The Build

The Guide is based on the book/movie called "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy." This is a story about Earth being destroyed and a select few of it's inhabitants becoming galactic hitchhikers. They have a guide that can help them translate each of the different populations' languages and give generally helpful information.

Originally, I wanted to make my own guide by using an eink screen and a small raspberry pi to drive the animations and compute modules, but I had to simplify the design based on time constraints so I figured I could just rely on the thing everyone has in their pocket and turn her phone into the guide.

The tablets would serve a couple of purposes. The first being is that they would mark locations where I buried something (either a location chest or a puzzle box) so Zoe would know to dig. The second is that they were intended to be script tablets from an ancient society: the idea being that while I was kidnapped I was grabbing random objects at my disposal to mark these spots. These scripts would represent dialogue and when translated would tell Zoe a story that ran parallel to the race.

I wanted the script language to look cryptic and be based around the shape of the sapphire cut of her ring. So I came up with this hexagon concept where each hexagon would represent people who were talking and lines coming out from them would represent the talking. In each conversation, the lines would get closer based on whether or not they came to a common ground in the dialogue. As much as I wanted each sign to have its own design reflective of the conversation, I was still writing the story all the way until the last day so I came up with ~7 designs. To make her phone useful, I would buy NFC chips and embed them into the tablets.

I didn't know exactly the amount I needed, but I figured I should have a buffer so I went with 40. I got a 5x5' sheet of UV coated plywood, but unfortunately some wind caught under it on the way to the shop and and the ratchet straps ripped through the plywood and it flew off onto a road with near highway traffic/speeds. Cue me running out into the middle of this busy road trying to retreive my expensive, shredded plywood with new tiremark embellishments.

Once I got to the shop, I cut them into large sections and etched the script designs in each doing about 10 at a time. I cleaned the edges up and then laser cut a 10mm deep hole to glue the nfc chip into. Then I cut a circular piece of plywood the same size, glued it over the nfc chip, and sanded it to flush. Viola, a tablet with an embedded nfc chip.

The mushrooms are a bit silly I confess. On one of our first dates we went mushroom hunting near Seattle so they've always been a bit of an inside joke. These would work in a pretty similar way to the tablets (to my surprise actually), but instead of translating script they would link to videos to some of Zoe's favorite people sharing their favorite memory with her and giving her a hint that would open puzzle boxes throughout the race.

First I used a dremel cutoff wheel to slice the top off. Then I glued down an nfc chip and the top back onto it. Then I filled with wood filler, sanded the next day (repeat until it looked good). Lastly, I painted them different combinations of orange, red, and brown. I added veil spots to some and on a select few even made the spots glow in the dark.

Since I was leaving many of these objects in public places, I made little tags for each thanking the observer for not disturbing.

I now had a bunch of items with embedded nfc chips that routed to absolutely nowhere. Time to build a website...

First I spun up a gcp instance. I searched for a domain to buy but I was quite tired of the many domains I have to my name that are not being used, so I decided to use my full name domain [fullname]/operationeagleclaw/[location]. As a side note, "operation eagle claw" was my secret name for this whole thing which shared a name with the mission to retrieve american hostages back in the 80s. Eagles are an inside joke and I was being taken hostage. HA! Okay, next I did all the fun SSL certificate stuff and copied a bunch of different CSS animation templates for a sort of Fallout/Terminal kind of feel and bada bing bada...I'm just kdding it took forever, stupid ai rule.

I shot a last minute note out to around 20 people before the race started as I needed 19 videos of people in Zoe's life (in some cases I went to grab the footage myself). I didn't need them all at once, just like 7-10 to get me through the east coast, the others I can do...later. They all graciously answered quickly, I converted the videos via ffmpeg and threw them on the site.

