Fancy dinner, CCR update, and more.

We had a great dinner in NYC tonight, and after calling my shot all day, I came away the big winner in the biggest CCR of the trip!

Here was my meal:

Dan has also firmly established himself as the worst CCR player of the trip, and possibly all-time, as he is now 0 for 7 career.  Maybe we should have let him play on his birthday to at least have given him a chance.

Earlier in the day, Wei-Hwa won the breakfast round after we successfully peer pressured him into playing.  Then Jonathan took the lunch round at White Castle, which was a meal that at least I would rather forget.

You might be wondering how today's Princeton leg went, and Wei-Hwa will be posting about that today in detail.  It had its highs and lows, but was probably my least favorite leg of the trip today overall.

I don't want to steal Wei-Hwa's thunder from his writeup, but on the plus side, there was a great homage to something we've been posting a lot about, and we got to use another of our props from the Ravenchase goodie bag.

On the downside, there was another badly broken puzzle (second day in a row) that could have easily been avoided with a full playtest (I suspect it was playtested, but not in the field and thus not with the actual data that appeared on the plaque).  I feel a bit conflicted about even mentioning this, given that we are so grateful to Josh for going ahead with this hunt with so few players involved, and that we are basically getting an awesome custom week-long hunt for next to nothing, but I do feel like my trust level that all the puzzles will be clean and solvable has dropped a bit.  Even after the great broken Vigenere debacle that was entirely our fault, there still have been a pretty substantial number of small typos and mistakes in many puzzles.  Most haven't affected the solving experience, but on the two broken puzzles, those small mistakes caused irreparable harm in the solvability of the puzzles.  Let's just hope those are the last we'll see.

So NYC and Boston are left, can't wait to see how this all wraps up!


P.S.  We know you guys are anxiously awaiting our challenges - we've been discussing them and hope to get at least one in tomorrow.