Midnight Madness (1980)

For a while now, I’ve been planning on developing a road rally/puzzle rally for my friends and extended friends. Finally, I’m pulling it together.

There are a couple of different kinds of road rallies. They go by different names and variations, but these are the core ideas

One is known as a TSD (time/speed/distance).  In this kind of rally, a team (typically two people -a driver and a navigator) is given a set of route directions to follow, and the speeds at which they should travel the route. The route will generally consist of rural and quieter back roads. The goal of a TSD Road Rally is to travel the correct route at the correct speeds, and arrive at “checkpoints’” precisely on time. You are scored on how closely to the correct time you arrive. A Road Rally is not a race, and no rally will ever require you to drive in a reckless or illegal fashion. Arriving too early at a checkpoint hurts your score, as does arriving too late.

The second is a puzzle rally. In this case, a team is given a set of clues and puzzles which will lead them from one location to another. At each location they must answer questions to earn points and then end in a final destination.

This kind of rally can easily be explained by this clip from Midnight Madness. More details can be found at nayrium.com. Their second video link isn’t working correctly, so I’ve copied both videos here for review.

Explanation:

Example clue solving:

My plan is to combine the best of both. I’m going to have puzzles as well as driving clues.

When I was about 10 years old, my mom used to participate in, and design road rallys, that were hybrids as well. I was always too young to participate (as they wound up at bars in the end), but I’ve always wanted to do it myself.

My rally will be family friendly. The end location will be a place we can all hang out at and enjoy ourselves and eat and drink.

I’ll need to pick a weekend that is free from SCA events and (hopefully) on an odd week to make it accessible to my law enforcement friends.

This is the kind of thing where you enjoy the company of your team while you are solving. Enjoy the drive and the competition against the other teams. Then, kick back, relax, and tell stories of getting lost etc. at the restaurant.

I’m going to design and put together the whole thing and then send out some invitations. I really hope to get a good group of folks together, as these are really alot of fun, so I encourage you to invite your friends along as well. I’ll just need to get a final RSVP count of teams so I know how many packets to put together. My goal is have this ready by the end of the year, but we’ll see how that fits into the schedule.

Technorati Tags: road rally, midnight madness, puzzle, fun

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So I’ve mentioned several times about my anticipation and roleout of the new ARG, Find the Lost Ring. Well it’s in full swing now. The main meta site has released two trailers (You Tube mirrors 1, 2) as well as some well placed banner ads on You Tube and Live Journal. Those kinds of things are going to constantly bring new people into the game.

The thing is, I don’t think I’ve explained to alot of you what an ARG even is. A great resource for an explanation and quickstart can be found here at Giant Mice. After reading that, you can read our wiki’s Beginner’s Guide.

Here’s what’s been going on so far, and hopefully it’ll pique your interest even further.

Current Nutshell

Six individuals woke up in late February – all in various Olympic attire, in a labyrinth, with amnesia (and a name given by whoever found them), blindfolded, and with a tattoo on their arms saying Trovu la ringon perditan, or “Find the lost ring” in Esperanto. Then we found Eli Hunt, who studies ancient Olympic mysteries. He’s studied the “lost ring”, and has decided to share his secret – a mysterious system not run by him. The six amnesiacs have been the keys to discovering omphaloi, which appear to be pointing towards hidden artifacts. Ariadne found the first in Cardiff, UK. A package containing two pages of a document believed to called the Codex of the Lost Ring. There are 27 chapters to find. Help us find them

Each of the primary 6 characters has an in-game blog, in their own language, as well as in-game forums to help coordinate the community that speaks that same language. One of the (in the beginning) protagonists has released 4 video podcasts of excellent quality detailing the lost history of the Olympics and providing alot of true facts about the games, while interweaving some plot devices for the game.

The game is still in its infancy, and I encourage you to check it out. It’s fun to be part of a community and to solve puzzles and do research. Plus, you’ll learn lots of things along the way. Right now I’m learning about Rhumb Lines and Great Circles as well as how to calculate the distance in km between two known coordinates at a constant bearing.

Sounds a bit geeky doesn’t it? It doesn’t *have* to be. That’s the cool part about joining up with a ARG, is that you can lurk, or get actively involved. When you get involved you speculate, learn, or even provide answers to the stuff you really do know. For example, we spent about 2 days trying to figure out why our coordinates were off when looking for the second location, until a GIS specialist explaining in great detail why the calculations were wrong, and provided the right ones for us — as well as online tools to use in the future. The next location was nailed within hours.