I had a problem though, I needed her to be able to reference the past hints/translations without having the objects in case she needed to go back. So I added a "logs" button that would show the rest of the objects. I didn't want her to see everything at once though so I added some logic that would only show the hints and translations that came before the one that was being currently scanned. This wasn't too complicated since it was sequential. Fin (well, not actually I still had to write the other half of the story which I did in random spare moments sitting in rental cars through the race but, mostly fin)

Alright, mandatory tangent. I have to take this opportunity to share my favorite part of the whole race. Zoe and I like watching film noir's (think alfred hitchcock). I wanted to incorporate that into the race with a film noir scene starring a detective immediately after I got kidnapped again in Seattle. I randomly thought of my buddy David who has an inexplicably attuned personality for such a task. He said yes with no questions. He showed up to my house after work, we found a detective coat (a bathrobe that was far too small for his stature). There were no pipes for purchase this late at night so Logan whittled an impressive replica out of a walmart sweet potato. Zoe was hopelessly confused what we were all doing. We rode David's motorcycle (two on the bike and one in the car of course) down to the train tracks and filmed random scenes. Having track fright, David preferred that we dub over the footage so he didn't have to nail lines at the exact time the train came. After some joking around we decided it would be funnier if it were in Japanese. A little bit of video editing and presto: Rom Mai Thai Hint

This concept came out of the need to put complex information behind a lock. Basically wherever I couldn't make the puzzle spit out the exact answer I needed, I would make it spit out the combination to a locked message that had the important stuff. I made them with random scrap wood and a rivet gun I found in the shop. I had a lot of gaffes throughout this setup process, but I'll accept a pat on the back for this one if you're giving 'em out.

This was pretty simple. She was already using her phone for the race anyways so about a month before it started I created a burner number and saved the contact in her phone. A slight oversight that I forgot to erase the test call I did to make sure it showed correctly. Cue Zoe calling me at 9am telling me she got a call 4 hours earlier from "Anastasia's Spirit." "Boy those scammers are getting really creative," I said.

Anastasia is a character from the story, so her spirit was helping Zoe through the race in theory. I asked my ex Liz (a friend to both of us now and actually the main reason we met) to be Anastasia for extra irony. Unfortunately, I realized pretty quickly I was going to have to mainly be Anastasia due the pace I had to keep her on each day.

This one was designed with our friend Schuyler in mind. I assumed she shared an interest in Shakespeare and I think I was right.

The first thing you had to do was solve a simple crossword of which Shakespeare play the quotes were from. Then you had to orient a transparency correctly which told you a particular act, scene, and line in Shakespeare's Othello. This line gave a clue to "turn" which would come in handy for the last part.

I included a trace paper sheet that had a quote from shakespeare's actual grave and a drawing of bones and a grave. When you "returned the bones to the grave" by folding the paper it would spell out the message "braille + 1" which would also be needed for the last part

The last part was an Othello board with several of the game pieces included in the box. They had numbers on one side and letters on the other. The board squares included braille numbers, but none of them matched with the pieces, they were one off. Once you figured that out, you put all the pieces on there, turn them over (the main common theme in the game and book) and it spelled out the next location.

This was designed for my longest standing friend ever, Colin. We used to collect rocks together as 8 year olds (maybe even earlier). Also I took Zoe to visit him in recent years and he took us hunting in a gainesville stream for shark teeth. Some things never change.

I think anyone who first sees this puzzle would take a nonlinear approach. You were given a scale, a map of the US that started in Colorado and had paths to different parts of the country, a bag of rocks, a rock identification guide with shark teeth glued in proximity with particular orientations, and a locked message that had a speed lock. There was also some random news article headlining marching as a way to lose weight.

They were clearly getting the gist of the puzzle early on, you identify the rocks, match them with a corresponding shark tooth, and that would give you a direction for the speed lock. But what path from colorado were you supposed to take?

