(no subject)
Part 1 | Part 2
We'd realized over the course of the last few puzzles that while we certainly felt like one of the slowest teams, we weren't actually all that far behind Snout and DFA. Resolved to start keeping track of the time differential between us. Starting the clock when we began work on a puzzle and stopping the clock when our opposition departed. While we weren't gaining ground, we also weren't losing ground, and quite a morale boost to record nearly identical times at back to back puzzles.
A bit disconcerting to find that it had gotten dark while we were in the Kennedy Center, but no matter, set off for our next location, some sort of a community center at the edge of a small forested area.
Tragedy struck as we were getting out of the van; Mark dropped his laptop. Not a simple drop, but rather a forceful, high velocity crash onto concrete. Picked it up off the ground and attempted to boot it. No dice. Thank goodness it was a very old laptop that he was in the process of replacing, but still. Alas, far too dark to attempt laptop surgery so put away to be looked at in the light of day and after some sleep.
For a variety (of security) reasons, we'd been unable to get the application on James' machine, so a scramble to figure out a solution and half the team set to solving the laptop problem (and reentering all of our solution words) while the rest of us started the next puzzle.
Said puzzle first involved following a piecekeeper into the forest where we were handed a pair of limb trimmers and pointed at a tree from which hung a series of gray paper lanterns. Tracker jacker nests and we had to cut one down! This right here was the kind of detail that made this Game great. We would have thought nothing of it had they simply handed us a tracker jacker themed puzzle but instead they took us out into the woods and made us retrieve one for ourselves. Wallowing in theme, this is exactly the thing I love most about the Game.
Retrieved our puzzle carefully lest it include a nasty surprise and made our way back to the porch of the community center where we spread everything out and got to work. The actual puzzle consisted of a honeycombed word search grid and a series of bees each of which had a word or two written on them.
The words on each of the bees were cluing another word or phrase, specifically one that had the "bee" word/sound in it. These new words could each be found in the crossword grid with the cutout bees taking the place of the letters that made the bee sound. Things progressed faster at this point, with half of us working backwards by scouring the grid for obvious words.
When we were done we'd managed to place each of the bees on the grid and the letters each bee was on top of gave us further instructions as to what to do next.
Probably there was an ordering method for the letters, likely it was even an obvious one but we resorted to our usual trick of writing the letter sequences on notecards and moving them around until we had a sentence.
Entered the solution into the app on a new laptop and the screen immediately freaked out, oh no, had we broken another one? Nope, that's the tracker jackers! All very pleased with joke.
Solution in hand we headed back to the van and off to our next stop, a game store. (I've decided that the reason that game stores show up as Game locations so often is that in addition to having lots of space (for gaming) you can also walk right into one, explain what you want, and what kind of crazy hour you want it and the owners don't look at you like you've lost your mind).
Awaiting us at this particular game store was the popular Settlers of Catan Pangram board game (and a bathroom! we love bathrooms!). Apparently someone had been called away from the game midway through but by studying the board, and the cards, we could easily determine what they'd been thinking.
Our next puzzle took us to a residential neighborhood. As it was getting to be quite late by this time crept quietly around the side of the house, doing our best not to make a single sound.
Apparently we needn't have bothered as no sooner had we arrived in the backyard than a great cacophony of sound erupted from a series of birds mocking jays arrayed along the fence.
Ok then.
Apparently this was a sound puzzle, and the birds along the fence would parrot back whatever it was that one said into a microphone attached to a bird located a short distance away in what turned out to be a fabulous tree house.
As I am nothing if not completely tone deaf, I was sent up the ladder to talk into the microphone while my teammates divided up the birds and attempted to record what they were doing. Each time I spoke the birds would parrot back my words in a specific order and in a higher or lower tone.
I was really glad to be on the speaking end of this one as my teammates did not seem to be having an easy time of it. There were eight birds in total, but two were "dead", complete with crossed out eyes, and at this point in the evening two had started malfunctioning so instructed to confirm our data with the onsite volunteers once we'd figure out what was going on.
There were six distinct patterns, repeated in order and once we had the data we headed inside the house to make sense of it.
Alas only five chairs at the table and as I'd opted for a pre-puzzling bathroom break, I missed out. Clearly this was a sign that while my teammates solved I should curl up on the couch and shut my eyes for a moment or two. While I didn't actually manage to fall asleep it was kind of nice to let everyone else sort it out without me.
After a fast stop at McDonald's as it was getting into the early hours and we'd completely missed our chances at a more appetizing meal, we found ourselves at yet another random house in yet another residential area.
A piecekeeper, well bundled up against the cold, was waiting for us and he led us into the back yard where we found a series of comfortable deck chairs from which we could watch the nightly display of fallen tributes.
Traditional music for the fallen was playing and as we watched an array of tributes were displayed on the screen before us, apparently it had been a bloody day. Each slide included the tributes' name, their cause of death and a picture of their deceased body, some of which were arrayed in quite unpleasant positions.
Displayed as they were on a field of stars, suddenly reminded that included amongst the items in our survival kit was an astrological chart (of the "what's your sign?" sort). Well that explains the uncomfortable death positions.
It was cold out so transcribed the data and headed back to the van to solve it. While we seemed to have a grasp of the basics, not quite sure what to do next and as it was proving hard for more than one or two people at a time to work on it in the confines to the van, opted to sacrifice a few fans in hopes that a hint or two might help us out.
This worked perfectly and before we knew it we were off to our next location, Denny's, another Game Control favorite.
We hadn't seen a lot of other people at our last two locations and would learn later that we'd skipped a puzzle (in actuality we'd skipped three, one in the early afternoon, and two in the evening hours, but as one of those puzzles had only been seen by a single team, we didn't feel too bad about ourselves).
Pulled into the Denny's parking lot just as Snout was heading inside, and while they had undoubtedly seen the puzzle we'd skipped, this was our chance to get ahead of them. Headed inside with renewed determination and were handed a box of "Capital Crisp Cereal" by Deanna.
Made ourselves comfortable at an empty table and had just placed our food order when DFA arrived.
This was our chance to get in front of BOTH teams. Turned our attention to the cereal box with renewed vigor. The box turned out to contain some foam peanuts (which were not part of the puzzle) and a bag of assorted cereal pieces. Like several of the puzzles we had encountered thus far, this seemed to be another example of a set of short puzzles with a minimeta.
Took some time to admire the cereal box itself which looked just like a real cereal box, rife with all sorts of interesting games and nutritional information, each of the different elements seemed to correspond to one of the types of cereal we had been given.
gizmoek and I tackled the lucky charms puzzle and quite amusing to hear us trying to figure out what each of the marshmallow shapes were. While we were fairly certainly they were supposed to be comets, they looked an awful lot like someone's thong and we did find one word choice that could have supported this supposition.
Despite the confusion we were doing well, the honeycomb puzzle fell almost immediately, followed by alphabits, lucky charms and trix. Despite being the easiest of the lot, froot loops wa last, and such a comparatively quick solve that we wondered if we'd done something wrong.
The mini-puzzles taken care of my team sent me off to pay the bill and turned their attention to the meta. It too fell at breakneck speed and they were done and packing up before I'd managed to hand over my credit card.
OMG, we'd done it! Both Snout and DFA still hard at work. Said our goodbyes to DFA (after all this was not something that was ever going to happen again) and headed out.
