A pirate's life for me

[darcydodo]

I played this weekend in the Pirate BATH game, which started at Coyote Point (a little ways below SFO), went all the way down to Watsonville, approximately, and then headed back up the 1 to somewhere around Devil's Slide. This game was different than others I've played in for a couple of reasons — first of all, we got to sleep. Yay! My body failed to take much advantage of this, because I woke up after about four hours of sleep, but in theory it was nice, and even four hours is better than none. Also, we were camping near the ocean (probably why I woke up so early), so apart from the whole tiredness issue I didn't mind being awake too much — I could listen to the waves breaking, and I got to catch a glimpse of the sunrise (only a glimpse because it was behind the trees) and hear the chirping of crickets suddenly and magically be replaced with the chirping of birds.

I spent the first day dressed as a pirate, which was great at the opening of the game when lots of other people around me were dressed as pirates but by the time I was walking along the Santa Cruz boardwalk looking for particular arcade signs made me a bit conspicuous in the crowd. I didn't mind too much, though.

Another reason this game was different is that the majority of the clues were written by the teams playing. This allowed us to indulge in a wonderful guessing game of which-team-wrote-this-clue? By and large, we were totally off, although Ian did correctly guess at the Burninators' clue. Most of the clues were piratey in some way or another, and what's wonderful is the spread of pirate-ness that managed to get covered. Blood Skull & Bones used a message in a bottle plus some (helpful, which I initially read as "hateful") flotsam; the Burninators SS Pancake Wagon used eyepatches; XX-PiRated used knot-tying; Golden Booty used skulls and daggers; Briny Deep used walking the plank; Lowkey (who were divided up into donkey in a pirate hat and sloth in a pirate hat) used being stuck on a deserted island and treasure chests and eel-infested waters and things; someone used pieces of eight; someone else used sea shanties; two teams (including ours) used the game battle-ship, but in entirely different ways, and the other team also used signal flags (a standard part of the puzzle-hunter's repertoire, but also nicely piratey). And there were plenty of other piratey themes too (given that seven other teams also wrote clues), I just can't remember what off the top of my head.

Many of the locations we went were pirate-y — on the other hand, many of the locations we went were places we'd just been for No More Secrets. I felt so sorry for the BATH GC, since they must have just been kicking themselves during the entire NMS game, at Memorial Park, at the Felton Covered Bridge, at the SS Palo Alto, and at sites where we were practically, if not exactly, in the same place as before. They were all so gorgeous that we didn't mind, of course. We did, however, use it as the subject of our scathing poem that we wrote to insult Captain Bloodbath and get a special doubloon:

With Bloodbath we sought to explore
And plunder for booty galore,
But the map was the same
As a previous Game —
We've been on this voyage before!

Once again, I brought my camera but failed to take any pictures. *sigh*

In addition to the eighteen (well, kind of seventeen plus a meta plus a meta-meta, but that's another story) main puzzles, there were some other cool things going on:

We got one or two or three mini-puzzles at every site in addition to the main puzzles, and while many (though not all!) of them were very simple, they provided good things to do in the car. I was navigating, though, so got to do many fewer of them than Ian or Michael; Corey, on the other hand, was driving, and so didn't really get to do any at all. Occasionally my humanities background and even general upbringing were useful — one mini-puzzle consisted of indexing into the names of famous artists, bits of whose paintings were shown, and I knew almost all of them (and could call my parents with a precise question to find out one name I'd forgotten), and one main puzzle even seemed utterly trivial to me but apparently would have been much harder for the rest of the team. On the one hand, I kind of don't believe that; on the other hand, I did see some evidence of that in other teams. Which leads me to the next cool thing...

A barter economy! At the beginning of the race, they'd given us a pouch of skulls, which were worth points. Now, they said we could do with them what we liked, but they suggested we might wish to gamble with other teams or bribe them with skulls. They also said that we would need a fair number for the first evening, when there would be a pirate carnival. (The carnival ended up consisting of petanc, liar's dice, a game of haggle, and firing a cannon.) So we didn't really do anything with our skulls on the first day, though we heard later that some other teams had indeed been exchanging skulls. The second day, though, after the carnival was over, the skull-trading economy really boomed. For us, it started when coed astronomy Mateys and Wenches with Astrolabes phoned us and suggested that whichever of us first figured out how to solve the current puzzle (which was taking a long time and being tricky) sell a hint to the other team. Well, we solved the puzzle first and sold them their hint for five skulls, and for a while that was that, but a bit later in the morning hints started to be sold right and left, and we made out like thieves pirates. As Corey later said, probably the optimal strategy for making skulls would be to solve a puzzle quickly, drive to the next site and get that puzzle, and then drive back to the previous site and solve the next puzzle there while selling hints for the previous puzzle. Of course, the extra driving time would probably kill one, but from the perspective of greed it would totally have worked.

We had a big long discussion last night after we got back about hint-systems and scoring and timing issues and what different levels of team like; this is entirely standard after every game, but sometimes it's prompted by what one didn't like in a game, whereas last night it was pretty much prompted by feeling that the BATH GC had done a really good job on all fronts.

