The Game

Today I got to experience the Bay Area Phenomenon known as “The Game.”  The Game is a combination scavenger hunt, logic puzzle, and race.  At each point in the hunt, you are given some puzzle to solve.  However, you generally aren’t given any kind of instructions and you need to solve the puzzle to obtain a clue as to where you have to go next.  For example, one puzzle I encountered today was just a sheet of paper with a maze filled with letters.  I solved the maze from start to finish, but the path I took through it didn’t hit any letters that made sense, but when I looked over the puzzle again after I finsihed, I saw that the path I took through the maze spelled out “MOD3.”  So, I went back and took every third letter, which then spelled out a riddle that I needed to solve in order to move on, and that was one of the more straightforward puzzles.

While my team didn’t finish first, we did make a decent attempt and had a lot of fun doing so.  While one instance of “The Game” is usually played over the entire Bay Area, our game was restricted to downtown Palo Alto, so we were able to complete it on foot.