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[Cortana]

I survived the ARGfest game.

I want this on a t-shirt sent to my house. Seriously. Survival is all I could hope for.

Our team, the green team, was given a cellphone, and two thick envelopes. We were told to walk north from Hotel Penn. So we did, taking our rag-tag band of Cloudmakers (myself, headmocker, Fluffy, darklytr, Adrian Hon) and our friends (Pixiestix, her fiance Brian, Wishi, SpaceBass and Mysteryjones) up seventh avenue toward Times Square. A few minutes later (at the prescribed time according to the axon list, our phone rang.

We were asked for our position and were instructed to continue walking North. We also opened the first envelope which included a number. Wishi was on phone duty, so he called the number and said "Oh, it's like I'm on hold." and then he set up our voicemail for the phone, per the instructions. We kept heading north to 42nd and Broadway (yes, we gave your regards.) and got our second call. Tiffany took this call and gave our location. She was spoken to by an angry voice (later we found this to be Durga herself :o ) and she told us to display some initiative. So we did. Dead center of our map says 49th and 7th (OMG it's a KLOOOOO!!) so, we went. We got there as the next call arrived. This is where it was dreadfully clear we were out of bounds. We were told to ignore the first clue and she gave us a set of clues that lead us to the mural room at Grand Central Station. Now, two things to note here:

1. We called the helpline twice, which was supposed to be staffed by a person, and we got nothing but voicemail.

2. Our clue was obscured by the voicemail system on the phone. The billy joel recording we were supposed to have heard (and which Wishi didn't recognize because Longest Time apparently wasn't as big in Britain as it was here) would have taken us to our correct theatre.

There was no way to properly nudge us here, in the design of this game. Big flaw.

Moving on. We arrived at Grand Central Station and found Sin Vraal standing under the muraled ceiling (gorgeous, wish I'd taken pictures of that) and he had on his chest (or, well, lower chest...dude, put that somewhere else.) a yellow arrow bearing instructions. We texted a code to a phone number and received instructions from the return automated text messaging system. We were told to get some maps from information, which we did.

This was an intriguing puzzle, and I'd like to see exactly how we were supposed to solve it, as that was fairly obtuse and abstract. Eventually, we called for help, but were angrily instructed to return to the main hall, as we'd gone to a starbucks to work on the puzzle. Frustrated with being barked at, we went back to see what people were doing in the main hall and get a clue.

Instead, we were given instructions to go to the Ascot Place subway. Back we went, all ten of us, more and more tired, more and more feeling a bit ticked at how poorly things were going. We got on the train and headed to Ascot. When we surfaced, we discovered yet another arrow on the ground. We texted the message to the number, "Message not sent, 0.5 credits used." Um. Okay. Retry. "Message not sent." We saw the yellow team at the foot of the stairs coming up, and we almost convinced them we were on our way to the next clue, but waiting for someone getting some water, all the while hiding the arrow. We just couldn't do it at the end. Letting them see the clue, we got a peek at the text response, just as our string of intial messages went out to the relay point and came back.

It was a tinyurl that Adrian brought up on his laptop (thank you Starbucks.) that lead to...an MBNA press release? WTF. This has nothing to do with our game. We read the rest of the text message and figured it out, heading over to Tokyo Toy for our next clue. In front of Tokyo Toy, we found the Red and Blue teams already there, they were enjoying some frites and some brand new Perplex City cards. Finding the arrow, and dispatching team members for all important cards, we texted the code to the phone number. "I'm sorry, this code hasn't been activated yet!"

Uh oh.

Time to call the helpline. So we did. And left voicemail. Again. This "live" helpline designed to get us out of a jam, or out of a sensitive situation has done us no good.

Crap. Call again. No answer. Call again, no answer.

It was at this point we realized that since the PMs weren't going to follow their rules, neither should we. We opened the rest of our envelopes as the phonecalls came in to the other teams, and we derived the next location: Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall subway station. Off we went.

We arrived at the Subway station beginning to figure things out. A picture of some funny model buildings matched a sculpture, and then it was a series of pictures that had us circling City Hall park, only to land in the center of the park having to complete a jigsaw puzzle that made a rebus that gave us the name of the pizza joint.

We arrived, quite tired, fairly sore, and a bit disappointed and ready for pizza.

The Good (because there WAS good, despite me being a bit negative)

- The Map puzzle. This was a neat puzzle. Because we felt rushed, it didn't get solved properly and that's quite a shame because it's clear effort went into it. I would appreciate it if the community could get a crack at it, because it was nicely devious.

- The last puzzle. This sort of running around would have been infinitely better at the beginning of the day rather than the end.

