The Next Chapter

Hi all,

It's time for the next Great America Race, and we've moved over to a new blog to chronicle our adventures in 2013. You can find it at http://teambsb2013.blogspot.com/.  We're public from the start this year, so unlike in past years, you should be able to set it up to follow us in your favorite RSS reader.

See you over there!

Rich

Rachel's Race Ramblings

Mom and me

I offered to chime in on the blog to provide the perspective of someone who played on a less hardcore level. My mom and I formed a two person team. We both like road trips and we saw this as a road trip with a bit more pizazz. We were in it purely to have fun and spend some time together.

First off, we had a great time and hopefully will be playing again next year with the rest of the family if the guys can get the vacation time off. The fact that we’re already looking forward to next year is probably the best endorsement. Also, I should mention that my 61-year-old mom had never done puzzles before (short of the sample one on the Ravenchase website) and she thoroughly enjoyed herself. Here are some of the other things I really enjoyed.

I inadvertently learned quite a bit about American History. Most of the cities we’d visited, I’d been to at some point (although in some cases it was nearly 2 decades ago). However, the puzzles brought us to new locations and landmarks that I hadn’t seen before. They also made me look at them, read about them and learn more about them than I otherwise would have. :)

Stella!

The puzzles for the most part were quite fun. I loved that we typically got several at once and could then plan out our day as we wanted. Since my mom and I weren’t playing as competitively as some the other two teams, we took some time to see some of the other sites around and enjoy ourselves. 

My s'mores cupcake was delicious, but also huuuuge!

The selection at Crumbs was daunting.

It was nice that there were often two sets of puzzles on a given day. I did not feel the need to solve the second set of puzzles (thought my mother who is more competitive than I am would have liked to) and it was nice to have a sense of completion after finishing one set without the need to do more unless it was desired. I liked that most of the city exploring was done on foot or with public transit. We didn’t have to worry about our stuff in the car or worry about parking in cities we weren’t familiar with.

Taking some time to see the sights in Central Park.

I really liked the audio clues for the drives. Since there was driving between cities, this was great! Plus since many of them were identifying quotes or songs, the driver can join in, too. Most of the clues were paper clues although they almost all interacted with the environment. Given that you’re walking around quite a bit, I can’t really complain about that since I wouldn’t want to be carrying around a whole bunch of junk. They were designed nicely and I liked how they were presented in scrolls. That being said, the skull was super cool and I loved that :) I loved interacting with the real characters. We soon go to recognize people in red and started wondering if everyone wearing a red shirt was part of the race :) But this really added to the immersive nature of it.

This guy was not part of the race but he was there when we picked up the skull so you can see why I thought he might be.

Overall we were happy with the quality. There was the occasional typo in the puzzles although as we were doing them, we quickly learned to recognize what made sense and what didn’t. None of them were OMG-I-was-going-down-the-wrong-path-for-hours type errors. Josh was very responsive for hints. He could be contacted both on the phone and via text so getting hints was not a problem and allowed us to continue moving throughout the day. I like that we had an end location each night and could do our own thing for hotels. We even got to crash at my brother’s in Manhattan for one of the nights. I also liked that we started at 10 am. It gave time to have a nice breakfast and relax in the morning, especially since this was still supposed to be a vacation.

Sadly we didn't have time to catch this . . .

Now that I’ve mentioned all the things that I really enjoyed, in the interest of sharing the full experience, there were a couple of bumps.

• At times my mom and I felt like a second class team. Although we had paid for the full race, we had to miss the first two legs and we didn’t end up doing the last day due a family emergency (everything is okay now, for those curious). I think it’s a great option that teams don’t have to do the entire 7 days which can be overwhelming, especially for n00bs. Not sure if this was because we were more relaxed about the whole thing or because we were the only chicks, but either way it was probably the only disappointing part.
• The guys told us that the first two days had a bit more hand holding in the puzzles. Since we missed those two days, we were jumping into the puzzles without the type of puzzles that Ravenchase usually makes other than the start puzzle. This made us scratch our head at a couple of the answers until the methodology was explained to us. I think it’d be a great option to offer the puzzles throughout the race with the handholding for those (less competitive) teams that want it (though this would obviously disqualify them for the trophy).

As I mentioned, I hope to do this event again next year or whenever it runs again. This was probably the most fun my mom and I have had on a family vacation. I would love to see more teams doing it and can’t stress enough that you don’t have to be super hardcore and competitive to enjoy it. It seems to have had big improvements since the last time it was run so I’m sure it will only continue to get better!

Rich's Final Thoughts

A few days have passed since the Great America Race ended, and there have been a few miscellaneous topics kicking around in my head that I felt worth sharing, so I figured I'd cobble together one last post on this year's race.

Full Time Puzzle Hunting

The transition from puzzling every day for a week back to normal life was a big contrast.  It was so much fun to wake up every day with new adventures in store, knowing we'd be exploring a different city with lots of fun puzzles.  I guess I know now what it would be like to be a full time puzzle-hunter (if such a crazy job existed), and I think it would be lots of fun.  I also feel like exploring cities in the context of puzzling really diminishes the experience of just exploring cities for the sake of exploring for me.  It sure would be nice if there were puzzles to solve everywhere I went!

Apparently Dan's recovery period from the race has also included some puzzle-related nightmares... I'd like to hear more about those!

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere
(credit to Larry Hosken for this subheader)

Anyway... one of the big reasons that I chose to play in the race this year was to help along a lifetime goal I set for myself to play a puzzle hunt in every state in the US, and this trip allowed me to add four new ones: Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts! Below you can see my newly updated chart of the now 17 different states I've puzzle hunted in, and I'm excited that Josh has committed to run more races like this in the future, which should help a ton on my quest!

If you are curious (or, better yet, if you'd like to take on the same goal!), I've created a few ground rules for what it means for me to puzzle hunt in a given state.

1. The hunt must be open to the public and have more than one team playing, so no "quick, write a puzzle so I can count this state", nor can I count private events like hunts at birthday parties or weddings.
2. The hunt must involve multiple distinct locations, so conference room style hunts don't count, since really you could do those anywhere.
3. For a state to count, the hunt must have at least one puzzle destination in that state.  It is for this reason, for instance, that I can't count states we drove through as part of GAR (e.g. Delaware and Connecticut this time), even if we may have been working on driving puzzles at the time.

Can anyone reading this beat my current record of 17?

2007 GAR vs 2012 GAR

As the only person who played in both the first GAR and this one, I thought it might also be interesting to make some comparisons between the two.  As many know, my team had a few issues with the first GAR and sadly, probably ended up inadvertently discouraging quite a few West Coast teams from playing this time as a result.  I'm happy to report, however, that many of the issues we had the first time were considerably better this time around.

