Wednesday, July 22, 2015

#Card12 Solution

This post was written up by Jason, the other half of team Bosun. This one was all his doing. -A 

This one began on November 18, 2014 with a few tweets explaining some rules:


And then the puzzle:
From the start there is alot going on with this grouping of cards. Base cards, Little Lions, Pastime’s Pastimes, Where Nature Ends, Larger than Life, Deadliest Predators, Natural Wonder and Into the Unknown all represented. Also, it should be noted that two other points were active prior to the start of this one, so now there are three (that’s one more than people on our team!). We submitted 2 wrong guesses on this one - both times I had come up with a way that it might make sense, and I did not intend to fake that we scored the point. My first guess was Honey Badger from World’s Deadliest Predators. To get this I pulled one letter off of each card face (11 cards) and was able to spell Honey Badger so I went with it. My second guess was Sopwith Camel from the Air Supremacy set. This was similar to the first, but now I was looking for a 12 letter name - if you didn’t guess by now, at the beginning of this point I pulled the whole set including inserts into Excel and found length of first, last and full name, which proved helpful later. Things started to become more clear with this tweet:
So now we know that something from the first nine points will be important for determining the missing card. Surely the CM cannot expect that we know how every point was solved, right? Still couldnt figure out what previous point mattered until Jim reached out to the CM in the early evening of the 21st to say “Not that my feelings matter, but 11 feels like too few to find a pattern from what looks like randomness” to which the CM replied, “Not if it’s a pattern you’ve already seen…”. This reply led me right to the grid from the triple plus point and now I just had to find the connection. I started looking at the grid and after a few minutes of discussing with Adam we saw what was happening. Looking at row 1 of the grid we saw “lmhsueftbrpokwanictgjdyfehlit” and looking at the cards I saw Lincecum, Smoltz, Sphynx, Kershaw, Maddux, Claude Monet, McGriff, William Tell, Black Mamba, Luray Caverns, Louis Hennepin - as you see with the bold the position of the first row of the big grid and the position in the name on the front of each card lines up if you move the position forward once per card. The CM posted an additional tweet to hint at this either just before or after we made the above discovery:
word 1 position 1 - A word 2 position 2 - B word 3 position 3 - C It was good we were already almost done because this was going to be inspiring to people. Even with what we realized that what we were looking for was a card with an O in the 12th position in the name that is printed on the front of the card. So I went over to my spreadsheet and filtered by cards with total length 12 - hopeful that one of these would end in O since that would be easiest to find and one jumped out:
Michelangelo Thankfully for everyone involved the tweet arrived before the daily “no points” tweet and a bit of our collective sanity was saved :) Interestingly after the point was awarded the CM posted this:
This was a bit confusing to me. It seemed the mystery of who scored and how was supposed to be part of the game, and I wasn’t sure why this was necessary. I also was curious if this account could have been found earlier or if the name was significant. Those questions aside we were starting to believe...
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6 comments:

  1. GrantJuly 22, 2015 at 11:44 AM

    I saw the "first letter A, second letter B, etc" thing right away, but never made the link back to the big grid. I actually misinterpreted the "should they be forgotten?" clue as applying to a different point. And having scored the "Big Grid" point, you can imagine that this one hurt more than most :)

    Nice job.

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  2. SharpeJuly 22, 2015 at 4:49 PM

    This was a good ol fashioned commuting time clue point....or so goes my excuse.

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  3. GrantJuly 23, 2015 at 8:42 AM

    Jim, you're such a sore loser ;)

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  4. SharpeJuly 23, 2015 at 6:06 PM

    What I did realize is that it went both ways. There were many points where the other team could have scored within a short time and vice versa. I've got perspective, I promise.

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  5. AdamJuly 23, 2015 at 7:39 PM

    You've got a long commute, Jim. This point was open for 3 days before we solved it.

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  6. GrantJuly 24, 2015 at 10:30 AM

    Ha ... I think Jim was referring to the "An object arcane ..." tweet. We picked up on that immediately when we saw it, just needed that leap back to the grid, but it was too late. Clearly you guys were already clued in to what was going on though, so even if we had made the connection right away, you likely still would have gotten the point.

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