![]() ![]() When Belfiore enrolled at Stanford, he brought his Game along. Joe Belfiore and his buddies created all-night scavenger hunts called Midnight Madness, inspired by the virtually unwatchable 1980 movie of the same name. The idea for this mental marathon germinated amongst a group of Clearwater, Fla., high schoolers in the mid-1980s. What else could it have been but Braille? Truffles in a 3x8 grid, he seems to be saying to himself. He seems torn between relief, euphoria and self-loathing. Rich burns rubber through the streets of Menlo Park. Once decoded, the truffles spell: “Go to Menlo Park Keplers.” not powdered), corresponds to dots of the Braille alphabet. The position of the truffles in the box, along with each one’s flavor and encasing (powdered vs. It isn’t, as Rich conjectured, a cryptogram. ![]() After further sampling and pondering-two hours’ worth, mind you-Rich’s team solves the puzzle. The winners get a place in Game history and the chance to head home to bed.īut back to that box of 24 truffles. Most teams cross the finish line in about 24 hours, while some limp along for 36 straight. Each solution leads a team to the next destination-and clue. Teams of four to 10 players drive around the Bay Area in pursuit of clues, which involve data collection, decryption, even a bit of performance art. Put simply, The Game is a puzzle-solving race. He’s embarked on The Game, a heady competition where words like cryptogram, ASCII and PerlScript are parlance for the course. Rich, MS ’00, MS ’02, isn’t playing by Miss Manners’s rules today. And then, more emphatically: “This should be cryptogram material when we’re done.” ![]() “I taste coconut,” he announces to his friends, who seem unfazed by the breach of etiquette. Then, he nonchalantly returns the half-eaten sweet to its square in the box. ![]() He examines it, sniffs it and takes a small nibble. Sitting in a van on a residential street in Redwood City, Rich Bragg selects one truffle from a box of two dozen. ![]()
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