Midnight Madness Event Synopsis

Emma Alosi and Theresa Piazza appeared on an episode of the Spoilers Club, a podcast hosted by Room Escape Artist.

Episode Transcript

David: Welcome to the Reality Escape Pod Spoilers Club. Today PG and I are joined by Theresa Piazza and Emma OSI of the Great Gotham Challenge. Theresa is the Chief Operating Officer and Emma has the wonderful title of Clue Creator and we will be spoiling Midnight Madness 2025, an exclusive event run as a fundraiser, primarily for finance people to go and solve lots of crazy puzzles and raise a whole bunch of money for charity. Welcome everybody.

Theresa: Thanks for having us.

Emma: Thank you.

Peih-Gee: Yay. I am so excited to dive into this super exclusive event. I doubt that I'll ever have a chance to participate myself, so I'm really looking forward to living vicariously through this account.

Theresa: We are here for you, pg. We will tell you anything you wanna know.

David: Well, let's, let's start with the concept of Midnight Madness. What's the background on this event?

Theresa: So this has been around since 2007, at least when two folks by the name of Matt and Elisha were running it. And then it changed into an event named Compass from 2017 running every other year until 2025. But this year we rebranded it back to its original roots as Midnight Madness, and it is an all night puzzle solving event based on the movie of the same title, Midnight Madness. So this was invented as a way to raise money for charity with, as David mentioned in the intro, really big finance firms that are looking to do something with their very big charity giving budget. This is an outlet for that.

David: This is basically one single night. It's a race to solve a whole bunch of interesting and complex puzzles that have been laid out in Manhattan.

Theresa: Generally in New York City, primarily Manhattan, historically very centered on Manhattan, but occasionally as this year, taking folks to different boroughs, namely Brooklyn,

David: didn't know that finance bros knew that the other boroughs existed.

Theresa: You know, and sometimes they have figured out how to use the subway too. It's really astonishing.

Emma: It's crazy. We had people go to places they had never been before this year for sure.

David: I'm quite confident that that is true.

Emma: Yeah. Oh, they admitted it to us.

Peih-Gee: So how many teams participate and like how many people are there per team?

Emma: Yeah. teams are six people maximum. And this year we had 19 teams participate. I think it always sits like that in that number between 15 to 25 teams, in general historically. So it's, you know, a pretty big group. It's, it's definitely over a hundred people and doing a lot of stuff all night long

Peih-Gee: Well, when you say all night long, what exactly does that mean? Is it like 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM? Is it 12 hours of puzzling madness throughout the night? Or like, what are the hours for that?

Emma: Yeah, it, this year we started at around like 1:00 PM and I think the first team arrived at the finish line after two, I think we wrapped, tried to wrap everything up by the 2:00 AM 3:00 AM situation. So a little bit over 12 hours of puzzling.

Peih-Gee: Wow, that's intense. Is that the same teams that come and play year after year or is it new players every year? Or like do you, do you know what returnees versus newbies?

Theresa: Yeah, we publish a survey and we beg all of our players to fill it out so that we can get this sort of intel. And we do have some recurring teams, like not only from the same organization or company, but the actual same people who participate over and over every two years in Midnight Madness AKA Compass. We do have some brand new teams this year. I talked to a team at the finish line that was so stoked to come and do this again next year, and I had to gently let them down being like, well, we haven't officially decided we're running every single year. It's typically every two years. And they were like, what? We can bring more teams from our company. Well, we're gonna get all our friends together, we're gonna be able to find a way to find this every single year. so we do have both a mix of returning companies, returning players, and brand newbies.

PeihGee: And is there like a prize or a reward for winning?

Theresa: Very exclusively. Bragging rights is the only prize. the, the ability to say that you won midnight madness is the only thing on the line.

Peih-Gee: But along with this, there's a pretty hefty entry fee, right? Because that's how they make the money that they don donate to Charity

TheresA: Correct. If you wanted to participate in Midnight Madness and you wanted to fund a team, it is an entry fee of $42,000 for your team of six.

Peih-Gee: 42,000 per team, and you have 19 teams. David, do the math. What?

David: Look, all I'm telling you is that those of you who are listening right now for $15 a month, you're getting a steal right now.

Theresa: Yeah. 'cause we're gonna tell you everything that happened that people got to experience for $42,000 and you're getting it for 15 bucks.

Peih-Gee: Wait. That's amazing. So you guys must have a pretty good sized budget to play with when designing challenges and designing all the puzzles and props for this.

Theresa: Yeah. And really excitingly, this was the first year that Gotham Immersive Labs, the company officially behind the Great Gotham Challenge, took over managing that budget. So instead of just coming on as a co-collaborator for puzzle creation, we actually took over the reins of the entire event, everything but fundraising, getting those companies on board to spend that money. Everything else was under our purview. So we also had to manage this giant budget and figure out how to spend that money that we had. Not, of course, the whole amount, lots of it goes to charity. But it's still a massive undertaking.

David: Before we dig into this too deeply, I am curious, I know that there is a London Midnight Madness. What is, what are the similarities and differences between the two?

Theresa: I am very confident Simon Edwards is listening to this and I'm very confident he will have a lot, more to say than I will on this matter. But, we do know who's leading the Midnight Madness UK event, and that's Simon and a team of folks over across the pond. The primary difference between these two events is, and I will get this wrong, so I'm not even gonna try and suggest I know what it is, but the entry fee is significantly different. I believe it's much less expensive to participate.

David: It is.

Theresa: In the uk. I also think that they have more teams, but not this year. Generally, they can support, I think a few more than 25 teams, which is usually what we max out at over here. One of the most interesting things debriefing after both of our events this year was just the percentage of our budget that we spend on locations. One of the things for the New York City version of Midnight Madness is keeping with this legacy of giving people access to the most exclusive and behind the scenes-y, most New York venues that you can get access to that typically are not rented out, which makes it a joy to go through contract negotiations with these folks. But we spend so much of our budget just trying to get venues rented, and for whatever reason, the folks in the UK either get them for free or at a really, really steep charity discount. That is not something that we can do over here. So. I think a fair amount more of the event happens outside in the UK. Whereas most of the time in New York you're going from to location, most of them being inside.

