all the colors must be from images that sort of looked like things (being able to see numbers as colors being a skill here I guess). Oh, that must be a jack o'lantern. Oh, that looks like the logo of Pepsi. Oh, that's a traffic light. Oh, that must be Elmo. With four letters in the acrostic ?H?PTE?? we got the answer word confirmed on Leon and then colored in the rest to confirm the four other letters. I walkie-talkied to Nick that we had the answer and our next location. They were just about finished getting the book titles confirmed, but back-solving colors can be a marvelous thing and makes your teammates very appreciative of their wasted effort.
An excellent puzzle followed at the life-sized Monopoly board that has previously been used in a BANG. Here, we first had to just roll someone onto free parking to get the puzzle and our whole team, standing on four different squares, totally failed in the first eight to ten circuits of the board to get someone in. A miracle 12 when I was the only one who could reach free parking got us to the promised land finally. The puzzle that followed, which had a bunch of trivia clues that mapped to the colors/types of the properties with bigram associations to the properties themselves (YELLOW RIBBON describes the three yellow properties with RI/BB/ON as what you wrote down) then gave us a set of die-rolls that mapped to the bigrams then eventually got us to draw a picture that pointed to a final phrase. The words were nicely constrained and the puzzle formatting with color made the steps, although not always immediately obvious, sensible and not big leaps. We needed no hints, except with what to do with the final phrase, but once we got that we were off to the final (and best) puzzle.
We stopped at a candy shop and picked up our clue. Actually, it was 9 clues, with 9 separate pieces of candy/chocolate having a puzzle attached to each. Eight were mini puzzles, and then apparently the box of Tic-Tacs, with just a tic-tac toe board on it, was the "meta" puzzle. We split these up and started in different ways. I did the certs (all the clued words used the letters in certs in a binary counting fashion (S, T, ST, R, SR, ...) with Charlie finishing it up as I wasn't seeing etc. as an answer there. I also did the skittles, which gave a long list of numbers that represented pins in bowling throws as clued by the flavor text. I didn't know skittles stood for ninepin bowling, but I could get all the letters I needed from using the 1-10 pin arrangement as well because I can solve a self-broken puzzle like that. We co-solved the peeps and I helped give some suggestions to Nick to solve the nice Starburst puzzle. There was also a NIM puzzle on a chocolate bar and while Derek solved it, I was more than willing to act out the role of a NIM player by eating a lot of chocolate squares.
We had about six of the answers when I started looking at the meta and also looking at this M and M puzzle we had in the front of the van. There were green M and M's with the custom messages arshall and athers on them (3 of each separate word), and then a bunch of M and M's of other flavors. I'd quickly clued eminem as an answer choice knowing that is Marshall Mathers, but that told us to go farther on LEON. So, I studied the distributions of candies for a long, long time. We had 4 of one color, 9 of another, 24 of green, .... In rainbow order with brown at the front, it looked like DDMIXX which was all Roman Numerals but that DD doesn't work out well. The word MIX seemed to work musically but what is a DD MIX X? Dance Dance MIX X? Then, after five to ten minutes of wondering what was going on, and basically just switching over to and solving the meta cause I was bored, Charlie in the front seat reveals the bag also had a single paper circle with the number 4152 which directly indexes into EMINEM to give the unlikely answer NEEM. Now, we at first discounted the answer, or maybe had mistyped it into leon, but I had the solved meta in hand so I'm like NEEM works really well guys. It ended up fine. That DDMIXX M and M count? Apparently just the result of pure chance. There was not meant to be any message in the other candies in the bag at all.
The Tic-Tac meta was a really nice construction. That piece of candy just gave a Tic-Tac-Toe grid with an X already in the center. The answers to the other puzzles in no particular order were SEES, ETC, WIN, NEEM, SWAN, NTH, N WON, and SDI. Figuring out what to do with these is a challenge left to the reader, but is a satisfying result. An excellent final puzzle round to conclude the Decathlon event. We reached the final destination, a pizza place, in first! WOO HOO!
But just finishing the main puzzles (which had a hint structure) was not enough to win. This event had bonus puzzles for all of the clues which had a huge variance in answer difficulties. You got a bonus book with a lot of weird pages at the start, but after doing a puzzle you could figure out what corresponded to what rather well (it was a nice design to be honest). So for the next 4 hours we banged our heads on the ones we had left. The Monopoly puzzle and RPS puzzle from Shintekimon had real nice conclusions although it took us awhile to get to what we needed to see there. The remaining two puzzles (the EIEIO See 'N' Say bonus and the Tic-Tac bonus puzzle) did not fall as easily. Nick bypassed the puzzle and solved EIEIO brilliantly (although not as brilliantly as Wei-Hwa had the week before, where he got LEON to confirm an answer that on checking his work was nowhere near possible to even be there at that point). But Tic-Tacs weren't falling. It was a lot of tic-tac toe boards with X's and O's filled in. We constructed four or five really solid versions of TTT puzzles that could, but did not, fit there. Having applied the rule used to solve the meta, we actually had bad data on the page and I think Charlie finally cracked through when there was about 2 minutes left before the organizers wanted the Palm Pilot back. In a rush to make sense of the answer phrase, I had to find my skittles puzzle work and explain it to them as they couldn't explain their message to me. Somehow a common language arose and we got AFTER EIGHT just in the nick of time to get a perfect score from the event. Here Be Dragons, who arrived maybe 40 minutes after us at the final site, had finished the bonus puzzles earlier than us at the restaurant so we were second for that weekend.
Overall lessons from the event: The LEON interface is an awesome one to use while solving puzzles or giving gentle nudges while a team is struggling with a puzzle. I hear a similar auto-entry interface is used at some of the Microsoft Hunts and I think it is a good innovation to use, just to confirm to people that they are on the right track at times. It requires no puzzle HQ input during the event, so LEON is a real time-saver for everyone involved. Answer spamming was slightly penalized, but I appreciated the recognition of partial answers to tell you you were on the right track. We never bought hints, but a hint would unlock every say 15 minutes you didn't make any progress, so a team that wasn't super-charged like we were could still get through the event (or just buy hints) if they were frustrated with a puzzle. Four people was the perfect number for this event and Derek and Nick and Charlie and I worked well as a team. Not well enough to win, but then maybe it is the case you need both Grahams to conquer a puzzle challenge. I wish some of the bonus puzzles had hints, or at least that my last memory of the event was the front half of the Tic-Tac puzzle (the meta) and not the back half (the bonus) of the Tic-Tac puzzle.