Well Game Control announced that this year was going to be their final year. The tenth year. Midnight Madness X.
Team Pink was going to be huge this year. We had recruited new players and grew our team to twice its size. We also spent time before the game discussing strategy, structure, and organization. I think it paid off. We finsihed 10th last year. This year, well I'll wait for that part...
The game kicked off at 103rd and Riverside. This was my old stomping ground. I was hoping that the entire game would be around the Columbia U area since that was the section of the city I knew the best. We quickly found out that the game would be played in zones and that Columbia was the first zone. We had until midnight to solve as many puzzles as we could in that zone before GC shut down the hint line, the solution line, and waited for us all to gather at Union Square. There were 4 puzzles in the Columbia "zone."
At the game start we were given two clues and a hint "dongle." The hint dongle was an electronic contraption that blinked a number every few minutes. The number represented how many hints we had, and it went up one every hour. To get a hint we had to plug our dongle into a member of GCs dongle and it would decrease our number by one. This meant we would be getting our hints in person, which was good.
The first hint was a weird glass block with words inside you could barely make out. One of our first ideas turned out to be the right idea, we submerged it in water and could read the message fine. So we had one puzzle down within the first 15 minutes. That seemed like good timing, but at the location we ran into several other teams already there.
We set up our office at a McDonalds at 105 and Broadway. Winston had agreed to be dispatch for the night, text blasting us with updates and info. He also brought along a copier so we could copy clues for everyone to work on at once. That was a great idea. It was far easier to solve when we all had our own copy rather than everyone huddled over our only copy.
The other clue we got at the starting line was a sheet divided up into what seemed to be Tangram shapes and had building name abbreviations on them. One shape had a star on it. We cut the pieces out, arranged them into a rectangle, set them on a map of columbia that was provided to us by GC, and the star lined up with the Schapiro Center.
At the Schapiro Center there were a lot of teams looking in to some classroom window where an unfinished game of hangman was on the board. Jed deduced that it was a red herring since it didn't have a codeword to text like all the other clues did. He smartly advised us all to keep searching and eventually someone found the right clue behind the building back on 120th street.
At both locations there were identical posters of a mad scientist with lots of bottles labeled with weird chemical names. But in each photo the bottles had changed order and the amount of liquid in the bottles was difference. Our first idea didn't pan out, that you use the letters on the bottle that were in the difference of liquid from one photo to the next. Instead, we figured out how the bottles shifted from one photo to the next then arranged them in order and read diagonally from the first letter in the first chemical name to the second letter in the second name etc etc to get the answer. The AHA moment was pretty hilarious, because Jeff had written the chemical names in reverse order, he was doing it right but exactly backwards. When Margaret suggested this, he immediately saw it and circled it in his notebook. It was pretty cool.
The next puzzle was a craigslist personals ad with lots of misspellings and abbreviations. I embarassed myself with my vast knowledge of craigslist acronymns. I don't know why I assumed everyone would know that VGL stood for "Very Good Lay." I suppose I haven't always been happily in love.
This one we had to solve crowded around a newspaper box. It was getting closer to midnight, the deadline for the zone, and we still had to make our way down to Union Square. We knew this was the final puzzle, though, so we pushed ourselves to solve it in 20 minutes. Some of the team jumped in cabs to make sure that someone was at Union Square at midnight just in case. The rest of us huddled around it and started shouting out ideas.
The solution came to us after either Jeff or Andrew noticed that the first paragraph contained every number from 2-0 but no 1. We had already been operating on the assumption that each paragraph would give us one letter (or number as it turns out). This bit of insight cracked the puzzle for us. Every paragraph had every number or had every letter except one. Find the missing letter or number. We solved the first 3 since they were all numbers and were easy. We got 105 so we figured it was an intersection of 103 and something. So we started from the bottom and got D and E and knew to go to riverside. We called in the solution with 6 minutes to spare.
Union Square was a mob scene. In addition to the normal Saturday night freakshow, add in 200 sweaty geeky gamers converging on their bikes and setting up their laptops. We waited for like an hour for something to happen. Game Control was busy setting up the second stage, which took a bit of time, but everyone was patient and our team had lots of water and candy and snacks (they said it was potluck!).