Let's take it category by category:

1. Hunt style.  Both GARs had the same basic Ravenchase feel - clues written on scrolls, all text presented as poetry, interesting clue-hiding gimmicks (heat, cold, invisible ink, blacklights, etc),  excellent environmental integration, and a lot of relatively hard core code-breaking.  All of this was a lot of fun both times.  However, in the first hunt, we ended up doing a lot more what we called "Easter egg hunts", where we would be in the right area, but then would spend a lot of time (sometimes over an hour!) just hunting for a tiny scroll hidden somewhere in a park or near a statute.  There was almost none of that this time, and I felt it was a huge improvement to spend more time solving puzzles and less time Easter egg hunting.  GAR II also made a lot more use of photos to help find locations, which was a lot more friendly when it came to seeking help from visitor's information centers or random passersby.  Advantage: GAR II.
2. Quality control.  The first GAR had at least one completely broken/unsolvable puzzle (e.g. the infamous "crackbrained" chess puzzle), and countless smaller, but ultimately non-critical errors in other puzzles (e.g. "THE GODDESH OF RICHMOND").   (Note that this does not include the issues I mentioned in decrypting Vigeneres that turned out to be our fault in my earlier Official Retraction post).  Coming from a community in which authors typically playtest every puzzle multiple times before putting it in front of the paying participants, we felt this lack of attention to detail to be a cardinal sin, and our biggest complaint about GAR I.  The good news in GAR II was that clearly playtesting had clearly been taken more seriously, though still not to the extent I would have like to have seen.  There were actually two broken puzzles this time, one on a driving puzzle that only my team saw (hard to criticize Josh for writing an extra puzzle just for us) and one that had a perfectly good explanation (the puzzle was written from a photoshopped version of the plaque we were looking at).  Several of the other puzzles, however, had issues that we were able to work through (e.g. the Annapolis meta grid, the final message that started "THE FIRS TWO COLUMS", the letter frequency puzzle using slightly the wrong text from the statue, etc), but would have and did significantly slow down teams with less experience in pushing through possibly broken messages.  In the end, I attribute most of these mistakes to the fact that Josh was working alone without someone to proofread his messages and vet his work.  One more set of critical eyes on all of this stuff, providing feedback at the specific letter-for-letter level on every puzzle could have made it much cleaner.  I guess overall, though, I'm willing to give Josh a bit of a pass given that this event was clearly operated at a huge loss, and there were so few players involved to make it worth his while to hire another person to help out, and there was evidence that some playtesting was done which was more than could be said about the first GAR.  This is still one area that I'd really like to see improved even more in GAR III (or The Iron Raven as the case may be).  For now, however, I give GAR II another win.  Advantage: GAR II
3. Scoring.  Another area that we found frustrating in GAR I was in how things were scored.  By assessing a time penalty when a team gave up on a puzzle, this essentially rewarded teams that quickly gave up on the more difficult puzzles compared to the teams that took the time to solve the puzzles.  Couple this with the fact that some of the puzzles were broken and/or unsolvable, it created a situation in which the first team to cry uncle would win.  I think we can all agree it isn't a great scoring system.  In GAR I, our team adapted as the week progressed, taking more of an effort to identify if a puzzle was difficult or possibly broken, and then punting immediately once we decided it might be.  This was the optimal strategy given the scoring system, but certainly not the most fun.  In GAR II, things evolved a bit differently where the competition wasn't as close, but had it been, I imagine this would have again been a source of frustration.  Any system in which giving up on a puzzle is an optimal strategy is a flawed one in my book.  Fortunately, in discussing this with Josh after the race, he seemed open to discussing better scoring systems for future races, like diminishing hint values over time, for instance, so I'm hopeful this will get much better in GAR III.  For now, however, this one was just as flawed this time as it was the first time.  Advantage: Tie
4. Locations.  The locations that were chosen in both GARs were great, as far as I'm concerned.  They were a great mix of famous locations and hidden gems that made it feel like we really got to see a great cross section of each city we visited.  Very well done both times, and this is one area that will keep me coming back for more any time this type of race is run.  Kudos.   Advantage: Tie
5. Inter-City Travel.  In the first GAR, most of the legs involved in doing all the puzzling in the city where you wake up, finish the leg, and then a long drive to the next city where you wouldn't start puzzling until the next day.  In GAR II, we had several legs that involved puzzling in multiple cities on the same day.  I think the days that involved puzzles in multiple cities were really fun, as it broke up the drive and made for a more full and balanced day of puzzling.  Unfortunately, I think it made it less likely that individual teams would play in a given leg unless they were doing the whole hunt, but I do hope to see more of it next time, perhaps even including a leg or two that is all by car with each clue site in the next city along the route.  Advantage: GAR II
6. Artistic impression.  The first GAR was written in multiple parts - the first half by Chris and Lisa from Richmond, and the latter half by Josh Wolak of Nashville.  The second GAR was written almost entirely by Josh Czarda, with some help from Natalie Parisi on the starter puzzle (at least) and the Jenners in Princeton.  It was easy to get a feel to the unique styles of each author, and all had things I liked and didn't, but all told, I think I liked Josh Czarda's style the best of them all.  He had quite a few very clever uses of the environment (like the manhole cover in DC, and the game pieces puzzle in Philadelphia), and showed a real knack for writing a very difficult puzzle with just information to make it possible to solve with enough persistence.   Advantage: GAR II

So, I'm happy to report that this year's hunt was better in just about every category, and with a few more tweaks, I'm confident that next year's can be even better!

Weeklong Hunts vs Overnight Hunts

One topic that came up several times among our team was whether we'd prefer to play in one of our typical West Coast overnight hunts (i.e. The Game), or a week long hunt like this one.  At one point in time I thought this would be a no-brainer answer in favor of The Game, but now I'm not so sure.

Here are a few things supporting the week-long format:

• You can cover far more ground, so you can go to much more exotic and interesting locations.  This is much more like a "puzzle vacation" than a Game.
• You get to sleep!  While we did get tired near the end of the week, it is nothing compared to fighting to stay awake in the middle of the night of a Game.
• Much more downtime and opportunity for bonding with your team than a typical Game.

And here are a few things in favor of the overnight format:

• You don't need to take as much time off of work, so it is much more accessible.
• It costs a lot less (hotel, van rental, time off, etc)
• If you aren't getting along with your teammates, it will all be over soon...

Note that I'm not using any arguments about the types of puzzles you might see in either one, since there isn't any reason one format or the other couldn't have a lot of overlap there - this is more about the inherent tradeoffs in the length of the game.

I guess what I'm realizing is that I really like the weeklong format, and if forced to choose between the two I would have a hard time deciding.  I would say that I would like to see more hunts in this format, but due to the cost and time requirements necessary, it would probably be difficult to do more than one (or maybe two) of these a year.  So really, I'm hoping that Josh comes through on making this happen every year!

In Conclusion

GAR II was a fantastic experience, and I can't wait for the next one.  I'd love it if we could get even more teams to come out and play and see first hand what it is like to be a full time puzzle hunter for a little while.  In the mean time, we need to start figuring out how to spend our months with the Iron Raven, so that's all for now, and I hope to see you all in next year's hunt!

Day 7: Boston

This morning we started at 11:00am for a change.  (Later we learned that Josh was having a spot of computer trouble and had to re-lay-out a bunch of puzzle material, which explains certain minor formatting glitches later on.)  We started where the swan boats operate in the Public Garden (a Boston park).  Alas, Rachel & company had a family emergency and couldn't play in this last day, so it was just us and the team Kangaroos Can't Jump.

Josh explained to us that, unlike previous days, today would be mostly linear with each clue leading to the next.  There would also be a set of nonlinear, independent bonus clues at scattered locations.  This was the inverse of the previous day in NYC (when we had a linear bonus track and a choose-your-path main set). Each bonus solve today was worth 30 minutes of time.

Josh also made sure we had our goodies.  We had actually misplaced our goody bag, so he gave us a replacement blacklight, which turned out to be critical (see later).

Much like yesterday's bonus track, today's main track contained some location hints, so we could make some guesses about where we could go.  We spent a little time at the start searching for them to get a head start on identification and navigation.  More importantly, we tried to nail down the location of today's scattered bonus clues, so that we could pick them up when they were in the area.

