Presidio mini-BANG

You may remember back in April when we took part in our first organized puzzle hunt, the San Francisco mini-game, and blogged a little about it. Marc was savvy enough to get us signed up for another one this past weekend in the Presidio of San Francisco, run by the same group that did the first one (coed astronomy). Unfortunately Kate could not make it, but Bailey stepped in for her so we had a team of 4 to tackle the puzzles. I thought it would be fun to show some pictures that I took of the puzzles while not pulling my weight in helping to solve them. The general idea was each puzzle solved to a single word, which you then used to match to a synonymous phrase on a master sheet, which gave you a number that you found on a map of the Presidio, indicating the destination of the next puzzle. We had 10 puzzles to try and solve in ~4 hours, and you could ask the staffers for a hint on any of them if needed. There were 30 teams overall.

Puzzles are available for download HERE if you would like to download them. Doesn't include the "Scaling Up" puzzle described below. Also, puzzle 9 was printed on transparencies and large-size paper, just so you don't get stuck on that one if you print it on normal paper.

DISCLAIMER - if you are Kate or Adam or anyone else who might be interested in trying to solve these on your own, you probably shouldn't read any further. I only took pictures of 3 of the 10 puzzles, but I wouldn't want to spoil your fun.

Fortunately the weather was awesome - warm and clear - a beautiful day in SF with the Golden Gate bridge towering over us as we traipsed around the Presidio. Here are all the teams gathering for the starting instructions.


And here's our intrepid band of puzzle solvers (Marc, Bailey, Mark):

All of the puzzles for this game were drawn from a prior event called the "Iron Puzzler," a weekend puzzling event where groups created puzzles around a theme (secret ingredient, kind of like "Iron Chef" .... ha ha) on day 1 and then solved them on day 2. The shared themes, or "secret ingredients" for these puzzles were one or more of the words "star," "nut," and "scale." Keep in mind the many alternate meanings of these words.

One of the puzzles we got consisted of a tin of mixed nuts, although instead of the actual nuts inside the tin there were a bunch of strangely shaped different colored letters (they gave us the actual nuts in a little baggie, you can see it in the picture below). On the side of the tin was an explanation that the nut ingredients (or words spelled by the colored letters in the tin) were each 6-letter nut names like"cashew," "peanut," "brazil," etc. Taking all six of the first letters in each nut name we were able to fit the funky-shaped letters into a general shape. Doing the same with all six second letters, third letters, and so on, gave us shapes that looked like letters. Keeping these letters in the same order as their component parts revealed the word below (the "D" is rotated wrong) - what do you know, yet another kind of nut! How clever. Off to the next puzzle!

For this puzzle we were given an envelope containing a sheet of paper with a large circle on it and several stars, each with a hand drawn image on it. The circle had numbers around the perimeter on the outside and letters on the inside. After a little head scratching we figured out that the pictures on each star were related to a common phrase involving a number. For example, the picture you can see is a stick figure trying to murder another with the big "No" sign around it (7 deadly sins). Others including a trombone (76), a bottle of beer sitting on a brick wall (99), the word "Hell" with a circle around it (9), a mouse with dark sunglasses and a cane (3), and a blackbird (24). As you can guess, we aligned the stars with the number appropriate to each, and they then blocked all but a few letters on the inside of the circle, revealing the answer - "Hollywood"! Home of the stars. How appropriate.

This next one was one of my favorites. The puzzle consisted of a sheet of paper with the words "Scaling Up" written on it, followed by a seemingly random assortment of letters and numbers in a hex grid pattern below it. There was a single metal hex nut glued onto the paper at the center so a character was visible through the hole in the nut. We were also given a dozen or so clusters of glued-together nuts (think hexagonal tetris pieces or something). Each cluster had a few of its nuts painted red on top, and some nuts had either a small picture (things like a pea in a pod, grape, a stick of butter, an airplane, a man's hairy chest, Brazil, an ear of corn, the Berlin Wall, etc.) glued on a side or a ratio (like 1:340 or something) etched on a side. Bailey took charge here and organized the pictures in order of smallest to largest. Doing the same with the ratios showed we had the same numbers of each. Somewhere around here we made the connection that all the pictures were also nut types (in the examples above: peanut, grape nuts, butternut, wing nut, chestnut, brazil nut, corn nut, wall nut). We assembled the metal nut clusters around the central glued-on piece by connecting the picture to the ratio that represented its scale, from the pea all the way up to Brazil, which - as you can see below - conveniently resulted in a hexagon of hex nuts! Reading only the letters under the red-painted nuts revealed the phrase "INDEX NUT NAMES." From this, we noticed that for each nut that had one of the photos glued to it there was a number (not a letter) underneath. Using that number to index a letter from the appropriate nut name (i.e. the central '3' was below the picture of the grape, so that gave the letter 'A') and descrambling those letters gave us the answer word of "Agriculture." Maybe it's just because I'm a mechanical engineer and like nuts, but I liked this puzzle.

Those were only 3 of the 10 puzzles we solved on Saturday. We enjoyed having the themes of star, nut, and scales to come back to time after time, often using 2 or more in the same puzzle. In the end we finished 9 of 10 puzzles in the 4-hour time limit and took only 1 hint - enough to get the Sol Survivors 15th place out of 29, the only team to solve 9 puzzles while only taking 1 hint. We are quite happy with those results, and have no problems finishing out of the medals as the winning team included at least 2 professional puzzle whizzes: Tyler Hinman (the red haired guy circled on the right and winner of the last 4 World Crossword Championships) and Thomas Snyder (the partially-obscured guy circled at the left and repeat winner of both the US Puzzle Championship and World Sudoku Championship). Yeah..... they finished all 10 puzzles in 2.5 hrs. That works out to 15 minutes per puzzle, including what was at least a 3-5 minute walk between locations. Riiiiight.

But between the great weather, beautiful location, creative and interesting puzzles, and well-organized event, we all had a good time. Maybe next time we'll crack the top-ten...