SNAP VI: Viking Conquest

This weekend was SNAP VI, run by Los Jefes in downtown Ballard. I was on team Boxfort Brigands, which happened to be five sixths of TBD from Non-Intern Puzzleday, but with a name this time due to a series of unlikely coincidences. We had a good run then, but most of the real big name teams weren't in that mix. I was curious how we'd fare against the serious contenders.

Of course, I started out by counting puzzle shirts at the pre-opening hangout. Over the course of the day, I got up to 16: five Intern Games, four teams who make their own shirt, one College Puzzle Challenge, one CMU PuzzleQuest (now defunct? college event), three Intern Puzzledays, Shinteki, Mooncurser's Handbook, and one I didn't even recognize. I'm sorely tempted to start referring to this statistic as Distinct Puzzle Shirts to throw off the WoW players among us.

We were surprised at being the first team out of the gate by solving the first puzzle, a sail sewn in the pattern of Semaphore flags dramatically unfurled at the end of the opening presentation. We kept pretty good momentum on the first few puzzles, but Briny Deep passed us on the first puzzle that really tested our rough spots: a set of five hexagonal nonograms. While we were the first to that puzzle and the first to notice that the other pieces were hidden around the site, the obvious "give one puzzle to each person" parallelization became a matter of our weakest link. As interesting an experience as it was to try to talk the team through the tricks of the puzzle type while solving ourselves, us not all having seen and experienced that sort of thing as much before was a slow-down.

From then on, we were trying to stay on Briny Deep's heels. The site arrangement was interesting- half the puzzles within a few blocks of downtown Ballard, and then we had about a mile walk to get to the Ballard Locks for the second half. They did give us a paper puzzle to solve on the way, which revealed that while solving crossword-style clues while walking is a reasonable test of our skills, anagramming while walking is less so. In the Locks, we saw them leaving every puzzle as we were arriving, so we went into the meta with a little bit of ground to make up.

The meta itself was a hard-core puzzle-solving race to the finish, which made up for losing the wandering to interesting locations aspect with a really cool form factor and theming: we got a set of three puzzles to open three really nice prop treasure chests (with three different types of lock), each of which contained a treasure that was a puzzle itself, and a simple meta to pull the answers to the treasure puzzles together to open the big chest and finish the hunt. And as it happened, we choked on both one of the combinations and its matching treasure, even as we solved the other four and could focus the whole team on the last pair. I liked the last treasure from a design standpoint- a diary containing colors encoded in a variety of ways and a wand with gems in those colors. But we got so attached to one red herring that it took running through all the timed hints and taking an offered manual hint to get back on track. By that time we'd spent enough time staring at it that we could quickly correct our data for the proper solve path, but we'd lost any chance of recovering the lead we had, finishing about fifteen minutes behind Briny Deep. The wand got broken vindictively on the way back to the end party.

Design-wise, I was interested in seeing so many constraint satisfaction puzzles in this sort of event, which was kind of my personal forte- they tried a few different ways of handling parallelization and such, making one, two and five different puzzles for the three puzzles that used it. For us the two probably worked best- we could put a strong person on both grids and have the other people point out the next step. (The five I mentioned above, the one essentially turned into me doing it.) I'm also sort of curious about how various folks handle metas for this sort of thing; a meta like this one that doesn't really require any work once you've solved the puzzles manages to be culminating without being frustrating or allowing for backsolving the last few puzzles (And it's the kind I did at the event I ran at school, with the twist that you could solve it missing any one puzzle to deliberately prevent the kind of frustration we hit here.), but a little part of me wanted more of a puzzle-solving burst at the end rather than finally being done with the wand and just plugging that in to what we already had.

Other noteworthy puzzles that I didn't mention above:
•The cryptogram of a set of Hagar comics was nicely accessible. Having a lot more data than we needed, and the title of the comic as a seed, made things pretty smooth and entertaining. (And the text still managed to be funny despite tweaking them to match the constraint)
•Getting financing at the Viking Bank started with the "take 1-3 coins, last coin wins" game. While I like having puzzles that involve interaction, I personally had seen this one so many times before that it wasn't very satisfying to already know the answer and just go through the motions. (I don't think my team noticed that I counted the coins at first to get the strategy right, noticed that there were 26 of them, and then totally forgot that fact when he handed us the coins as the second half of the puzzle.)
•The shield challenge later in the event (Basically throwing Velcro balls at a felt shield that matched the grid we were trying to fill words into, where each hit gave us the clue for the word in that space) was a nicer application of that theme. It's nice having a slight change of pace that releases puzzle information progressively to keep the people focusing on the solving busy.

Now that the event's over, I really appreciate the thoroughness of the wrap-up site. There are prior SNAPs that I can't even figure out where they were held, so having puzzles with solutions, standings, lots of photos, and interesting tidbits like the GC text message log up at all, much less two days after the event when they all probably have sleep and work and life to catch up to, far exceeded my expectations. Wouldn't have brought my camera if I knew how thorough the GC photography would be, but I did get some video of the opening that I'm working on getting online.

All in all, a lot of fun, with solid puzzles making good use of the cultural history of the area. I thought I'd caught on to something when I noticed the Nordic Heritage Museum a mile away from the start location, but it turns out they didn't need to use it because of all of the Nordic-themed locations in Ballard. Thanks to Los Jefes for hosting!