Did DASH 8 leave you wanting more?

whatsnext

This site has always declared its constituency to be Escape games, puzzle hunts and more and the escape games have had to take a back seat for some time. Perhaps you’re coming here for your first time, or one of your first times, as a result of DASH, or perhaps you couldn’t go but thought it sounded great; you don’t have to wait another year for DASH 9 to get your fill of puzzle fun. The idea to try to keep a calendar of such things has rather fallen by the wayside, but there are plenty of exciting-looking things coming up:

  • This site is perhaps more excited about the upcoming Raiders of the Lost Archive than anything else. It’s a version of Citydash by the esteemed Fire Hazard, but has a big twist. It takes place in the Victoria & Albert Museum; the V&A are excited about this, but it’s not an official event of theirs. The difference between this and any other Citydash is “(…)this time there’ll be nobody chasing you (and no running in the museum!). We’ll keep the pressure up with twists & turns, surprise clues and leaderboard updates, but you won’t need your running shoes for this one – and you’ll be inside throughout.
     
    If the running element of previous Citydash events has been a turn-off (*raises hand*) then this may well fit the bill and the theme is gorgeous. You can play solo, in a pair, or in a team of up to five. Tickets for Sunday afternoons in May are now listed for 15th May, 5th June and possibly 28th May. (Thanks to Ken for the heads-up!) 
     
  • The A Door In A Wall are, happily, continuing to put on their large-scale public events. The next one coming up very soon will be entitled Played to Death. “Each team will need a charged smartphone to hand and we advise you wear comfortable footwear as our story leads you out into the nearby streets in search of puzzles, clues and characters. (…) you’ll have about 45 mins to get settled and work out where to begin your investigation before the game’s opening scene. You’ll be tasked with gathering evidence to crack the case and you’ll then have two hours to explore the area outside: solving puzzles, interacting with characters and collecting clues. Once the time is up, return to the Square Pig ((pub)) where you’ll have some time to make sense of what you’ve found and identify the killer.
     
    The game will be offered on most evenings and some afternoons (particularly at weekends) between mid-May and mid-June; tickets are already available and have sold out on a number of days already. If you don’t get to play, the company are also offering the A Veiled Threat game on the third Tuesday of every month, which The Logic Escaped Me played and loved
     
  • This site’s friends at Treasure Hunts In London are also continuing to run their events; the best way to keep in touch with what’s on offer there is their calendar on Eventbrite. Three events are coming up soon: May sees the Art on the Streets Treasure Hunt at the Chocolate Museum on the 14th and the Trafalgar Square Experience at the National Gallery on the 28th; June sees the Naughty But Nice Afternoon Adventure starting at the Annenberg Courtyard of the Royal Academy on the 18th. Prices vary, depending on whether the event includes no food, a cream tea or a full dinner. 
     
  • The Cambridge University Computing and Technology Society have held a long, ambitious, advanced puzzle hunt annually for the last three or four years, normally in early June after most students have finished their exams. No word whether there’ll be another one this year, but fingers crossed. The logical place to look for more information would be the society’s Facebook page
     
  • The Manorcon board game convention (15th to 18th July at the University of Leicester) is set to feature a puzzle hunt, probably on the Sunday afternoon. This year’s hunt setters are past hunt setting veterans and multiple-time solving champions, as well as some of this site’s favourite people in the world; attend Manorcon because it’s a tremendous board game convention that started running ten or twenty years before the current breed of board games started to become popular again, rather than just for the puzzle hunt. 
     
  • Before all those, there’s dear old Puzzled Pint in London – and now also in Manchester! – on the second Tuesday of each month, so as soon as the Tuesday in half a week’s time. The puzzles here come from a rather more DASH-like background, but are deliberately accessible to all and designed to provide an hour or two’s fun for a team enjoying food, drink and good company. 
     
