That was a bad ask.
Get on a Raft with Taft threw The Apprentice:Zorg yesterday, a sixteen hour Fifth Element themed Game. I always like Get on a Raft with Taft's puzzles; I think we have similar puzzle tastes, so I find them particularly appealing.

TAZ took place in the East Bay, so we had a pretty good tour of Berkeley (albeit in the pouring rain) and, later, Walnut Creek/Concord. We spent about 5 hours on the Berkeley campus, 2 of them starting in downtown Berkeley and then about the Southern parts of campus and then 3 at the Lawrence Hall of Science. We also ended up spending a good chunk of time at Eudemonia, a little gaming shop in Berkeley that was the site of a morning clue and the end party. It's a cute shop, but when we wandered in there in the mid-morning, it was filled with dorky looking gamer guys either playing computer or tabletop games and it completely reminded me of the game shop skewered in Veronica Mars ("0wnage!" "It's not 0wnage if you're on the same team!!").

TAZ had pretty good clues, more BANG-like than stew-for-three-hours-on-the-same-clue-like (they kept the pace fast with hints coming rapidly on our hint-pdas) and a good mix of activities. Among other things, we got to:

• Write a natural science/geology themed rap song:
  I wasn't so keen on this when I got the clue spec and neither were a couple of the other teams (*cough*Burninators*cough*), but Yar and Dale got really into and actually wrote something that was pretty funny. Unfortunately, our only copy is scribbled onto a piece of torn graph paper, but Dale says he'll post it online.


• Play Red vs. Green laser tag with five other teams at Quazar in Concord:
  Technically, we were supposed to be looking at each other's arms for clue snippets written in ultraviolet pencil during the game, but almost everyone got into the spirit of laser tag and ended up dashing around the arena shooting each other instead.


• Play the Game of Four with a Taft-er in Sproull Plaza:
  Basically, twenty questions with a twist, or by its true name, the game of ten and ten asks - dog, corn or rock? Linnsey and I were working on another puzzle while the rest of the team played this, but judging from the laughter, they had a good time.


• Make silly putty:
  Solving a set of clues gave us instructions to mix glue with the cannister of unidentified white powder that we'd been given previously, creating silly putty. Turns out that white powder was borax, which, of course, I wish I'd known before I ate some of it while trying to determine what it was.
  
  Ian, from Get on a Raft with Taft, at the end party: You ate the borax?
  Us: Um... Yeah.
  Ian: I didn't think people would eat the borax.
  Rebecca (of XX-Rated): Our team ate it too.
  Daniel (from the Burninators): The white stuff? So did we.