Update (08/31/10): Registration for the 1.23 year anniversary edition of BANG 23 will open on September 4th at 10 AM. Find more info here.
Update (08/01/10): As we approach the 1.23 year anniversary of BANG 23, the League of Extraordinary Puzzlemen has decided to run BANG 23 again for those who missed it the first time. The re-run will occur on September 18th and 19th. Look for registration details in the coming weeks.
About: BANG 23 (a Bay Area Night Game) is a puzzle hunt organized by The League of Extraordinary Puzzlemen to be played on foot by teams of around four people (the recommended size). Puzzles of all sorts will be encountered throughout the day. Each puzzle (which could be anything from a wacky twist on Sudoku to a jelly bean flavor identification challenge) will give an answer word/phrase that directs teams to the next puzzle location. Some puzzles will be completely self-contained in whatever handout (such as a sheet of paper, some puzzle pieces, maybe even cake) is found at a puzzle site; others may make use of information in the surrounding environment so keep your eyes open during the day. The final puzzle is a "meta-puzzle" that will make use of the puzzle answers or puzzle mechanisms encountered throughout the day to provide a last challenge for teams that reach the finish line.
Is Prior Puzzle Experience Necessary?: While specific puzzle hunt experience is not necessary to participate in BANG 23, many of the puzzles in BANG 23 are difficult so having a team member or two with some experience is recommended. The League contains many logic puzzle solvers and so familiarity with challenges like the ones seen every year on the US Puzzle Championship or the types found at nikoli.com will be useful (much, much more so than is typical for a BANG). But with a multi-time crossword champion in our ranks too, don't think we will shortchange word puzzles. There are many common encoding schemes (Morse, Braille, Semaphore, etc.) used to hide messages in puzzles and familiarity with these may be important too.
Scoring/Hints: Solving puzzles should be fun so we will be available to give hints to teams that get stuck and stop having fun. At any time, teams can ask for hints on a puzzle they are stuck on, or even ask straight-away for the answer if a nudge won't suffice. Each puzzle will be worth a set number of points plus a certain number of bonus points per minute that a team solves faster than the expected time for an average team. By asking for a hint early, teams sacrifice any potential bonus they could earn for that puzzle, but can hopefully get unstuck. Note that after some amount of time, when a bonus is no longer possible, hints actually become free and we encourage teams that feel like they aren't getting anywhere to talk to a member of Game Control to figure out what they might be missing. This is a full day of puzzles and taking too long at any one spot may keep you from seeing everything, so please take advantage of hints if you get very stuck.
Where? - Downtown Burlingame, starting at the north side of Washington Park close to the Burlingame Caltrain station.
When? - Saturday June 27th, from 9 AM to 5 PM. (Yes, we know the N in BANG originally stood for Night, but like many recent BANGs we think a Saturday afternoon is a very friendly time to do our puzzling).
(This website is not a puzzle.)
Questions? Contact us here.