The clue packet also included a hotel card key for the nearby Park Plaza hotel.

Main track #1: Line of Statues

The first main track clue had four portraits of historical figures and this poem:

Near moving swans not living

These four man [sic] span a line

And there [sic] last names in this order

Shall fill the grid just fine

When you have this order

Zig Zag leads the way, that which you must find

For the next clue now in play

This was followed by a large box with scattered X's and a series of small boxes across the top.  This was a straightforward solve: The historical figures are all statues along one side of the park; their names fill the boxes at the top; reading the letters corresponding to the X's in vertical order yields the message "PREACHERS PROPHET OF".

We got stymied here for a while.  One of the statues was clearly of a preacher (with a Bible, etc.), and had an inscription including the phrase "PROPHET OF LIBERTY".  So we thought the answer was "LIBERTY", and we thought that would feed down into the chunk of crypto text below.  But we couldn't get it to decode.

But that was wrong.  Eventually Wei-Hwa convinced us (over my strong objections, I'm ashamed to admit) to move on to location #2.

Main track #2: Edward Everett Hale statue

The next clue included another photo of a historical figure (Edward Everett Hale) with a statue in the park.

This matched the flavor text "(My hat is off to you sir if you an crack the code!)".

His statue had the inscription "PROPHET OF PEACE", and indeed "PEACE" decrypted the Vigenere text.  This set up the pattern for the future; whenever a dotted line appeared between two sections on the page, that meant a physical walk from one site to the next, carrying some data through.  So after receiving "PREACHERS PROPHET OF", we were supposed to walk to this site, then extract the keyword and decrypt the text.  This carry-instructions-forward mechanism is novel to me, and an interesting change from "West Coast" style hunting -- you may know where you're going to go, but without solving previous clues you won't know what to do when you get there!

Anyway, we decoded our ciphertext to a long message circuitously hinting at the word "pollywog" (via the nautical term for sailors who have never crossed the Equator), and suggesting that we find a place where adult versions might be found.  This is clearly the Frog Pond in Boston Common.

So far this was all pretty straightforward.  On the way to the Frog Pond, we stopped off at our first bonus clue on the way.

Bonus: Minesweeper

The bonus clue included a picture of the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial in the Boston Common, a Minesweeper grid, and this poem:

A monument to those for whom

This duty was no game

Fill all the squares from A to U

And the answer you may claim

Near the S&S memorial is a small memorial to the North Sea mine sweepers.

The memorial was an actual sea mine (we presume the explosive had been removed!).  Filling the Minesweeper grid with text from the mine (with started with A and ended with the letter U) and marking off the letters corresponding to mines, you get an anagram of the word "BATTLESHIP".  I thought the use of the thematic location was cute.

Main track #3: Tadpole Playground

Back on the main track, we headed to the Tadpole Playground, near the Frog Pond, as clued by the decoded text from the last main track clue.

This clue was more complicated.  It started with an arch-shaped set of numbers: "1 3 5 7 9 11 13    15 17 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16".  These clearly corresponded to the letters "TADPOLE PLAYGROUND" in the arch.  There was also a pile of ciphertext.

This stymied us for a while!  Right away, we permuted TADPOLE PLAYGROUND with the numbers to get "TAAYDGPROULUENPDL".  We tried various extensions to that without too much luck.  Applying decrypto to the ciphertext didn't work, exactly, but it did produce some promising phrases.  Guessing that this would be an ambiguous cryptogram (a Ravenchase favorite), we worked back, and eventually figured out that we needed to fill out our permutation with a backwards alphabet (yes, this was clued... but obliquely) "TAAYDGPROULUENPDLZYXWVUTSR", using that as a substitution for the forward alphabet, and working through the ambiguous cryptogram to get a message something like this:

CXXVI FEET UNTO THE SKY

SEEK HERE FOR WHAT MM KNEW

HEADLESS ZOMBIE SHOWS A CLUE

RINGS HELD BY THEIR MAN

SHOW THE PATTERN TO IMPART

I'd like to point out here that starting ciphertext with a roman numeral is a little diabolical!  Also "headless zombie", what could that possibly mean?  Read on...

Main track #4: Headless Zombie

The Soldiers & Sailors memorial (the same one from the bonus -- we were probably "meant" to solve the bonus at the next main track site) is in fact 126 feet high.

After the requisite dotted line, the clue sheet included a diagram with a number of overlapping circles in various configurations with letters in each circle.  The decrypt from the last puzzle led us to search for "headless zombies", and we found this:

The pattern of rings (being handed out by some women in the frieze) matched some of the rings on the clue sheet.  Extracting the letters from those rings spelled "RM 1144".  We knew what to do next!

Main track #5: Hotel room

We headed to the Park Plaza hotel, and lo and behold, our key opened room 1144.  After the dotted line on the clue sheet was this poem:

A lock within a lock, needs a key within a key

To find the clues which wait within

Which leads you on to me

Here within this room you'll find

Six words that you will need

To crack the simple safe you find

And get what waits for the [sic]

Once you have the answer

Go there and use this code

And shall have the answer

To take you down the road

(It was like that when I got here, I swear)

Yay, a locked hotel room mystery!  As we're sort of poking around, Wei-Hwa berates us: "Haven't you ever ransacked a hotel room before?  Hurry up!"  We do things like use our trusty blacklight on everything in sight, and eventually we find a few things:

• The shaving mirror, when steamed with breath, had a phone number on one side, and "SEEK INSIDE THE LIGHT" on the other.
• Inside one of the lampshades, it said "BREATHE".
• On a mirror, we found the numbers 7, 1, 7, and 6.  This was written high enough that Rich found it before Wei-Hwa did!

We missed the biggest clue of all, which was apparently that the sheets had been written on in UV ink ("full on Monica Lewinsky style") in Pig-pen cipher.  Anyway we didn't get that.  But the safe combination was indeed 1776!  Inside the safe was a lovely cryptex:

The phone number led to a message which gave hints for the word to use: "A word which means Dutch castle, or possibly even Dutch stone".  We were trying various things, when Wei-Hwa was able to use his mechanical puzzle skills to figure out that the first few letters were "STE..."; from that, we got to "STEEN", Dutch for stone and the name of a particular Dutch castle.  The cryptex popped open:

Inside was a slip of paper with two lines of a wacky cipher made of circles with lines and smaller circles in it. On inspection, one of the lines was 26 symbols long, and turned out to be an alphabet.  After trying the wrong orientation first, we decoded it to "CRISPUS MAKES A POINT".  The actual cipher was reminiscent of the "swiss cheese alphabet" from the Googol hunt, if any of you remember that.

Main track #6: Crispus Attucks

Crispus Attucks has a monument back in the Boston Common depicting the Boston Massacre.  After the dotted line, the clue sheet had a series of numeric triplets (5-1-3, 3-1-3, 3-4-1, ...) which were a straightforward line-word-letter index into the plaque on the monument.  This spelled "NEARS SOUTH ST. STATION".

Bonus: Chinatown Gate

On the way to South Station, we picked up this bonus.  The clue showed a picture of one of the lions outside the Boston Chinatown gate, with this poem:

When you see this mythic creature

Turn yourself around

Assemble the sign of red found there

And a question will be found

Below that was a series of fragments of Chinese characters, each labeled with a letter.  Behind the lion was a red sign with the name of the park in English and Chinese.  Taking each character, identifying the fragments from the clue sheet that formed that character, and anagramming the associated letters yielded the phrase "NAME BUFFET NW OF GATE".

