BANG 21 Puzzles

We ran BANG 21 was run in Menlo Park on May 2 and 3, 2009.  (The Linguistic Geographers ran SNAP 21, based on many of the same puzzles, in Seattle on May 9, 2009.)  We've collected the puzzles, solutions, and other material from the game here.

This page contains SPOILERS for the hunt. We also have a spoiler-free version with puzzle descriptions only (no solutions or discussion).

Welcome to BANG 21! - Rules, hint system, scoring, and so on

BANG 21 Map - Teams used this to find the next location after solving a puzzle

BANG 21 Answer Sheet - Teams would record their answers here, to be turned in at the end

Dan notes:

Mostly we ran this game as a conventional BANG.  We borrowed the map navigation mechanism (crossword clues) from Iron Puzzler BANG.  We think it works pretty well, but we did know of one case where a team back-solved a puzzle (21 Equals) by combining the flavor hint from the puzzle with the list of clues on the map -- in retrospect, the map clues should have been more ambiguous ("Parts of a train" is good because there are dozens of possible answers; "Converse with the deaf" is not so good because there are only one or two).

There were 42 map clues (21 x 2!) but all but 8 were unused dummy answers.  This felt a little bit inelegant to us, and we considered actually using those clues as part of a metapuzzle or something, but dropped that idea.

Wei-Hwa notes:

Most conventional BANGs don't have metapuzzles, so that was one small divergence.  There were many cases where the crossword clues didn't seem like the best clue for the job.  This is because originally the meta also used crossword clues to reference the puzzle answers, and we didn't want the multiple references to feel redundant.

Generally, when we develop puzzles, everyone who cares to gets a hand in refining the puzzle, and this hunt was no exception.  Many puzzles were very different than the one the "Original Idea" presented, and almost all the puzzles went through multiple revisions.  There was an added wrinkle this time; after BANG XX, Dan and I discussed the possibility of upping the presentation value of all the puzzles, so that they weren't all just "here's a couple of photocopied sheets of paper".  In the end, only one puzzle was spared this fate.  So, if you don't like a certain aspect of a certain puzzle, don't go blaming the person with the "Original Idea"; more likely than not, it's my fault.

Puzzle 1, Twenty-One (Quiz Show)

21 Hook:

The 1950s game show Twenty One had a scandal, dramatized in the 1994 movie Quiz Show, where it was discovered that contestants were given the answers ahead of time.  We used the look of the 2000 version of Twenty One (the original version didn't really have onscreen logos or text).

Original Idea:

Trisha Lantznester

Puzzle Location:

Burgess Park/Recreation center (start location).

Presentation:

During intro, teams received a hand-written note explaining that they have been selected to win (i.e. the game is rigged), and that they have accordingly been given a list of answers.  The note is attached to a typewritten list of 21 answer words, in alphabetical order.

When the game started, an MC (Wei-Hwa Huang) read 21 trivia questions, while members of GC flip through poster boards showing the questions.  After the 21 questions are done, we repeat through the list indefinitely (as long as anyone is watching).  GC never paused for answers, nor did anyone attempt to call them out.

Here are the questions:

  1. What is the full name of the company that removed the word "Computer" from its name once it started making music players and phones?
  2. In the Harry Potter novels, an agent whose job is to pursue and apprehend Dark wizards is called a what?
  3. What R&B artist, nicknamed the "Beale Street Blues Boy", won a Grammy in 1970 for performing "The Thrill is Gone"?
  4. On the TV show The Simpsons, Maggie Simpson is Bart's what?
  5. What brand of caffeinated root beer with "bite" is sold by The Coca-Cola Company and comes in a silvery can?
  6. In mathematical analysis, what is the verb used to describe how an infinite series approaches a specific finite limit?
  7. The 1946 book "The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" was renamed in 1998 to "(Who)'s Book of Baby and Child Care"? 
  8. What Sunday occurs two days after Good Friday and can be celebrated by signs of fertility such as bunnies, eggs, and marshmallow Peeps? 
  9. When one celestial object, like the moon, moves into the shadow of another, like the earth's, the visual phenomenon is called a what?
  10. What traditional Swiss communal dish comes in the three varieties of cheese, meat, and chocolate?
  11. What chess term for "a ruse or risky stratagem" is also the name of a card-throwing mutant who appears in the new X-Men movie?
  12. In the Street Fighter games, what is Ryu's spinning move, literally "Tornado Whirlwind Foot," more commonly known as in English?
  13. What peninsula in Europe, forming the majority of the nation of Denmark, does not actually get its name from the fact that it sticks out?
  14. What food company replaced AIG on the Dow Jones Industrial Average but is probably better known for its Macaroni and Cheese?
  15. What computer peripheral was invented in 1969, paradoxically one year before the dot matrix variety and 7 years before the inkjet variety?
  16. An Austrian composer numbered his tenth symphony his "9th" in an attempt to avoid a curse.  His first name was Gustav; what was his last?
  17. What is known in slang as a "biffy," "kybo," "thunderbox," or "long drop," and often has a crescent on its door?
  18. The suits in a standard Rider Tarot deck are swords, wands, cups, and the five-pointed discs called what?
  19. What Swiss cough-drop is known for using an alpine horn and yodeling in its commercials?
  20. What farmed fish is often fed artificial colorants to give its meat the same pinkish hue found in the wild variety?
  21. What '90s TV science-fiction series, starring Jerry O'Connell as Quinn Mallory, shares its name with White Castle hamburgers?