Back in the van we pulled up our new kill video to discover that this was a group kill in which the captains of several teams had been brutally murdered by (and in) the vicious "captain crunch". We were reliably informed that while all the members of the other teams effected had sucumbed to the same fate, our team had been miraculously spared, with only our captain (me!) killed.
My team was on the opinion that this was a fair trade and for the rest of the event used this as a prime opportunity to ignore anything I said that they didn't agree with.
Meanwhile, Haymitch had been watching our performance and he had a bit more advise, or at least a word of caution for us.
Our next stop was a high end kennel/pet daycare. Met at the door by a giant dog (ok fine, a person in a giant dog costume) and after barking to gain admission, escorted down the hall to the kennel runs where a series of adorably cute little stuffed dogs awaited us, each of the dogs were labeled with the name of the team to whom they belonged. Directed to find, and rescue, ours and then given a place to work in a small conference room.
Ran out to the van for a moment (to take some allergy meds as a kennel is probably not the kind of place where I should spend any great amount of time) and ran into DFA on their way into the building. Wasn't I supposed to be dead, and by the way if I hadn't seen my death sequence, I needed to as it was just about the best way to die ever. James was positively gleeful as he rehashed my untimely death with a frame by frame, blow by blow, narration.
Rejoined my team and discovered that our adorable little puppy was actually a mut(t)ation and close inspection revealed that someone had performed some sort of cruel surgery on it, leaving behind thick black stitches along its back.
Fortunately we'd earned cutting tools somewhere along the way, so after assuring our pup that we didn't mean it any harm and would give it a loving home, we cut open the stitches and pulled out strands of its DNA.
Here I should mention that someone had taken a lot of time to make sure that this puzzle was adorably perfect. While thematically it was enough (way more than enough) simply to have us rescue mutts from a cage, someone had taken the time to sew a small pink pocket into the back of each mutt such that when you pulled out the strands of paper on which the puzzle was written, it looked like you were pulling them out of their actual flesh. This is another example of the amazing attention to detail that was so prevalent in this event. We wouldn't have thought twice about reaching into their actual stuffing, or even of detaching a puzzle that was strapped to the outside of their bodies, but someone had actually taken the time to sew pockets into 24 stuffed animals.
Where Wartron was an eye opening experience with regard to learning how long it takes to mass produce a mere twelve copies of a physical puzzle, the Famine Game was equally eye opening as it drove home what DeeAnn said to me each and every time I started to feel stressed. "Teams won't miss what they don't know about." The counterpoint of course it that even six months ago I don't think I would have noticed (or at least remarked) on half of the amazing details that made this event so good.
I don't mean to say that teams didn't notice the details, I'm sure they did, but rather the details were integrated so seamlessly that unless you stopped to think about things, you often took for granted that things were the way they were simply because that's the way they were supposed to be.
Hats off to the Famine Game GC, I hope to one day produce an original Game that is even half as good as this one was.
But I digress, here it was the early hours of morning and we were sitting around a conference room table with a small stuffed dog and a slew of paper strips upon which had been written (typed and photocopied this time though we wondered at first if this puzzle had been customized for each team) a series of letters that contained the names of all of the teams interspersed with the names of a variety of different dog breeds. (Ours was the longest strip!) Each strip also contained a handful of random letters which turned out to be the letters used in genetic coding and in order to solve this puzzle we had to combine these letters in such a way as to form a particular thing.
While I was more than capable of spotting team names and dog breeds (apparently that subscription I had to Dog Fancy as a small child was useful for something other than serving as a hint to my mother). I was no help at all when it came to assembling DNA. Fortunately this is why we have jagheterlelle , and whether she was actually the one to finally solve it, I firmly consider this type of puzzle to be HER problem (not mine).
Getting pretty late by this time and as the morning shift would be arriving shortly, the kennel employees were starting to hope we would soon be done. As they had been more than patient with our insanity, headed out to finish solving in the van. (I am going with the assumption that GC must have known the owner or even an employee of that particular kennel as I can't for a moment imagine the conversation that would have otherwise transpired as they tried to explain who they were and what they wanted to a complete stranger.)
With that puzzle solved, we'd done it! We were the last team alive in the arena! We could go home and (with the tragic exception of myself), we would live. Except, what's this? A communique from president Snow? It wasn't over? Far from it? We were now to turn on each other and battle it out until only one of us remained?
Oh, ok.
NO! No don't do it. A frantic communication from Haymitch, we should proceed to the next location as indicated, but we were not under any circumstances to start murdering each other (though he certainly understood why we might want to).
The next location turned out to be a small private school, located on the first floor of a fairly non-descript office building. Lots of vans were in the parking lot and heading inside we found groups hard at work at tables in a central gathering area.
Apparently we had entered "the clock" (we'd made it to the 2nd book!), a devilish arena designed to kill us all.
One of the piecekeepers on duty welcomed us, handed us a tag with our team name on it, and proceeded to explain the rules of this new arena.
Apparently in the rooms around us we would find 12 unique challenges that we would need to overcome in order to escape. In the main room there was a timer that marked 15 minute increments. We could visit any room we wanted but at the conclusion of the 15 minutes we had to exit the room and could not return again until we had visited all of the rooms at which point we could visit whichever rooms we pleased. While not everyone had to be in any given room, we could not visit multiple rooms at the same time.
Some of the rooms were designed for a single team at a time, others were open to multiple groups at the same time and yes, we were welcome to take photographs of what we found in each room.
A quick glance at the timer revealed that there were only 3 minutes left before the next rotation, and while that didn't seem like anywhere near enough time to actually solve a puzzle, rccap and gizmoek of the opinion that it was still worth darting into one of the rooms so we at least had an idea of the kinds of things that would await us.
As there was a room with an open door only a few feet away, this seemed like a fair strategy, so rushed inside and found 3 monkeys hanging from the ceiling each of which with a short poem attached to its chest.
Not much time to do anything other than photograph the three of them and make note of the fact that since monkeys were in fact one of the things in the actual clock arena (in the books), that we would likely be encountering the other ones as well. Our attempts to recollect what those might be were interrupted by the sound of some sort of a dying animal. Apparently that was the signal that the 15 minutes were up so we dutifully trotted back into the lobby and selected the next open door.
This was a one team at a time kind of room and Inside we found a member of Game Control who explained the rules of the room.
Apparently we were to defeat the evil AI (who spoke with Glados' voice), we could only use our bodies and the few materials (some plastic tubing, a jug of water and some play-doh) that they had provided us with. He would stay to observe the process (not I suspect to prevent cheating, but rather because this particular challenge had to have been hilarious to watch).
Looking around the room we noticed 6 distinct metal plates, two each with three different markings on them that were clearly connected into the computer at the center of the room. Two of the marks were particularly close together and some fast experimentation determined that by placing a hand on each one, one could use their body to complete a circuit and register success on the central computer.
Ok, not so hard. Another set of plates were located on the floor across from each other and by laying on the floor and holding hands, gizmoek and I could just reach the two of them.
Turned our attention to the last set, while one of these was on the floor, the other was set high on the wall on the opposite side of the room and there was no way that Mark and James could bridge that distance with their bodies alone. Started over to look at the contents of the table and Mark lifted the pitcher of water half heartedly when someone suggested we just connect them all together.