Peih-Gee: Oh, that makes a lot of sense. When I was in London last year, Simon met up with me and then he showed me one of the locations and he was kind of telling me like, yeah, this is an exclusive location we use for Midnight Madness. I had no idea what this event was at the time, but I was like, it's cool. Got to go up in the belt tower. And he took me to like, some buildings that are closed off for normal tourists. But I got a tiny taste, I guess, of what the participants get to see. You know, like, like you're going into these historical buildings and you're kind of getting to go to places that usually aren't accessible to tourists.

Theresa: And I will say one other thing to differentiate the two events is that the style and length of puzzle are really different across each of the UK and US events. I would say, and Simon would probably agree with me here, that most of the UK puzzles are meant to be solved in like a max of 15 minutes. Where Emma routinely, we made puzzles that teams of six would probably take at least an hour to solve throughout this event. So it's just a different style of puzzling too. I believe.

Peih-Gee: Now, what made you decide to change it from 15 minutes to one hour? Did you try the 15 minute style first or realize teams were like dissatisfied with that here?

Theresa: The events kind of evolved differently. So GGC got involved in Midnight Madness helping to create puzzles in 2021, and we were onboarded into the legacy that had been created here, and those were really difficult puzzles at a point where, puzzles were not solvable unless you got a particular hint that gave you missing information. Personally I think that the puzzles were broken before you got that hint. But that was just the style of how this evolved in the us and so we continued with that theme. 2021, 23, and now 25.

David: So the other big difference, if I'm not mistaken, is. The structure of the event in New York, it is very much a race. The first one across the finish line wins, and in the UK it is points based and there is an elaborate point based system. Can you talk to me a little bit about why the culture of the finish line matters in New York?

Emma: I would guess that it's a lot about the people who play to some extent. They're very competitive. They come from a very competitive finance world. and think that this idea that, you know, you're racing against other teams, you see your competition next to you, you know that your only objective is to get to that finish line first, is in line with that culture and is also a, a really fun way to play an event. I'm not super familiar with the point system in the UK. I'm sure it's a really fun way to play an event too. But, I can imagine the people that created Midnight Madness here in the US were very motivated to create a very straightforwardly competitive game.

Theresa: Yeah, this is another legacy item that we inherited from the folks who were creating the event previously, which is the first team to cross the Finish Line wins. We have pitched lots of different timing adjustments. If you've ever played a great Gotham challenge, you know that if you take a hint, you get a time penalty that was very quickly thrown out, and it is still the first team to cross the finish line wins, and on top of that, the winner is announced immediately in the participant Slack. So if you're a participating team, you know the second the event has been won.

Peih-Gee: Do you need to have solved all of the puzzles to cross the finish line?

Theresa & Emma: Yeah.

David: This is a relevant question because for this year little bit of foreshadowing this question will end up being important about the structure of this event. With all of that in mind, let's talk about Midnight Madness 2025.

Set the scene for me. What are players knowing as they approach and where are they going?

Emma: What players know. Ahead of time. They learn, I think about 24 hours in advance where the starting location is. And that is it. This year the event was themed after the life and afterlife of Harry Houdini, obviously famed magician and escape artist.

David: We've never heard of him around here.

Emma: yeah, no one has ever, he's very obscure. So we started in Coney Island in Brooklyn, and we did that for a logistics reason. We didn't want people to have to travel to Coney Island during the game, so we cut out all that travel time by making them start there.

David: For those who are not from New York and or haven't spent a lot of time here, Coney Island is what we technically refer to as the ass end of Brooklyn.

Emma: Very far, but an awesome location. And thematically we started there because, Houdini and his wife Bess, started their careers in Vaudeville and Coney Island has a rich history in connection with vaudeville. Houdini actually did perform there, so it was sort of this homage to the start of his career, and the start of the game.

David: Fantastic. So what do they do once they get to Coney Island?

Yeah. So the first puzzle that they encountered, all of these puzzles have a lot of different parts, but they get a bag of stuff that's gonna help them kind of throughout the whole game and the first puzzle they have to solve is hinted at through this newspaper. And this newspaper will probably come up a lot in this discussion because it was sort of like the players outline for the whole game. It was this resource they kept coming back to. And on the back page of the newspaper, there's this hand bill, sort of like show bill of different vaudeville performers. That's very puzzlified and some advertisements that are telling players places they need to go. So essentially they needed to play five different real Midway Games in Luna Park, and win five different prizes, and the prizes were these stuffed bears. And concurrently they had to go around Coney Island and find these different performers that were listed on the Handbill and watch their performances. And each performance had a puzzle embedded in it. They also had to meet a magician who gave them this magic wand, which will also come back again, throughout the game. and putting all these pieces together, they essentially needed to figure out that one) the magic wand the bears that they won at Coney Island, meaning that these bears could talk, but only if tapped by the wand and activated, by a magnet in the wand. and the bears spoke directions like turn left at the next block, or, you know, so on and so forth.

The answers to the puzzles that the performers had, interfaced, I don't know how into the weeds we wanna get, but they interfaced with the bears names on their little tags, and gave you an order to put the bears in and then you would know directions to your next location. And a big part of midnight madness, this tradition that was actually kind of revitalized this year is that each puzzle solves to the next location or gives you instructions in some way to find the next location. So there's no, congratulations, you've got it right. Here's your next stop. It's like, you know that as soon as you solve the puzzle.

Theresa: Let's go a little bit deeper with, I think one of the coolest things from this first puzzle was all the different vaudeville acts and how you came up with all of those. I don't think you need to get into the puzzles, but just at least name all of the different acts that we had stationed on the boardwalk and in the Coney Island Museum.