This created some consternation, because the obvious candidate was this buffet restaurant:

Unfortunately, the answer sheet for the bonus clues had an enumeration 7 letters long for this answer!

For a while we jokingly speculated that he might have mistook the name as "FLOT POT BUFFET" (based on the script text), but GC quickly confirmed that they had an error in the answer sheet and "HOT POT" was correct.  (A casualty of the rapid retyping of clue materials in the morning.)

Main track #7: South Station mural

Back on the main track, this mural is outside South Station:

On the clue sheet (after the dotted line!) was a detail from that mural, sliced into chunks and scrambled, with letters on the pieces.  Reassembling the detail to match the mural, the letters spell "NEARBY TREE OF KNOWLEDGE HAS KEY TO CODE TO LEAD ON NEXT".

Main track #8: Tree of Knowledge

The Tree of Knowledge is a Tom Otterness statue further on in the Greenway:

After the dotted line, the clue sheet has a painting of Eve, and this text:

From one bad beaver to the next...

Pounding your fist, to find the key

Might not help a bit, but a simple pound upon a key reveals

Words that are hit, 3 in all, repeated twice, less S upon the

end, help you back the code below and lead closer to the end.

Lengthy ciphertext follows.  This puzzle stumped us for a good half hour!  Meanwhile, the other team (the Kangaroos) showed up and left.  (After the game, we learned that they did indeed solve the puzzle, and felt really great about blowing by us.  At the time, we thought they had actually passed us -- but it turns out they had done things in a different order.)

We could tell that it was a reference to a plaque which gave a phone number and codes to enter (152#, 153#) to hear about the sculpture.  Eventually we realized that we should look for a three-word phrase repeated in the artist's description on the phone.  I don't remember the actual phrase, but it was a Vigenere key for the ciphertext.

Bonus: St. Anthony's Shrine

On the way to the next location, we stopped at a bonus location hinted by a picture of a crucifix and a poem.  This was St. Anthony's Shrine.  Matching some numbers with the text on the cornerstone generated the answer.  In a bit of cleverness, the number 8 (the 8th letter in the output) was sideways (like an infinity symbol), which meant to take the C on the sign and turn it into a U in the output, which was a phrase (that I forget) cluing "MACARENA".

Main track #9: Norman B. Leventhal Park

The ciphertext from the Tree of Knowledge gave us something like this message:

He surely was a beacon though often in a chair 

on a circle near the fountain his normal name is there

seek upon this marker in the temple park

as you get your bearings the code will spin your heart

The clue sheet had a Franklin postage stamp.  Based on the stamp we went to Post Office Square, now known as Norman B. Leventhal Park.  The rhyme refers to Leventhal, founder and chairman of the Beacon companies.  There is indeed a circular marker in this park.

The clue sheet also had a series of numbers, 188-164-....  These are compass directions indicating a position along the rim of the circular marker, picking out a particular letter.  The directions are a little approximate and our compass was none too precise, so picking this out was tricky.  (Text on the clue sheet basically said as much: "Variations May Occur.  With just a slight adjustment, the code you can infer.")

That decoded to a message which directed us to the neighboring Angell memorial.  This was confusing because the dotted line ran off the page with no further pages of clue sheet!  But the Angell memorial has a fountain, and floating in the fountain was a laminated card containing our next clue.  But first...

Bonus: Hungarian Revolution Monument

Todd was able to identify this from a tricky small detail photo, and it was near the final clue so we stopped by.

The clue sheet had this poem:

Find the place these hollow eyes

Now cast their empty gaze

Then count the "eyes" within each line

To shift the following phrase:

LJKSLCLPXH

Counting the number of "I" letters in each row on the plaque and using that to shift the ciphertext yielded the answer, "MONUMENTAL".

Bonus: USS Cassin Young

This bonus was quite a bit out of the way, so we confirmed with GC that we should go there.  By this point it was getting late, so GC advised us to skip it.  But this would have been the first puzzle we skipped!  Refusing to be stymied, we searched around online, and found this picture depicting awards won by the ship:

The clue sheet contained some of these awards, with letters at the corners.  Placing them in position on the display and reading the letters, it spelled the answer, "DECEMBER".

Main track #10: Angell Memorial

Back on the main track, this clue was quite a doozy.

Upon arrival, we found this laminated card floating in the fountain:

The dates on the fountain were "1823 - 1909", and the "6 words, upon the gentle spire" were "IN MEMORY OF GEORGE THORNDIKE ANGELL".

I will spare you our many wrong attempts!  We were finally reduced to confirming our approach with GC, who basically suggested we were on the right track, and closed with this:

Phone about to die.  Spoiler will be in mailbox.  Don't look if ya don't want it.

Wei-Hwa volunteered to take the bullet, read the spoiler, and then offer us nudges as needed.  Meanwhile, I went to a Starbucks to use the restroom and maybe grab a drink... while there, I suddenly had a realization and ran back sans drink to make sure Wei-Hwa hadn't spoiled us.  The realization was a minor tweak on our approach so far.  Details are tiresome, but here's the correct interpretation of the flavor text:

1 8 2 3 1 8 2 3

9 I N M E M O R

0 Y O F G E O R

9 G E T H O R N

1 D I K E A N G

9 E L L I N M E

0 M O R Y O F G

9 E O R G E T H

1 O R N D I K E

9 A N G E L L .

The numbers on the card look into the grid, for example "18" means to use the letter at the intersection of "1" (from the side) and "8" (from the top).  Note that the digits are not unique, which means any given number could be any of several letters -- an extremely non unique cryptogram.  Puzzling through that yielded this phrase: "FIRS TWO COLUMS ALIGN RAVEN WHEEL" [sic].

Another good way to stymie cryptogram solvers: Typos in the message!

The RAVEN WHEEL is the lovely codewheel they gave us way back in DC.  What that really means is to use the distance between the letters in the pairs as a shift distance.  Applying that to the letter pairs on the clue card yielded the final answer: "MEET AT MR DOOLEYS", a.k.a. the pub that was yesterday's theoretical end location.

Whew!

Day 6 - New York to Boston

I was tasked with blogging the first day's writeup and I tried to set the bar at a reasonable height in terms of length and detail. But since then, our recaps have gotten more and more elaborate to the point where multiple photos and videos are posted alongside complete puzzle walkthroughs. Honestly, if I had known such detail would be available, I would have just stayed home and read the blog.

Well it's my turn again to summarize our daily adventure. (In fact, I'm rather late in doing so and there is a real danger at this point that Dan's Day 7 writeup will be posted before mine. If that does occur, just pretend that we looped back to New York after Boston.) Sure, I could follow my teammates' examples and go bigger and grander, but I still believe there is something to be said for conciseness. Brevity being the soul of wit and all that.

Day 6 starts off with us in New York, ready to take a big bite out of Manhattan. (Get it? Because New York is the Big Apple. That's the kind of wit you can expect from this post. You just can't maintain that level of cleverness if you allow yourself to just run on and on with your descriptions.) Our hotel was just across the street from Carnegie Deli so we started off the day ordering some of their monstrous sandwiches. Rich and I couldn't decide between pastrami or corned beef but we solved that puzzle handily by ordering one of each and splitting them. To spare our readers the suspense and difficulty of such a dilemma in the future, I'll tell you now... pastrami was better.