Eventually someone came around and gave us a flashcard. Teams were given the card in order of how they finished the Columbia zone. I think we got ours third or something like that. Team Marmalade finsihed the zone first, I know that much.
The flashcard had two photos on it of two locations. One was an auto parts store on the Lower East Side, the other was of an apartment building in Chelsea. Of course all the teams descended on each location looking for the next puzzle. Some on our team knew better and insisted there was a puzzle here. The first idea we got was to follow the trajectory of each photo and see where they intersect. That ended up being a Community Garden near Tompkins Square Park. However on first search we didn't find anything. And I'm pretty sure we were the first, or one of the first teams to that location. We left and came back several times. Every time we were so sure we were right but never saw another team or any clue so kept doubting ourselves.
About an hour and a half later, with no new solution, Jeff said he wanted to go back and look again, and I went with him. This time there were other teams there searching. We decided to not leave until we found something. After all, the rest of the team were in other places pursuing other leads and would text us if they found anything, so we had nothing to lose. Eventually I saw the clue, or a corner of it anyway, peering out from underneath a large rock by a fence. I nonchalantly grabbed it and we walked away pretending to still be searching.
I was pretty peeved by this clue, but we only had ourselves to blame. We solved it quickly but gave up on the hunt way too soon. We should have learned from last year that GC likes to hide the clues.
This envelope had three paper puzzles in it. One said something like "Meet a Man in the Outback at Rivington and Washington" or something like that. Near that intersection was a bar called Aussie's which was a big red herring and probably intentional. The Man in the Outback was a guy sitting in a Subaru Outback. Jed was first on the scene for us there and he got some alligator clips.
The other clue was a string of numbers spelled out in different fonts, some in wingdings. And the final clue was a sheet of incomplete sentences with the heading "statements."
We took the sheets to our new HQ, Jessica's apartment near Union Square. We copied them all and set in to work on them. Half the room took fonts and the other half took statements. I had statements but I watched them solve fonts.
They latched on to the "identify the fonts" angle right away. Once you identify the fonts, you count however many letters the number was in the font name to get your letter. They solved it pretty quick. We sent a team of bikes to the location to grab the next puzzle.
Statements might have made our game. We got married to the idea that it had something to do with states right away. Eventually someone on the team suggested state abbreviations, and then I believe Jeff saw ND in the first line, then WY in the second, and it was off to the races. We saw a state abbreviation in every line. Before we even had them all IDd, Winston printed out several US maps and we took to tracing them, like we immediatley instinctively knew what to do with them. We solved it in like 20 minutes with no hints. That is only noteworthy because a few clues later we went to GC for a hint and saw like 7 teams working on this puzzle still. Then later after that we saw a team at Starbucks working on it. I think teams really struggled with this puzzle, and it may have made our game for us.
The next two puzzles were location puzzles, so the team bailed on HQ and split up. One puzzle was a bunch of little toy animals glued to a ledge. The other was a playground with lots of numbers and weird shapes stuck all over it.
I went to meet the team that was at the playground, which was its own fiasco. But later on I had ran across the Animals team in a Citibank ATM and worked with them for a minute.
Lots of people came and looked in at us and/or came in to use the ATM, but nobody ever inquired about what we were doing. I guess in NYC you see things like this all the time.
The team was struggling with the animal puzzle, so I went to get a hint from GC, but the team solved it before I could even get the hint. So we used our hint on the playground puzzle.
The solution to the animals was to take the number of difference between the placement of like animals and use that number on the animal's name. Pretty decent puzzle.
The hint GC gave us for the playground puzzle was that we didn't have all of the numbers. We had 1-9 but were missing 0. So a few of us went back to look for it. Meanwhile the team in the ATM were working from a sketch of the shapes that Tim had given them.
Back at the playground the lights were now shut off and we only had one flashlight. Plus, there were now like three or four teams here, including Team Black! Now I knew we were in the lead. We searched for the 0 to no avail for a long time, but eventually the team solved it without the 0. I suggested to GC that we could try to solve it without the 0 if he'd give us a hint about the ideas we had. He insisted we needed the 0. I'm just glad the whole team didn't go try to find the 0 with us.
Basically each number had two shapes and you ordered the shapes based on the right edge of one shape and the left edge of the next shape. It was obvious where 0 went when you did that. The digits formed a phone number, and we knew the missing number was 0, so that was that.
