"MEET Q RUSSIAN HILL PARK FIND PASSWORD 888 FRANCISCO"
Each letter bead had a tiny colored bead to its left.
The key to the solution was to associate letters
with the colors to their left, then group the letters
by color.
The words in the Beginners' and Regular divisions clues
were simply scrambled within their groups by alphabetizing
the letters in each word (thus, "EEMT" for "MEET"). The
Beginners' division word groups were already in the correct
order; Regular division teams needed to re-order the words
in the phrase once they had unscrambled them.
For the Masters division clue, the entire phrase was
cleverly anagrammed to the obscurely worded phrase: "IF
ASK SARDONIC QUESTION MAP SCRAWL HELPS RR 888".
After unscrambling the entire phrase, teams needed to
go to 888 Francisco to find the password. No, we didn't
ask the people at that address to help us with the game;
teams just needed to pass by the house in order to find
the password posted on a pole outside. We used that address
because it would be impossible to mistake those numbers
for anything other than what they were. If we'd used an
address with numbers that were not all the same, teams
would have had no way of figuring out the correct address
(e.g., if they'd received 864, the password could have
been at 864, 846, 684, 648, 486 or 468). And we chose
Francisco because it was most convenient to the route
teams were likely to take from the Clue 7 site to the
Clue 8 site, and it's a really pretty walk.
This was probably the toughest clue of the game.
Many teams showed up at Russian Hill Park (on the corner
of Bay and Hyde Streets) without the password - without
which Q would not reveal the location's license plate
(which was BV 5099), nor give the teams their next set
of clues.
This meant that quite a few teams had to make the trek
(or at a minimum, send their least-tired member) back
up part of Russian Hill to get the password.
Moral of the story for players? Sometimes solving the
entire clue can save you time.
Moral of the story for Game Control? Write less complicated
clues!
Observant teams noticed that the license plate at the
previous site indicated the character they would meet
in Russian Hill Park - Q, James Bond's gadget-man. And
what was the password at 888 Francisco? "Llewelyn", in
honor of the late actor, Desmond Llewelyn, who played
Q in every James Bond film but two, from 1962 until his
death in 1999:
http://www.klast.net/bond/q.html
In addition to Q, some teams met Secret Agent Becky
(Becky Haycox, improv-ess extraordinaire
http://www.beckyhaycox.com
and/or Agent 006-½. Of those teams, some also noticed
that there was a silver Aston Martin DB4 parked right
there at Russian Hill Park, with a license plate of AGT
007 in the rear window. This was because Game Control
had the fortune to find Aston Martin owner and British
expatriate Guy Simpson, who not only very generously brought
his car up from the South Bay for the game, but also was
a good enough sport to play along with Q while he was
there - so we created the role of Agent 006-½ especially
for him.
