Dear Bangers,
Thanks for participating in BANG 13. It was inevitable that the thirteenth BANG would have a few problems, but we’re happy with how the event turned out, and we hope you had a good time as well.
Congratulations to The Burninators and Condimental Bratwurst for winning! We humbly call for a modification of the tradition that the winning BANG team *has* to put on the next one. Putting on this event took a lot out of us – granted, we were ambitious, and we put together a lot of puzzles and went all out on some of them – and we don’t really think it’s the kind of responsibility that should just be dropped in someone’s lap. We encourage BANG veterans and our high-scoring teams to consider putting on an event of their own free will, as XX-Rated did, but we won’t require our winners to host. We’ll leave future decisions up to future BANG hosts.
We apologize to those of you who solved S&M (the R/Y/B puzzle) quickly, but couldn’t interpret the message (GO SE was supposed to be “go southeast”) or ruled out the right area because the map legend covered it up (our bad.) Also, we realize that the pumpkin carving must have seemed like manual labor. There were supposed to have been three fun mini-puzzles in South Yerba Buena Gardens, and every time you solved one, you would have gotten a new shape to carve into your pumpkin. We had no idea that Yerba Buena Gardens was a private park – it seemed pretty darn public to us, and they didn’t have a problem with our playtest – and I hope you all appreciated the black humor of us getting kicked out immediately after the intro speech, right after I finished telling everyone how not to get kicked out. There was also supposed to be a cool puzzle involving your pumpkins at the end, and it’s only thanks to one of our volunteers, who drew out and photocopied the right pumpkins *during the event*, that we were able to give it to you at all. We’re also sorry that some of you got kicked out of Consumer Hell toward the end. We tried to put as much of our course indoors as possible in case it rained, but we didn’t anticipate that businesses would be quite so keen to kick us out even when we were buying food (thanks again to those of you who chose to have dinner at one of our puzzle sites!) We hope you enjoyed the chance to solve puzzles that took advantage of the unique features of the Westin St. Francis and San Francisco Shopping Center, but we recommend that future hosts not try those things with 30 teams.
We will have the puzzles online soon. There were some puzzles that only a handful of teams got to do, not to mention the Candy Land mini-puzzles that nobody saw, and we want everyone to have a chance to experience them.
Please send me general feedback about the puzzles, locations, hint system, and overall experience. We now know not to attempt puzzles in places where it’s virtually impossible to get permission to do so. What else should we have done differently? What did we do particularly well?
Thanks again, and BANG on,
Ian, for Team Get on a Raft with Taft