Ravenchase

Today I played the Ravenchase game with two friends. It is a combination puzzle and scavenger hunt game. None of us had ever played before, so we didn't know what to expect. It was amazing and challenging.

There were four clues, each at different location, and each clue pointed you to two subsequent clues in order to find pieces to a bigger puzzle. Once all four clues were completely solved, you had all the information needed to decode a clue pointing you to a final meeting point and the end of the game. It was a timed event, with the fastest team winning. As an example, here is an outline of Clue #1.

Where Crawford meets the Water
A center for visiting guests
Just outside a call for you
In its bright red very best

Find the town that gave us this
And write it from left to right
Next the country down the side
Two levels of code come to light

This clue called us to the Portsmouth visitor center, where there is a red phone booth, a gift from Portsmouth, England. So we wrote "Portsmouth" across the top of the grid in the clue and "England" down the side. Then the letter string below the grid was decoded by reading into the grid. For the code "EP" we read along the "E" in England to under the letter "P" in Portsmouth yielding the number 1, which we wrote into the space provide. Decoding the resulting number string was a simple substitution operation, with "1" meaning "A," "2" meaning "B," etcetera. Numbers higher than 26 required a second trip through the alphabet, so "27" became "A" as well. Eventually, the message decoded as "VA PILOT PAPER ANNOUNCEMENTS." We bought a paper from a nearby machine, and read the announcements.

A message in the classifieds from the event organizer took us to a nearby park, where we found a little scroll of paper hidden with the first piece of the big puzzle. From there, off to Clue #2 and another multi-part clue and cipher.

None of my team had ever played this game before, and most of the remaining teams were very experienced. Still, we managed to finish in third place and claim a fabulously tacky trophy, described be the organizers as "the most phallic thing we could find." I think we will have to try this thing again.