Emma: Yeah, so we had five different acts, just like there was five midway games. so we had an accordionist, we had a snake handler with a live snake, we had a juggler, we had a contortionist and we had a burlesque dancer. And they had a very wide variety of associated puzzles.

Peih-Gee: How do you embed a puzzle into a performance like that?

Theresa: Excellent question. So glad you asked Peih-Gee.

Theresa: I think that the most interesting ones for me were the contortionist and the burlesque dancer.

Emma: Yeah, so the contortionist, the way that that puzzle was embedded was there was like a stage, a theater that we were in. So the contortionist had like a three minute routine. And in the three minute routine, she hit six poses, that she was flowing between, that were semaphore angles, and that spelled out their word. So players were having to pay attention to actually what angles her legs were making. And she was wearing these like ballet slippers that had the like red and yellow semaphore color flag design on it.

David: Clever.

Emma: It was quite the process to find a contortionist who was willing to work with us in this really. Collaborative way to make a puzzle happen with her routine. But the person that we got was so amazing.

David: Time, time out. I, I have, I have to probe at that a little bit more. Are there, like, I, I have to imagine that like, finding interesting work for as a contortionist is maybe a challenge. So I'm wondering like, did you encounter a lot of contortionists who were like, oh, no, no. I will not embed a puzzle

Peih-Gee: Their craft is too precious.

Emma: No, it wasn't that I, everyone was super down to embed a puzzle in their act, but it was also about collaborating with the performer to find the angles that would be doable, and then build the puzzle off of that. And also finding someone who just had the right skillset. I, I didn't really know who I was reaching out to when I started that process. I was kind of casting a very broad net. And I get people who are like, my thing is aerial silks, like, I'm not gonna help you with this, but sounds super cool. Or people that maybe were just, you know, wanted to do their own existing routine and collect that paycheck, which totally understand that.

David: I get it.

Peih-Gee: So, oh, so you're designing all of these puzzles and finding all of the people for it as well?

Emma: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I would say that I am involved in like every step from like a, Hey, we need to like, make a puzzle hunt in this location. Like conceptualizing it all the way to the, the final thing you're holding in your hand. a lot of the time. Obviously not for every single puzzle in this game 'cause there's so much puzzle material to see, but Coney was one that I spent a lot of time on.

David: What were you doing before you worked for GGC?

Emma: So I actually got hired at GGC while I was still in college. I was in my last year of college. I have a degree in illustration and I had never made a puzzle or even done a puzzle hunt style puzzle until I applied to work for GGC. So…

Theresa: Best hire we ever made.

Emma: …the puzzle, part of it, I have spent so much time learning and learning from everyone who, works for GGC, but yeah, it's it great. I always have amazing things to say about my job

David: Wonderful. Okay, so we've got the contortionist. There was a different one that you, Theresa, that you wanted us to, to zoom in on. What was that one?

Emma: Burlesque. So the act itself that the burlesque performer was doing. It didn't have like, any specific puzzle content in the same way that the contortionist acted. What she was doing was like a burlesque style strip tease. And she, every time she took off an item of clothing would reveal a different number, and it made a phone number that players then called to get a phone tree puzzle for this like sexy hotline.

Peih-Gee: I'm just, I'm just watching for the puzzles.

Emma: yeah, so the puzzle there is like, something that they're doing once they call the phone number, but the delivery of the phone number was the actual performance.

Peih-Gee: Oh, this is, yeah, these guys are dialed in.

Emma: My moment that was really memorable this year while we were at Coney was,these performers are used to doing lots of different things like we talked about. They're very cool people. I'm sure this was their first time doing a puzzle hunt. And the audience, obviously, it's their first puzzle. They're so locked in and they were getting into the theater and sitting down and watching, you know, the burlesque performance or the contortion. And at the end, like, we'd close the curtain and they would sit there in silence. They wouldn't clap. They wouldn't even like, acknowledge that the performance had ended.

Theresa: There was a moment that I read a discord message from Emma so furious in all capital letters saying, guys, no one's clapping. And just being infuriated by these players who were so engrossed in puzzle content that they couldn't clap for the performers, which was truly awful.

Peih-Gee: you need an emcee, you. gotta get an mc up there. Let's give 'em a round of.

Theresa: Ugh, pg, you're hired.

Emma: I got up there and I was like, people in the audience, like, I know you're locked in. Like I have been in your shoes. I get it. But being said, please clap for these performers. They're, they're kind of performing these awesome routines for you. You need to kind of acknowledge them. And then our photographer Chase, who was in the room, after I got off the stage was like, were you a teacher at some point? And I was like, yes. 'cause I used to teach middle school art, and I think that really translated in the way I addressed the audience.

Peih-Gee: School marm energy.

Emma: Yeah, it was, I was giving more, less mc more like, all right friends, like we just watched something cool, let's slap our hands. not obviously what I said, but I think the energy I brought,

David: Okay, so they experience all of these vaudeville acts and they're getting information out of these puzzles that it's ultimately gonna lead them to another place. What are they extracting from this?

Emma: Each performer in a very typical to GGC style, solved to a key word that was. A pun related to the act itself, and then the way that they interfaced that with the bears is the end of the keyword that they got from the performers. When matched with the correct bear name, the middle portion of the two together was the name of a carnival snack. So for example. There was the juggler keyword was high school dropout, and one of the bears was named Inez. And so the end of dropout, like the POUT the beginning of Inez together made poutine.

David: Ah,

Peih-Gee: Oh, cute. It's like a PGS Playhouse puzzle.

Theresa: It is, with so many layers. And so the back of the newspaper had icons indicating where I think the performer answers were supposed to go. And so if you matched up the bears to the performer answers that gave you the order to listen to the bear instructions in, and the bear instructions, once you tapped them with a magic wand, gave you the directions to follow, to reach your second location in Midnight Madness, which was a mansion in Brooklyn.