  • If Tuesday’s too long to wait, or if London and Manchester are both too far to go, there are online puzzle hunts which come to you. The annual Melbourne University Mathematics (and statistics) Society hunt starts at midday, local time, on 9th May. It’s designed for teams of up to ten; you’ll recognise some of the participating teams’ names from the top of the DASH leaderboard, but other teams come from the MIT Mystery Hunt tradition and more. Suffice to say that the MUMS hunt has gained an audience who like to spend hours on deep, research-y, Aha!-y puzzles, though they’re almost always brilliantly constructed. 
     
  • Staying online, if you like logic puzzle contests then the calendar also looks busy. The World Puzzle Federation’s Grand Prix season’s contests take place every four weeks, with the next starting on Friday 13th May. The next contest is set by the US authors and may be of particular interest; more soon. The move to featuring “casual” puzzles as well as the more high-powered traditional fare adds massively to the fun as well as the accessibility. That’s not all from US authors, though; the US Puzzle Championship will be on Sunday 18th June. Before that, HIQORA takes place on Saturday 28th May; more soon on that one, too. Look out (perhaps at @ukpuzzles on Twitter?) for news of the UK Puzzle Championship as well, which has rapidly become this site’s favourite of the year. Previous UKPCs have happened in May, June, July and August, so this year’s event could happen at any moment. Exciting times!

Coming up this weekend: the 2015 Manorcon board games convention

Manorcon board games convention logoThis weekend sees the thirty-third annual Manorcon board games convention at the John Foster Hall in the University of Leicester, near Oadby. (The event gets its name from its original home, the Northfield Manor House at the University of Birmingham.) From 2pm on Friday 17th to 2pm on Monday 20th, probably a couple of hundred attendees or so will be there. The majority of games played will be from the last 20 years or so, but there will be plenty of classics as well – most notably, the late-’50s negotiation classic Diplomacy, though no one game comes close to dominating the event.

It’s a little strange that the event has stayed about the same size over time while the the board games played there have moved further and further into what might be considered orthodox geek culture, if that’s not a horrible contradiction in terms. Likely more people have played Carcassonne in the last year in the UK than Canasta, and maybe more have played Settlers of Catan than Cribbage – but twenty years or so ago you had to come to a convention to play games like these, whereas now you can find at least one board game club in virtually any large UK town and board game cafés are practically mainstream. That said, this year’s event is expected to be a little larger than usual, as it also hosts this year’s European Diplomacy Championship.

It’s reliably a great event; registration will still be available at the door. (Thirty single rooms should still be available too if you want to stay on-site.) However, Manorcon is of most interest to this site because it now has a proud fourteen-year annual history of hosting a puzzle-based Treasure Hunt on the Sunday afternoon, which is what puzzle hunts were once called before the concise term came into use. This year’s event will run from 2pm to 5pm, and this year’s theme is inspired by the recent discovery of Richard III’s skeleton in a Leicester car park. To wit:

530 years ago, England’s last true and rightful ruler was betrayed and brutally slain by Welsh invaders and their treacherous lickspittles. His followers slaughtered, his reputation besmirched, his life of valour and achievement obliterated, only a few true souls preserve the memory of the divine majesty of Richard of Gloucester, ultimate son of York. A tiny cadre of the faithful remain – direct descendants through countless generations of Richard’s most honourable followers – committed from birth to guard the royal legacy through time. Meeting each year on the site of his last great feast, now more than ever their mission is endangered by the discovery of Richard’s bones, so cunningly hidden, in a Leicester car park. These last, loyal few guard an artefact of awesome power behind sigils and riddles, waiting, ever waiting until the One True King, the New Plantagenet comes again to claim from their tender care the embodiment of English power – the Great Crown, long thought lost – and thus ascend the throne to annihilate the usurpers and restore England to righteous might!