Would that work?
rccap went back to touching the two adjacent wall plates and gizmoek and I laid on the floor, one hand each on a plate and the other on one of his ankles.
Yup, that would work.
Actually positioning ourselves so that the five of us were touching took a bit more doing and I ended up with one hand on the plate, one hand on James' ankle and my foot intersecting with rccap. jagheterlelle was unable to help as she had been assigned the task of dealing with the computer and she called out helpfully to let us know which circuits were and weren't connected.
The end result was a lot of laughing interspersed with cries of pain as rccap attempted to solve the problem of the circuit not quite being connected through the simple expedient of stomping harder on my foot.
Apparently we were the first all human solve.
Triumphant, we exited the room only to discover that there was still a fair amount of time on the clock. Raced off to see what the next room had in store for us.
Apparently this next room was the paralyzing fog and the challenge consisted of us opening a series of locked containers each of which was secured in a different way and each of which contained a series of images that we needed in order to solve the puzzle.
Set to with gusto only to realize a few moments later that we were doing it wrong. The whole point of the paralyzing fog was that it was impairing our fine motor skills and we were to create this effect by donning heavy kitchen mitts.
Fortunately we hadn't actually gotten anywhere with the challenge, and dutifully donned our kitchen gloves the second we realized what we were supposed to be doing. Yup, this makes it harder. Indeed that 4 digit combination lock that had seemed merely irritating now seemed downright impossible.
Managed to get about half of them open before we ran out of time, and proceeded dutifully to the next room where we were separated into two teams and placed on either side of a great divider. The one rule of this room was that we were to keep our butts in our chairs at all times. We each seemed to be looking at a wall of "clinging vines" each of which contained an image. Talking back and forth over the divider determined that these images could be paired and very thankful that we could photograph them, this was definitely a puzzle for later.
Our next room featured a giant flashing bolt of lightening and while James, jagheterlelle and I tackled it, the rest of the team turned their attention to some of the pieces we'd been picking up along the way.
While we managed to determine fairly quickly that the lightening was spelling something out in braille, a bit of a trick to focus on the six corners. The other half of the team had solved the monkeys and had turned their attention to the clinging vines by the time we'd managed to sort it all out.
Next up blood rain (which consisted of strands of red LED lights hanging from the ceiling) and then killer robots. As both of these rooms were pretty dark, a bit hard to multitask, half of the team working on the new puzzle and the rest finishing up an older puzzle, but we managed it, crouching on the floor by the door, or huddled around the light of the laptop.
The next room we entered had a bunch of CDs laid out on the counter, one of which was labeled with our team's name. Popping it into the laptop we were rewarded with a bunch of random tracks of people begging for help or otherwise expressing horror.
Hey wait a second, that's ivo_b - this was our own personal jabber jay puzzle!
Track 3 | Track 5 | Track 11
Back in August when Game Control had requested pictures and the like, they'd also asked us for contact information for our "next of kin". As I was fairly certain that my mother wasn't quite the person they were looking for, and rccap was going to be with me, and would thus need his own "next of kin", I'd asked ivo_b if he'd be willing to play along and then promptly forgotten all about it.
Apparently they'd been in contact and the result was a series of tracks recorded in the voices of people we knew and cared about. Going through the recordings I identified ivo_b's voice on three of the eleven tracks (it probably helps that he has such a distinctive accent, as nobody else recognized any of the voices). Actually have we confirmed? Was ivo_b the only one of our next of kin they used, or are the rest of you just terrible at recognizing the voices of your friends and relatives?
Getting on towards dawn at this point and my teammates showed no sign of stopping. James and rccap had flat out stated that they weren't planning on sleeping and everyone else said they'd get around to it "later". As this later, or rather the idea that later might come all at once was a bit disturbing to me, my inner OCD team captain was rearing her ugly head. My team seemed to have these puzzles well under control and we were going to need coherent drivers later which meant that SOMEONE should be sleeping, and since they wouldn't, I needed to do it for them.
Took myself off to the van and managed about an hour of sleep before curiosity got the better of me, I was missing things. (I think I should at least get points for trying.)
Headed back in and found my team sitting at a table in the main room trying to crack the meta. They'd solved all but one of the clock puzzles and gizmoek and jagheterlelle were in the appropriate room finishing it off as we spoke. The puzzle in question was apparently called insect swarm and involved a large number of small plastic bugs.
I'd brought in snacks (healthy stuff like cheese, grapes and apple juice), so dumped them in the middle of the table and got myself caught up on what I'd missed: deadly beasts (mutant beanie babies), snowstorm (paper snowflakes), and flash flood (water noises).
My team had been working on the meta for awhile (according the the instructions we'd been given, we could request it once we had 9 solves), and had made some good progress. So by the time gizmoek and jagheterlelle returned with the last solve we'd cracked it (hint: that's not semaphore) and soon after we had a solution.
We'd done it! We'd escaped the clock arena! The instruction in our app told us to make our way discretely down the hall, to slip through a door marked "Capitol Employees Only", and to make our way up a flight of stairs.
Did as told (as sneakily as possible), and halfway up the stairs we encountered a Game Maker. Oh no, this was it, we were doomed! We'd be brutally murdered and our bodies shipped back to our families in cardboard boxes.
But, no, what was this. He wasn't turning us in? Quite the opposite, he was beckoning us closer. It appears he'd wanted us to escape and now that we had he was sending us to District 13, where we'd be safe and from where we could help to overthrow President Snow.
Apparently we'd finished book 2.
"I feel kind of guilty," said rccap as we headed out the door and back to our van. "We pledged our allegiance to President Snow, and I don't really want to betray him. I wish he wasn't trying to kill us because I'd much rather help him."
Probably not a sentiment we should share once we got to District 13.
It had gotten light while we'd been inside so now clear to see what a disaster the van was, took a few minutes to clean it up before hitting the road again. (Though not before we took a moment to admire the souvenirs that festooned Team Snout's van. Were these the remains of the team they had so viciously run over with their van?)
District 13 was aparently headquartered at the offices of The Motley Fool; clever of them to hide in plain sight.
Headed inside where we received a warm welcome and were immediately inducted into the way of life in District 13. As said way of life was apparently quite heavily structured, to make sure that people didn't forget what they had to do and where they had to be, schedules were tattooed onto their arms each day.
Funny how my team, who hadn't shed a single tear when I was viciously murdered by a mutant cartoon character, now fell all over themselves to make sure everyone knew I was the captain. Interesting how the tables turn once the tattoo needles come out.
OK, fine, so they were temporary tattoos, my point stands.
In the end they tattooed several of us and then set us loose to enjoy life there in district 13. And really, while there were a few militant anti-capital rabble rousers hanging around, life in district 13 wasn't so bad. There was food (apparently I'm not the only one who likes to feed people vegetables in the middle of the night - or in this case in the early, early morning), some comfortable furniture, and no threat of imminent death. Quite frankly this was the most relaxed we'd been in ages.
Unfortunately it was also boring, now that we'd agreed to betray help defeat President Snow, we wanted action, we wanted bloodshed, we wanted glory! And yet here were were cooling our heels in District 13, surely there had to be some way to defeat our infernal schedules.
And then we noticed it, inconsistencies as to where we were supposed to be and for how long, there was a pattern, and by studying our new home carefully we were able to piece together enough of its secrets to get ourselves noticed.
