I make no apology for the number of posts about the upcoming DASH 6 puzzle hunt in London next Saturday, which should be one of the highlights of the puzzling year. It’s very close and I’m very excited. If you’re excited too, you may well enjoy Clavis Cryptica‘s preparation tips document from last year; good advice like that never goes out of style.

Let’s next talk about the organisers. The DASH Facebook group has been running a series of “Better Know A City GC” (Game Control) mini-interviews with the teams in charge around the world, with the London organisers being interviewed about a week ago. In order of publication, you can see what Jordan, Lisa and Ronald had to say. Additionally, if that’s not enough, the London Street Games blog has a longer interview with Jordan.

Finally, let’s make some predictions:

1. The prediction most likely to be accurate of all is the one made with the assistance of science; we’re within medium-range weather forecast territory. The BBC make this prediction (showery with sunny intervals), MetCheck make this prediction (showery in morning, rainier later) and forecast.co.uk make this prediction (showery).
2. I’m going to predict that this event will be relatively long, and relatively construction-heavy (which is slightly different from saying relatively difficult). I’m going to base this on the individual locations’ posted predictions that this will likely be a long-ish hunt and the mail from London GC.
3. Some previous DASHes have had nationwide clues, often with interaction between teams on Twitter. Some years even had the motif that all the teams would start at the same time – so around 9am Pacific on the West coast, or around midday Eastern on the East coast. (Or, perhaps, 5pm UK time, leading to the hunt running through the night!) As most locations are starting around 10am local time, I don’t anticipate that the same thing will be happening this year – at least in that way. Perhaps the DASH organisers have something more cunning up their sleeve!
4. I’ll also predict that the code sheet will contain something unusual this year, and the unusual content will be used. Looking at past years’ code sheets, I would consider morse, semaphore, braille, binary and phonetic alphabet codes to be usual, maybe also hexadecimal. If anything else crops up, I’d consider it suspicious and proactively look for opportunities to use it!