Show Posts
1471
Unwashed Village / Re: What's going on in your life?
« on: August 20, 2007, 06:48:04 PM »
My girlfriend, a mutual friend, and I participated in a road rallye with a Harry Potter Deathly Hallows theme on Saturday night. It was part scavenger hunt, part road navigation, part instruction following, and part game. You're given a list of roads you need to follow and to turn on (though the instructions don't always explicitly tell you what you need to do), and a series of other instructions that give hints on when you must peform certain actions that take precedence over the standard route instructions. There were 25 cars that registered (two cars apparently preregistered), and 24 cars that actually participated. There were 9 beginner cars (i.e. never won a trophy), 10 novice cars (those that have won a beginner trophy, 3 master cars (those that have one a novice trophy) and 2 grand master cars (those that have wone a master trophy). Each car also got to choose which Hogwarts house it belonged to. We chose Slytherin. I had only been on one rallye before, and that was a puzzle rallye where there is no predefined route. Just a bunch of locations you have to visit which are determined by puzzles you solve (and you can visit any location in any order, and you also will never be able to visit all the locations) and things you need to find at these locations. The other two had never participated in a Rallye period.
So we made many mistakes, many which we realized after it was too late to fix them. We got to the end knowing that we didn't do very well, but apparently a lot of other cars felt the same way. We also had to the tiebreaker quiz which was matching up the characters to their patronuses (this is the only part of the event that actually required knowledge of the books, the rallye itself did not). In the tiebreaker you got 5 points for each correct match and lost two points for each wrong match. (The tiebreaker score being independent of the rallye score.)
It turns out on the official answer sheet of the rallye which was handed out to everyone after they finsihed there were 38 specific things you needed to do. Each one you did incorrectly netted you 10 points. When they announced the scores, the last place team had something like 330 points. We listened for our car number and were amazed as the numbers got lower and we hadn't been called. Then they mentioned the 10th place team had also gotten the highest score on the tiebreaker (knowing we knew all but two, I figured this would be us). Sure enough, with a score of 180 points (hey, that's one item better than 50%) we placed 10th overall, and second in the Beginner class, garnering us a trophy. The first in the beginner class placed 9th and beat us by only 10 points, which means one less mistake and their would have been a tie. They were also Slytherine interestingly enough. Slytherine managed to get four cars finishing in the top 10, Ravenclaw got 3, and Gryffindor got 3. As a result, Slytherine was the winning house as well. (The Hufflepuffs all finished outside of the top 10.)
So we made many mistakes, many which we realized after it was too late to fix them. We got to the end knowing that we didn't do very well, but apparently a lot of other cars felt the same way. We also had to the tiebreaker quiz which was matching up the characters to their patronuses (this is the only part of the event that actually required knowledge of the books, the rallye itself did not). In the tiebreaker you got 5 points for each correct match and lost two points for each wrong match. (The tiebreaker score being independent of the rallye score.)
It turns out on the official answer sheet of the rallye which was handed out to everyone after they finsihed there were 38 specific things you needed to do. Each one you did incorrectly netted you 10 points. When they announced the scores, the last place team had something like 330 points. We listened for our car number and were amazed as the numbers got lower and we hadn't been called. Then they mentioned the 10th place team had also gotten the highest score on the tiebreaker (knowing we knew all but two, I figured this would be us). Sure enough, with a score of 180 points (hey, that's one item better than 50%) we placed 10th overall, and second in the Beginner class, garnering us a trophy. The first in the beginner class placed 9th and beat us by only 10 points, which means one less mistake and their would have been a tie. They were also Slytherine interestingly enough. Slytherine managed to get four cars finishing in the top 10, Ravenclaw got 3, and Gryffindor got 3. As a result, Slytherine was the winning house as well. (The Hufflepuffs all finished outside of the top 10.)