Peih-Gee: The proper, layered puzzle. I love it.

Emma: That's gonna be the theme.

David: Fantastic. So we've got our magic wand and we've got our location

Theresa: You also have five bears. a whole bag of stuff that you don't know what to do with, which includes a swimsuit and a map. What else was in those opening packets?

Emma: There's like a, a drawing compass, like to draw circles. There's like silly putty in there. There's all sorts of stuff. I think we've covered it,

Peih-gee: Did the players have to bring all of this stuff with them or could they have left the bears behind?

Emma: They could have left the bears behind. You would I think they don't do that because they never know. yes, technically for this puzzle you could have left the bears.

David: They have all of this stuff and now they are off to what Mansion?

Emma: This was a weird find of ours. Location wise, this is just like a privately owned home. It's in Kensington, Brooklyn. so. South of Prospect Park and it's just this gorgeous giant mansion that we rented out, we staged a mentalist act and ouija board seance there.

David: Okay, well, tell us more about that.

Theresa: The teams would arrive at the mansion and watch a mentalist act being performed as someone who watches a lot of Penn and Teller fool us and perhaps other people on the listening to this podcast know, mentalist acts are typically done by a sort of code. And so players needed to break this mentalist code. The players would hold up an object and the one magician who is not blindfolded would see the object. And the second magician, who I believe was stationed on an upper balcony and blindfolded, would magically telepathically understand what object the players were holding.

Emma: And they have a sort of like verbal back and forth, the assistant and the mentalist where they're saying things that, you know, it. When you're listening to it, you wouldn't be like, oh, he's telling the other guy what is in his hand. But that is how the Mentalist Act works. The code that they're breaking is sort of, how is, how are they determining what the object is? And also there is some interfacing with the Ouija boards that we'll get to in a second. But yeah,

Peih-Gee: Is the Mentalist only doing his act the one time and you only get one shot to figure it out?

Emma: No, they're doing it, like not on a loop, but like there's a bunch of objects on the table in the room with the mentalist and teams are coming in and all of them and seeing what happens. So like maybe you're not the person presenting the object, but you, you might be watching and, and that kind of goes on the whole time the puzzle is happening.

So you would have a chance to see, jump in and see it at kind of any point. So the Ouija boards, unlike traditional Ouija boards that have letters and then maybe like yes or no, these have what we were referring to as like magic eight ball phrases. So like “you’re on the right track”. “It's possible”. “Not a chance.” What the Ouija boards would give the teams is a sequence of those phrases. And so they were prompted to ask a question, it could be anything, and then move the planchette around and it would vibrate over one of those phrases that was like the answer to the question. And they would repeat this to get a series of answers to their questions. So they'd have a series of like, okay, it says likely, and then it says not possible, and then it says this and that. So they had like, I think it was. Maybe seven, eight of those. Then separately they watch the Mentalist Act. and what they're learning from the Mentalist Act as they break the code is that each object on the table represents a number. So for example, we had like the seventh Harry Potter book on the table. We had a bagel that represented zero. We had a pair of chopsticks that was two, and in the exchange too, with the magicians, the verbal exchange, they're using these phrases from the Ouija board. So they're like, oh, it's not a chance that it's this and so on and so forth. and so if players kind of learn all of that information, then they. Are able to say, okay, I have numbers that match with this series of words, or like phrases, and that was a set of geo coordinates to the next location.

Peih-Gee: I assume that teams are solving this at different rates, so like how long do you contract the mentalist out for? Is he just contracted to stay there all night to perform this, or is there like a three hour window that he's doing this where teams are trickling it or how does that work?

Theresa: Yeah, this is one of the most difficult components about Midnight Madness and a great Gotham Challenge, but particularly a Midnight Madness, is that need to make sure that all teams progress through the puzzles within the window that we have either the actors' staffed or the location reserved for. And all of these puzzles that we'll walk through are set up, and broken down same day, which is, which makes our day absolutely insane because we have to set all of these locations up, run all of the teams through them in like, correct Peih-Gee, like a three or four hour span, and then break everything down and probably set up the like, location three puzzles ahead of that, over and over again for the course of this. So it's really challenging. We have. One thing we haven't touched on is that the way that players validate their answers and receive hints is through a mechanism called game control, which is a set of volunteers who participate in Midnight Madness from a conference room on Ninth Avenue, and they don't get to see anything that happens on the course, except they get to correspond with all of the teams. And those game controllers are really instrumental in making sure that the teams are progressing through at the proper pace. So we can give hints as regimented every 15 minutes. That means if you need a hint, you can take one every 15 minutes. But also when we're getting closer to that location reservation ending, we can hint teams more aggressively to make sure that they actually solve the puzzle before they get kicked out and what we call swept from the location.

David: it’s also worth noting that a whole bunch of folks from our community were functioning as game controllers for this particular event.

Theresa: Yeah, when we needed to staff game control this year, I was like, I know exactly the people I want to tap.

Peih-Gee: Okay. I was wondering if it was like a marathon where some people are finishing like, 24 hours behind the front runners or something like that. they get swept off.

Theresa: I mean, I think if we had more flexibility to do more outdoor locations, we could let the spread become even wider between the teams. But I think all of the teams finished with about two hours between each other max. So it's really quite a tight pack.

Emma: We have many, many meetings, or had, I guess. About what, how long we think things are going to take. and there are often arguments about how long we think things are going to take. 'cause we have to estimate all of this ahead of time to be able to say, Hey, mentalist, you're booked from this time to this time like you were asking about. And so that's a lot of the game creation process.

Peih-Gee: Yeah, that makes sense.

David: Okay, so we now have GPS coordinates to a new location. Where are we going next?

Theresa: Great. Let's see if I can explain this puzzle properly without getting anything wrong,

David: I wish you luck.