Besides being conveniently located to delicious cured meats, the hotel was also only 4 short blocks and 2 long avenues away from the starting location at the Grand Army Plaza located on the southeast corner of Central Park. This leg's main section of puzzles was similar to past legs' comprising 6 locations that needed to be identified from poems and which could be visited in any order. However, for the first time, we also received a group of bonus puzzles that were designed to be solved sequentially. Reaching the end of the bonus puzzle chain would reward a team with a 3 hour reduction to their overall time. We were also given 5 CDs and a scroll of puzzles that were to be used to solve the ending location and password while driving to Boston later.

As usual, we immediately looked for a good spot to sit and identify the puzzle locations. Dressed as we were in sandals, unwashed shorts and t-shirts ornamented with giant buttons proclaiming our various puzzle names, we thought the most appropriate place would be the lobby of the nearby Plaza Hotel. This turned out to be a perfect place as the crystal chandeliers provided soft yet excellent lighting. We fit in perfectly with the rest of the patrons and so it was a bit surprising when not two minutes after sitting down, we were approached by an employee who inquired in a polite but snooty manner if we were guests of the hotel. I mentally prepared the huge scene I was going to make complaining about the discriminatory practices of the Plaza's hotel staff, but Dan defused the situation by claiming we were waiting for a hotel guest to join us and that we would be gone shortly. The staff member looked at us dubiously but good manners forbade him from proclaiming us liars and he had no choice but to mumble under his breath as he stepped away.

If you have the means, I highly recommend solving here

 One of our clues could be solved from just a subway map and Dan set about doing just that. We needed to identify the unique subway lines that serviced each of the listed stations and taking the letters of said lines, we obtained the answer GRATS FELLAS.

I guess I'm supposed to caption each photo

The other main clue locations were quickly identified and we saw that they covered a good portion of southern Manhattan though a few were clustered around Central Park along with the beginning of the bonus track. We jumped in a taxi and got a ride to the west side of the park near the center.

I could break this into sections for each bonus but I don't want to

The bonus chain started off at Belvedere Castle and we found the clued plaque without any difficulty. The clue showed several lines connecting the eyes of the man engraved on the plaque to different sections of the text and Rich suggested we take the letters that came before each section. This resulted in BOLOENDS but as none of us had recently been to a rodeo, our neckwear was woefully insufficient and we did not know how to proceed. We explored the castle a bit because, you know, it's a castle and they're cool, but then we had to move on to the next bonus location which Dan and Wei-Hwa and just identified as the nearby statue of Wladyslaw Jagiello. (Wei-Hwa tried telling me the name several times but he insisted on pronouncing it with the correct Polish pronunciation which meant I kept saying "Gesundheit".)

Would a caption really add any value to this?

We reached the statue and again were completely stuck. We suspected that the solution to each bonus would provide necessary information for solving the next one in the chain and so while Dan and Wei-Hwa looked up the remaining bonus locations, Rich and I set about trying to crack the Vigenère clue from the first bonus. At one point Rich noticed that using OLDB as a key gave SEEK as the start of the decrypted text while around the same time I decided the key should be 8 letters and end in BONES. We wisely combined our two portions into the most likely key candidate, JAWBONES, and set about trying to parse the almost readable plaintext. Meanwhile, Todd (who I thought we had successfully gotten rid of), independently came up with the much less likely key of OLDBONES. His choice had the benefit of being an anagram of BOLOENDS and a very slight advantage in that it resulted in completely legible text detailing how to solve the second location.

The last four words on the statue (AGGRESSORS AT GRUNWALD JULY) could be assigned the letters A-X and then used as a polyalphabetic cipher key to decode the encrypted text. Which in turn told us to use the last three words off the statue of Balto in Central Park. We actually didn't solve this part until after we had decided to visit the fourth bonus location (prior to the third because we obviously didn't fully grasp the concept of a linear set of clues). Of course we had no idea how to solve this fourth location so Rich took careful pictures of the entire Richard Morris Hunt Memorial before we left for the third bonus location. It turns out he did this to prevent us from having to return; at the time I just thought Rich had some weird obsession with Richard Hunt.

Rich took like a thousand photos and this was the most interesting one

We arrived at the statue of Balto, grabbed the last three words (ENDURANCE, FIDELITY and INTELLIGENCE), placed them in a 4x7 arrangement with the last three cells blank and then treated the provided numbers as coordinates to obtain our next message lickety-split. (Lickety-split may not mean what I think it means.) This message told us to use the letter frequencies from the text at the Richard Hunt Memorial to decode the next bonus clue.

Counting the number of times each letter appeared in the text allowed us to assign each of the numbers in the cryptotext a range of letters and then choosing the appropriate letters would result in the answer message. We had to solve such ambiguous message phrases several times during this week of puzzling and rather than being annoying as I might have expected, it ended up being quite a bit of fun. Once done, the decoded message hinted at using some name for the Statue of Liberty (Richard Hunt designed her pedestal) as a Vigenère key for the last bonus clue. Unfortunately, as the clue indicates, there is more than one name for Lady Liberty (I lost count around 348) and we were initially unable to finish the bonus clues.

I've decided captions are more trouble than they're worth

We had spent a long time on the bonus track (possibly more than the 3 hour reward) and we were running out of time so we decided to start solving the main clues; the closest of which was at the Alice in Wonderland statue nearby.

This clue was much more straightforward. Alice is surrounded by lines of poetry and we assigned letters to each line as instructed by the puzzle text. Taking the appropriate letter for each line provided gave the question "WHAT WAS MIMSY?" and we entered BOROGOVES onto our answer sheet.

The above clue was solved at Strawberry Fields using a plaque with 5 columns of country names. Taking the first letter of each of the indicated countries gave the answer, "ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE". Flush off the last two quick solves, we hightailed it to a subway station and caught a ride to Times Square.

Wei-Hwa and Dan solved this clue at the Times Square Visitor Center while Rich and I tried a bunch of different keys for the still unsolved bonus. We probably should have helped them because it involved counting a bunch of triangles and I think they ran out of fingers. It solved to LIEUTENANT COLONEL.

We caught another subway to Washington Square Park where we found the above-mentioned plaque at the corner of Waverly and University. We entered the quote from the plaque onto the periodic table and used the provided elements and subscripts to select letters resulting in ILLUMINATI. To reward ourselves for our brilliance, we made a small detour to Amorino to gorge on gelato. Then it was off to Battery Park for the last clue!

This was a wordsearch where we had to find several strange words that were on a flagpole in Battery Park. The remaining letters led us to The Sphere nearby where we got our answer of MARCH 11, 2002. We were now done with the main set of clues!

It was sometime either right before or after the Battery Park clue that Rich cracked the bonus clue cipher with the key of THE NEW COLOSSUS. We had tried just NEW COLOSSUS earlier to no avail. Thankfully, he revisited the idea. The final bonus message instructed us to create a picture illustrating the poem on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. I think we can all agree that we did so admirably.

McCuela is not impressed with the chosen preposition in the above photo

The New York leg took us almost 7 hours and we still had a 4+ hour drive to Boston ahead of us. And the CDs and driving puzzles that we needed to solve so we would know where exactly we were going. I would share pictures of said puzzles with you, our faithful readers, except I don't think we ever took any and I can't locate the paper copies right now. But they were based on various games (Mad Gab, Monopoly, Twister and Scrabble), each consisting of a paper portion and corresponding CD, and they were a lot of fun.

The Mad Gab CD played a bunch of sounds that we had to put together into famous sayings. We then had to order and index into them using the clues on the paper portion.