Comments

[cuthalion.livejournal.com]

Hooray!

The route overlap with NMS (and puzzle overlap! The broken boardwalk clue replaced a sudoku cube puzzle we had half finished by NMS) was much less of a worry than that we'd be completely overshadowed by such a fantastically well put together event so close before. I think the diametrically opposed themes (old-timey pirates, vs computer security) really saved us here.

Thanks for liking it! :D

[darcydodo]

(I deleted the original anonymous post of your comment.) Have you noticed that the red X deletion button looks awfully like the red X "NO" doubloon? :)

[neilfred.livejournal.com]

The route overlap with NMS was much less of a worry than that we'd be completely overshadowed

But nevertheless I do seem to recall some kicking-of-self over the repeated locations at the time. :)

The broken boardwalk clue replaced a sudoku cube puzzle we had half finished by NMS

Aha, so that's how you realized that the NMS cube puzzle was a sudoku as quickly as you did!

[cuthalion.livejournal.com]

I'd done another sudoku cube in ... I think, the Puzzle Boat?, but we never cut it out and folded it. I think that actually made it easier to have it flat.

[neilfred.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I'm sure it would have been much easier flat. Andrew and I actually started trying to transcribe it while you and Dzin were working on it, but we gave up pretty quickly since the way you kept moving it around wasn't very conducive to transcribing. :)

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

How did that work, with the teams writing puzzles for a location-based game like this? Because something like that collaborative style would allow for more puzzle activities to take place (like Iron Puzzler for instance).

[darcydodo]

The way it worked was that most of the locations were 100% pure clue-drop. However, the sites were thematic to the game (beaches, coves, etc.), so one didn't really notice. The only real location-based puzzle was a GC clue (it was the one on the Santa Cruz boardwalk), of which there were only two in the first place not counting the meta and the meta-meta. Also, a big thing was that teams weren't required to write a puzzle, but if there had been an overfull roster then teams that hadn't written puzzles were potentially in danger of being dropped. (That ended up not being an issue.) The result of this is that pretty much all of the clues were strong, since teams that didn't feel comfortable producing clues didn't have to. If all teams in a game were required to write a puzzle, there might be some weaker ones.

It's still a lot of work for GC, though.

[neilfred.livejournal.com]

Also worth noting that unlike Iron Puzzler, the non-GC-written clues were written well in advance and went through test-solves and revisions...

[jessicala.livejournal.com]

Pieces of Eight was ours (Bonny Wenches).

[alexandra-bath3.livejournal.com]

Yes, the choice of words on the Pieces of Eight clue was SEVERELY constrained since we had already written much of the metapuzzle (and the hidden meta) by the time we assigned words to the teams who were writing clues.

We did make one switch, on the BatShip clue, when it turned out that the word we gave them solved to nautical flags that were almost always in the same colors. But it was a b*tch to swap in another word and make three (yes, THREE) messages still work with the same meta data. It would have been very hard to do it again.

As for the overlap of clue sites, it didn't bother me at all, I was laughing to myself as we kept hitting duplicates, and had to bite my tongue when I walked across the Felton covered bridge behind Briny Deep, and Peter Sarratt said "Oh, this is cool." I was thinking "You'll see it again soon enough!"

I even recall lobbying to swap in the UCSC Long Marine Lab because it was an incredibly cool site, but Greg -while he didn't mind accidental overlap -wasn't about to do it on purpose (for which, I don't blame him). BTW, in the department of coincidences, a category of Jeopardy! clues taped at the Long Marine Lab was aired yesterday, I think.

As for the Rosicrucian Museum, I believe we selected that because the Pieces of Eight clue used a Caesar shift, and when we scouted the Rosicrucian, we came across a statue of Caesar - that sealed the deal :-)

The broken boardwalk clue could have been playtested at home - all we needed to do was take a set of the original site photos, compare them to the clue photos that had been altered, and we would immediately have spotted the three (yes THREE again) mistakes.

The clue was supposed to read like this:

B - BL - LO - OO - OD - DB - BA - AT - TH - H
C - O - C - K - H - O - R - S - E - S

but instead it solved to this:

B - BL - LO - OO - OD - DB - BA - AT - TH - H
C - HO - C - K - H - O - R - A - TH - S

We had one image where both an H and an O were photoshopped out, when only the O should have been. In the next pair of images, an A was erased, instead of an S. And then the TH image was duplicated, when the actual photo should have shown a missing E from the same sign.

CHOCKHORATHS - yes indeed! Oddly, Golden Booty actually figured out the answer word was COCKHORSES. Most other teams thought it was COCKROACHES.

One of the reasons that the game was as error-free as it was, was that we double- and triple-checked our own, and each other's work. For the first - oh - seven and a half months :-) But we wrote that clue at the last minute...and it seemed so simple, I opted to spend three hours making the duckie & crossbones banner the night before the game, rather than playtesting one of the 18 major clues in the game. What was I thinking????

A lesson for anybody ever contemplating running a game - any clue, no matter how simple, that you don't playtest - WILL come back to bite you. Guaranteed.