That led us to another part of the game, which is real-world retrieval. We’re trying to reassemble the chapters of the The Codex of the Lost Ring. So far, we’ve found chapter 1 in Cardiff, Wales, and chapter 2 in Austin, Texas!

As a community, we’re coordinating discoveries and discussion on Unfiction Forums, and Ariadne’s ingame community (English), as well as using IRC Chat, Twitter, Flickr, and plenty of other tools.

I’d love to have you join up with us. Who knows what obscure knowledge you can bring to the community! If this isn’t the right ARG for you, then there will always be others.

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Here’s hoping that the new ARG that I am following is going to pan out to be a really good one.

I’ve been disappointed in the last several I have joined/lurked on. For whatever reason, they’ve fallen apart or didn’t meet my expectations of puzzles/interaction. This is often the case when they are grassroots ones run by inexperienced puppet masters, or when they are limited in their involvement tool and are more marketing based.

There have been several bits of information regarding this one that indicate that it may have some serious ARG designers behind it. If that’s the case, then it’s less likely to fizzle and *hopefully* will have the involvement level I’m looking for. Not going to post them just yet in case they are incorrect, but it’s a start.

One of the most inspiring tidbits though is that the theme of the ARG is the Olympics. If it’s truly a professionally done product tying into such a well known product, it’s going to need the proper level of support. It appears to be tied to the 1920 Olympics. Speculation abounds regarding a stolen flag, a 6th colored ring, protests, the works….

If all goes well, today should be the day that more information is revealed. People received boxes last week to draw us into the rabbit hole, and the initial date appears to be 3/3. So I’m anxiously monitoring the website and the unfiction forum for more information. Another indicator that this is being done large scale is the individuals who received the packages have various ties to the ARG community, but more importantly there are also ties to major media outlets and things. Your common grassroots projects don’t send out information like that which gets you covered on big sites likes CNet.

If you think that you might want to follow this ARG, whether it’s your first time or you know about ilovebees and others, here’s some informative links:

Article on CNet with some beginning coverage

Initial Wiki by thebruce (contains rabbit hole coverage and information regarding the packages received)

[Trailhead] Find the Lost Ring (unfiction forum thread covering the initial rabbithole packages, who’s received them, what they include, and rampant specualation)

Find the Lost Ring (the website revealed in the rabbit hold packages.. as of this post, nothing is on it but an error message.. hopefully more will be revealed today)

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So I wanted to do something a little different this Valentine’s Day. I’ve been wanting to do a puzzle adventure with Ravenchase Adventures for quite some time. Scheduling being what it is, we’ve missed several opportunities. However, I realized that they were holding a Valentine’s theme event in Philadelphia on Saturday, and I decided that we needed to make room in our schedule to sign up.

So I surprised Jean with the tickets. Well, not really surprised, since part of the scheduling included getting a baby sitter and coordinating not going to other events that weekend, so I kinda had to spoil the surprise a little earlier than yesterday.

Ravenchase has a variety of kinds of adventures, and this is going to be an outside walking one. The weather today is incredible, and I wish it would be 50 degrees tomorrow. More likely, it’s going to be mid 30s. So we’ll just make sure to bundle up.

We got our first clue last night! The way they start their adventures is that they send you the first clue to decipher, and it contains the location where you are supposed to meet.

The clue was setup to use 3 different ciphers: Vigenère, Caesar, and a Polybius.

I’m happy to report that we successfully  decoded the clues (in about 25 minutes) and know where we are supposed to start.

The Polybius one was actually the hardest because we didn’t follow the clue exactly, and wound up filling the grid incorrectly. Once we reread it a few times, we were on our way.

It’s funny, because when we solved the Caesar one, which should have been the easiest as a simple ROT cipher, the first word didn’t make any sense. Luckily we chose to decrypt the entire thing because it was so short and realized that the rest of the plaintext *did* make sense. In the end, we determined that the problem in the beginning was really a error in the encrypting, and when I contacted the coordinators they confirmed that for us. (it was one letter wrong, but it was an abbreviation, so it wasn’t obvious)

It’s a shame that the opening puzzle had an error in it, but I’m confident that the rest of the puzzles will work as expected. I just want to make sure I’m not second guessing our answers on Saturday thinking there is an error with the puzzle.

If you want to learn more about cryptography, there is a very good set of articles on Topics in Cryptography on Wikipedia.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to the game tomorrow. Our team, Team Celtic Lovers, has done our mental calisthenics and we’re ready to rock and roll!

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