Puzzle Answer:

SCORE

Puzzle Solution:

  1. Start solving some trivia questions. There's a solution spreadsheet with all the questions and answers.
  2. (Optional) Notice that the trivia questions are sorted such that their answers are in alphabet order (hence order of trivia questions not relevant).
  3. Notice that the list of "answers" given don't actually match the trivia questions.
  4. Notice that the answer to each trivia question is off by one letter from a given answer.
  5. (Optional) Notice that the "answers" are sorted such that the letter that needs to be changed is in alphabetical order (hence order of "answers" not relevant).
  6. Notice that the letters changed in the actual trivia answers are the letters from A through U, once each.
  7. Sort the "answer" letters by the actual answer letters.
  8. Extract message FILMMUSICORPOINTTOTAL.
  9. Interpret as "Film music, or point total" to get SCORE.

Dan notes:

Wei-Hwa Huang wrote the notes while riding a train through Slovakia.  We thought the handwriting would make it seem a little more authentic.

One of the placards got dropped in the fountain on the first showing.  It was still usable for the next day, though, just a little bit wrinkled.

In case we got kicked out of the start location (which was, after all, across from a police station), or it was raining, or something else went wrong, we had a "Plan B" envelope in everyone's start packet that just gave teams the trivia questions directly.  (Fortunately, we didn't have to use it.)  Teams must have wondered all game long what "Plan B" was for.

Wei-Hwa notes:

The cue cards I was holding had three questions printed on each one.

We did explain at the final location what "Plan B" was for.  On the first day, suddenly we got a bit paranoid that teams might have opened the "Plan B" envelope immediately and started solving the first puzzle, so we started telling all the teams to not open the little envelopes.  That paranoia turned out to be an unfounded rumor, but better safe than sorry.

This was perhaps the only puzzle where the clue on the map ("Twenty-One minus one") was more obscure than the clue in the puzzle ("Film music or point total".)  A few teams got stuck when they couldn't find a matching clue.  My stock hint was, "Do any of you know the first line of the Gettysburg Address?"  For one team, the answer was a simple "no."

Trisha was rather happy that she finally got me to buy a suit.

Puzzle 2, 21st Letter

21 Hook:

The 21st letter of the alphabet is U.  All the answer words in this puzzle use only the vowel U.

Original Idea:

Corin Anderson

Puzzle Location:

Burgess Park.

Presentation:

Teams receive:

Here are the clues:

The blanks at the bottom looked like this:

___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
1st     5th 3rd     4th 2nd 6th

Here are the letters that were in the bag:

Puzzle Answer:

BURGUNDY

Puzzle Solution:

Dan notes:

We laser cut the letters (at TechShop), using this template (which produces 4 sets out of a 1' square sheet of acrylic).  The letters came out nicely, but in retrospect, this was more trouble than it was worth; we could have sorted some letter beads or foam letters or something instead.  Cutting out four sets takes 30 minutes on the laser cutter, and with 50+ teams...  I think Seattle used slips of paper instead.

In fact, if it hadn't been for the time and hassle of laser cutting, we might have included the U's in the bag, mostly for the fun factor of dumping out letters and having a huge number of U's among them.

Wei-Hwa notes:

Actually, Seattle used alphabet beads -- something that we had considered, since we had thousands of beads left over from the Griffiths Collection game, but decided that Scrabble-tiles would be more fun to manipulate.  Scrabble tiles became etched wood panels, which became etched acrylic panels, which became acrylic cut-outs.

