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!