The Bad:

- The "music" puzzle.
- The cellphone calls at the beginning.

The Ugly:

- The helpline. This really, really, really didn't work. Not answering when you say you will get a person is quite distressing.
- The arrows. These worked sometimes. They did not work other times. And of course, broke in ways that should have been readily apparent if they'd been tested at all.

Overall, thank you for trying. I wish it had come off better.

[Empty Eyes]

Wow

[shambles]

Not waiting for Orbital Colony anymore, EmptyEyes!

[Pixiestix]

Not drinking beer, not eating pizza... Well... personally, the only prize I feel I got was getting to spend time with specific people I've only spoken to online, and having the surreal experience of having Adrian Hon on my team {yes, that's right, the cranky team who couldn't figure out their own puzzles had the big man himself on our team, what's that tell ya?}. Generally, I think if we had decided to walk around the city, it would have been a better experience. My team didn't "site see", we frantically tried to figure out what was going on at any given moment. I fully agree with Cortana when he says it was a good game concept, just not test played. there was a point where a code we needed to text in wasn't working yet - shouldn't that have been done before we got there? It's the little things that make walking around the city aimlessly in heat not fun. Sorry... The rest of the day was awesome, but the"quest" just made us cranky {and for the record, i honestly did love the picture part at the end, i was on a roll and entirely excited by it!!!}

[mysteryjones]

Thanks for the report

[Twilight]

I for one would like to thank all of the people that helped to put this together. It was obvious that a lot of effort was put into this puzzle trail, and I think that each and every step shows this. Much of this post will be similar to Cortana's post, but I would like to post a review of the day from the perspective of someone from a team that enjoyed the experience.

Before we are even started there is a URL in the last slide of Jane's presentation that leads to an axon list. Each team is then given two packages that contain clues that we will be opening along the way, a cell phone, and a metro card for every player allowing unlimited access to the subway. Each team was then sent walking in a different direction and told to listen to their cell phone.

Our first puzzle starts when we get a call telling us to open our first envelope. There were several cards in it for us. Again the effort shows through as these cards were well put together and gave not only our first clue but information to help us navigate (subway maps, advice for keeping the group together, tips for New York travel, etc.) Our first clue was a map with the theaters in the area marked on it and a phone number. When we called the phone number we heard a recording of music. Three or four of us got a chance to hear the music before it ended and the consensus was that it sounded like music from a musicbox (and when I got a chance to hear it later I can see why they thought this with only 2-3 seconds of listening each.) So we set off walking for the Musicbox Theater. On the way there we get a second call from Kristen (which due to traffic we did not find out was her until a little later.) She asks where we are and tells us we are not quite close enough. When we get to the theater we look everywhere for some sort of clue, but find nothing so we try the helpline. This is when we discovered that the helpline was sketchy at best, as we could not get through. Celina gets the idea to call the number on her own phone so that we could all listen to the music on speaker phone. We soon realized our mistake as the song was correctly identified, placed into the correct show, and with the help of a nearby poster placed to the correct theater where you could see that show. As we were on our way to the correct theater we received another call checking on our status. We told her (still not knowing who we were talking to) where we were headed. She let us know we were correct and set us to Grand Central Station.

When we got to GCS we found Sin Vraal, the walking clue. The clue on his shirt lead us to send a text message. The reply sent us to information for some maps. While some of us went to get the maps I went to collect a missing teammate that was talking with the people running the game. When I told him we were moving and where to xnbomb told me he was dropping out of the team because he had "other things" he had to do. We gathered around our maps and worked on what is one of my favorite puzzles in quite some time. For the time frame it was expected to be solved in, it was just the right difficulty. As we looked for someone to confirm our answer so that we did not head completely in the wrong direction, the confirmation came from a bit of a surprise source. As it turned out, the "other things" xnbomb had to do was to not help us solve a puzzle he had created.

When we got to our destination we met up with the green team. As Cortana mentioned they started to send us off on a wild goose chase, but were not mean enough to go through with it. Once they let us see the clue, we sent another test message and got a reply with our clue. Green teams good karma for not being mean paid off immediately as their phone would not send the text message for some reason and they had to rely on our clue to move along. This puzzle came in two parts. One part was a text that asked where Sente would look for help and told us that four letters arranged correctly would give us the answer. The second part was a tinyurl to an NMBA press release. Green team solved the text part and headed for the correct location in no time. Yellow team however looked at the tinyurl first and foremost. We were to find out later that the tinyurl was a typo and was supposed to be a site about the cube. It was just plain bad luck that the page we were mistakenly lead to gave such an obvious four letters for us to try to arrange into our answer. After spending quite some time working on acronyms for a location off of the 16 combinations those four letters gave us, xnbomb broke his silence and let us know that why he had not been helping was that again he had known the answer to the puzzle beforehand. He let us know that he had no idea what the clue to the MNBA page was and had us focus just on the text. Cassandra, our only current PC player (and I say current because after their presentation I will be catching back up and joining in ASAP), quickly came up with the answer of Toy Tokyo, including the street address to it.

