DASH 008? More like DASH GR8!

Mötley Clüe at the end of DASH 008If you couldn’t be at DASH 8, you missed a total treat. The picture above tells a thousand words by showing the reaction of the team I played with at the end of the hunt. The most specific compliment that the hunt deserves was that it was really smooth; the administration in London was spot on, the puzzles were very cleverly designed and the playtesting proved effective, so the overall effect for our middling-performing Expert-track team was that we didn’t encounter any glitches and enjoyed the ride… albeit at more of a trot than at a canter, let alone a gallop. It was clear that a lot of lessons were learned from last year.

Congratulations to Misremembered Apple for being clear winners of the Expert track in London, and to Team Reckless of Escape Review and friends for being clear winners of the Normal track in London. After the hunt finished, it was fun to watch the live ClueKeeper scoreboard, as if it were a Gillette DASH Saturday and Matt le Tissier were shouting “Oh! Soooolve!” as incremental results came in. While not all the results are in yet, provisional returns point to The Judean GNUs and LXP of Palo Alto being the world’s top two; congratulations to them, too. Early leader in the “best team name” contest might just be Quantum of Solvers.

Thank you to all the staff, volunteers and people behind the scenes worldwide; you’ve made a lot of people very, very happy. The event proceeds apace not just as a puzzle championship but also as an increasingly social event, with so many teams familiar from the flourishing Puzzled Pint. The event was so spectacular that the post-event buzz fading left a void; here’s looking forward to the next one!

5 thoughts on “DASH 008? More like DASH GR8!”

  1. We had an absolute blast! Need to start training now because we found a lot of the puzzles really hard or just very hard to get that last step 🙂

    1. Hi, Shasha! Thanks for dropping by and glad to read that you had such a great time. I can recommend Puzzled Pint on the second Tuesday of every month, as well as other hunts and competitions that crop up from time to time. 🙂

  2. I believe the London results were somewhat closer than Cluekeeper suggests. My understanding is that some error meant that their “Oragami” score didn’t count for the Magpie team, and they were only a few points behind us… They were certainly arriving at points ahead of us throughout the day – keeping us on our toes! They also beat our time on half the scored puzzles… In fact looking at the times we can’t help but wonder if all we really demonstrated was that we were faster at cutting out than them.

    Let me echo the thanks to the organisers – the day ran smoothly and there were some quality puzzles with great presentation. We were particularly impressed with the design of the telephone numbers question given the constraints. (Amusingly we’d hypothesised the correct extraction a few minutes before trying it – but ruled it out because “it would be tricky to design a puzzle where that worked”.)

    1. Yes, Magpie accidentally skipped a puzzle after solving it. After checking the records, we awarded them 631 points for a very good 2nd place, but we are unable to fix this in the CK records.

      1. Jan, let me know more about this, you actually can fix the CK records (or I can do it for you if you like if you tell me what needs to be changed).

        I would also like to hear more about how the puzzle was accidentally skipped, as you literally now have to type in the word SKIP after a message that says “This cannot be undone.” in order to do that (unless there was a bug, in which case I’d *really* like to hear more).

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