The Monopoly CD played 22 songs, each of which would clue a location on a Monopoly board (like "Under the Boardwalk" for instance). We were also supplied with a Monopoly board with words on each of the squares. Taking the locations and their associated words in order gave us some coordinates.

For Twister, we were given a strange version of the Twister board along with a felt doll-like figure with movable arms and legs. The CD sounded out hand and feet movements. Moving the doll appropriately spelled out letters using the Dancing Man cipher.

The Scrabble CD played famous movie quotes where one word was missing from each one. Placing those words on the Scrabble board in the places specified allowed us to get another answer.

Each of the board game clues solved to a location in Boston. The center of the 4 locations was the ending location, Mr. Dooley's Bar.

The fifth CD was used to obtain our password for the day. It sounded like garbage but Dan figured out that it needed to be played in reverse and Wei-Hwa quickly converted the sound files on his laptop. This gave us a Vigenère key and a bunch of cryptotext which decoded to CAUSE WE ROCK LIKE AC/DC.

All in all, a long day of excellent puzzling and this was our favorite leg so far. Only one day left!

(I'm sure the intelligent readers of this blog are fully aware that I'm actually posting this after we've completed the entire hunt. In fact, I'll be immediately publishing Dan's Day 7 writeup right after this one. But please allow me the illusion that I completed this on time.)

Challenges

Of the various challenges submitted by you, our dear readers, we have managed to accomplish two.  Not a great showing, perhaps, but we thought you should know:

Here in Boston, we asked a waitress at Legal Sea Foods (our postgame dinner choice) what the dessert of her people was.  She suggested a Boston cream pie, which we dutifully ate:

We can also confirm that the word "wicked" was used many times!

DONE

We finished the hunt today!  The last puzzle was seriously gnarly.  We had to ask for some confirmation on the last puzzle but we eventually got it.  So we finished every puzzle and every bonus in the game!

I'll get out a full writeup later.  But we solved some tricky puzzles, saw some good Boston sights, did a neat hotel room search... it was a great day!

For the trophy we got our choice of the raven or a big golden Statue of Liberty.  We liked the raven (pictured) better.  Apparently Josh will make it a traveling trophy, Stanley Cup style, with plaques and all.

I'm a little sad it's done.  I'm ready for another week!  But my feet might disagree, and I'm looking forward to being home with my sweetie and the kitties.

Quick update

Figured I'd post a quick update so it didn't seem like we went dark on everyone today.  We got into Boston pretty late tonight, so the full recap will have to wait (Jonathan's on it, but won't finish tonight.)

The leg in New York today was great, though.   While yesterday in NJ was probably my least favorite leg, the New York one may have been my favorite so far.

We had three waves of puzzles today.  The first was a pretty straightforward wave that took us all over Manhattan from Central Park to Times Square to Battery Park.  The second was a purely optional bonus wave with a linear sequence of very difficult, but all fair and solvable puzzles, all in Central Park.  The third was a set of driving puzzles to solve on the way to Boston that told us where to go and what the final password of the leg was.

We got a solid 10 hours of puzzling in today, as we didn't finish the final location puzzle until around 7pm.  Good news is that we solved the bonus wave and got a 3 hour bonus, so our actual time was probably somewhere around 7 hours.  And we've still solved every puzzle in the hunt and not taken a hint, which we decided a few days ago was one of our top goals for the week.

Tomorrow we've got the final leg in Boston which should prove to be fun.  It is a little sad the adventure is almost over, but it has been an amazing experience so far.

Day 5: Princeton to* New York

*Disclaimer: No actual puzzle-hunting was actually endured on the trip to New York.

We start our morning with a short drive to downtown Princeton (motto: "We're so awesome that we can get away with being in New Jersey") where we find a significant lack of restaurants that are open before the hunt start time of 10am.

If you're going to win credit card roulette, win big.

But we eventually find a small snack bar open in the Princeton Public Library and I win my first game of Credit Card Roulette, placing a highest-ever record until I fall down the chart at supper.

Not pictured: Our team; Rachel's Mom.  Pictured: all the other teams not in this picture.

The hunt starts and we see GC (Joshua) and the other teams.  We go back to the library, get a town map, and start researching.

Generally the past legs (unless the other guys were pulling mine) gave out all the clues in no particular geographical order.  This means that the best strategy is to sit in one position, determine as many clue locations as you can, and then map out all the clue locations and find a Hamiltonian Path.  At around the third clue we started to suspect that the clues were given in order, along an actual Hamiltonian path.  That was helped by Joshua suggesting at some point that this leg was actually written by some friends of his.  This suspicion slowly became more and more confirming until we reached the end.  Then we realized it was dead.  More on that later.

After a while, we think we have locations for all the clues except clues #5 and #7.  So we make a mental note to keep on the lookout for the salient features.

Jonathan tries to not pay attention to what Rich is doing to the front of that cat.

On the way to Clue #1, we see a "tiger's tail" and lots of data on the ground.  But the tiger's tail, in an amazing form of non-Darwinian evolution, eventually becomes a red herring.

Think we'll need to index the 1777th letter of something?

Clue #1.

The oldest building on campus is Nassau Hall.  The poem eventually leads us to a sejant tiger statue.  ("Sejant"?  Who the heck says "sejant"?  Nobody says "sejant".  Unless you're reading this blog out loud, in which case someone has just said "sejant" four times.) 

Don't use bronze ink when writing.  It gets runny in just a few decades.

Anyway, the tiger's sitting in front of a plaque, that has a bunch of text but includes the word "BEHOLD", which seems to suggest that the text after that is what "our fathers say you should behold".

The Code, however, is mysterious.  It looks kind of coordinate-based but trying row/word/first letter or row/index letter was unsuccessful. 

"Maybe we need to count the digits on the tiger's paws."

Eventually someone remembers that in a previous leg, letters were placed into a grid... and the lion says "79" on it.  I plot out a 7 by 9 grid and we get "WHO WAS DECAPITATED HEREIN"?  Answer.

Whew!  I was worried about not calling the zebra a cheating bastard.

Clue #2.

Princeton students who died on 9/11, on the other hand, get nothing.

This starts out simple -- there's a 9/11 memorial between Chancellor green and East Pyne Hall. 

"Why did they make a shrine to Super Mario Galaxy?"

 There are 13 bronze stars on the ground, labeled with the names of 13 alumni who died in the Twin Towers attack that day. 

"Wish I was on Hollywood Boulevard."

The stars have their graduation years.

In retrospect, guessing that the message started with 'OOK' was probably not the smartest idea.

Sorting their graduation years in order resulting in us getting the same message Jonathan got hours ago in the library: "SEEK BY WITHERSPOON FOR TOP BOOK".

Dude is so smart, he poops philosophy.

We go to the statue of Witherspoon, look at the back of the statue where there are a pile of books, and note that the top book was "CICERO", which fits nicely into the answer grid.

But just in case, Dan calls GC to confirm.  In the meantime, we look at Clue #3:

You need a pretty strong NJ accent to rhyme "installed" with "code."

We knew from research that this was referring to the same statue.  Looking on the back, under "CICERO", and between "HUME" and "LOCKE", we find the title "PAISLEY".  Using that as a Vigenere shift gets us text: "THEANSWERISAWILSONPRIME".  Of the Wilson Primes that we are able to calculate, only one of them had eight letters, so we think that's it.

'Lectern'?  I thought you said 'Black tern'!