Theresa: Thank you. This one is complicated. This is a puzzle that took place at 28 Liberty, which if you don't know, has about a hundred pianos in its basement with a company called Sing for Hope, which company, as I understand it, whole non-profit mission, probably a nonprofit, I have to check, is just to promote people playing instruments throughout the city. And we really wanted to have this. Be done outside, but for a whole bunch of logistical reasons we didn't. And so players will arrive at this location, 28 Liberty downtown in the financial district and see that we have grouped sets of pianos four pianos together, kind of keys facing each other. So there are all of these pods of four pianos, we have stickered specific keys across these pianos for I believe, seven different songs. And so the notes are numbered across all different pianos. So note one might appear on the top, piano note two might appear on the. Bottom, like the South Piano note three might appear on the West, piano note four on the east piano, and so on and so forth. So this isn't, I sit down to a piano. I play these notes in this order. This is, I collaborate with my six teammates to play these notes in the correct sequence. And so the seven songs have different colors and numbers associated with them.

Okay. First challenge, I have to figure out what all these songs are. Big problem with music and pianos is that we have basically taken out any sort of indication of how fast or slow the notes are being played, long or short. So you're just getting all of this in quarter notes. So players are playing these potentially, 7 to 15 notes to try and guess which song this is for each of these different keys that are indicate. Once the players identify which seven songs are being indicated across these pianos. They need to understand that in the lyrics of all these songs, there is a reference to the word star. All of these songs have something to do with Star like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. I now cannot think of another one. But given those notes that they were playing earlier, the next piece of the puzzle is to identify exactly which key falls on the word star in the lyrics. And once they do that, they can make the connection based on something written in the newspaper that they were given at Coney Island, that the 88 keys on a piano map to the 88 agreed upon constellations. And so then if they, I understand which key in each song says the word star, and then they look at the number, on that key, an index into that constellation, that number of letters, they can extract their next location.

David: So what does this, does this one, derive for you?

Theresa: This extracts another location in the form of Pier 16. So the answer you get is P-I-E-R-X-V-I.

David: Okay, we're off to Pier 16. Roughly what time is it at this point in the evening, night, whatever it might be.

Emma: Maybe like 5:00 PM at this point. I think that location opened at 3:30.

Peih-Gee: Do the teams break for dinner or are they just eating on the run

Theresa: Some teams will break for dinner. Other teams will just grab something and keep going.

Peih-Gee: Eating's for the week? Eating's for losers.

David: Eat the week.

Peih-Gee: Yeah, Yeah, exactly.

David: Okay, so we land ourselves on Pier 16. Tell us about what they experience there.

Emma: So anyone who played the Great Gotham Challenge flag ship game this year in June will be familiar with the Wavertree. The waiver tree is a big tall ship that belongs to the South Street Seaport Museum. and that is, anchored on Pier 16 as a permanent kind of museum exhibit. But it's in the water and it's really cool. It's a ship from the 19th century. It has these huge sails. It's very epic. and so teams would go aboard there and they would have a series of mini puzzles to solve. So they had all these colored lanterns that indicated locations of mini puzzles and some of the mini puzzles were things like they had real hard tack, that we really baked, that was a puzzle that they had to like, make a grid and solve a puzzle with. They had to get tattoos like sailors, and that was a puzzle. They had to. Use this giant map that we put on the wall, this world map, and they had to take their wands. This is one of the places where the wands come in. and on one end of the wand was, that were activated by induction coils.

So on the back of the map, they can't see, but there's induction coils that make the wand light up when they're over certain cities and they use that information to solve a puzzle. And each of these puzzles is yielding either two letters, or something that could be abbreviated as two letters. So, for example, one of the puzzles, solved to an element on the periodic table. I think it was, I don't know what element this was, but the letters were TH. One of the puzzles solved to Sweden, which could be abbreviated as SW. They had to put all of these two letter chunks they got from each puzzle in order to form a phrase that said, swab the deck. And with them in their bag the whole time, they have had a deck of cards and they've had some Q-tips, but just putting the Q-tip on the deck of cards is not gonna do anything. They need one last piece, so they have to go to a bartender at the bar on the ship. And they do this, logic puzzle where they're trying to order a cocktail for the captain. We actually just put this puzzle like on our Instagram and in the GGC newsletter. So if anyone wants to actually do this part of the puzzle, they can. They're going back and forth with the bartender. They’re trying to figure out the right cocktail to order for the captain. And once they do, the bartender does not give them a drink, unfortunately. He gives them a little vial with the strange orange solution. And it is a chemical reveal solution that when they swab that on the outside box of their deck of cards, they reveal a symbol, which is a, the like Freemason symbol that gives them their next location, which is the Masonic Hall, in Manhattan.

David: I have landed there, during puzzle hunts at least a couple times over the years.

Emma: It's very cool.

Peih-Gee: Do teams just take off and go to the location or do people want to, like, do they ever have to call in and like double check and be like, this is the location we got, we just wanna make sure we're not, you know, going on a wild goose chase.

Emma: Yes. The game controllers, do verify the answers for them, so that they are not like, Hey, we are gonna go to Queens, and they're actually not supposed to

Peih-Gee: Okay, so they call in after every time when they think they have the next location, they call in to verify it.

Emma: Yes, they should.

Peih-Gee: Okay. That seems, that seems like a smart decision.

David: Yes, they should imply you have had teams show up in places they're not supposed to show up.

Theresa: We've definitely had teams try to go places they're not supposed to go and considered GPS tracking the teams, but just didn't wanna get around all the privacy concerns with that. So we just strongly encourage they check in with game control.

Emma: Yeah, because the other consideration like here, with GGC, we are able to see what puzzle teams are on at all times, and immediately when they move from one to the next. With Midnight Madness, you are beholden to the game controller's understanding of where a team is. You know, as the people running the event on the ground, it's important to know when teams are coming, how many teams are coming, how fast they're coming, so that you can deal with those flow issues. And so them checking in with the game controllers was like the only defense we had against like a team randomly showing up and us being like, we are not ready.