While I'm not normally one to advocate for public recognitions, we were the victors of not one but two arenas so I suppose I shouldn't have been too surprised when a short while later we were asked to film a propaganda video to give hope to the oppressed denizens of all the other districts.
I don't want to toot my own horn here, but we were amazing. Impassioned, enraged and melodramatic all in one 30 second soundbite. I only wish I could share the results with you here but alas while we were given a copy to take with us, we were so concerned that we not accidentally lose it or scratch it (as we were told we would need it later), that for safe keeping we tucked it inside the front cover of our rental car's owner's manual and then promptly forgot about it.
Actually that's not entirely true, I did look for it while we were cleaning out the car, but then someone handed me a CD and I assumed that that was the correct CD and so stopped looking.
One day, someone, somewhere, is going to be awfully confused.
But I digress, propos video made we hit the road again, we were off to the United States Air Force memorial to do reconnaissance work.
And this is where we floundered.
Pretty apparent that some skipping was going on as when we arrived at the air force memorial all sorts of teams (teams that we hadn't seen in hours) were wandering around and while we worked teams that we'd left behind at the clock began to catch up and then overtake us.
It's funny, months later I'm still feeling a little bit guilty about this one as I was absolutely no help at all to my team. Indeed I didn't even try to help with this one but rather wandered off and took a nap in the van. What a great team captain I am.
In my defense, I realize now that the reason I did this was that when we arrived I ended up getting waylaid by a member of another team and in the process of talking to them, I accidentally saw their puzzle and thus felt I had to recuse myself. Add in the fact that I'd been spending a significant amount of time in an enclosed space with rccap (who had spent most of Friday evening trying to pretend he didn't have a cold) and the fact that I'd spent an hour hanging out at a boarding kennel (because I wasn't smart enough to go take a nap THEN), and I was definitely not feeling my best.
And so off I went, and I actually managed quite an extended nap as, as rccap told me later, the rest of my team totally over thought that puzzle and in so doing got stuck at what should have been the simplest step. Which is to say while they'd figured out what the rest of the puzzle was doing and how it had to work, they could not for the life of them assemble the initial star.
Actually in retrospect I feel quite justified in my nap, after all isn't that pretty much what Katniss herself spent most of book 3 doing?
Either way, all very pleased when we finally finished and could move on although a bit chagrined to realize that we were now dead last.
Next up the Marine Corps War Memorial where we were handed a collection of small flags. While initially incomprehensible, soon evident that we were going to need information off the memorial itself so a lot of time spent wandering in circles around it while muttering to ourselves.
Actually managed to find the solution to this one fairly quickly which was a good thing as after hitting rock bottom on the last one it gave us a much needed morale boost. While we may have arrived last, we were not the last to depart and that's our only real team goal.
Next up Washington DC, we'd done what we could in the districts, it was time to storm the city and the leader of District 13 had some inspiring words for us.
Managed to find street parking a block or two from the Mall and set off towards the Smithsonian, home of some of the county's finest free bathrooms!
Our immediate needs taken care of we headed towards the appointed location only to be waved onward toward the Capitol building, apparently everyone had finished storming the city and had moved on to storming the Capitol itself.
Easy to spot our fellow teams as we approached the reflecting pool, this because while tourists fluttered around taking photographs and looking relaxed and happy, Famine Game participants were hunched tightly over their clipboards, hair and clothing in in a disorderly state and a half crazed look in their eyes.
Located a piecekeeper (who wasn't looking all that better rested) and acquired our next puzzle which turned out to involve mazes or lasers, or matching, or... really it's all just a blur. What I do know was that it was a pod, and that it, and all of the puzzles that followed, were President Snow's last ditch attempt to keep us at bay.
When we finished this one we moved on to the next, which was an iPOD, and involved apps. And from there we moved on to another and another and another, all in a tight area at the foot of the Capitol building.
Every so often we'd receive another inspiring communique for the illustrious leader of District 13.
Despite the close proximity, some difficulty finding one or two of the puzzles, fortunately in at least one of these cases our app helpfully detailed exactly where to go, right at the base of a statute that nobody had ever heard the proper name of. Hey wait, there's an app for that.
Opened up Ingress and sure enough, it was a portal. Even better, it was a conveniently located portal. See Ingress totally has useful real world applications!
Kept solving and with each successfully solved puzzle we got closer and closer to the Capitol building where President Snow was waiting.
Eventually we found ourselves, meta in hand, on the steps of the Capitol itself. (Amusingly every once in awhile a tourist would stop photographing the Capitol building and instead take a moment to photograph us and our fellow teams, apparently even the mundanes could tell that something was going on.)
Did you know that a pangram (in addition to being the fictional country whose capital we were attacking), is a type of sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once? We didn't either. But now that we do we can more properly appreciate the way they finished things off. Remove every letter of the alphabet from the solution words, assemble a handful of key terms, and anagram the leftovers (we'd bet money that there was actually some very elegant ordering method, but as I've said before, figuring out the ordering method isn't one of our strengths).
And just like that we'd done it, we'd found "AN END TO FAMINE" and triumphant we rushed off to confront President Snow.
Foiled, he bowed to our superior intellect, handed us a souvenir rose, and suggested that as the best way to end famine was to go eat, that we join our fellow tributes at Nando's Peri Peri for a feast.
This sounded like an excellent plan.
Back at the van we convinced a random stranger to take a team photo and then said our goodbyes to James who had somewhere else he had to be.
One last communication from the leader of District 13 and we were done.
Yes, yes we do.
Aftermath
The after party was great fun, the food was very tasty and while sleep deprivation and an open bar can't have possibly been a good idea, the sangria proved far too tempting to resist. Lots of fun to catch up with all our friends and swap stories. It had been a phenomenal event!
Piled into the van one last time and back to the hotel, thank god we'd all opted for Monday morning flights instead of trying to head straight home (DFA was crazy for driving straight home!). As nobody interested in getting up early to clean the van took care of it right away and still managed to pack and be in bed by 6pm.
15 hours later I begrudgingly dragged myself out of bed and bleary eyed onto a plane, apparently I'm getting old.
While I had ostensibly taken the day off, I still had a night class I had to teach (my design challenge team). Fortunately Game Control had handed me lesson plans on Saturday in the form of the Xbox puzzle. My kids were going to adore it. (And indeed they did. Even better how awesome to watch seven high school students who had never even heard of a cryptogram figure out how to solve one without any intervention. I was really proud of them and they had such fun that they demanded another puzzle the following week.)
Fast forward to Halloween, and puzzles in general and the Famine Game in particular the talk of the night at my annual pumpkin carving party. The video of me being brutally murdered by Captain Crunch had made the rounds amongst attendees and rccap bowed to popular pressure and created a Captain Crunch themed pumpkin that he then proceeded to terrorize me with. Don't worry, I got my own back.
In closing I'd just like to take one more opportunity to say THANK YOU to Game Control for putting together such a fantastic Game. I hope you had as much fun producing it as we had playing it (and that you look back on this adventure fondly enough that in a few years you consider producing another).
In all seriousness, my team and I know first hand just how much work goes into producing an event of this magnitude (and in contrast what we did was small potatoes, half the teams and not a lot of original (to us) content). While I'm sure there were a number of little things that made you wince, or that you might secretly think you could have done better, allow me to assure you that you're wrong. This Game was fantastic and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for putting your regularly scheduled lives on hold to make it happen.