Puzzle 3, 21st element

21 Hook:

There are 21 slips of paper, the first 20 representing a car traveling game in which the player is trying to guess the thing that GC is thinking of.  In this case the thing is an element and all 20 statements are comparisons (unlike, like) of each of the first 20 elements to the answer, the 21st element, scandium.

Original Idea:

Corin Anderson

Puzzle Location:

Menlo Park Caltrain.

We had a periodic table on display at this location.  We didn't explicitly point it out to teams but it should have been pretty obvious.

Presentation:

Teams receive:

Puzzle Answer:

NUCLEAR

Puzzle Solution:

Dan Notes:

Even in the final version, it wasn't clear that all of the statements were about the same element (i.e. scandium), so many teams missed the whole point of the puzzle (that it's all about this one element).  They solved it anyway, of course.

Puzzle 4, 21 Dots

21 Hook:

There are 21 consonants in the alphabet, and 21 pips on a die.  There are 6 faces on a die, and 6 vowels.  (Y counts a both consonant and vowel.)

Original Idea:

Doug Zongker

Puzzle Location:

In front of the Chase Bank along Santa Cruz Ave.

Presentation:

Each team receives an envelope that contains 21 pieces of card stock (1, 2, 3):

Puzzle Answer:

BOXCARS

Puzzle Solution:

Dan Notes:

Many teams didn't understand how vowels worked, so got B_XC_RS, but it's easy enough to guess the answer from that.

Doug developed "scissor finger" from cutting out all the card stock pieces for this puzzle.

Wei-Hwa Notes:

Seattle GC cleverly (lazily) avoided "scissor finger" by having teams do their own cutting.

I wanted the answer to this puzzle to be "CASINO ROYALE" (cleverly, the name of the 21st James Bond movie), but we couldn't work out an elegant answer extraction mechanism that handled repeated letters.

Puzzle 5, 21 Years

21 Hook:

21 is the legal drinking age in most states, and the 21st amendment repealed Prohibition.

Original Idea:

Melinda Owens

Puzzle Location:

Santa Cruz & Chestnut St. in front of Le Boulanger.

Presentation:

Each team gets a "fun activities" place mat for kids and a foofy cocktail menu.
(Note, depending on your PDF viewer, the kiddie menu may show a solution on it.  This has to do with how it renders invisible layers.)

Puzzle Answer:

SPEAKEASY

Puzzle Solution:

Wei-Hwa's Notes:

Technically, you don't need the adult drink menu to solve the puzzle at all.  This is because we made the kiddie puzzle clues as easy as possible; in the first draft, many of them were more vague.

Puzzle 6, 21 (Blackjack)

21 Hook:

The game is about getting as close to 21 as possible without going over.

Original Idea:

Corin Anderson

Puzzle Location:

Fremont Park

Presentation:

Each team arrives to a dealer at a blackjack table at the park.  They are encouraged to sit down and play.

Posted is this sign:

BANG Blackjack
Minimum Bet ....... 2
Maximum Bet ...... 2
Bailout Money ........ 3
Win Pays ............ 5
Blackjack Pays .... 7

The dealer has a rack of chips in front of him, in the denominations 1, 5, 10, and 21.

Players receive starting money to start, and play blackjack.  If they do not have enough money to bet, they can ask for a bailout, which will give them 3 more.  Each team can only have one player at a time.

Teams should figure out two things pretty quickly:

Procedure notes for the dealer:

Puzzle Answer:

VINGT-ET-UN

Puzzle Solution:

The stickers are:

Putting the prime-valued card letters (two, three, five, seven, Ace) in the blanks gives the answer.

Wei-Hwa's Notes:

Surrender was taken once the whole weekend, and doubling down was done only occasionally.  There was an interesting four-hand split (that ended up not being very profitable for the player).  We found ourselves repeating the same phrases over and over, to the point where Jan and I still giggle at "The minimum bid is two, sir."

The puzzle is nigh-impossible to solve if you don't notice the backs of the chips.  To help this, teams were asked "would you like to change up to a 10?" when they had two 5 chips.  Teams that pondered the purpose of this strange question figured out what it was getting at.  In a few cases, a team would harvest all the card letters, decide they were done playing, and walked away without ever looking at the back of a chip.  In those cases, we told the team that we would save their winnings in case they decided to re-visit us.

The blackjack sign (with the Easter-Egg-like humorous photograph) was put on the prize table on Sunday.  I don't know who took it.

Puzzle 7, 21 equals

21 Hook:

There are 21 ways to have three unordered operators, if you allow "no solution".