So, at least, are the beliefs of the Ricardians, a sect who disguise their secret meetings by attaching themselves to other, low profile gatherings where unusual characters are unlikely to be noticed. Your object is to locate, and steal the Crown. There is a source in the Ricardians who will slip you most of the info you need, a source who is also prepared to steal the Crown, but is frustrated by not knowing who the top Ricardians are and is unable to break the Ricardian riddles. Also, this source has tipped off some of your Treasure Hunting rivals, hoping to play you off against one another. Good luck, folks. Only you can make King Richard rise again. And then nick his stuff. Note that teams will need at least some sort of functioning smartphone.

Another delightful theme; this year’s setters are a mix of DASH veterans and Manorcon Treasure Hunt veterans, and apparently they have pledged that the Treasure Hunt has “become too easy in recent years”, so expect a stiff challenge. If you’re not far from Leicester, you might well enjoy turning up between 2pm and 5pm on the Sunday for the Treasure Hunt – and, if you like board games, it’s very likely you’ll enjoy the whole weekend. (One other particularly interesting event is the Pop Quiz at 10pm on Saturday in the bar, run by site co-writer Phil. His last two events have been delightfully off-beat, imaginative and yet very accessible; it’ll be interesting to learn what he has this year…)

All the news: hunts, contests and more

NewspaperThe site has been slow recently due to a nasty case of moving house. If you can stay put somewhere for a long time, it’s a wonderful thing. Still, these are decisions that have to be taken as a family, and you’ve got to go where the work is. Nobody came here for ranting on renting, either, so on to the news.

There are a couple of new hunts listed in the calendar, as Treasure Hunts in London have announced a hunt in historic Chingford and a second with the title “Drink to me only”, both coming up in September.

Past events are not lost to the mists of time but are stored in the calendar archive, and it’s worth following up a couple of events listed there. Mark Goodliffe did the double of winning the puzzles (sudoku and Kenken) competition at this year’s Mind Sports Olympiad and also the recent finals of the Times Sudoku championship, putting him commandingly atop the hypothetical money list for 2014. All three podium positions in both events were taken by UK Puzzle Association members; congratulations all round!

Previously this site also covered the recent puzzle hunt at the Manorcon board games convention; further to that, this site thoroughly recemmends the recent Snoutcast episode that featured an interview with hunt organiser Annie Percik. Snoutcast episodes are habitually excellent, and about 85% of them focus on puzzle hunts; in previous years, the podcast racked up 200 near enough weekly episodes, and this year the podcast has gone to a focus on monthly(-ish) interviews, focusing on women who make puzzles. Strongly recommended.

Lastly, you might notice a revamping of the blogroll at the right, for this site is in the fortunate position of having so many great blogs to link to that it’s worth categorising them for ease of use. A new Toronto Room Escape blog has got off to an excellent start, and Intervirals has added some forums, of a type that the hobby does not currently have, that may well take off over time.

Behind the scenes of the Manorcon Treasure Hunt

Manorcon board games convention logoTen days ago, this site previewed the Manorcon board games convention in Leicester, with a focus on the event’s puzzle-based Treasure Hunt. This site is fortunate enough to be able to feature a retrospective of the finished event, very kindly supplied by hunt organiser Annie Percik.

Up until 2013, I had never entered the Manorcon Treasure Hunt, so of course the first year I did, my team won. The prize was the responsibility of running it the following year.

Sunday 20 July 2014 – a full year of preparation (largely on my own, but with several hugely important contributions from others) found me rather looking forward to the experience, and confident of its success.

Usually, I operate via an attitude of positive pessimism – if I assume something is going to go badly, I’m nearly always pleasantly surprised. So, even though the event was mostly fine, and I got some great feedback afterwards, it still felt a bit of a let-down because it didn’t go as well as I’d hoped.

Basic structure:

  • Teams move from A to B on a map with multiple routes.
  • Solving a puzzle allows the team to move one space.
  • They each start with some pieces and some time for the final puzzle.
  • Leaving yellow spaces allows them to pick either more pieces or more time to add to their loot.
  • Landing on red spaces or spaces where there is already another team causes them to sacrifice some of their loot.
  • The first team to reach point B gets some additional loot, and then the final puzzle begins.
  • The final puzzle is a jigsaw, and the winner of the overall Treasure Hunt is the team that manages to put together the most pieces in the shortest time.