Back to Part 1
We'd realized over the course of the last few puzzles that while we certainly felt like one of the slowest teams, we weren't actually all that far behind Snout and DFA. Resolved to start keeping track of the time differential between us. Starting the clock when we began work on a puzzle and stopping the clock when our opposition departed. While we weren't gaining ground, we also weren't losing ground, and quite a morale boost to record nearly identical times at back to back puzzles.
A bit disconcerting to find that it had gotten dark while we were in the Kennedy Center, but no matter, set off for our next location, some sort of a community center at the edge of a small forested area.
Tragedy struck as we were getting out of the van; Mark dropped his laptop. Not a simple drop, but rather a forceful, high velocity crash onto concrete. Picked it up off the ground and attempted to boot it. No dice. Thank goodness it was a very old laptop that he was in the process of replacing, but still. Alas, far too dark to attempt laptop surgery so put away to be looked at in the light of day and after some sleep.
For a variety (of security) reasons, we'd been unable to get the application on James' machine, so a scramble to figure out a solution and half the team set to solving the laptop problem (and reentering all of our solution words) while the rest of us started the next puzzle.
Said puzzle first involved following a piecekeeper into the forest where we were handed a pair of limb trimmers and pointed at a tree from which hung a series of gray paper lanterns. Tracker jacker nests and we had to cut one down! This right here was the kind of detail that made this Game great. We would have thought nothing of it had they simply handed us a tracker jacker themed puzzle but instead they took us out into the woods and made us retrieve one for ourselves. Wallowing in theme, this is exactly the thing I love most about the Game.
Retrieved our puzzle carefully lest it include a nasty surprise and made our way back to the porch of the community center where we spread everything out and got to work. The actual puzzle consisted of a honeycombed word search grid and a series of bees each of which had a word or two written on them.
The words on each of the bees were cluing another word or phrase, specifically one that had the "bee" word/sound in it. These new words could each be found in the crossword grid with the cutout bees taking the place of the letters that made the bee sound. Things progressed faster at this point, with half of us working backwards by scouring the grid for obvious words.
When we were done we'd managed to place each of the bees on the grid and the letters each bee was on top of gave us further instructions as to what to do next.
Probably there was an ordering method for the letters, likely it was even an obvious one but we resorted to our usual trick of writing the letter sequences on notecards and moving them around until we had a sentence.
Entered the solution into the app on a new laptop and the screen immediately freaked out, oh no, had we broken another one? Nope, that's the tracker jackers! All very pleased with joke.
Solution in hand we headed back to the van and off to our next stop, a game store. (I've decided that the reason that game stores show up as Game locations so often is that in addition to having lots of space (for gaming) you can also walk right into one, explain what you want, and what kind of crazy hour you want it and the owners don't look at you like you've lost your mind).
Awaiting us at this particular game store was the popular Settlers of Catan Pangram board game (and a bathroom! we love bathrooms!). Apparently someone had been called away from the game midway through but by studying the board, and the cards, we could easily determine what they'd been thinking.
Our next puzzle took us to a residential neighborhood. As it was getting to be quite late by this time crept quietly around the side of the house, doing our best not to make a single sound.
Apparently we needn't have bothered as no sooner had we arrived in the backyard than a great cacophony of sound erupted from a series of birds mocking jays arrayed along the fence.
Ok then.
Apparently this was a sound puzzle, and the birds along the fence would parrot back whatever it was that one said into a microphone attached to a bird located a short distance away in what turned out to be a fabulous tree house.
As I am nothing if not completely tone deaf, I was sent up the ladder to talk into the microphone while my teammates divided up the birds and attempted to record what they were doing. Each time I spoke the birds would parrot back my words in a specific order and in a higher or lower tone.
I was really glad to be on the speaking end of this one as my teammates did not seem to be having an easy time of it. There were eight birds in total, but two were "dead", complete with crossed out eyes, and at this point in the evening two had started malfunctioning so instructed to confirm our data with the onsite volunteers once we'd figure out what was going on.
There were six distinct patterns, repeated in order and once we had the data we headed inside the house to make sense of it.
Alas only five chairs at the table and as I'd opted for a pre-puzzling bathroom break, I missed out. Clearly this was a sign that while my teammates solved I should curl up on the couch and shut my eyes for a moment or two. While I didn't actually manage to fall asleep it was kind of nice to let everyone else sort it out without me.
After a fast stop at McDonald's as it was getting into the early hours and we'd completely missed our chances at a more appetizing meal, we found ourselves at yet another random house in yet another residential area.
A piecekeeper, well bundled up against the cold, was waiting for us and he led us into the back yard where we found a series of comfortable deck chairs from which we could watch the nightly display of fallen tributes.
Traditional music for the fallen was playing and as we watched an array of tributes were displayed on the screen before us, apparently it had been a bloody day. Each slide included the tributes' name, their cause of death and a picture of their deceased body, some of which were arrayed in quite unpleasant positions.
Displayed as they were on a field of stars, suddenly reminded that included amongst the items in our survival kit was an astrological chart (of the "what's your sign?" sort). Well that explains the uncomfortable death positions.
It was cold out so transcribed the data and headed back to the van to solve it. While we seemed to have a grasp of the basics, not quite sure what to do next and as it was proving hard for more than one or two people at a time to work on it in the confines to the van, opted to sacrifice a few fans in hopes that a hint or two might help us out.
This worked perfectly and before we knew it we were off to our next location, Denny's, another Game Control favorite.
We hadn't seen a lot of other people at our last two locations and would learn later that we'd skipped a puzzle (in actuality we'd skipped three, one in the early afternoon, and two in the evening hours, but as one of those puzzles had only been seen by a single team, we didn't feel too bad about ourselves).
Pulled into the Denny's parking lot just as Snout was heading inside, and while they had undoubtedly seen the puzzle we'd skipped, this was our chance to get ahead of them. Headed inside with renewed determination and were handed a box of "Capital Crisp Cereal" by Deanna.
Made ourselves comfortable at an empty table and had just placed our food order when DFA arrived.
This was our chance to get in front of BOTH teams. Turned our attention to the cereal box with renewed vigor. The box turned out to contain some foam peanuts (which were not part of the puzzle) and a bag of assorted cereal pieces. Like several of the puzzles we had encountered thus far, this seemed to be another example of a set of short puzzles with a minimeta.
Took some time to admire the cereal box itself which looked just like a real cereal box, rife with all sorts of interesting games and nutritional information, each of the different elements seemed to correspond to one of the types of cereal we had been given.
gizmoek and I tackled the lucky charms puzzle and quite amusing to hear us trying to figure out what each of the marshmallow shapes were. While we were fairly certainly they were supposed to be comets, they looked an awful lot like someone's thong and we did find one word choice that could have supported this supposition.
Despite the confusion we were doing well, the honeycomb puzzle fell almost immediately, followed by alphabits, lucky charms and trix. Despite being the easiest of the lot, froot loops wa last, and such a comparatively quick solve that we wondered if we'd done something wrong.
The mini-puzzles taken care of my team sent me off to pay the bill and turned their attention to the meta. It too fell at breakneck speed and they were done and packing up before I'd managed to hand over my credit card.
OMG, we'd done it! Both Snout and DFA still hard at work. Said our goodbyes to DFA (after all this was not something that was ever going to happen again) and headed out.
