Treasure Hunting in the Mint Museum

On Saturday (Nov. 2), I took part in a treasure hunt contest.  Sleepbetter.org sponsored a contest in Charlotte, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee called “The Quest for the Lost Hour”.  Each city had a main prize of a $10,000 donation to the charity of your choice.  I gathered a team consisting of my brother Chris and my friend Lee.  I signed up and solved the rather simple qualifier puzzles that had to be finished to compete (most were simple searches for a piece of data on their web site; a few involved codes). 

We assembled at the Randolph branch of the Mint Museum in Charlotte along with 10 other teams to test our treasure hunting skills.  If you’ve never been on a treasure hunt, the concept is this:  each team is given clues that they must solve to complete the event.  The clues will generally reference some feature of a nearby location that has to be used to solve it (so that it’s not just sitting in a room solving puzzles).  Sometimes the clues lead to other clues that you have to find onsite and solve to continue on the trail.  Generally, teams are required to stick together (as they were here) as this makes the event much more fun and makes it reasonable for short-handed teams to compete.  In this particular hunt there were eight easy clues and four hard clues - none of them unlocked subsequent clues within the museum.  All of the clues were worth points (easy were 100, hard were 250) and players had two hours to finish them.  Finishing earlier would give you credit for breaking ties only.

Our approach was to find all of the sites as quickly as we could, with no concern for how hard the clue was supposed to be; we were pretty sure we would need to solve all of them to win.  We found several hard clues and solved them rather quickly.  Some were fairly interesting as well:  solve a code which instructed us to apply the supplied cold pack to the back of the clue page to reveal the answer, decode a Vigenere cipher, solve a book-type cipher to discover the location of the UV flashlight that reveals the real answer.

The easy clues, however, were much harder.  Why?  Because the answer sheet has a certain number of boxes for each answer to show you how many letters long it should be ...and the answer sheet they handed out was for another city.  All of the “easy” clues were the wrong number of letters, while the answers to the “hard” clues were common to every city (the events took place simultaneously) and the correct answers fit perfectly.  Sometimes you could come up with another answer fairly easily and make it fit, but usually nothing reasonable would work.  After about 40 minutes we had gathered back at the starting point with the information we thought we would need to finish. 

We inquired if the spaces on the answer key were correct (which we were assured they were), we solved the Vigenere cipher, then went off to repeat all of the clues that wouldn’t fit properly.  During the next hour, we and the other teams hovered around the locations that kept giving us impossible answers and wracked our brains while the annoying obvious correct answers (that wouldn’t fit) stared us in the face.  We turned in our answers about fifteen minutes before the deadline (and turned in first), convinced that we would not come up with anything better.  Since I was very much starting to suspect the validity of the answer sheets at this point, we kept one answer even though it didn’t fit and wrote all of the original answers on the margin of the paper. 

Before the top teams were revealed we were told that yes, the answer sheets *were* indeed wrong.  We ended up being declared the winner, but not surprisingly there were many complaints and suggestions of how to rectify the situation.  We let the officials know that we had no objections to repeating the challenge and re-assigning the charity donation to the winner of the next event (I didn’t say this about evenly splitting up the prize, as I was rather less excited about that prospect).  After a couple of days I received an email saying that the event would be repeated; all of the charities will get $1,000, while the winner of the repeat event will still get $10,000 for their charity.  No word yet on exactly when it will take place.  Props to Carpenter Co. (who sponsers the website) on ponying up extra charity money due to the error.

It was fun, and I would do it again (and hopefully will).  I’m definitely hoping it is more challenging next time, and error-free.

Game Review - Mundus Novus

I've played Mundus Novus (by Asmodee games) 3 times now and wanted to post a review of this excellent game.  This is a fairly light game where players play shipping magnates in 16th century Spain trying to make a certain amount of money before any of the other players.  Alternately, if one player get a set of all 10 goods, they win immediately.

When the game begins, each player gets five cards.  They are ranked one to nine, plus one card that is wild.  Low numbers are more common, with higher numbers being rarer.  The trade master (random first round) chooses from two to four card and ALL players must trade that many cards.  Trading is not open, but structured with players choosing one card at a time from other players and each player ending up with exactly the same number of cards with which they began.  The player who offers the highest sum of cards immediately becomes the trading master.  This provides an interesting strategy choice as being trading master is a clear advantage, yet offering your best cards up for trade is quite the opposite.

After player trades, they can turn in sets of the same cards to get development cards which can give them more cards, the ability to save cards, income, and/or special powers.  They can turn in sets of different cards for money with the gains increasing with large sets.  Finally, they can turn in wild cards for even more money (although it may be better to increase the size of your different-card set).

There are events than can be triggered based on which development card is first in line when the round ends, therefore you have another factor to consider when you choose a development card.  You will definitely want to choose different cards based on whether you are trying to win by gettingn 75 doubloons or are trying to win by getting a set of all 10 different cards.  The game moves quickly and should play in under an hour (though the first play may take more).

