The Casino Royale Game

Friday night was normal enough, catching up and chowing down with some ex-DG peeps at Timbre and listening to Timmy's stand-in bop through next generation's easy listening menu of Green Day, Coldplay, Maroon 5 and a song dedicated to a Vivian (whom it must have been painful to smooch), "Lips of an Angle (sic)".

1700 hours Saturday evening to 1230 hours Sunday, however, the applicants for double-0 agent status were legging it around Singapore in the Casino Royale Game induction programme.

Our team wagon was decently-equipped with 5 laptops, 1 M1 wireless broadband router for a bouncy wifi bubble, 1 extension cord for juice-sharing, 4 phone cameras, a pair of walkie-talkies, 1 GPS kit, 5 bottles of water, 2 toolboxes, a bunch of bananas, a roll of toilet paper, a diving torch for boinking sharks on the nose (if necessary), killer wasabe seaweed snacks and a terry-cloth elephant named Ganesh (who spent the first hour warming the bananas and was thereafter relegated to the boot).

Tummies ruled the day with enquiries about dinner before The Game commenced and the driver needing to be fed every 4 hours (and the rest needing resupplying at various other times):
1800 (before solving 1st clue): McDonald's, Bras Basah for burgers.

1850 (2nd pitstop): stocked up on bao, pancakes and currypuffs.

2030 (working on 4th clue): a round of drinks at McDonald's, Liang Court.

2235 (5th pitstop): Applicant M had 5 groundnuts. (Actually meant to be a sort of penalty.)

0020 (working on 7th clue): we were truly foiled by food. A mini-wok of fried chilli chicken rice, a huge plate of carrot cake, another plate of oyster omelette and several plates of dim sum later, we all succumbed to a 2-hour food-induced coma.

The Changi Airport Run-around

0520 (9th clue): backseat folk nibbled on a string of jelly beans that constituted the 9th clue.

0800 (working on clue 12): teas, milos, pratas and wanton noodles at Seah Im.

0900 (working on clue 13): canned drinks at Science Hub.

1130 (end point): there were snacks at the MI6 Secret Intelligence Service Headquarters at Oglivy Centre but we were too zonked to eat much. Wound down by attempting to play Saboteur.

(All timings very approximate.)

In the end, we were rather gobsmacked to have won the game. Better still, even though most of the other Games awarded only bragging rights to winners, we got an S$80 voucher for Brewerkz. Neat.

Many thanks to:

• our ignorance (or our blatant lack of attention at the intro briefing) that asking for help was permitted, we saved on penalty points for hint-whoring;
  
• the technologically souped-up wagon;
  
• the frontseat "20 is space in ASCII" meta-cryptographer Google-king;
  
• the driver, the back window of whose wagon we had to frequently scrape our faces off, whose constant practice in bad jokes came in useful and who appeared to sporadically download the collective consciousness of Game Control ("Suntec Skygarden!", "UE Square!", "Reflections at Bukit Chandu!");
  
• the teamleader for sharp eyes, working knowledge of many things and loads of enthusiasm;
  
• the other backseater who was ace in Japanese hieroglyphics and pop culture jingles; and
• the combined general knowledge pool.
  

(I was good only for brute force attacks and hacking. In a most literal way.)

Loads of thanks to Agents X, M (whom we discovered was male (and probably heterosexual) and therefore, had not wished to bond with us the previous night), O, T, J and Q, the Stanford chaps who'd planned this inaugural Game in Singapore and who'd stayed cheerful (but hungry) through the night at SIS HQ and not drunk at Long Bar, Raffles Hotel. Especially loved the Dove Soap and X-ray clues but most of all, the dead cool CD containing interactive software. (Let us not make mention of laws of the land that were tickled in the process.)

Fairly decent overnighter fun that has spawned some ideas for youth camp wide games (toned down of course, without them ASCII hexadecimal things).

Semper OccultusTill next time!

PS: Game Control's post-game blog here - game stats, meta-clue solution and clue debriefs.

(In other news, while trying not to fall asleep at work today, was hauled up by The Boss. Fortunately, it wasn't a ticking-off for skiving but a nod of the head and a pay raise. Phew. Just about enough for the desperately-needed haircut. The hair, like Neil Gaiman's mop, looks like it's getting ready to escape from my head and go hunting for weasels.)