Game Summary:
This one was a sort of hybrid game between the YABA hunt and the more
traditional Game. The teams traveled by car with each clue leading
to the next as in the traditional Game, but like YABA, all of the clues
were within the city limits of San Francisco and only over the course of
about 5-8 hours. There were couple of twists, though: First,
10 of the 12 clues were designed by teams in the hunt, which gave a slight
advantage to those teams (of which we were one). Second, each team
was given a "Get out of jail free" card to use to skip any of the clues.
My favorite part about this game was the extremely well defined scoring
system, in which each clue was worth five points, any hints received took
away a point, and when a team finished, they were docked a point for every
10 minutes they finished behind the first finishing team. This allowed
us to carefully strategize when we should call for hints, when we should
use our free pass, and when we should try to solve a clue on our own.
As for our team, we improved once again on our past performances.
Pointwise, we ended up tied for second place only behind the all-star team
of veteran Gamers, but got dropped down to third based on the tiebreaker.
Once again, we had a wonderful time, and this was a great warmup for the
upcoming Zelda game. An interesting side-point was that we were by
far the largest team at this one, with 8 team members. This definitely
turned out to be a great benefit, as we were often able to muli-task with
different people working on different angles of clue-solving while others
were responsible for driving and navigating.
Team Members: Rich Bragg (captain), Kristen Bragg, Robert
Cheng, Mike Holzbaur, Scott Krueger, Sarangan Narasimhan, Kate Saul, Nathan
Whiteside
Internet "Phone-A-Friend" Helpers: Ajit Chaudhari, Chris
Dyrby
Start Time: Saturday, September 29, 11:00 AM
Finish Time: Saturday, September 29, 4:09 PM (5:09 hours
elapsed)
Score: 57 (max 60)
Clues: Solved 11 of 12 clues (we strategically skipped
the last clue using our free pass without even looking at it)
Awards: 3rd Place
Result: 3rd out of 16 teams overall