In short, we crushed it, finishing an hour plus ahead of the Ravenchase veterans team, who were themselves quite a bit ahead of the third place team.
Josh wrote a solid leg with lots of fun puzzles and a couple really cool twists, but also had on average about one bad letter per decryption step. Definitely playtested for puzzle quality, probably not so much on the detailed quality control, but hey, this was a huge improvement over what we had in the first GAR, so I'm not complaining. In fact, I'm extremely grateful for the effort he is putting in for so little payoff financially.
It was sad that the Kilts and A-squared folks won't be continuing on to future legs, it was nice to have the sense that someone could be right on our tails or ahead of us, to give us a sense of urgency throughout. Not sure we'll feel that in the rest of the legs. There were seven teams today, but it seems like most legs will have fewer than that.
I'm also a little worried that Josh mentioned he really wanted to "stump us" on future legs, so we're hoping that harder isn't just another layer of cryptography. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that for now, though, as this leg was a lot of fun.
Anyway, tomorrow we will have a few more puzzles in the morning here in DC, and then on to Baltimore for even more tomorrow afternoon.
So far so good!
One more thing... we were told that computers "would be paperweights" if we brought them, but Dan and I brought them anyone, you know, just in case. It turns out we used them *extensively* today, in particular, we used our custom Vigenere spreadsheet solver (thanks Robert!) at least four times, saving us at least 30 minutes of total time had we had to work out some extremely long messages by hand.
ReplyDeleteDon't let that prevent you from also using them as paperweights! They're really good for that.
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