Starter puzzle!

As promised, Ravenchase posted the starter puzzle today, which solves to the start location:

http://clues.ravenchase.com/starters/GAR2012Starter.pdf

We got together this evening over Skype to solve it.

There's a lot going on -- six historical figures (five of whom we identified), with some sort of associated item or invention.  After collecting a bunch of data, we discover that all the figures owned telescopes, which is in keeping with the flavor text.  We were in the middle of carefully researching the location of each telescope when suddenly (two and a half hours into our solve) Todd starts totally cracking up over Skype.  He's laughing maniacally for like twenty seconds before we can convince him to tell us what's so funny.

Turns out, if you *click on the eyes* of one of the figures (in a PDF reader), it links to another PDF.

Rich and I had been using printed copies; fortunately Todd was looking at his screen!  We could have gone days without ever noticing that.  The click target was hinted by the flavor text, but the fact that you need to use your mouse definitely wasn't.  Aaaaanyway, that leads to a second level:

http://clues.ravenchase.com/starters/GAR2012StarterPt0.pdf

This one's flavor text is quite explicit.  The stars link to 13 mini-puzzles, each of which yield a letter.  Put them together, you get the answer.  We solved enough of them for Todd (I think?) to grok out the answer, THE LONE SAILOR, a known D.C. landmark.

• Part 1 - an audio clip we actually bailed on with words from a JFK speech; probably simple.
• Part 2 - a grid of state flags, a list of president numbers (under the Presidential seal); color in the flags corresponding to Presidential birthplaces and you get a big letter H.
• Part 3 - a sound file of the Star-Spangled Banner, with every E note replaced by static.
• Part 4 - scattered words from a Lincoln quote; one wildcard "?????" is the word "power", which is a Vinegere key for ciphertext at the bottom.
• Part 5 - Braille based on true/false USA facts.
• Part 6 - a YouTube video with eight clips from Gone With The Wind; each clip begins with Scarlett saying "I" or "Oh", forming an 8-bit binary letter.
• Part 7 - (not sure, Todd or Jasters solved this, something about presidents)
• Part 8 - a 3x3 scramble of an image with the target letter (S) and some other letter-like shapes; a pinstripe background helps reassembly.
• Part 9 - a sound file of America The Beautiful, with the audio cutting in and out in Morse code.
• Part 10 - Semaphore for a phone number (not sure what happens when you call, Todd/Jasters did this one)
• Part 11 - match state birds with state flowers, crossing over words that make a message describing a letter
• Part 12 - a number of (easily researched) trivia items which solve to numbers, and colors keyed to mathematical operators (/*+-), all of which computes to the number 15 (so, letter O)
• Part 13 - Presidential faces with letters on them; put them in order and you get a message

We were having so much fun, we voluntarily solved more of the minis after landing the answer (which Todd got after getting maybe half the letters).  I think there's only one we didn't bother to solve.

So here's the thing:

This puzzle has two parts.  The first part has a lot of red herring data (maybe used later, maybe not?) and a totally insanely ridiculous a-ha.  The second part is a totally reasonable, fair, fun "Bay Area-style" (or "Game-style") puzzle -- maybe on the simple side by our standards.  The whole thing was nicely laid out and well presented.

The puzzle was made by Natalie Parisi (http://claviscryptica.com/), a new Ravenchase hire who played in DASH and whose blog references Bay Area puzzle events.  So it's interesting that there's getting to be some crossover between these scenes.

All told, our experience here makes me cautiously enthusiastic about the hunt itself; this seems like a way better experience than they had with the starter project in the first GAR!