Well, it all hinged on a random phrase Colin and I's second grade teacher used to say every other day...Mean Mamma Moine Marches Madly to Medina. You should have seen the look on his face when he realized (actually you can, it's on video in the race page)

Dedicated to Zach, this was a nod to the early name of the company I started my tech career at and where I met several jack***es/lifelong friends. This wasn't a prop heavy puzzle, it was 3 sheets of paper with a bit of IT architecture and networking integrated.

First thing you have to do is match square icon cutouts to a traditional Citrix architecture diagram. On the back of these squares are numbers and if you do what the instructions say to do by following the arrows to the SQL server, it gives you an IP address. Next you'll look at the other two sheets: one which is a list of CIDR notation IP address schemes next to various popular logos and the other has a huge list of IP addresses with an alphabetic number encoding. Technically, you could brute force this puzzle by deciphering each of the IP addresses, but I believe there were over a hundred so not super feasible.

So how do you avoid brute forcing? I threw in a bit of a trick here (moreso I painstakenly designed the puzzle around this curveball) in that you have to actually resolve the IP address from the first sheet which will point you to one of the logos on the second sheet. From there you get the correct IP addressing scheme and there is only one valid IP address on the last page within that schema that sticks out like a sore thumb when you see it.

The painstaking part is that with typical networking complexity today, you can't really just do an nslookup to get a single IP associated with these large logos. There are tons and they rarely resolve directly to the site when you try to resolve them numerically in your broswer. So what I did was create a GCP instance that simply accepted a request and routed you to the large logo site. I had to get the IP to repeat numbers at particular places in the IP address due to the nature of the traffic flow to the SQL server...so I just turned off the static IP for this instance and rebooted until I got an address that worked. Took maybe 13 tries and I'm sure there's a better way.

There truly wasn't a lot to this puzzle, just an opporunity to throw shade on Zach's favorite sports teams

Built for Matt and named after Hume, this puzzle mandated a logicians touch against some bold claims featuring Sun Zu, Matt Reed, and our very own Zoe Day.

The first thing you needed to do is match up a star outline transparency against the converse logo in the background. This would outline a specific part of diologue that hints to think "not about the nail." This is a semi-popular and not so mild euphemism for a romantic partner trying to fix a problem instead of listening which Zoe alludes to...often. Truly this step is completely useless but helped me give them a prop for future use without revealing its purpose.

Now you needed to gather a few hints from the box which ultimately tell you to evaluate the converse of a series of logical claims (If q => p instead of if p => q) and lastly you needed to inverse the answer based on the "not about the nail" hint. This would give you 4 0s and 1s to open a locked message.

They completely bypassed and brute forced the message by the simple fact there were 16 combinations to try. At least Matt was appreciative I included references to papers he authored in his Masters.

If you don't have time to make a puzzle an epic experience what do you do? You make it funny.

This puzzle provided cutouts of many flags and a single letter on the back of each. Then it had a piece of paper featuring a quote that a particular country would never say from modern stereotypes. Once you have the quotes right you have to flip the flags over which give you a sequence of letters. The only problem: the letter sequence isn't exactly correct.

There is one more thing this box includes which is a small keychain UV light that says "Bring down my defenses." You see, Matt and I have an ongoing joke where we send each other copies of the art of war in different languages (long story). I sent him an Italian version about a month before the race and hid some things among the pages in UV ink. He had to recall the note I wrote on the inside of the cover connecting the UV light to the book. This would tell him to go to a certain page that had a hammer and sickle which based on the soviet flag design used for Russia in the quote puzzle would guide him to take the transparency from the last puzzle and use it on this page. That transparency would highlight a quote from the book to "swap your enemies flag for your own." When you switched the Soviet and U.S. flag the message would spell JINYA pointing them to the next location.

Name courtesy of Watchhouse and David McCullough, this was designed for my siblings. I was running pretty low on time when building this one so I stuck with relatively simple puzzles. There was a crossword puzzle based around the Office and a sudoku puzzle which my sister loves. Solving the two pointed you to the next location at my Grandparent's house.

