Jen, Jess, Ben, and I arrived in Washington Square Park in North Beach at about quarter past 12 on Saturday. We headed for the southwest corner of the park where we spied the table covered in 1980s lunch pails — He-Man, Spider-Man, Rambo, and the like. With the photo of the giant cell phone leaning against the table, we knew were in the right place. We were the first team to arrive. We would soon learn, however, that our Vassar team would be more than just the four of us — since so many people had signed up for this Ivy League/Seven Sisters edition of The Go Game, we would be on a combined team with Dartmouth. “Isn’t Dartmouth the opposite of Vassar?” we quipped, laughing at the unlikely pairing of schools.
Soon enough, JJ from Dartmouth and her friend Jacquelyn from Yale arrived. Then Farouk from Dartmouth showed up and rounded off our team. We all hit it off. Jess was assigned phone operator and Ben the photographer and videographer in this high-tech game that led us through the streets and hills of San Francisco to solve puzzles, riddles, and exercise our creative juices.
The concept is simple and very cool: Cell phone as guide and data input device. Each mission is timed and worth a certain number of points. The data are fed to a central database, which tracks the running tally of scores. Throughout the game, each team can monitor how it’s faring against the others. Most of the game, we were in 2nd or 3rd place, and ended up finishing 5th of 10 overall.
I had a lot more fun in this version of a city treasure hunt than I did in the last one we did on the soaking-wet Chinese New Year’s a few months back.
Unlike the last hunt, which was more about random trivia, knowledge of the city, and finding specific places, this game was much more intense, guiding us to certain destinations to answer multiple choice or text-based questions, and to input into our phone the photo or video number on our camera corresponding to the particular objective or skit we were acting out — all the while racing against the clock, keeping our goldfish Goldie from losing more water, and avoiding the man with the shaved head who was after us with silly string.
From painting the number 4 in chocolate sauce (our own creative twist) on the northwest corner of a city block to acting out our own rendition of the famous scene from Reservoir Dogs using the mascot of a competing school (MIT’s beaver in our case), the game was tremendous fun. We quickly bonded with our teammates as we ran from mission to mission. In an attempt to discover to whom the statue at Coit Tower is dedicated (Christopher Columbus), I sprinted up the super-steep hill in Telegraph Hill leading to the San Francisco landmark. I felt sick afterward, but I did it for the team. When charged with acting out in six still frames a compulsion or phobia, our team elected Ben to have hydra-urination-obsession (or something like that), wherein he developed a fondness early in life for pissing on fire hydrants. Later on during the judging at the bar, our photos received some great applause (as did our Reservoir Beavers video, wherein Jess’ tree chomping booty shakin’ scored us some big bonus points).
When the city-based missions were over, all the teams headed to The Field, a bar on Union Street, where we received 5 betting chips each (per team) and engaged in various challenges against other teams. Jen was the reigning arm-wrestling champion, faring 3-0 against other women and earning a handful of chips for our team. While engaged in the 4-person (2 guys and 2 girls per team) chugging relay, Jen, Ben, Jacquelyn, and I tore up the competition, even though Ben’s initial false start caused us to begin with more beer on our side. It was great fun.
During the judging portion, one of the most hilarious and daring photos was of two guys on another team who got buck naked for a full frontal in the rightly-titled “Boldest” mission of the competition. By comparison, team VD (Vassar Dartmouth (Yale)) had a pretty lame entry: We had JJ lie down in front of a moving truck as Jen and I stood at the front and acted as if we were stopping the truck.
It was an exhausting day that I would definitely do again. Go Game rocks.
We had a pleasant end to the evening at Jane and Sarah’s wine tasting dinner party. The Fetzer sauvignon blanc that Jen and I brought tied for 7th, and the cheapest wine wasn’t our favorite this time, so all in all, I’d say it was a successful evening. Jane cooked some mean chicken. She and Sarah throw the coolest wine tasting events. It will be great once Jen and I have a big enough house again to throw fun parties.
1 response so far ↓
1 work at home // May 14, 2003 at 3:32 pm
Sounds like you had fun.