Meanwhile, Dan is having a very strange conversation with GC.  They seemed to confirm that it was right... but then started talking about a whole lot of other stuff, like how the statue was holding a book in his hand, which is actually the Bible but you can't really tell because no spine is visible.  On the book, that is.  (Well, Mr. Witherspoon's spine isn't visible either, but you'd expect that.)  At this point we remembered we hadn't used any of the hand-written stuff on the back of the sheet.

First we noticed that some of the text in the middle was kind of weird, and was actually written in two different inks.  A bunch of text seemed to say "ABLE READ BUT TOP +TOP OK NOT HEAT", which lined up with the hole at the bottom of the page.

MESSAGE NOT OK SENSE MAKE

Then we thought, well, looks like the text is magic heat-sensitive text.  So we used a lighter to heat the paper up, and that revealed another message: "IT MEANS NO IF THING NOT IN SQUARE."

We are now totally confused.  Did we solve this puzzle or not?

Eventually we pieced together what probably happened.  We'd gotten the last few steps in the wrong order!  We were first supposed to get the "IT MEANS NO" message, which tells us to only use the hole ("SQUARE") with the bottom of the page, which would get us to "HEAT", which was supposed to tell us to heat the page, which would get us to "OK, NOT +TOP TOP BUT READABLE", which was telling is to ignore the top-top book (the Bible) but rather the top readable book (Cicero).

Speculation on whether this was something that another team had trouble with and GC decided to make a last-minute addition to the puzzle to clarify which book was the "top" book ensued.  But we had more puzzles to do.

Wait, isn't there supposed to be a code at the bottom?

Clue #4.

We figured out that this clue was probably talking about the chapel. 

You'll just have to take my word that the plaque says that Cram built this abbey and invented Prilosec.

After going around it multiple times without really finding any "iron gates", we found a plaque inside the chapel proclaiming it was designed by a man named Cram.  Okay, that gets us to the second paragraph...

Rev. Bright is so bright he preaches to the outside of the chapel!

Then we found a plaque on the south side of the chapel mentioning a William Bright, thereby suggesting that we were in the correct neighborhood for the third paragraph.

The rest of the poem made no sense though.  It was at this point that we split up and started looking around more.

Eventually, I decide to hang out with one of the many tour groups that was wandering the area, and then hear about the story of the chapel bulldog.

On the other side there's a gargoyle shaped like Spider-Man.

Yup, there it is.  I call the rest of the team over, tell them the story, and we convince ourselves that we must be in the right place... but what should we do next?

After a few more minutes of fruitless searching, we call GC and he tells us to use the blacklight.  Oh.  That seems unexpected, but behold, there's a message on the back:

"Confucius say: This fortune cookie too tough to eat."

LOOK UNDER ROCK.  Oh.  Look, there's a rock and is that something under it?

But WHO OWNS THE ZEBRA?

Ah, another riddle.  Fortunately, this one's easy -- the answer is  IMAGINATION.

There are easier ways to leave a guy your phone number, you know.

Clue #5

Well, uh.  We had no idea what this clue was talking about.  So, let's move onto Clue #6:

Six figures on both sides... so, we're looking for a millionaire, right?

Our initial thought, before we set out on our travels, was that "glass of color" was probably a reference to stained glass, and hence we'd be looking for something near the campus chapel.  Well, since Clue #3 and #4 were already around the chapel, we felt less confident about that.  Also us having walked around the chapel around three times probably also undermined our confidence about Clue #6 being near the chapel.

So, to increase our chances of finding something useful, we detoured south of Dickinson Hall and turned west.  We also give Clue #7 an extra look:

I'm sure it's important that the first letters of each line anagram to 'BEAUTY BASICS.'

At that exact moment, a cart driven by a food services person drove past and we decided to ask him if he knew anything about stained glass.  He pointed to the University Art Museum and said there's an information desk inside.

The information desk turned out to me the Museum gift shop, with a young girl staffer and an older lady on the phone.  We asked the young girl and she said that Clue #6 looked like maybe it was the Chapel and Clue #7 was probably about Nassau Hall.  Er, thanks.  Three of us then walked outside.  Jonathan notices that the fodder at the bottom of Clue #7 has a lot of typewriter patterns: QWERTY, EDCRFV, stuff like that.  We eventually decide that GC used those letters as fillers and it wouldn't be that useful (or fun) to try to backsolve that way.

Then we noticed one of us was missing. One of us went inside to look for the fourth one just as the fourth one came outside, then we sent another one to go back in to find the guy who went inside, and after about three repetitions of this, the older lady got off the phone so we asked her about the clues because why not. 

She said, in an apparently much more helpful manner, there's a very nice stained glass window of St. Catherine near here, and pointed out the door and around the building.  So we head out.

We were still incapable of not splitting up into groups of three, and, unbeknownst to us, there was no actual stained glass window of St. Catherine outside the building.  This led to us wandering around south of the Art Museum, half-looking for clues, half-looking for stained glass, and half-looking for other team members.

"Don't come over here!  I'm peeing in the bush!"

This was at the point when Rich found Luke's hat.

Your hat's so heavy you can't lift it?  Use the Force, Luke.

Turns out "Luke" is short for "Louis R. Roth", and his hat is made out of copper.  On the other side of the bench is a plaque that matched the pattern on our cluesheet rather nicely.  More than one of us put the words onto the pattern, then took the numbers as indexes, then realized that we were just getting the last letter of every word.

Since we knew that Ian Tullis wasn't writing this puzzle, we immediately rejected the idea that GC had managed to find a plaque where the last letter of each word spelled a phrase. 

The next thought was that the number triplets were a simple index: first number was a row, second number told you which word in the row, third number told you which letter to take in the word.  This ran into problems at the third number, where we ended up needing to take the third letter of a two-letter word.

Triangle, man.  Triangle, man.  Doing whatever.  A triangle.  Can.

Eventually we figured out the extraction rule, getting the answer: THIS GAMER OCKS.  We didn't know any gamer named Ocks but it fit in the meta grid so that was fine.

At this point, with no idea where to find clues #6 and #7, we decide we might as well make our way to clue #8.  For our Hamiltonian path theory to still be alive, we should expect those two to be on the way.  Rich can't handle the fact that we're all travelling together, so he volunteers to go back to the Art Museum and get some better information about the stained glass of St. Catherine.

We walk north along Elm Drive.  Rich returns with some negative news -- the stained glass is of Saint Cecilia, is inside the museum, and is of no help to Clue #6 whatsoever. 

Jonathan does a pattern match based on the letters from the metapuzzle and hypothesizes that the answer to Clue #7 is AUGUSTUS VAN WINKLE.  Fits the pattern, and we're reasonably confident that it's correct, but we'd still like to "forward-solve" Clue #7 if we can.

We speculate on whether our theory is bad and maybe Clue #7 is referring to the year plaques around Nassau Hall.  So we detour back to the Hall, look at the plaques with no inspiration, and three of us go into the Hall, leaving Dan sitting on the steps, who is still working on Clue #6.

The inside of Nassau Hall is filled with text fodder, about Princeton alumni who have died in the wars, but is of no apparent help to the clue.  We come out to find Dan making progress on Clue #6.  He's discovered that it's referring to a bas-relief sculpture on the south end of Alexander Hall, and is trying to fill out what he can from Internet searches.

I propose, since we're making no progress on #7, why not walk towards #8 and pass by Alexander Hall on the way?

We walk past Alexander Hall, and Clue #6 becomes instantly obvious:

I think I beat a Final Fantasy boss here once.