Another high point is the beautiful card and box art by Vincent Dutrait, which is evocative and thematic.  A similar trading system was used in the game Mare Nostrum, which was a long, involved (and in my opinion, tedious) economic game which took place on a large map of the Mediteranean.  This game distills the most interesting piece of that game into a much quick (and much less expensive) package.  I highly recommend it.

Ludiquest 2 solution (almost)

It's been about a year and a half since I posted here. I've been gaming more recently, including attending the World Boardgaming Championships in Lancaster, PA in the first week of August. I've learned plenty of new games and definitely want to post some reviews, but first I think I need to post the solution (or as much as I remember) to Ludiquest 2.

It's probably easiest to go through it line by line (I've added the hints where relevant):

'With Roman count "as 102"' and "Where does c = 100?", "Where does 1000001 = 65 = A?" - Obviously, in roman numberals 102 would be CII. Which would make the part in quotes read "asCII". ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is common knowledge to anyone who programs.


"You'll read the writing on the wall" - Nothing exciting here...just continuing the sentence to mention that ASCII is how you'll read what I've written. What is written, of course, is

57 76 57 48 57 55 57 57 57 56

If you plug these numbers into a standard ASCII table, they translate to:

9 L 9 0 9 7 9 9 8


"But you will need to change your view", "When does pi = 180?" - The characters don't make much sense as they are. To change your view, turn them upside down. Regarding the hint, in geometry 2 Pi Radians is equal to 360 degrees of a circle. Pi radians would be half a circle, telling you to turn what you have 180 degrees.

If you do so, they will read (roughly):

8 6 6 L 6 0 6 6 7 6

Now, they are beginning to look a little more familiar.


"Before you make the proper call" - Call this number on the phone. This hint reads "where does L = 5?". On a phone keypad is the answer. If you called 866 560-6676, you would get a voicemail which would give you the next hint. I turned off the phone number about a month or two after my last post. I have no idea who might answer now.

I know that at least two people made it this far, since I saw their numbers on the phone statement. There were multiple calls from each - I assume so they could hear the whole message and write down the numbers. However, no one solved the final one-word answer.

The voicemail clue had another little rhyme about "keys" and I read off a long list of numbers with occasional slightly longer pauses. If you were paying attention to the numbers, you definitely would have noticed that they tended to fall into the same range as the numbers from the original post, and were indeed ASCII. The longer pauses were intended to be line breaks. If you translated these using an ASCII table, you would get the following:

1 4 7 * 0 #

1 4 7 * 0 # 9 6 3

1 4 7 * 2 6 9 0

2 5 8 0 1 2 3 * 0 #

3 2 1 4 7 * 0 #


What does this mean? I'm not going to tell you. I'll leave it as a modest challenge for the reader. The answer is only one word and you have one clue remaining: "The last word will be found by location, not by sound" - really more of a warning not to go down the wrong path.

I have no idea if anyone is reading, but my next post will be a game review (and will be within 2 weeks).

- Happy gaming

Ludiquest 2 - Last chance!

I am posting the Ludiquest puzzle one last time. Whoever sends the proper one-word answer to the correct e-mail address will win a new copy of Vegas Showdown or Hollywood Blockbuster (your choice). The puzzle has several steps and you will learn the e-mail address as you progress through the puzzle. I know at least one person has gotten extremely close to solving it. The hints I've previously revealed are included below the puzzle and I've added a new one. If this isn't solved by Saturday, I'll start revealing steps until someone gets it. Good luck!

With Roman count "as 102"

You’ll read the writing on the wall,

But you will need to change your view

Before you make the proper call.

57 76 57 48 57 55 57 57 57 56

Hints:

Where does c = 100?

Where does 1000001 = 65 = A?

When does pi = 180?

Where does L = 5?

The last word will be found by location, not by sound

Quick Update

I'm impatient to retire the the Ludiquest so someone needs to solve it. I'll do one last post of it and try to link it in new places to get some new eyes to look at it and someone to solve it. If that doesn't work, I'll post pieces of the solution until someone gets it. After this, I won't be posting new Ludiquests unless I can figure out some way to structure them so they wrap up more quickly. Instead, I will post a game review every Monday morning, beginning with Fairy Tale this coming Monday.

Games played this week: The Bucket King, Ra, Shogun, Fairy Tale, St. Peterburg, California, Battlelore (x2). Shogun and BattleLore were both new to me and both were pretty good. I will definitely have to try both of them again. Game count is now at 63.

Game's I've played since Saturday, etc.

It's been a furious few days of boardgaming. I've played Aqueduct, Nottingham (x2), Pit, Fairy Tale (x2), Vegas Showdown, Saga and Tongiaki. This brings me to 55 games for the year.

Inspired by a challenge on Brenda Brathwaite's web site, I was struck by an idea for a card game about assembling adventuring parties and matching their skills to dungeons/quests. Also, yesterday I practically completed a design for a new card-drafting game. When I will have time to develop these, I have no idea.

I did finally complete the newest prototype of Cattle Baron and got the chance to test it. It seemed to be a fair improvement, but I feel like the final few fence placements are anticlimactic since the board is usually too cluttered for them to be useful. I need to experiment with a few possible approaches to fix this.