Back in the van we pulled up our new kill video to discover that this was a group kill in which the captains of several teams had been brutally murdered by (and in) the vicious "captain crunch". We were reliably informed that while all the members of the other teams effected had sucumbed to the same fate, our team had been miraculously spared, with only our captain (me!) killed.
Click to viewMy team was on the opinion that this was a fair trade and for the rest of the event used this as a prime opportunity to ignore anything I said that they didn't agree with.
Meanwhile, Haymitch had been watching our performance and he had a bit more advise, or at least a word of caution for us.
Our next stop was a high end kennel/pet daycare. Met at the door by a giant dog (ok fine, a person in a giant dog costume) and after barking to gain admission, escorted down the hall to the kennel runs where a series of adorably cute little stuffed dogs awaited us, each of the dogs were labeled with the name of the team to whom they belonged. Directed to find, and rescue, ours and then given a place to work in a small conference room.
Ran out to the van for a moment (to take some allergy meds as a kennel is probably not the kind of place where I should spend any great amount of time) and ran into DFA on their way into the building. Wasn't I supposed to be dead, and by the way if I hadn't seen my death sequence, I needed to as it was just about the best way to die ever. James was positively gleeful as he rehashed my untimely death with a frame by frame, blow by blow, narration.
Rejoined my team and discovered that our adorable little puppy was actually a mut(t)ation and close inspection revealed that someone had performed some sort of cruel surgery on it, leaving behind thick black stitches along its back.
Fortunately we'd earned cutting tools somewhere along the way, so after assuring our pup that we didn't mean it any harm and would give it a loving home, we cut open the stitches and pulled out strands of its DNA.
Here I should mention that someone had taken a lot of time to make sure that this puzzle was adorably perfect. While thematically it was enough (way more than enough) simply to have us rescue mutts from a cage, someone had taken the time to sew a small pink pocket into the back of each mutt such that when you pulled out the strands of paper on which the puzzle was written, it looked like you were pulling them out of their actual flesh. This is another example of the amazing attention to detail that was so prevalent in this event. We wouldn't have thought twice about reaching into their actual stuffing, or even of detaching a puzzle that was strapped to the outside of their bodies, but someone had actually taken the time to sew pockets into 24 stuffed animals.
Where Wartron was an eye opening experience with regard to learning how long it takes to mass produce a mere twelve copies of a physical puzzle, the Famine Game was equally eye opening as it drove home what DeeAnn said to me each and every time I started to feel stressed. "Teams won't miss what they don't know about." The counterpoint of course it that even six months ago I don't think I would have noticed (or at least remarked) on half of the amazing details that made this event so good.
I don't mean to say that teams didn't notice the details, I'm sure they did, but rather the details were integrated so seamlessly that unless you stopped to think about things, you often took for granted that things were the way they were simply because that's the way they were supposed to be.
Hats off to the Famine Game GC, I hope to one day produce an original Game that is even half as good as this one was.
But I digress, here it was the early hours of morning and we were sitting around a conference room table with a small stuffed dog and a slew of paper strips upon which had been written (typed and photocopied this time though we wondered at first if this puzzle had been customized for each team) a series of letters that contained the names of all of the teams interspersed with the names of a variety of different dog breeds. (Ours was the longest strip!) Each strip also contained a handful of random letters which turned out to be the letters used in genetic coding and in order to solve this puzzle we had to combine these letters in such a way as to form a particular thing.
While I was more than capable of spotting team names and dog breeds (apparently that subscription I had to Dog Fancy as a small child was useful for something other than serving as a hint to my mother). I was no help at all when it came to assembling DNA. Fortunately this is why we have jagheterlelle , and whether she was actually the one to finally solve it, I firmly consider this type of puzzle to be HER problem (not mine).
Getting pretty late by this time and as the morning shift would be arriving shortly, the kennel employees were starting to hope we would soon be done. As they had been more than patient with our insanity, headed out to finish solving in the van. (I am going with the assumption that GC must have known the owner or even an employee of that particular kennel as I can't for a moment imagine the conversation that would have otherwise transpired as they tried to explain who they were and what they wanted to a complete stranger.)
With that puzzle solved, we'd done it! We were the last team alive in the arena! We could go home and (with the tragic exception of myself), we would live. Except, what's this? A communique from president Snow? It wasn't over? Far from it? We were now to turn on each other and battle it out until only one of us remained?
Oh, ok.
NO! No don't do it. A frantic communication from Haymitch, we should proceed to the next location as indicated, but we were not under any circumstances to start murdering each other (though he certainly understood why we might want to).
The next location turned out to be a small private school, located on the first floor of a fairly non-descript office building. Lots of vans were in the parking lot and heading inside we found groups hard at work at tables in a central gathering area.
Apparently we had entered "the clock" (we'd made it to the 2nd book!), a devilish arena designed to kill us all.
One of the piecekeepers on duty welcomed us, handed us a tag with our team name on it, and proceeded to explain the rules of this new arena.
Apparently in the rooms around us we would find 12 unique challenges that we would need to overcome in order to escape. In the main room there was a timer that marked 15 minute increments. We could visit any room we wanted but at the conclusion of the 15 minutes we had to exit the room and could not return again until we had visited all of the rooms at which point we could visit whichever rooms we pleased. While not everyone had to be in any given room, we could not visit multiple rooms at the same time.
Some of the rooms were designed for a single team at a time, others were open to multiple groups at the same time and yes, we were welcome to take photographs of what we found in each room.
A quick glance at the timer revealed that there were only 3 minutes left before the next rotation, and while that didn't seem like anywhere near enough time to actually solve a puzzle, rccap and gizmoek of the opinion that it was still worth darting into one of the rooms so we at least had an idea of the kinds of things that would await us.
As there was a room with an open door only a few feet away, this seemed like a fair strategy, so rushed inside and found 3 monkeys hanging from the ceiling each of which with a short poem attached to its chest.
Not much time to do anything other than photograph the three of them and make note of the fact that since monkeys were in fact one of the things in the actual clock arena (in the books), that we would likely be encountering the other ones as well. Our attempts to recollect what those might be were interrupted by the sound of some sort of a dying animal. Apparently that was the signal that the 15 minutes were up so we dutifully trotted back into the lobby and selected the next open door.
This was a one team at a time kind of room and Inside we found a member of Game Control who explained the rules of the room.
Apparently we were to defeat the evil AI (who spoke with Glados' voice), we could only use our bodies and the few materials (some plastic tubing, a jug of water and some play-doh) that they had provided us with. He would stay to observe the process (not I suspect to prevent cheating, but rather because this particular challenge had to have been hilarious to watch).
Looking around the room we noticed 6 distinct metal plates, two each with three different markings on them that were clearly connected into the computer at the center of the room. Two of the marks were particularly close together and some fast experimentation determined that by placing a hand on each one, one could use their body to complete a circuit and register success on the central computer.
Ok, not so hard. Another set of plates were located on the floor across from each other and by laying on the floor and holding hands, gizmoek and I could just reach the two of them.
Turned our attention to the last set, while one of these was on the floor, the other was set high on the wall on the opposite side of the room and there was no way that Mark and James could bridge that distance with their bodies alone. Started over to look at the contents of the table and Mark lifted the pitcher of water half heartedly when someone suggested we just connect them all together.
Would that work?
rccap went back to touching the two adjacent wall plates and gizmoek and I laid on the floor, one hand each on a plate and the other on one of his ankles.