From here I get foggy on what clues came when, so I'll just use some artistic license.
I'm pretty sure the next puzzle was the stickers. This was the lowpoint of the game for us.
We arrive at the location and find a bunch of MMX stickers that are different colors and a little cradle that the dongle fit into perfectly. Whenever you put the dongle in the cradle it would say "Start Over" on the dongle. We were the first team to this site, but not by much. A couple of teams showed up right after us.
We tried to think of ways to use these stickers in conjunction with the dongle. After putting the dongle near one of the stickers we noticed that we got an asterix on the dongle, so we figured maybe there were photoelectric sensors or rfid transmitters somewhere near the stickers.
From here we set off to try to put the dongle on each sticker in order of the color spectrum, then on the cradle, but every time we got "Start Over." We tried several different orders, but nothing worked. But we knew we were on the right track because of the asterix reading we'd get every once and a while. Meanwhile teams were showing up one by one. It was getting bottlenecked.
At least the teams who were showing up didn't know what to do. Up to this point we had hidden what we were doing pretty well, and other teams were trying to use their batteries and wires with the dongle and cradle. We were still holding out hope that there was yet more pieces to go with the batteries and wires we had picked up and that it would be the final metapuzzle.
Eventually someone from Game Control came to watch what we were doing. He told us that he had been watching and that we were doing it right, we were the only team who was doing it right, and he had no idea why it wasn't working.
What he didn't know was that we were doing it wrong. Not entirely, but we didn't understand a key part of what was happening. There was some kind of gyroscope in the dongle, so tilting it at the angles of the stickers was making it register with the asterixes. When we put it on the stickers, we would turn it all around thinking we were trying to get some kind of sensor to register, so we weren't doing it totally right.
When we finally got it, it was really by chance. Since we figured it was time sensitive and that was why we weren't getting it, Jed just ran through placing it on each for a split second, literally pushing teams out of the way and running in traffic to get back to the cradle in time. By the time we got it, we were no longer in the lead. Team Black got it before we did. But it felt like we had dropped way behind and were now bunched up with lots of other teams. We had no idea that we had already solved more puzzles than most other teams at that location.
There were two pieces to the next puzzle, one at each of the next two locations. One was a game board and one was a poster with some weird looking celebrity photos. Our team convened at a nearby park and blazed through this one.
Each photo was a morph of two celebrities' faces, and each space on the game board had a description of a third celebrity. So for a description that refered to Billy Joel, you used the number of the photo that was a morph of Haley JOEL Osmond and BILL Clinton. It gave us a phone number with the next location.
I want to say the next puzzle was this one...
which came with this...
which isnt one sheet its a small strip. This was one of if not my single favorite puzzle. We all sat around on the sidewalk working on it, and we had tons of crazy ideas. It took a hint from GC to get us going in the right direction. We were told that we didn't need to fill in the circles with letters or numbers or anything, in fact we didn't need anything external to what we were given to get the answer. Up to that point we were working on patterns. After some nudging we realized that the lines were instructions. You were supposed to fold the strip on the line in the spiral and the circles were character breaks. Each pattern of lines would fold into a shape of a number or letter. Great puzzle. At one point while trying to solve it Chris said "this is going to be one of those puzzles that when we solve it we will love it." This was before we had much of an idea of what to do, and he was totally right.
This one took us to the Blue Building where we found a bag with 3 batteries. We also ran in to Team Red, who dispatched two of their teammates to follow us. We walked all the way to David and Andrew's apartment to try to lose them, but they followed us the entire way. We thought it was pretty funny so we started messing with them. We inspected light poles, fire hydrants, and empty lots. We took photos of random things and acted excited. Every time they would saunter up behind us and after we left would inspect what we were examining. After the game we posted a photo of them on the MM board and made fun of them, which drew lots of scorn from Team Red. It also drew some interesting justifications for their tactics and revealed a pretty pervasive attitude that stuff like that is inbounds and fair play because it doesn't break any stated rules. I thought that was ludicrous, personally. I don't like being followed and I wouldn't follow another team. I think the winners should have solved all of the puzzles faster than the other teams. Or in the case of last year's game with the points system, have earned more points than other teams however they can given the rules of the game. But whatever. I apologized to them on the board.
