SEE ALL THE PUZZLES AND SOLUTIONS ON THE WEBSITE!



Once upon a time, in a land far away, Oliver X & Star5 participated in a game called BANG: Bay Area Night Game. They had fun. They wanted to bring some of this fun back to their land of MN. Finally they got around to creating a game. This game was called MN0PQ1: DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE. MN0PQ stands for Minnesota Zero Puzzle Quest. THE RABBIT HOLE refers to the Alice In Wonderland Theme.

...
STARFIVE:
Mostly Oliver created the puzzles, and I made them pretty, sent emails, made flyers and organized things. I did put together a few of the puzzles after he told me how they should work. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. We created 8 puzzles, all Alice in Wonderland themed. Some puzzles were on paper, some were physical objects, one was audio, one was even edible! The answer to each puzzle led you to a different location somewhere between 2-6 blocks away. Teams were required to walk.. no cars or bikes or that sort of thing. The whole route was about 3 miles over 5 hours. The weekend before the event, we had 2 test teams run our game. They both did well. We figured out a few things to change and improve, thanks to their testing.

The game was scored based on time. At each puzzle you could take up to 2 hints and then answer. Hint one added 5 minutes to your time. Hint 2 added 10 more minutes. The answer added 20 more minutes. The only problem with this method of hints, is that most teams were able to figure out the first thing to do, which meant that hint one was often of little use.. but we never came up with a better way to do it.. that would keep it fair and not have to have the checkpoint person watching over everything to see what people needed.

Day of the puzzle race, the weather was beautiful. There was a chance of rain, but it was a nice day. We hoped this would last. Alas, it did not. Everything started off well.



We had 8 teams, which was a pretty good number for our first game. I watched over the beginning, then left to help setup a few of the next puzzles.



Around the time when most teams were getting to puzzle 2, it started to storm.. and not just rain.. but hail! Hail littered the streets. I had just seen a team in the wrong place entirely, heading the wrong direction.. so I took off to check on them. I found them hiding out in the wrong coffee shop.. I encouraged them to look a little harder at the first puzzle to figure out the correct answer and then offered them a ride to the second location.



The second puzzle seems to have been one of the more difficult ones. I spent a long time making it work so that you wouldn't get any errors if you did it in a different order.



But the one thing I've learned is that people will almost always think of something you never thought of. Even after you've tested it.. there will be different answers that people will get and some of them will unfortunately work on our map. We tried to avoid that.. but you never can tell what will happen.

Puzzle 3 seems to have been one of the easier ones, though I know a couple teams had some trouble at first remembering a QWERTY keyboard layout.

From there I moved on to setup the croquet at location 4. Yes.. you had to play a short bit of croquet before you got to the actual puzzle, which was an audio puzzle. I found many of the songs for the audio puzzle and put them together. It was a lot of fun to create.

Then, as teams seemed to be solving the 4th puzzle, I moved on to setup my actual station, which was The Mad Hatter's Tea Party. I was the Mad Hatter.



I even found a ridiculous pink and orange polkadot hat and tie at the dollar store that I wore. Sadly I was too busy worrying about the storm to take good photos of myself. I setup a picnic blanket in the little park. I had a cooler with iced tea and some cookies. The puzzle was in the cookies.



It was a tasty puzzle! People were very excited to get cookies. Gwen from The Bill Murrays was so excited she started eating it before I could manage to tell her that she was eating her puzzle.. luckily each team member got one and they were all the same. It rained some more. Luckily I brought an umbrella and a big piece of plastic to cover up my picnic when the rain came. Teams were pretty spread out by the time they got to me. But most teams seem to have gotten that puzzle without a huge amount of difficulty.

My experience with the rest of the game is all from what others have told me.. By the time I closed up shop at the tea party, it was time to head to the end puzzle. I gave one team who had gotten stuck and taken a study-the-puzzle-dinner-break.

Overall it went really well. The weather was crazy. There was a pretty good hail storm when most teams were at puzzle 2. Luckily that one had shelter. Sorry to those who ended up in the middle of places at that point! There was a rainbow soon after. People seemed to have a lot of fun, even though some puzzles were quite difficult and many hints were taken.

And the results were..

1. Team Kaiju
2. The Pekingese Liberation Army
3. Ironclad Alibi
4. Team Edsroom
5. The Bill Murrays
6. The aNOMNOMNOMalies
7. The Draconians
8. Gnome Liberation Front

Everyone who played or helped got a button.



But i created a shiny trophy for the winner.



Yay Team Kaiju!



The trophy will be passed on from team to team with each game. Hopefully winners and/or others will create new puzzle games for everyone to play. If anyone wants to create one, but needs some help or advice, let me know!

After the ranking was announced, we headed back to Oliver's place for food, drinks and fire. We had a good time chatting with people about the game and everything late into the night.

We're going to try to have another one in the beginning of August.

Thanks to everyone who helped run, helped test, and play our game. And thanks for having fun and enjoying it even when it was hard and the weather was crazy.

I created a website which has all the puzzles and solutions so even those that couldn't be there can try some out. The solutions have descriptions of how to go about solving the puzzle, not just the answer. This could be helpful for learning how to go about solving these sorts of puzzles.


SEE ALL THE PUZZLES AND SOLUTIONS!