Yup, that would work.
Actually positioning ourselves so that the five of us were touching took a bit more doing and I ended up with one hand on the plate, one hand on James' ankle and my foot intersecting with rccap. jagheterlelle was unable to help as she had been assigned the task of dealing with the computer and she called out helpfully to let us know which circuits were and weren't connected.
The end result was a lot of laughing interspersed with cries of pain as rccap attempted to solve the problem of the circuit not quite being connected through the simple expedient of stomping harder on my foot.
Apparently we were the first all human solve.
Triumphant, we exited the room only to discover that there was still a fair amount of time on the clock. Raced off to see what the next room had in store for us.
Apparently this next room was the paralyzing fog and the challenge consisted of us opening a series of locked containers each of which was secured in a different way and each of which contained a series of images that we needed in order to solve the puzzle.
Set to with gusto only to realize a few moments later that we were doing it wrong. The whole point of the paralyzing fog was that it was impairing our fine motor skills and we were to create this effect by donning heavy kitchen mitts.
Fortunately we hadn't actually gotten anywhere with the challenge, and dutifully donned our kitchen gloves the second we realized what we were supposed to be doing. Yup, this makes it harder. Indeed that 4 digit combination lock that had seemed merely irritating now seemed downright impossible.
Managed to get about half of them open before we ran out of time, and proceeded dutifully to the next room where we were separated into two teams and placed on either side of a great divider. The one rule of this room was that we were to keep our butts in our chairs at all times. We each seemed to be looking at a wall of "clinging vines" each of which contained an image. Talking back and forth over the divider determined that these images could be paired and very thankful that we could photograph them, this was definitely a puzzle for later.
Our next room featured a giant flashing bolt of lightening and while James, jagheterlelle and I tackled it, the rest of the team turned their attention to some of the pieces we'd been picking up along the way.
While we managed to determine fairly quickly that the lightening was spelling something out in braille, a bit of a trick to focus on the six corners. The other half of the team had solved the monkeys and had turned their attention to the clinging vines by the time we'd managed to sort it all out.
Next up blood rain (which consisted of strands of red LED lights hanging from the ceiling) and then killer robots. As both of these rooms were pretty dark, a bit hard to multitask, half of the team working on the new puzzle and the rest finishing up an older puzzle, but we managed it, crouching on the floor by the door, or huddled around the light of the laptop.
The next room we entered had a bunch of CDs laid out on the counter, one of which was labeled with our team's name. Popping it into the laptop we were rewarded with a bunch of random tracks of people begging for help or otherwise expressing horror.
Hey wait a second, that's ivo_b - this was our own personal jabber jay puzzle!
Track 3 | Track 5 | Track 11
Back in August when Game Control had requested pictures and the like, they'd also asked us for contact information for our "next of kin". As I was fairly certain that my mother wasn't quite the person they were looking for, and rccap was going to be with me, and would thus need his own "next of kin", I'd asked ivo_b if he'd be willing to play along and then promptly forgotten all about it.
Apparently they'd been in contact and the result was a series of tracks recorded in the voices of people we knew and cared about. Going through the recordings I identified ivo_b's voice on three of the eleven tracks (it probably helps that he has such a distinctive accent, as nobody else recognized any of the voices). Actually have we confirmed? Was ivo_b the only one of our next of kin they used, or are the rest of you just terrible at recognizing the voices of your friends and relatives?
Getting on towards dawn at this point and my teammates showed no sign of stopping. James and rccap had flat out stated that they weren't planning on sleeping and everyone else said they'd get around to it "later". As this later, or rather the idea that later might come all at once was a bit disturbing to me, my inner OCD team captain was rearing her ugly head. My team seemed to have these puzzles well under control and we were going to need coherent drivers later which meant that SOMEONE should be sleeping, and since they wouldn't, I needed to do it for them.
Took myself off to the van and managed about an hour of sleep before curiosity got the better of me, I was missing things. (I think I should at least get points for trying.)
Headed back in and found my team sitting at a table in the main room trying to crack the meta. They'd solved all but one of the clock puzzles and gizmoek and jagheterlelle were in the appropriate room finishing it off as we spoke. The puzzle in question was apparently called insect swarm and involved a large number of small plastic bugs.
I'd brought in snacks (healthy stuff like cheese, grapes and apple juice), so dumped them in the middle of the table and got myself caught up on what I'd missed: deadly beasts (mutant beanie babies), snowstorm (paper snowflakes), and flash flood (water noises).
My team had been working on the meta for awhile (according the the instructions we'd been given, we could request it once we had 9 solves), and had made some good progress. So by the time gizmoek and jagheterlelle returned with the last solve we'd cracked it (hint: that's not semaphore) and soon after we had a solution.
We'd done it! We'd escaped the clock arena! The instruction in our app told us to make our way discretely down the hall, to slip through a door marked "Capitol Employees Only", and to make our way up a flight of stairs.
Did as told (as sneakily as possible), and halfway up the stairs we encountered a Game Maker. Oh no, this was it, we were doomed! We'd be brutally murdered and our bodies shipped back to our families in cardboard boxes.
But, no, what was this. He wasn't turning us in? Quite the opposite, he was beckoning us closer. It appears he'd wanted us to escape and now that we had he was sending us to District 13, where we'd be safe and from where we could help to overthrow President Snow.
Apparently we'd finished book 2.
"I feel kind of guilty," said rccap as we headed out the door and back to our van. "We pledged our allegiance to President Snow, and I don't really want to betray him. I wish he wasn't trying to kill us because I'd much rather help him."
Probably not a sentiment we should share once we got to District 13.
It had gotten light while we'd been inside so now clear to see what a disaster the van was, took a few minutes to clean it up before hitting the road again. (Though not before we took a moment to admire the souvenirs that festooned Team Snout's van. Were these the remains of the team they had so viciously run over with their van?)
District 13 was aparently headquartered at the offices of The Motley Fool; clever of them to hide in plain sight.
Headed inside where we received a warm welcome and were immediately inducted into the way of life in District 13. As said way of life was apparently quite heavily structured, to make sure that people didn't forget what they had to do and where they had to be, schedules were tattooed onto their arms each day.
Funny how my team, who hadn't shed a single tear when I was viciously murdered by a mutant cartoon character, now fell all over themselves to make sure everyone knew I was the captain. Interesting how the tables turn once the tattoo needles come out.
OK, fine, so they were temporary tattoos, my point stands.
In the end they tattooed several of us and then set us loose to enjoy life there in district 13. And really, while there were a few militant anti-capital rabble rousers hanging around, life in district 13 wasn't so bad. There was food (apparently I'm not the only one who likes to feed people vegetables in the middle of the night - or in this case in the early, early morning), some comfortable furniture, and no threat of imminent death. Quite frankly this was the most relaxed we'd been in ages.
Unfortunately it was also boring, now that we'd agreed to betray help defeat President Snow, we wanted action, we wanted bloodshed, we wanted glory! And yet here were were cooling our heels in District 13, surely there had to be some way to defeat our infernal schedules.
And then we noticed it, inconsistencies as to where we were supposed to be and for how long, there was a pattern, and by studying our new home carefully we were able to piece together enough of its secrets to get ourselves noticed.