We got to Toy Tokyo and found that all three of the other teams were still here (the line to buy PC cards was quite a choke point.) Teams left here whenever their team all had cards (at least the ones that wanted them.) The clue to leave as we left Toy Tokyo was a picture taken from the Brooklyn Bridge. We rode the subway to the bridge and tried to figure out what to do from here. The four teams took three different approaches. Blue called the helpline and were told to open the last envelope and proceed with this puzzle. Apparently this is what we were expected to do although between having never been told to call when we got to a location on any previous puzzles or in the instructions of this one and the fact that the helpline only worked for us one time out of many tires and never for the green team made this the only problem that really hurt a couple of the teams. The green team out of frustration at this point open their last envelope on their own, which happened to be where and when they were supposed to anyway. Red and yellow on the other hand decided that since the picture was from on the bridge, that we must be meant to go to the place it was taken from. When the yellow team had made it to the first stopping point on the bridge we realized that we were only about half way to where the picture was taken. J5 was sent ahead to the next section to look for a clue while we tried to call the helpline. This was the one time the helpline worked for us and they sent us back across the bridge and to a fountain in the park right there at the foot of the bridge. When we called j5 to let him know to come back we discovered he had meet up with the red team and we passed the info along, but this was not until they had crossed the entire bridge . As we headed back down the bridge we opened the last envelope to discover how we were supposed to find our way into the park. Again the effort showed through as not only was there a well done picture trail to follow on a nice scenic tour into the park, but they were obviously taken by one of our designers and not just ripped off a brochure.

As we made our way to the fountain we saw Sin Vraal and Bags waiting for us. They looked as hot and tired as we were and it had obviously not been easy to run. Our last puzzle waited with them. A custom made jigsaw puzzle with a rebus to dinner's location on it (again the effort put into it just leapt out at you.) We quickly finished this puzzle off and were still talking to Sin and Bags when the red team made it there. We had left the jigsaw put together for them and helped them through the rebus (it was getting late enough that there had been talk of just telling them the location, but we thought it better to just help them finish.)

While my team did see all the problems that Cortana mentioned, I think that the main thing that caused ill feelings was out of our control... the heat. If we had been given an extra hour and the temperature had been milder, I would be shocked to find that anyone from this community would not have overlooked the few problems that were there. I know that I had fun and unless someone did not want to go against the group, the same can be said for all of team yellow.

[Pixiestix]

[Cortana]

[johnny5]

I agree with the seldom spoken [twilight], and not just because he has compromising video of me shakin' my money-maker. (How much were you wanting again to not post that video twilight?)

Good times....good times.

[cassandra]

Wait, wait - I want to see this video

[Twilight]

[konamouse]

Well, I had a great time with the FestQuest puzzles (but, as I said at the onset of the game), I LOVE these puzzle/hunts.

/me kicks herself in the butt for not recognizing Razzle Dazzle from Chicago the first time we heard the music.

I have the set of puzzle cards and the puzzle map. I plan to scan them today and figure out how to post this "trail" later today.

[konamouse]

Here are the main pieces of the FestQuest Trail.

1. First phone call from the PMs tell us to open our #1 envelope. Instructed to call and press appropriate button for your color - you are suppose to hear music (figured out who got which song from discussion and process of elimination).
Blue: Imagine from the John Lennon tribute
Green: Longest Time from the Billy Joel musical "Moving On"
Red: Theme from "Phantom of the Opera"
Yellow: Razzle Dazzle from "Chicago".

2. The axon times were first Melissa asking if we were making progress, second the Sleeping Princess giggling and trying to throw us off the trail, and third, Melissa asking again if we knew our destination (the theatre where the show was playing) and to stop going there and instead, gave us our new mission. I didn't write down her clue but it led us to where Time Converges and Hercules & Minerva were overhead.

3. The map puzzle (from xnbomb). Rumor is that Blue solved it quickly and Yellow eventually got it (the hard way). Leading to our next destination.

4. The Astor Pl point with the broken tinyurl link confusing us with MBNA (what a coincidence that the link is a press release from a company with 4 letters in it's name). The text message read:

[rose]

Url

[johnny5]

Re: Url