Original Idea:

Ian Tullis

Puzzle Location:

Jack W Lyle Park

Presentation:

Teams receive two letter-sized pages of paper (1, 2).

Puzzle Answer:

SIGN

Puzzle Solution:

  1. Realize (from examples) that the goal is to put the given numbers in the squares, and then add operators so that the expression evaluates to the magic number.  Rules at bottom say parentheses aren't allowed.
  2. Realize that the magic number is always 21.
  3. Solve many such things.
  4. Decode each set of operators to a letter, as per the example, using the table at the right.
  5. Extract message FINDALLFOURSOLUTIONSFORONEONEEIGHTTHIRTEEN.
  6. The solutions for {1,1,8,13} are 13+8+1-1, 13+8/1/1, 13+8*1/1, 13+8*1*1.
  7. Those letters are G, I, N, S.
  8. Anagram (as per rules) to get SIGN (as confirmed by text).

Wei-Hwa Comments:

It turns out that it's very hard to find a set of numbers with more than three solutions, even more so when you realize that you can't use any numbers that contain the letters V, W, or X (approximately 40% of all integers).  Ian had the idea, but I did all the number-crunching.

Puzzle 8, Meta

21 Hook:

The smallest way to build a square out of smaller squares of distinct size -- "Squaring the Square" -- requires 21 squares.

Original Idea:

Wei-Hwa Huang

Puzzle Location:

Nealon Park

Presentation:

Teams receive:

Puzzle Answer:

YOU

Puzzle Solution:

  1. Assemble both grids, the "square" grid (solution) and the "quad" grid (solution).  This is greatly helped by noticing the correspondence between the two grids, as shown in the example:
    • Each square has a matching quad, and vice versa; they will both have the same number.
    • Each square has a number corresponding to its side length.
    • Each quad has four corners; two green and two blue/purple.  The opposite corners have the same color and the diagonal is drawn.  The number on the quad is at the intersection of the diagonals, simultaneously "marking" both diagonals.
    • When multiple squares on the "square" grid meet, they share an edge which is both the sum of the squares on one side of the edge, and the sum of the squares on the other side of the edge.
    • When multiple quads meet at a corner, the unified corners form a circle.  The quad diagonals going into that corner have the property that the sum of the upper diagonals equals the sum of the lower diagonals (for green), and sum of the left diagonals equals the sum of the right diagonals (for blue).
    • There is a direct correspondence between the "edge sums" of the square grid and the "diagonal sums" of the quad grid.  This is illustrated in the example in the upper-left of the grids.
  2. The puzzle symbols at the top of each square align with the numbers along the edge of the containing square.
  3. Indexing into the corresponding puzzle answers with those numbers reads the answer "SECOND-PERSONSINGULAR".
  4. Intepret that as "SECOND-PERSON SINGULAR" to get the answer "YOU".

Dan Notes:

This puzzle was also made using the laser cutter.  The designs were printed on label stock, stuck to cardboard, covered with a sheet of low tack transfer tape, aligned carefully in the laser cutter's bed (using a jig we manufactured for the purpose), cut, and peeled.  The low tack tape was there to prevent the labels from getting scorched and discolored by the smoke from the laser cutting.  This took rather a while to make but it sure beat cutting them out by hand.

Wei-Hwa Notes:

This puzzle changed the most from inception to final result.  The puzzle was always about assembling a square of squares while using a quadrilateral jigsaw as a guide; the change was that we didn't really have a good way of extracting a word from the puzzle that didn't allow teams to simply back-solve the puzzle, while still being easy enough that teams didn't solve the two grids first and then have no idea how to get the answer.  The first version involved labelling the squares with letters from A through U and then cutting the grid into thirds both ways; the cuts spell out the dubious phrase "PAINFUL MAGNITUDE."  Testers thought that was some oblique crossword clue to a single word.  The second version (which made it to the playtest) involved having arrows on the squares that pointed to targets on the grid, with numbers underneath the respective targets being indexes into the words.  The final version was a reasonable compromise, one that a few teams backsolved (and then asked "What the heck were the quadrilaterals for?") but no one got stuck on the answer word extraction.  Dan really gets the credit for both the second and the third version.

Because of the last change, a couple of red herrings got introduced that weren't there before: the whole square solution could be transposed (not a problem in the previous version since the arrows wouldn't point correctly), and teams didn't know to count the hyphens as characters for indexing (which was explained in a sub-clue in the second version).  After this hit a few teams on Saturday, we issued an "errata sheet" on Sunday to cover these two issues.
  The Burninators