Just got back from a San Francisco game, themed on Midnight Madness and put on by Snout and Drunken Spiders (yay acorn).  I played with Los Jeffes, since there was a private invite round beforehand.  Overall the game is still a nice break from anything else, and san francisco gave us nice weather for the weekend, but the game itself fell flat in a lot of ways.  My main disappointement was with the number of puzzles which did not clue their own steps, and instead relied on direct psychic link to the author.  We saw a lot more of other teams this hunt, I think because enough of the puzzles stumped the entire audience until game control clued them onto the next location.

 

Following the track of the movie:
- invitation "meet candy and sunshine"

They had one of the game runners from before the movie there to talk how these events started and watch what they have become- really nice touch, plus an acapella rendition of the theme song.
A quick cryptic crossword (I got one! yay) with some distracting flavortext, that kept us for a bit longer than it should.

 

- observatory "If I'm lucky I may get to see Venus's two moons"
Ouch....
Required binoculars- ok, clued pre-game.
Required 60/20 vision- things to see with the binoculars were too far away to be seen with our pair, or the stock pair they had handy.  Never found the third installation- eventually it got dark without anyone solving the puzzle, and GC had to pass around copies.
Not solvable- the next step was working through some equations which were missing information about how to group and combine them.
This was my least favorite puzzle and a very sour note to start the event on. I think it would have done much better to make semaphore puzzle out of the buxom silouettes.

 

- piano: Just passing through
Followed by a more reasonable puzzle, that we didn't really have the expertise to solve. Once we found a music sequencing program we worked out jingles with incorrect letters and put together a meta-jingle out of those.  Though we had to get GC to identify the final step, but at least we got ice cream out of the deal.

This marks the point where we almost got arrested.  Apparently burglers travel in soccer-team vans with a laptop apiece.

 

- brewery: Well the door was open...
Here the frustration was a clue hidden in a cactus, 20 feet and around the corner from where instructions had told us to look.  After that I got to race the computer solver to finish a nonogram, and lost by about a minute :(

 

- busty diner waitress: *Hot* motor
Tee hee hee. Word search for jubblies = entertaining and well constructed. We tried really hard to turn her 8 letter necklace into a next location, rather than a magazine containing the real puzzle.

 

- old drivers: Mortie the embezzler
We got to ride around a hear a rambly story which frequently prompted us to insert words. Pick out a pattern from the words and on we go.  A fun little play and nice interactive bit.

 

- mini-golf: foreshadowing
This puzzle prompted the beginning and end as my term as hint caller. :)

Stray hints aside, the puzzle itself was well themed and collected itself nicely after the difficult aha moment.

 

- train station- radio: Not the band Madness, no...
Listen to a radio station- pull out left and right channels to learn... no.. not really- call game control until they explain it to you.

 

- train station- literature:
Puzzle broken before we got to it. Hari krishna dancing gets an gold star though.

 

- train station- locker: Blargh I am Ded.
Lolcats! Woo-hoo! And grammer correction... awwww.  Before the grammar section the puzzle was a fun but difficult sorting problem.  After that we had to get GC to explain the proofreading marks they invented.

 

- arcade: Is there Q-Bert?
We were pulled off to the final puzzle just as we got here, but apparently some folks got to play Star Fire.

 

- tower: Jennifer, you are special.
Another puzzle we missed, alask.

 

- balls: balls.
A bizarre mix of data collection and physical game.  We collected words from several oversized volley balls while being chased by inflatable hammers.  Sadly I spent most of the puzzle searching all of stanford for a bathroom and sleeping.

 

Lessons learned-
teams can learn very quickly that the only way to solve the puzzle is to call in, predicting an impossible logical jump, or a start location that has wandered away.  Really the looming spectre of what-if-we-get-this-far-and-get-stuck was looming for most of the weekend.  On the plus side- the good puzzles were quite good. They were just interrupted often enough that we didn't build confidence in the underlying mechanism.

 

Much as I'm a whiny bastard though- thanks to Curtis & Co for running this, and thanks to the Jeffes for having me play. :)