The playtest a couple of weeks before went really well, which gave me confidence – but we only had one team testing, so we had no experience of dealing with multiple teams and how they interacted on the map.

It was all a bit chaotic and demanding, especially at the beginning, and the teams solved puzzles faster than we expected, which put pressure on all of us – moving markers on the map, handing out new puzzles and keeping an accurate record of the various amounts of loot.

We panicked a bit on the timings and changed the rules half way through (probably unnecessarily), which annoyed some teams who had strategised based on the time available. We should have stuck to our original schedule and forced the teams who were steaming ahead to take a break (which was what the schedule was designed to do in the first place), rather than making a snap decision under pressure to try and fix something that wasn’t really broken.

Anyway, everyone seemed to enjoy it, it certainly didn’t over-run, and overall it went reasonably well. Plus, it was amusing that the team who had never played before, and joined in at the last minute to support my endeavours, was the team that won – and so they have to run the event next year!

While setting high standards for yourself before taking pride in the success of your own work may be the greatest motivator of them all, it’s extremely easy to be very negative about an event that you have run. For instance, the second year I (co-)ran the event, when the plans were for a 1½-3 hour event, it was something of a surprise to see the fastest teams crack the metapuzzle after about 57 minutes. Nevertheless, it didn’t stop the hunt from being fun on its own terms, and this site firmly believes in the maxim that “Nothing would be done at all if a man waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.” The important thing in practice is, as Annie says, that people seemed to enjoy it. Many thanks to Annie both for running the event and for writing it up for this site.

Manorcon XXXIII is set for 17th to 20th July 2015 and looks extremely likely to contain a highly puzzle-based Treasure Hunt for a fifteenth consecutive year. Some of this year’s winners come from a team who did very well at this year’s DASH in London, so the omens are extremely promising. More news as it becomes available!

Coming up this weekend: the Manorcon board games convention

Manorcon board games convention logoThis weekend sees the thirty-second annual Manorcon board games convention at the John Foster Hall in the University of Leicester, near Oadby. (The event gets its name from its original home, the Northfield Manor House at the University of Birmingham.) From 2pm on Friday 18th to 2pm on Monday 21st, probably a couple of hundred attendees or so will be there. The majority of games played will be from the last 20 years or so, but there will be plenty of classics as well – most notably, the late-’50s negotiation classic Diplomacy, though no one game comes close to dominating the event.

It’s reliably a great event – I went every year from about 1994 to 2002 or so – and registration will still be available at the door. (Some single rooms should still be available too if you want to stay over.) It’s particularly relevant to this site because every year since 2001, there has been a puzzle-based Treasure Hunt, normally for three hours or so on the Sunday afternoon. I ran the first event in 2001 and co-ran the second one in 2002; since then, it’s often been the previous year’s winners who go on to run the next year’s event.

This year’s ManorCon Treasure Hunt is being run by Dave Durant, Mark Fox and Annie Percik. This year’s theme is a Pirate Quest located in the island city of Bandar Lanun, famed for its cliff-side rope bridges and hanging prison cells. Trust in your crewmates and come armed with your wits. Five teams of up to six welcome – put yourself down on the sign-up sheets displayed all weekend.

A delightful theme, and Dave and Annie enjoyed learning what types of puzzles are suitable for team solving at DASH 6. If you’re not far from Leicester, you might well enjoy turning up between 2pm and 5pm on the Sunday for the Treasure Hunt – and, if you like board games, it’s very likely you’ll enjoy the whole weekend. (One other particularly interesting event is the Pop Quiz at 10pm on Saturday in the bar, run by site co-writer Phil Hannay. His event last year was delightfully off-beat, imaginitive and yet very accessible; it’ll be interesting to learn what he has this year…)