The next puzzles were made with Lexie in mind who has a knack for biology. This first one had several viles of soil mixed with either Citrix acid or Borax. You had to use the pH strips to test the soil pH which was on a scale from 3 to 8.

It ended up being unreliable with the amount of time I had to get the concetrations right for exact numbers between 3 and 8, so I put a enough of each to pin them to the max of the scale. 4 digits with either 3 and 8, also brute forceable.

In this puzzle I included an identification guide for trees across america. You put in the genus of each of the plants and then the first letter of each genus spelled out the name of the next location: Donaca Lake.

After a long hike into the wilderness, Zoë would stumble upon a box that had a set of circular wooden cutouts and 6 circles on the top of the box. These represented steam guages which are the set of instruments you get in a standard airplane and when you put them in order and read the instruments, they would give you the code to the lock.

Why would Zoë know how to do this? Perhaps a little known fun fact: Zoë used to do flight training to be a pilot.

This was a complex puzzle that was based on Mormonism and several Bible stories as something fun for her family to do. First she had to go all over LA and track down several "Blessing Barrels" which were tiny spice mason jars surrounded with cement. Each of them contained a small amount of clear fluid. There was a quick word search scavenger hunt around her house for various scriptures from the Book of Mormon, each that had a partiular letter capitalized every time it appeared.

When you put the scriptures in order and pulled the letters from each, it spelled "ISRAEL" which you would then input into a wooden block with the pegs. Looking through the viewing holes on each side, you saw two other scriptures each of which had a word you needed to use on the outside of the box in order to decipher the code for the lock which was "MERCY."

After opening this box you were given a beaker which suggested to combine all of the blessings (from the barrels) into the beaker. This started a clock iodine reaction and would "turn water into wine." The amount of "wine" would tell you the number for the location chest.

This was a fun mini race of different things Zoë has encountered throughout her life that took place at her grandparents house in Provo. She had to change a doll's diaper, tie a figure 8 knot in a climbing harness, solder a copper pipe, set up a telescope, pour hoisson sauce into condiment containers, therapize a troubled soul, serve champagne, set up a telescope, and assemble a skateboard.

This was more of an activity than a puzzle involving the use of a directional antenna, a radio receiver, and a hidden transmitting beacon. After she acquired the antennas in Utah and the radio in Black Canyon, she had to triangulate the radio beacon hidden in Tennyson park that was buried with the next puzzle box.

This was really the only puzzle that involved using pieces across cities. When she was in gainesville she stopped by her favorite planet "Uranus" to find a transparency. When she was in the final city (in Denver) she had to go back to Uranus at the planetary walk in Boulder to find another transparancy. When you put the two overtop of each other they gave you the next location and task which was to find a UV flourescent rock at Dinosaur Ridge in Devner.

Involving a bit of research, I made this puzzle for Logan. I wanted to work in some Geology, so I flipped through this book that I bought with him in Durango which was a Geo-biochemistry book. There was a section in there about dissolving rocks in strong acids to retrieve something inside which got me thinking...

I bought muriatic acid (a pretty strong 30% concentration of HCL) and learned that copper/pyrite does not dissolve well in HCL. Copper being more accessible I bout a coupler from the hardware store, hammered it flat and etched "1924" into the piece. I mixed some precast with pebbles to make a faux rock texture and had a rock with a copper piece inside. The last step was to dabble UV flourescent paint over it and drop it at the tracks near Dinosaur Ridge.

A 6 part Geocache in various places that were special to us in Denver. Each one had a box with part of a cryptic message in a various code. I used semaphore, binary, unicode, morse code, braille, and hex across each of the boxes. Once you found them all, you had to put them in a certain order to reveal that you should go to the electrical room in our house at 8pm.

At the electrical room, there was a latched door. This latch was hooked to a relay switch and a raspberry pi and would only open at 8pm that night. Why? I needed it to be dark for the next part...

Complicated puzzle, description in progress...