But also useless because Dan has pretty much solved the puzzle by now, decoding to "WHO HAS A LYRE" (if you assume that ARCHITECTURE and BELLES-LETRES have 13 characters each).  That would be the fourth figure from the left, so we'll fill in MUSIC for the answer.

'KCTITMAW'?  What kind of crappy acrostic is this?

At this point, we've made enough progress on the Answer Sheet to get the message: "SEEK?NOVERFLO?INGKIOSKONNASSAUNEARTH?ATRE".  We're guessing that this means we should look for an overflowing kiosk on Nassau street near a theatre. 

Since the only theatre we can find on a map is east and #8 is west, we decide to do the meta before doing #8.

The sad part is, the actual kiosk is two blocks beyond this one.

Man, this kiosk is far away.

"Have you seen this cat?"  "Well, I have now!"

Really far away.

Not the best photo to be putting on Craigslist.

Eventually we get there and look for anything odd-looking on the kiosk.  We immediately spot something on it. 

Jonathan is not impressed.

Seriously, though, the team is very amused that GC has taken our running gag and incorporated into the hunt.  Although we have no idea how GC learned about it.  Turns out that Todd is a traitor who has violated the sanctity of this blog's privacy.  You will be dealt with appropriately, Etter!

On the photo of McKayla there is more blacklight text.  We can't read it, so instead we look behind McKayla and find a rebus that looks like it came straight from the opening shot of Star Wars:

That's the shadow of the Millenium Falcon on the bottom.

It's a simple rebus that we decode quickly, except that we can't tell what that record-music-looking thing is supposed to be.  RECORD doesn't work (and there's already a RECORD in the rebus), nor does MUSIC or DISC. 

Check out the ICE in the lower left.  No, there's no CREAM in it.

Eventually we realize it has to be a CD.

1 = Luke's hat.

Well, we've been zigzagging around the campus more than enough times, so it's time to decree the Hamiltonian path theory totally dead -- killed by Aaron Burr.

They told me Rock is Dead, but I didn't believe it until now.

We head north to Princeton Cemetery, "The Westminster Abbey of the United States", to find the gravesite of Aaron Burr.

And they can't even print their letters the right way.

We quickly get turned around in the Cemetery.  Fortunately we find some maps of the place hidden in a small box marked "SPAM."

It's in a plot especially reserved for dead presidents, like Samuel Davies and Ashbel Green.

With this map, we find Aaron's grave.   

Puzzler's claim to fame: starting and ending with doubled letters.

Burr's headstone is weatherworn and hard to read, so fortunately later people have added a plaque underneath to translate fuzzy text into ITC Bookman Demi.

Oh wait, what's this?

Ah, it's just rolled-up blank pieces of yellow paper.

How appropriate for a Vice President.  (The plot is for dead presidents of Princeton, in case you haven't figure that out yet.)

Ink fades faster than stone engraving.

The blank piece has... more blacklight writing on it.

"The answer is H0DEIB-F0IA!  Submit it!"

Calling the phone number yields a poem that is hard to hear (you can try it yourself if it's still up), but we eventually figure out that it's leading us on a scavenger hunt through the cemetery.

Avant-garde gravestones are awesome.

"Seek a bird upon a spiral,"

This happened a lot.

"to a pole known to all..."

I think the angel's name is Mark Johnson.

"An angel of a child waits glowing light for all.  Past the Mark of Johnson,"

Don't ask, don't tell.

"to a Celtic cross of Dykes,"

"What does a sheep do, Alex?"

"Bahcall holds a nice refraction to lut such a lovely site."

Told you.

Moving past his marker to the iron dog;

This is where the Blue Ball Machine starts.

An angel in the distance marks a heartfelt metal log.

Yes, it really does say "Barker" under that finger.

From here two pillars stand aside for that man barking tough,

Bet you're surprised.

And past the bonnie lass get closer to the sum.

Rich's phone is just a little bit faster.

For here you seek nine pillars tall to five night quite and dig,

Isn't Millicent a woman's name?

And here you find a signal that old Burley helps to give.

Math class is hard.

Three times the day he was born, minus one or two;

Physics class is harder.

shall help you hear a message to solve this final clue. Good luck!"

"Wait, you mean radio signals haven't gone digital yet?"

The little AM/FM radio (the only unused item in our goodie bag from the start of the hunt), when tuned correctly, has a (thankfully) much shorter repeating message:  "Well done indeed!  Your answer is I LOVE NEW YORK."  We call GC to confirm.  Yay!  We're off the clock.


Clue #8

They were sent back to remedial pirate school because of their mediocre chant.

Well, to get a perfect score we need to solve this.  We pick up our van and drive to the location, ...

George Washington Crossing His Eyes

Where we see George Washington looking at ...

"Ring it.  You know you want to."

A bell memorializing the sinking of the U.S.S. Princeton.

See if you can find the two typos.

The poem seems to be pretty clear what we need to do.  Take the names on the plaque in order, which are UPSHUR, GILMER, KENNON, MAXCY, GARDNER.  Assign them the letters from A to Z, so A is U, B  is P, C is S, and so on.  Doing that, we can decode YENNSAEHLA into... WKOOCTKDIT.  Well, except that the Ks could be Ns or Cs, and the Os can be Ps, Rs, or Bs, and the Ts could be Ys.

This is not good progress.  We call GC and, not asking for a hint, ask for confirmation that this puzzle has in fact been solved.  GC says that other teams solved it in playtest.

We try other techniques and talk ourselves out of it -- sorting by alphabetical order, sorting by first name, Playfair cipher, Vigenere, etc.  Since we're off the clock and can legally split up, Jonathan and I decide that even though Hamilton is long since dead, we'll try walking to Clue #6 and see if we can find anything that helps with Clue #7.  We don't.

Jonathan gets a call from GC about data confirmation.  Their records say that the first two names are "UPSHER" and "GILMAR".  We call back to Rich and Dan, who quickly extract the answer of "WE ROCK. EDIT!", a rather appropriate message for us to give to GC.  Rich and Dan come and pick us up, and we speed away from Princeton.

Rich and Jonathan have grumblies in their tumblies, so we figure out what the quintessential dining experience in New Jersey should be... and we go to White Castle. 

Now the only sliders are made from motor oil!

But wait, the map says there's a White Castle here but it's gone!

Parking lot seems awfully crowded for a White Castle.

Whew, they just moved half a mile away.

But first, a game of Classic Concentration!

We order a mass quantity of food to celebrate Dan losing his WC virginity.

Dan exhibits schadenfreude.

Rich downs 12 sliders.  He later says, "If I had a time machine, I would have only eaten 8."  Maybe he already has a time machine and he original ate 16.  Who knows.

We then brave NYC rush hour traffic, and Rich loses his "driving in NYC" virginity.  He handles the horn like he's been driving here all his life.

We check into the hotel, which has an interesting property -- to get to Dan and Ana's room, which is on the sixth floor, we had to go down 6 steps of stairs from the elevator.  To get to Rich and Jonathan's room, which is on the 11th floor, we had to go up 6 steps of stairs.  I'll let you guess as to the reason why.

"Unh.  Can't.  Reach...."

After marvelling at the world's most inconvenient toilet dispenser, we joined Larry Green-noun-that-I-can-never-remember-but-it-is-probably-field for dinner at Seasonal.  I come back here and type up most of this blog post.

Then I type the first sentence in the last paragraph.  Then the second one.  And then I type the penultimate sentence in the post.  I type the last sentence and that's it.