The next spot gave us two puzzles, or maybe we already had two puzzles, I can't remember. We ended up at Seaward Park where we could sit and work on puzzles and dispatch the bikes again.
One puzzle was a long poem. I worked on it for a second, we thought we had brute forced a quick answer, and Andrew took off on his bike to see if we were right. In the meantime, luckily, David and Margaret kept at it and found the real solution. To be honest, I don't know how they did it because I was working on the other puzzle. But it led us to a dress shop where there was a video playing in the window of a woman dancing.
We solved the dancing puzzle standing in front of it. We identified each dance (well as many as we could) and took the first letters and it spelled the next location, a bike shop somewhere nearby.
I didn't go to this location but heard about it. There was a bike on a bike rack outside of the shop with another dongle cradle on it. Unfortunately our dongle was at GC trying to get a hint on another puzzle so Carl had to carry it all the way back across town to Jed at the bike shop. Evidently if you put the dongle in the cradle and pedaled the bike it would display a message on the dongle.
From here we got the final piece of the metapuzzle, a small metal plate thing. It was actually two metal plates glued together. We knew we had to use the batteries and the alligator clips with the plates to get them seperated, but we weren't sure how. And we still had one more puzzle to solve.
I'm embarassed I didn't solve this one, being a geocacher and all. On the face of it it looked like a list of crossword puzzle clues. One list was labeled "Across" and another was labeled "Down." Many of the clues had numbers in the solutions, so we figured they all had numbers in the solutions and would give us phone numbers. But we got stuck on some that we couldn't force numbers into, so we needed a hint. GC told us that not every answer was a number, and then we realized that "Awestruck," a possible solution for one of the clues, had the word West in it. David figured out that it was GPS coordinates, and from there we were off to the final location.
The GPS coordinates took us to an envelope with a weird schematic for how to assemble the metapuzzle. There were two teams here already, Black and Spicy Mustard. Team Black, however, were in the wrong area completely. They were searching a playground a block away. Spicy Mustard (I think) grabbed the clue the same time we did, so we figured we were in a foot race with them, with Black close at hand.
The schematic said to make a circuit with the three batteries, attatch the clips and hook them up to the plates and wait. We did this, then we formed a human wall so Team Black, who was milling around us, couldn't see what we were doing. Black was worried we were hiding the clue so they couldn't get it, but we assured them we weren't. Our whole team was huddled together shoulder to shoulder watching the contraption waiting for it to pop. It never did, so we pulled it apart ourselves after letting it heat up for a while. Inside was a keyword. When we texted it, it texted us back to go to the ampitheater in a nearby park. We looked at each other and smiled. This was the finish line and we knew it.
Jed and Andrew took off on their bikes while the rest of us footed it. We had no idea if the other team that grabbed the clue the same time as us was already there, or if we were in the middle of the pack! A few minutes later Jed called me.
"Get down here fast!"
"What? More puzzles???"
"No."
"What then? The finish line?"
"Just get down here."
"Are you going to tell me anything?"
"No."
I relayed this conversation to the team. Tim looked at me and smiled a huge smile and he took off running. Everyone else ran, too. When we got there we were elated to see Jed and Andrew standing all alone with GC. We had won.
This was a sweet victory for us. We had a lot of discsussion before the game that we knew we could win. Our last two finishes tainted by circumstance, all we needed was to avoid silly complications and compete based on our ability to solve puzzles. We also discussed our team organization a lot and how to communciate and work together well. In the end, it all payed off. A very satisfying victory, winning the final Midnight Madness. And to win so decisively, too. Team Black came in 15 minutes later, but they hadn't solved the final puzzle yet. They tailed us to the finish line. Then Team Goldenrod showed up an hour later but they had some kind of weird quasi-cheating thing happen to them, too. I don't even know how long after Goldenrod the next team, Team Red, showed up, because we got tired from waiting, as bad as we wanted to, and we went to get dim sum and celebrate.
Anyway, if anyone from GC reads this, thank you so much for all these years of awesome games. We have enjoyed the challenge year after year. Now that you are hanging up the guns, we are hoping to do your tradition proud next year with our own game.
See you then.
