- a n a l y s i s -

0. Leo (Pregame)

The starting game basically came down to two factors--how many cards you were able to use in a trick and how quickly you turned your hand in. Depending on what trick it was used in, a used card gave anywhere from 5/3 to 5 points. The two most powerful tricks, however, the Birds of a Feather and the Mastery were both so difficult to get that it was generally more effective to focus on using all of your cards instead. A team that was able to get rid of their Horoscope card, use all 12 Sign cards, and turn their hand in in the first 10 was guaranteed at least 35 points (4 uncolored Teamworks at 5 points each and 15 points for early turn-in). To put this in perspective, this would have put you in the first 15 teams to start.

The top possible hand was 72 points, but it required 10 Gemini (2 sets of 5 of 2 different colors) and one Opposing Pair of the same color, as well as an early turn-in. Because the Birds of a Feather and the Mastery tricks were so hard to get, nobody even got close to this top score. In fact, only one team used a Birds of a Feather and one team used a Mastery. Both teams were in the top 5, however, showing that it did give them a slight edge. If I had it to do over again, I would have made it Gemini of any color and only 4 or 5 for Mastery, just to make these more viable tricks.

There were several unfortunate teams that got stuck with The Loner. Either they were dealt Tauruses and Leos and couldn't get rid of them or use them in a trick, or they didn't see the applicable Horoscope card in time. Just one or two of them unused could really ruin an otherwise good hand. The intent, however, was to force teams to contend with having to play a less than optimal trick to get rid of a Taurus or Leo, and it did work out this way for the most part. Out of 62 Tauruses and Leos in play, only 9 were unused.

So here is the full breakdown of tricks played:
Uncolored Opposing Pair: 22
Colored Opposing Pair: 30
3-card Unolored Teamwork: 11
3-card Colored Teamwork: 0
4-card Unolored Teamwork: 0
4-card Colored Teamwork: 1
5-card Unolored Teamwork: 8
5-card Colored Teamwork: 2
Jack of All Trades: 22
Mastery: 1
2-card Birds of a Feather: 1
3-card Birds of a Feather: 0
4-card Birds of a Feather: 0
5-card Birds of a Feather: 0
The Loner: 9

Team Results are here.

1. Capricorn

This clue took all teams relatively little time to solve. Most teams quickly realized that a phone was somehow associated with the clue, though some struggled with exactly how. Only a few teams took a hint, and within a few minutes made the connection that the Greek letters corresponded to rows and columns of the phone pad, gridded each line, and were on their way.

5. Gemini

Because the objects were arranged in a circle, some teams initially tried semaphore. People also thought that the objects were halves of compound words (i.e. workhorse, workshoe, etc.). Also, some teams initially ignored the The Fraternal Twins text from the sign, but usually someone on the team would eventually bring it up. The other issue was the misspelling of some of the words, making the solution much more difficult to find.

7. Libra

Teams quickly realized that the strips on the second page corresponded to gaps in the equation on the first page. Some teams picked up immediately on what the Libra operation was, while others weren't as sure. Common snafus included turning individual digits upside down, instead of rotating the entire number; bad arithmetic; placing the final strip at the bottom of the equation (though there was no box in the final slot); thinking the Libra of 5 was 2 (and vice-versa).

9. Aries

The main insight for this clue was to see that each line of text contains a number as a substring. For example "it entirely" contains the characters "ten" in it, so the green parallelogram to the right of that line is worth 10 points. The title, "Disrespecting Boundaries," refers both to the breaking of the wall, as well as to this breaking of word boundaries. Curiously enough, "Disrespecting Boundaries" actually contains "Aries", which is just kinda neat.

Next, you just add up the shapes on each path to a star, and that is the value of the star. There is one star per row, and if you index the value of that star into the alphabet and write that letter to the right of the row, you can read "PYTHON" vertically.

Many teams had trouble noticing the numbers in the text. FIVE was particularly hard because of the capitalization and the apostrophe in "I've". This insight was hard enough that well over half of the teams took the first hint on the clue. The first hint had another example of text with embedded numbers, but they were in a shade of grey to make them stand out from the rest of the text. A good number of teams didn't notice this, or thought that it was an issue with printer toner. Many of these teams took the second and even third hints on this clue.

Once teams saw the numbers, the rest of the clue was usually pretty quick. There were a few teams who didn't notice that there was one star per row and got all the letters but were unable to anagram them. I didn't even realize when writing the clue, but python is actually a pretty difficult word to unscramble!

10. Sagittarius

The first thing teams needed to notice was that the pool table was set up so that all of the balls could be pocketed, in order, from 1 to 15 (except the 8 ball, which was last). Most teams seemed to figure this out pretty quickly.

Many teams seemed to have some difficulty figuring out what to do from there. The text on the paper that was laid out on the pool table referred to the "dashed 15", hinting towards Morse code. Still, some teams didn't realize this and assumed that they needed to use Braille (perhaps because of the six pockets of the pool table), though this ended up being a dead-end.

Sadly, not all teams were able to finish this clue, since it was the second to last clue, and we had to shut it down at 10pm.

11. Aquarius

Most teams quickly realized that the strips corresponded to the answer crossword. Upon answering the remaining clues, most teams needed assistance in seeing the final answer.