Peih-Gee: Is it just a phone number that they call?

Theresa: It's a Slack channel, so they're just corresponding via text with their game controller. And each team is assigned to one specific game controller for the duration of the event. And most game controllers are dealing with two teams at once, but it allows them to be really present in their team chat. And the other thing we encourage is the more the team can talk in that Slack channel, the better idea that game controller will have of what hint they need next. So it's really challenging if they just say, we need a hint. I mean, everybody can relate to this in an escape room. If you don't talk about the problem you're trying to solve, you as a game master have no idea how to hint them. So we really encourage the teams to be really active in that chat for the reasons of hinting. And then also for what Emma was talking about, getting a sense of where the teams are, how close they are to making that final solve or transiting to that next location is really important for us as producers on the other side.

Peih-Gee: Besides the performers, how many other producers or staff do you have like on the ground at each location?

Theresa: Interesting question. Did not run these numbers. we probably had, I'm gonna say 45 volunteers across the 10 different locations. So these are folks that Good Shepherd Services, the charity that this benefits will help us, with just bodies trying to either have people check teams in if necessary or dole out specific pieces of information or just do small volunteering tasks. And then Emma, I am not sure anymore how many actors and clue sitters and other production folks we had, but I'm gonna guess like 25 or 30. Plus our team.

Emma: Yeah, I know the number for magicians, so. doesn't include the Coney Island performers. This doesn't include actors that we'll talk about. but just magicians alone, we had 12 or 13 professional magicians working at this event.

Theresa: an excellent segue to the next puzzle if we wanna talk about that because that is where we had 6 different magicians stationed

David: That was what I was about to ask.

Theresa: Great. So at the Masonic Hall, teams would enter this really grand space and find six different magicians performing different magic tricks. And the posters, these like very cool Houdini era style posters, advertising the specific magician. You can think of these in your head. They're cool, a picture of the magician and lots of really cool art around them. And what teams had to do is extract a single word from a relatively simple puzzle embedded into each of the posters. So there's a poster I'm looking at here that is the, the Great Flame Whisperer.

And embedded in the smoke in this poster's image are the letters, H-E-A-R-T. So you're just taking the word heart from there. There's many different extractions that teams would use, and once they have extracted all of the words from each of these six different posters, they can then turn their attention to the actual different magic acts and watch each of these six magicians perform their routines over and over and over and over again. And as the magicians go through their specific routines, they will refer back to the newspaper, which has the eight different classical magicians effects, appearance, disappearance, transformation, et cetera.

David: Would be very familiar to anyone who watched my RECON talk.

Theresa: Correct. And so as these players have extracted the word from the posters advertising the specific magician, and are watching this specific magician's routine, each time one of these effects come up, they are modifying the word that they've extracted from the poster in a similar way. So if the magician makes perhaps the middle card disappear, that means the players have to remove the middle letter from that word and get another word. So now they're playing some sort of like physical and mental word ladder game. And by doing this through all of the different posters, with all of the different magician's routines, they are getting to six specific words that when read together. Repeatedly, these are different words that once you kind of mashed them all together and say them enough again, it leads you to your next location, which was Horace Cafe on a, so now they're going to Alphabet City.

David: Okay, so where does this land us now?

Emma: Well, I'm actually gonna say there is a bit of, I don't know what the right word, maybe intermission happening. Between these two puzzles or a thing that's running concurrently that I think maybe we should talk about first. So on the newspaper that they get in their opening bag, there's a big advertisement, for something that was called The Great Escape happening at the Connolly Theater, which is in the East Village, at 9:00 PM So they know at 9:00 PM something is going down at the Connelley Theater, from the moment they open their bag. Teams could choose to send one person to see what this was or their whole team.

What was happening at the Connolly Theater was a real escape act, a hanging upside down, handcuff escape with this awesome escape artist. There was also sort of like an emcee magician who did a little trick ahead of time, and I believe gave the team some puzzle material, as well, and teams go and they watch a really cool show. They just watch an escape act. And the Escape Act doesn't have any puzzle material embedded in it. But in the theater they also stop by the coat check and they get a series of coat check tags, that have numbers written on them, you know, as you do. And they complete this puzzle. and the puzzle uses a font that magicians use often, where when flipped one way the numbers look like numbers, but when flipped the other way, they look like letters. So players are I think a math equation with these numbers, and they're solving a puzzle with the numbers, and what they get at the end is a series of numbers that when flipped in the other direction is their keyword, and then they would give that to, the coat check attendant and they would receive some cloaks, some scary kind of witch looking cloaks that will come into play later. So this was sort of a little mini puzzle. It fed in something we'll see later that was playing with that upside down theme, and playing with the escape artist, theme as well.

David: Okay, so that, that's intriguing. So now we're heading to Alphabet City

Theresa: Alphabet city with a cloak and a swimsuit that we still haven't used and we have no idea where they're coming up.

David: And still a magic wand.

Theresa: Oh yeah. Still a magic wand. And the magic wand is definitely used in this next puzzle. Which Emma, do you have any idea how to succinctly explain a stack to deck?

Emma: I can try. So we called this puzzle a stacked deck. They all have punny names we haven't really gotten into, but the basic concept behind this was we were mapping, cards and suits of cards to street numbers and avenues in the East Village. And so how that played out in the actual puzzle was there was a series of magicians, who kind of like street magic card tricks, and teams would go find these magicians. So basically they'd find the first magician, he would do a card trick that extracted, I believe it was like the 10 of hearts card and be like, this card is important for where we are right now. And then he would give them another card that had information about where to go next.

