It fell upon us to host a BANG when we came in first in Nutella's excellent BANG 11. We decided to break with BANG tradition in several ways:

• We didn't provide or require any reference materials, and none of our puzzles depended on Morse, Braille, semaphore, or other puzzle hunt mainstays that primarily reward experienced teams. (This was also true of BANG 11.)

• Each of our puzzles clued the next location directly. This eliminated the need for a list of words corresponding to map locations, and it prevented back-solving.

• Nine of our puzzles produced additional words that fed into a metapuzzle. (There were also metapuzzles in BANG 10 and BANG 12.)

• We put in an absurd number of puzzles - if you count subpuzzles and the starting event, there were a total of 28! We wanted our event to be a puzzle buffet in which everyone, even the notoriously fast teams, would always be working on something right up to the end. To make sure that everyone saw the "regular" puzzles that led to the metapuzzle, we devised an elaborate timing system to determine who would get the "bonus" puzzles.

• We de-emphasized points and winning by making hints completely free. The only hint penalty came in the form of time spent decoding ROT-13 to get the final hints for a puzzle. Again, our goal was to keep you happy and "fed" and to make sure you didn't get stuck for too long on any particular puzzle.

• We wanted to host our BANG in a bustling, crowded, downtown area, and to bring teams into cool locations that generally wouldn't be used in a BANG. (This was both a good and a bad idea, as we couldn't have asked for permission to be in certain places, and we were kicked out of a couple of locations mid-game.)

• Finally, we knew there just had to be a Halloween-themed BANG at some point.

There were some hitches, but on the whole, we got overwhelmingly positive feedback. Thanks to everyone who played, and we look forward to BANGing with you again soon!