While I'm not normally one to advocate for public recognitions, we were the victors of not one but two arenas so I suppose I shouldn't have been too surprised when a short while later we were asked to film a propaganda video to give hope to the oppressed denizens of all the other districts.
I don't want to toot my own horn here, but we were amazing. Impassioned, enraged and melodramatic all in one 30 second soundbite. I only wish I could share the results with you here but alas while we were given a copy to take with us, we were so concerned that we not accidentally lose it or scratch it (as we were told we would need it later), that for safe keeping we tucked it inside the front cover of our rental car's owner's manual and then promptly forgot about it.
Actually that's not entirely true, I did look for it while we were cleaning out the car, but then someone handed me a CD and I assumed that that was the correct CD and so stopped looking.
One day, someone, somewhere, is going to be awfully confused.
But I digress, propos video made we hit the road again, we were off to the United States Air Force memorial to do reconnaissance work.
And this is where we floundered.
Pretty apparent that some skipping was going on as when we arrived at the air force memorial all sorts of teams (teams that we hadn't seen in hours) were wandering around and while we worked teams that we'd left behind at the clock began to catch up and then overtake us.
It's funny, months later I'm still feeling a little bit guilty about this one as I was absolutely no help at all to my team. Indeed I didn't even try to help with this one but rather wandered off and took a nap in the van. What a great team captain I am.
In my defense, I realize now that the reason I did this was that when we arrived I ended up getting waylaid by a member of another team and in the process of talking to them, I accidentally saw their puzzle and thus felt I had to recuse myself. Add in the fact that I'd been spending a significant amount of time in an enclosed space with rccap (who had spent most of Friday evening trying to pretend he didn't have a cold) and the fact that I'd spent an hour hanging out at a boarding kennel (because I wasn't smart enough to go take a nap THEN), and I was definitely not feeling my best.
And so off I went, and I actually managed quite an extended nap as, as rccap told me later, the rest of my team totally over thought that puzzle and in so doing got stuck at what should have been the simplest step. Which is to say while they'd figured out what the rest of the puzzle was doing and how it had to work, they could not for the life of them assemble the initial star.
Actually in retrospect I feel quite justified in my nap, after all isn't that pretty much what Katniss herself spent most of book 3 doing?
Either way, all very pleased when we finally finished and could move on although a bit chagrined to realize that we were now dead last.
Next up the Marine Corps War Memorial where we were handed a collection of small flags. While initially incomprehensible, soon evident that we were going to need information off the memorial itself so a lot of time spent wandering in circles around it while muttering to ourselves.
Actually managed to find the solution to this one fairly quickly which was a good thing as after hitting rock bottom on the last one it gave us a much needed morale boost. While we may have arrived last, we were not the last to depart and that's our only real team goal.
Next up Washington DC, we'd done what we could in the districts, it was time to storm the city and the leader of District 13 had some inspiring words for us.
Managed to find street parking a block or two from the Mall and set off towards the Smithsonian, home of some of the county's finest free bathrooms!
Our immediate needs taken care of we headed towards the appointed location only to be waved onward toward the Capitol building, apparently everyone had finished storming the city and had moved on to storming the Capitol itself.
Easy to spot our fellow teams as we approached the reflecting pool, this because while tourists fluttered around taking photographs and looking relaxed and happy, Famine Game participants were hunched tightly over their clipboards, hair and clothing in in a disorderly state and a half crazed look in their eyes.
Located a piecekeeper (who wasn't looking all that better rested) and acquired our next puzzle which turned out to involve mazes or lasers, or matching, or... really it's all just a blur. What I do know was that it was a pod, and that it, and all of the puzzles that followed, were President Snow's last ditch attempt to keep us at bay.
When we finished this one we moved on to the next, which was an iPOD, and involved apps. And from there we moved on to another and another and another, all in a tight area at the foot of the Capitol building.
Every so often we'd receive another inspiring communique for the illustrious leader of District 13.
Despite the close proximity, some difficulty finding one or two of the puzzles, fortunately in at least one of these cases our app helpfully detailed exactly where to go, right at the base of a statute that nobody had ever heard the proper name of. Hey wait, there's an app for that.
Opened up Ingress and sure enough, it was a portal. Even better, it was a conveniently located portal. See Ingress totally has useful real world applications!
Kept solving and with each successfully solved puzzle we got closer and closer to the Capitol building where President Snow was waiting.
Eventually we found ourselves, meta in hand, on the steps of the Capitol itself. (Amusingly every once in awhile a tourist would stop photographing the Capitol building and instead take a moment to photograph us and our fellow teams, apparently even the mundanes could tell that something was going on.)
Did you know that a pangram (in addition to being the fictional country whose capital we were attacking), is a type of sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once? We didn't either. But now that we do we can more properly appreciate the way they finished things off. Remove every letter of the alphabet from the solution words, assemble a handful of key terms, and anagram the leftovers (we'd bet money that there was actually some very elegant ordering method, but as I've said before, figuring out the ordering method isn't one of our strengths).
And just like that we'd done it, we'd found "AN END TO FAMINE" and triumphant we rushed off to confront President Snow.
Foiled, he bowed to our superior intellect, handed us a souvenir rose, and suggested that as the best way to end famine was to go eat, that we join our fellow tributes at Nando's Peri Peri for a feast.
This sounded like an excellent plan.
Back at the van we convinced a random stranger to take a team photo and then said our goodbyes to James who had somewhere else he had to be.
One last communication from the leader of District 13 and we were done.
Yes, yes we do.
Aftermath
The after party was great fun, the food was very tasty and while sleep deprivation and an open bar can't have possibly been a good idea, the sangria proved far too tempting to resist. Lots of fun to catch up with all our friends and swap stories. It had been a phenomenal event!
Piled into the van one last time and back to the hotel, thank god we'd all opted for Monday morning flights instead of trying to head straight home (DFA was crazy for driving straight home!). As nobody interested in getting up early to clean the van took care of it right away and still managed to pack and be in bed by 6pm.
15 hours later I begrudgingly dragged myself out of bed and bleary eyed onto a plane, apparently I'm getting old.
While I had ostensibly taken the day off, I still had a night class I had to teach (my design challenge team). Fortunately Game Control had handed me lesson plans on Saturday in the form of the Xbox puzzle. My kids were going to adore it. (And indeed they did. Even better how awesome to watch seven high school students who had never even heard of a cryptogram figure out how to solve one without any intervention. I was really proud of them and they had such fun that they demanded another puzzle the following week.)
Fast forward to Halloween, and puzzles in general and the Famine Game in particular the talk of the night at my annual pumpkin carving party. The video of me being brutally murdered by Captain Crunch had made the rounds amongst attendees and rccap bowed to popular pressure and created a Captain Crunch themed pumpkin that he then proceeded to terrorize me with. Don't worry, I got my own back.
In closing I'd just like to take one more opportunity to say THANK YOU to Game Control for putting together such a fantastic Game. I hope you had as much fun producing it as we had playing it (and that you look back on this adventure fondly enough that in a few years you consider producing another).
In all seriousness, my team and I know first hand just how much work goes into producing an event of this magnitude (and in contrast what we did was small potatoes, half the teams and not a lot of original (to us) content). While I'm sure there were a number of little things that made you wince, or that you might secretly think you could have done better, allow me to assure you that you're wrong. This Game was fantastic and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for putting your regularly scheduled lives on hold to make it happen.
Back to Part 1