I joined Team Kaiju for the Puzzle Quest, flown in from overseas as a last minute substitution for Eve L Hazzard. My supply officer provided transportation in the form of motorcycle and gear, and I raced off to the rally point. Arrived just in time to meet my teammates: spacebug and s4, and a new acquaintance "Eric", whose bald head positively gleamed with the electric thoughts of a comp-sci engineer.

The puzzling started light, but quickly turned hot and heavy. Multi-layer puzzles, with several leaps needed to spot patterns-within-patterns. We had a great team assembled. As s4 or spacebug said: "a musician, a visual artist, a programmer, and
an electrical engineer are all folks who are used to working in
different kinds of code." We could split up tasks and analyze the puzzle in different ways. Often, one member would glimpse a brilliant and barely supportable leap of logic, that someone else could chase down and verify.

It was hard. So hard, that the heat coming off the heads of the collected puzzlers caused a massive disturbance in local weather patterns, resulting in a bizarre hailstorm that was only experienced in that neighborhood of Minneapolis.

Really. Here's spacebug running through the hail, as we dash to the next puzzle location.


Here's an example of one of the puzzles - it was a cookie from the Mad Hatter's tea party. That's it, from that we had to find the answer and the next puzzle location. I've removed our notations from the picture, to avoid giving away any answers to future puzzlers.




Every puzzle was challenging and mindbending. It took us the full 4 hours to complete 8 puzzles, and we took a fair number of the hints (along with the associated time penalty) to complete it. In the end, to our joy, Team Kaiju won the trophy. Looking forward to next year, and many thanks to the organizers.