The Puzzle DASH

No, it wasn't a mistake that I capitalized 'DASH', and I'm also not yelling the word as I write the title.  It's just the acronymn for the activity Elissa decided would be my birthday present.  A couple years ago we heard about the 'Different Area Same Hunt' and thought it sounded like fun, but we were going to be out of town when they did it, and the next year we had a happy addition to our family and suddenly found ourselves with a lot less time and energy for something like that.  Well, Elissa was really thoughtful this year and thought she would register a team for me to go with some friends while she selflessly stayed home devotedly missing her dear husband.  (I really hope she had a good time and did something interesting while I was away).

I find it really hard to describe the format of this thing, but I'll try to give a quick description.  It consisted of 9 puzzles (+ a pretty-much-mandatory-if-you-want-to-be-competitive bonus puzzle) over the course of ~8 hours.  Each puzzle starts with a prompt and some materials (a diagram, tiles with words on them, etc.) and you had to figure out what the puzzle actually was, how to solve it, and obviously solve it.  Usually there was a pretty obvious hint how to get started. For example in one case we had to figure out how to place game tiles, then assign each tile a letter, then look around until we found a message with a new hint, then we had to flip the whole thing upside down and unscramble some words before taking a single letter from each word, finally constructing the single word answer.

All in all we had a good time and finished with a probably respectable score putting us ahead of 1/4 of the contestants, which seems pretty good for it being our first time and choosing the "Expert" difficulty instead of "Novice".

Hopefully I'll be able to find equally nice to do for Elissa (maybe we'll send her next year or we can be a team or something).