[Wow--better get it in gear on this series of posts, or I'll forget everything I have to say about it!]
I’ll throw in a brief mention here of the application process for those of you who aren’t familiar with Game-style events. Since it’s impractical to host more than some small two-digit number of teams, and since there are often more teams than that who are interested in participating, Game organizers usually require some form of application for the event. Applications are usually evaluated principally on the amount of effort put into them. My team submitted a 16-page glossy magazine called
"Shark Bait Quarterly". It’d take forever to explain all of the inside jokes, but there’s lots of good stuff in there if you’re just skimming through, too. Pay special attention to the Tips from the Baiting Masters at the bottom of each of the crew biographies pages. At any rate, it was a good enough application to get us in.
Since we made the cut, we were mailed a physical invitation about a week before the actual event. Up until that point, we didn’t have much of an idea where the Game would start. The invitation itself looked like it was just a few pieces of card stock glued to each other in that common invitation-y way. We knew that more information had to be there somewhere, so we chose to dissect it. Turned out that the _real_ invitation was, in fact, inside the middle layer of the fancy invitation. It told us to make our way up to a hotel in Bellingham, WA.
On the Friday that the game actually started, we made our way up to Bellingham for a banquet in celebration of the release of the 42nd Mooncurser’s Handbook. We were encouraged by Game staff to mix and mingle during the banquet instead of seating our entire team together at any one table, but they didn’t explain why that might come in handy.
Leading up to dinner itself, they alluded to an executive in Galactic Consortium going rogue, but this was about the only plot development they did. It popped up one more time during the weekend, but in a somewhat weak way (we’ll get to that later). I have to say, the near complete lack of a plot may well have been one of the only major disappointments for me in this entire Game.
After an all-around good meal (which it sure should have been considering the $300 per person participation fee), something spectacular happened. They rolled back the wall to the tune of awe-filled gasps from around the room, to reveal an elaborate set of games and activity stations. They quickly explained all of the activity stations, and more importantly that every activity was a group activity that required cooperation among competing teams. Every success in one of the activities earned your team additional information to use in solving one of several metapuzzles that would get your team hundreds of points.
The activities took the form of simple things such as stacking cups (yeah–of the CupStacking variety) with a plastic robot arm, answering Sci-Fi trivia questions game show style, and 4-way Dance-Dance Revolution. We had a lot of fun doing most of them, but despite a three-team coalition to solve the meta-puzzles, we didn’t get any points for any of them.
By the end of the night, we had all done so much cooperating, that most teams had decided that alliances would be required to win the next day. We were eventually told that collusion was expressly forbidden, with one exception that would be explained later.
I’ll explain that exception in the next installment of this series.