So they're like, okay, we saw this guy on this street corner and he gave us these two pieces of information. They would go to their next location, and they were interacting with things in their environment with their wands as well as the magician. For example, they get this card from the magician at the first street corner that tells them to find a car with a certain license plate and to point their wand at it. When they do that, the wand has an IR blaster in it. The car radio plays a song when they flick their wand at it. and the song is actually what's telling them the next street corner to go to. It's like a series of songs. So it was like Avenue B 13. Okay. They know to go to, you know, 13th Street and Avenue B. They get there, there's another magician. He forces another card and he's like, this card is important for this street and then a card that tells them where to go next and do kind of that next wand interaction, and so on and so forth. So that repeats a couple times.

Peih-Gee: That is so cool.

David: Let's do a little digression here. Who built this wand? A question. I know the answer to

Theresa: Evan Broder built the wand.

Emma: Yes, with help I think from other folks for the, like actual CADding and printing of the exterior part. But Evan not only built the wand, he also did the bear voice boxes. Evan was such a great help in this game. He also was like down to like roll maps.

Theresa: He designed part of our boxing puzzle that we used in the flagship, and then again for Midnight Madness. Evan has been a really delightful resource and was someone who quote, just happened to be passing through New York City on the week before Midnight Madness,

David: That's 'cause he lives on the East coast.

Theresa: Correct. But as Emma mentioned, he just spent like far too much time in our very busy, very crowded GGC office. Basically doing the job that I frequently do, which is quote, being big dumb hands, which is just like, great. Got a task for me to do. I'm happy to do whatever you need me to do. Roll maps. Sounds awesome. Great. Roll them again 'cause you need them Rolled tighter to fit in these tote bags we got printed. Awesome. Do that too. Evan was a delight. Still is a delight.

Emma: Yeah, as the big dumb hands delegator in chief, the fastest way to my heart is to say, yes, Emma, of course, I will. Hot glue bears together and roll maps, anything you need. So Evan and also Brendan get a huge shout out for their willingness to do those things.

Peih-Gee: Is the hand strikes again.

Theresa: Yeah. The hand. Um. A stack deck was a really wonderful puzzle that I think I can talk about. Something that failed in Midnight Madness. This is one of, we, Emma mentioned, did a lot of internal fighting about how long puzzles will take and how much we need to plan contingencies for. And one of the things that I said very early on is that if we're gonna use black light somewhere, it has to be like really well hidden because experienced puzzlers will show up with black lights to things. As an experienced puzzler, I travel with a black light. Lots of people do.

David: Don't leave home without one

Theresa: Don't leave home without a black light. David Peih-Gee, Emma, never do it. Anyway. So we got this ping from game control early on saying well before a stacked deck, which is the whole, we didn't really get to this part, but the whole point of this mapping to the avenues and the streets is to order the deck that they were given in their opening tote bag, and then find a space that we had installed a black light on the streets of Alphabet city and examine your deck underneath it.

We had spray painted in UV ink, examine your deck under this light, and that would've given you the next location of where to go to written on the side of the cards that you had the whole time, but not being able to see it unless you ordered it correctly and you looked at it under UV light. Now, of course someone had this and had probably too much free time on their hands and had ordered the deck. And I mean, once you solve a couple jigsaw puzzles and you have a bunch of time on the subway from perhaps Coney Island to a Brooklyn mansion, you can sit there and just try different permutations of trying to get the lines to line up to make words. And someone indeed did this. They brute forced the deck, the ordering, and was able to reveal the location that was sending you to this next puzzle.

And we just very politely asked the game controller to tell that team to not go to that location next 'cause they had accidentally jumped too far forward in the path. And they would eventually find when they were supposed to use that location, which they did. But always a good reminder to hide your black light reveals carefully when dealing with experienced puzzlers.

David: Yep.

Emma: I do also wanna go back and touch on all of the ways that the wand got used here. 'cause we were calling this the, like wand waving frenzy and there was some really cool stuff. So I talked about pointing it at the car and turning on the radio. Theresa alluded to some black lights that were installed. Those were not just on all the time. You had to wave your wand at them to turn them on. Actually, I went out. Prior to midnight Madness and flyered around the East Village to find someone who was willing to put a neon sign in their apartment window, for this game and you had to point your wand at like a random apartment building and a neon sign lit up with information. So there was so much cool wand stuff going on.

Peih-Gee: What was the distance or like, how much room for error was there when pointing the wand? Like, how close did it have to be?

Emma I think it's about 10 or 12 feet, so it does, you don't have to be right on top of it. Obviously if it's a second story window, you can't really be, but there was definitely a limitation there. We were like, okay, you have to live on, the first floor up of this

Peih-Gee: that's still a pretty good range for a wand. I'm, I'm imagining you needed to be like five inches away, you know?

David: Peih-Gee this wand is so cool. I have seen it, I have had bit of time to play with it. It is, as so many things that Evan Broder his fingers on and builds, so incredibly extra.

Peih-Gee: That's a lot of tech to pack into one tiny wand.

David: Oh, we're not done with the wand yet, but we'll keep going.

Emma: Yeah, and so one other mishap that wasn't related to the wand, which worked great, was they got some dumplings during this puzzle because we do like to feed them once during the game. And we had spent a lot of time finding a food truck,

Theresa: Truly so much time, so much of Kelly Chen's time.

Emma: finding a food truck with the word magic in the name. we were like. Thinking of Magic gyro or gyro, which I think is parked a lot of the times around Washington Square Park. We didn't get that one, we got this truck called, Dumpling Magic. It was like a little cart and we were like, great, dumpling magic dumpling's, fun. We love it. And Kelly, who Theresa just alluded to, who's our event producer, had even gone to Dumpling Magic the week before Midnight Madness to get some dumplings and just make sure we hadn't made a huge mistake and like gotten really bad dumplings. So all was well with the carts until, the night of Midnight Madness. We get there and they have like reskinned the cart it is a different name. I don't remember what it was, but it is no longer….

Peih-Gee: Wait, but did you contract with them to like be at that location during your event?

Theresa: Yes. And what we did not work into the contract, PG was you do, you cannot change your name.

