Paparazzi Bay Area, 3-4 June 2006

XX-Rated ran Parapazzi in June 2006. Team Advil consisted of me, Scott, Alex, Greg, Gordon, and Gordon's friend Peter Engrav from Seattle. Peter Sarrett did a great job summing up the clues, so I won't repeat them, but overall we had a terrific time.

Notable bits:

  • All hinting/confirmations were done through Palm Pilots
  • We started in Marin, went north to Napa, then south through the East Bay to Emeryville (where all teams had dinner at Chevy's), then across the bay to San Francisco and south to Saratoga for the finish line
  • Up through dinnertime we had to find and photograph an object at each clue site.
  • One clue was at Dateway (Safeway in the Marina District in SF), after which we dressed up, took limos to a Union Square club, had to find a GC rep and dance with her and get the next clue.
  • We had a 2 am poker game/clue, where we played against all the other teams in our pack. I'm glad Greg was able to represent our team well at the poker table.
  • At Stanford, an entire conference room was filled with computers and Dance Dance Revolution pads with 5 different games on them. Winning move sequences mapped to directions on campus where we found tile pieces for the next puzzle.
  • One clue was a video CD file with little but animals having sex.
  • Greg videotaped a speaking part early in the game, as did one person on each other team; the last clue was the assembly of all the video clips. Pretty cool.

The only nit I'd have with the overall event was that it relied on external Internet access for several clues (movie headlines, passport, animals, donuts, video). In general I'm not a fan of clues that require Internet access, partially because I don't want to see the Game turn into a technological arms race, partially because Googling just isn't any fun. I'd rather use my brain to solve clues instead of collecting a bunch of information online.

We placed somewhere in the middle of the front pack, a good bit behind the victors, an excellent Briny Deep team. It wasn't Advil's best effort overall, but that wasn't at all a problem with the event; anything we were slow at was our own fault, and the clues were a bit on the easier side, which doesn't always let us show our best. Actually I didn't feel that we did particularly poorly, but instead that there's just a lot of formidable teams out there!

Other commenters: [ Peter Sarrett (Briny Deep) | Curtis Chen (Snout) | Jan Chong (Coed Astronomy) | Ian Tullis (Burninators) ]


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