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December 06, 2004

The Tomb

Matt arranged a group of 16 of us to go to The Tomb near Fenway Park on Saturday which is a kind of puzzle haunted house where people take on the role of archaeologists exploring a newly discovered tomb and solving puzzles and traps to advance through it. The cost was $16 each ($2 group discount) and it was around 40 minutes long.

Overall, I think most of us enjoyed it but felt that we were definitely too big a group (8 would be a good number I think) and it was kind of expensive for the length. For myself, I definitely thought it was worth going the once but would not go back again. Our guide was also too helpful in getting us to solutions, particularly annoying that he interfered several times when we were 90% done to do the last 10%. If others go, I might recommend that they ask the guide not to give them any help unless they ask for it.

Ok, on to a more specific description of some of the puzzles but this is going to include serious spoiler info on some things so stop reading here if you plan to do this.

Spoilers Below!

There were I believe overall some 9 puzzles/activities in 3 rooms as well as a couple of other notable events at the beginning and end, of which I'll describe a few. We started out having a tape played giving us the theme and general information which was pretty nicely done. 5 people were then handed flashlights, after the guide carefully checked they were all working in front of us. We then all headed in to the tomb and the door (sliding stone slab) closed behind us. All of the walls of all the rooms had various hieroglyphic markings. Once we had all been in for a minute or so, the flashlights suddenly all stopped working (a very neat touch) although of course the LED light on my keychain still worked ;) A small curtain of water started falling in a corner alcove and projected on the water (a very neat way to do a removable and transparent screen) was the dead Pharoah explaining that he had planned to kill us but was instead going to give us a chance to prove our worth and pass four tests. The first test was the most interesting and good for a group as it involved finding specific spots all over the large room and pressing in on them a few inches, causing them to glow red. Once we had found enough (all?) of them, we advanced to the next test. After passing three more tests (including a neat group musical test and another which was a neat idea but didn't work at all in reality as they put on low lights and it could only work to the desired effect in absolute darkness), we advanced to the next room.

This room only contained two puzzles, the first of which was my favorite of the experience. On the floor was a large circle composed of about 16 symbols (numbers are approximate - I didn't count). It turned out that half the symbols (every other one) were fixed in position while the other 8 could be picked up and moved. Each of these tiles also had a symbol on both sides. On one wall was shown two similar wheels of 16 symbols, one on the left side and one on the right. The voice over instructed us that the floor puzzle currently matched the guide on the right and we needed to make it match the guide on the left. To solve this puzzle analytically on paper would actually take a bit of work and wasn't practical here but a trial and error solution was, and was probably easier anyway. We had 8 people each pick up a tile (overall 8 symbols each repeated twice I think), found the wall wheel (which eventually started slowly rotating to make things more complicated) orientation based on the fixed symbols, and had people drop in the symbols needed. We got all but one in place (pretty lucky I think) and then just had to do a couple of swaps to fix things. This unfortunately was one of the points where the guide really annoyingly interfered and helped us do the swaps. One particularly neat thing about this puzzle is that the organizers don't have to do anything to reset it. Just change the voice-over to say the left side guide wheel is currently matching and they need to make it match the right side guide wheel. The second puzzle in this room was a 4 piece Towers of Hanoi which we of course solved in seconds and is not a good group puzzle at all. Also, this puzzle had no effects or instrumentation (leds, electronics, whatever taking effect when solved automatically) to it at all as almost all the other puzzles did.

The third room had three puzzles, the first two each with multiple copies. The first puzzle involved rotating two movable sections of a column to be in the right alignment with two fixed sections. Unfortunately, the key for the four columns (one in each corner of the room) apparently was only in one corner so the people there quickly solved their column and then had to show the rest of us on the other columns once we realized the key was shared. The third puzzle here involved a beam of light being let into the room and us provided with two copper plates to reflect the light. We were supposed to do a double reflection onto a specific spot but it took us a while to find the spot and somehow the people finding the spot activated it without us doing the reflecting (leds or lights on cell phones or something) which was too bad as it was a nice idea.

General points. The guide had a device which I assume advanced the plot to the next point which we debated over how much was used. I felt that the great majority of things happened automatically and that he only acted in a couple of cases where things weren't instrumented (Hanoi in particular) or if things went wrong or a group couldn't solve a given task. Others felt he had to do this more often and less was automatic. Another thing was that the Pharoah warned us of traps for mistakes but even intentionally making mistakes in one of those cases did nothing so I am not sure whether this was just talk or something additional could happen.

Posted by aarondf at December 6, 2004 03:13 PM

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