Peih-Gee: Yeah, this is the one. The only thing we really wanted you for was the name. It wasn't your crappy dumplings.

David: You literally had one job.

Theresa: Yep. And, write really aggressive contracts and write everything into them because not that this would've made any kind of a difference, but yep, they changed their name.

David: This is why. This is why people who produce these kinds of events have such trust issues.

Theresa: Yeah. We have trust issues now for

Peih-Gee: wait. So what did you do then?

Theresa: Did nothing, what they're, there's nothing to do. We just got them. We just installed our tech on this other cart, told them to go there, and then the cool inside, oh, magic dumpling, magic themed event just evaporated into the night.

Peih-Gee: Bummer.

David: Can't win them all.

Peih-Gee: Just put a sign that says Dumpling Magic onto this side of the truck.

Emma: Yeah, just no time.

Theresa: Okay. I will take us through the next puzzle, which is, it's very punny name that we have not talked enough about, is called pooled resources. This is where players get to use this old timey black and white striped swimsuit that was given to them back, I don't know, let's say 11 hours ago. In Coney Island.

It's about 11 or 12 o'clock at this point, and on the side of their card deck they see 69 Columbia, which is the location of an indoor pool. And so at this indoor pool, teams are led and they see a giant chest full of chains, different lengths of chains with keys attached to the end of it, and then lots of different mats and beakers, and this giant key duplicator machine along with all of these uncut foam keys. So just like the outline of a giant key, but with no teeth in it. And what teams needed to do was by looking at the images on the mat, identify which keys were represented in the images. So as David knows, there's lots of different types of locks and keys, and every type of key has its own name. So very generically a skeleton key. If it was an image of a skeleton, and then teams would take the skeleton key and the length of chain that was attached to it and submerge it in this like beaker looking cylinder to displace water out of it. So once they did that for all the different keys and chains, they then those beaker water heights indicated how they should cut this giant foam key. So they went upstairs with an exacto knife and cut this out, stuck this giant foam key into a key duplicator machine, and this giant foam key became an actual real metal key before their eyes magically. Now, what did teams do with this metal key that they had?

David: I love this

Theresa: They still haven't used their swimsuit. So at the bottom of the pool, we sunk a safe. And in that safe, was another key. And in that tote bag that they got back on Coney Island was a bunch of what Emma described as putty, but was just clay and a clamshell that said, make impression here. So teams needed to jump into the pool, understand that the key unlocked the safe hidden at the bottom and sunk to the bottom of the pool, and then make an impression of the key that was in that safe with the clamshell and the clay that they were given up at the beginning of this event, and then dry themselves off and leave the pool.

Peih-Gee: Is the key chained inside the safe?

Theresa: Correct.

Peih-Gee: Okay. Okay. That's why they had to make the impression they couldn't take the key with them.

Theresa: Right. On the key, we had the next location engraved. So it said Gleason's boxing on the key. It was reversed so that the impression was correct, but they needed not only the name of that place and the actual impression of the key at the next location.

Peih-Gee: Oh, that's very, that's very cool. That's a very survivor challenge.

Theresa: Yes, here's another mistake we made. We thought, we would only order enough swimsuits so that like a person or two could get into the pool from each team way misunderestimated. How many people were gonna wanna get into a pool at midnight, and we should have gotten way more old timey swimsuits so that people could have gotten into the pool. People had an absolute blast understanding that all of this was meant to be done under water.

David: Love it.

Emma: People loved the pool and I know that Ryan has spoken publicly about how getting a pool for midnight Madness was like his white whale. and he did it and everyone loved it.

Theresa: We spoke to over 20 pools and we're told no. And then like the 21st or 22nd pool was like, yeah, you can sink a chest to the bottom of it. Yeah. You can bring all your weird chain in here. Yeah, we can be open until two in the morning. Sounds good.

Peih-Gee: I can't believe they wanted to get into a pool, getting into a pool at midnight during a puzzle, hunt feels like the last thing I would be into.

Theresa: It was really fun as someone who was in the pool resetting that safe. Every time someone opened it, it was a blast.

Peih-Gee: Okay, awesome. So then after this, they had to go to a boxing club.

Emma: So they went to Gleason's Boxing Gym, which is actually a very cool spot. A lot of famous fighters trained there. It's in DUMBO, so they're going back to Brooklyn, although not quite as far as Coney Island. And they got to this boxing gym and they would go with their team to a ring. And in one of the boxing rings, there was a boxing dummy. Those like Bob Dummies, they look like the torso of a guy. and hooked up to that.

David: He has it coming.

Emma: Hooked up to that, was this tech that we alluded to Evan, working on and was used also in our flagship game in June in a different puzzle. And how that tech works is it registers your punches on the bag and it can reveal information on a screen, the more you punch. and so what it was doing in this puzzle was revealing these news clips on these old TVs. So you're punching it and like you're starting to see these old news clips and each news clip was talking about an event that happened on a specific day, in a specific year.

So you're kind of solving that part first. And then. What is also in the ring is this pediatric scale. and it's one of those scales with the sliders on the top where you kind of measure the weight by offsetting it. and so it's like a little version of that that they use to weigh babies, But we are using it for something different. there's a bunch of boxes. there's these like big white plastic boxes and inside of each box there's an object, a seemingly random weird object. so you're putting all this information together. By realizing that the dates on the TV are actually dates of fights, famous fights between boxers, and that the boxes and the objects they contain represent different boxers and their nicknames. So for example, like there was a box with an iron in it, and that was like Iron Mike Tyson. and each of these boxes weighs a very specific amount. And so you're pairing up the boxers that were matched in the boxing match and weighing those boxes together to get a specific weight. And on the scale, on the sliders, there's different colors, indicated at each kind of marking.

So with your weight, you're getting two different colors, and that corresponds to the newspaper, which would help you pick out words from a specific article that would tell you what your next location was, which is the cell theater. So yeah, a lot of steps in this one too.

Listen to the full episode for the rest!