Participants busy playing Fifa 13 at the gaming contest.

(From left) Abhyutthan Sinha, Soumik Nandy, Soujanya Bhowmick and Anaranya Majumdar, the treasure hunt winners. Pictures by Aniket Sil

The youth of BL Block had a blast on Kali puja, playing video games and cracking clues.

The morning began with Game On, a video game contest where participants had to play Fifa 13 and Need For Speed Most Wanted. Two computers were stationed below the stage for the soccer game and another computer, along with a projector, was on stage for the car racing game. Fifa drew 30 participants who got eight minutes each to test their skills and in NFS the 16 participants had to race against the computer in the medium difficulty level. The game was sponsored by Infi Gaming, the video game parlour in the neighbouring BK Block.

“My opponent came to play NFS but was asked to take part in Fifa. His FC Barcelona lost 0-3 to my Manchester City,” said Anuraag Sinha.

Asked if he would have liked a game on goddess Kali to go with the festive mood, he jumped at the idea. “I’d love to. It should have high-end graphics and plenty of action and bloodshed on the lines of Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed games.”

The participants of Fifa 13 were not allowed to change squads. This brought serious rivalry to the El Clasico. Chirag Gupta’s Real Madrid lost to FC Barcelona by three goals despite the former having chosen Mesut Ozil, Gonzalo Higuain, Angel Di Maria and Xabi Alonso to be in the squad, albeit virtually.

Kaustav Roy, who emerged second in both the games, said he never expected to reach even the semi-finals of either. “It was a humiliating defeat for me in the Fifa finals. I scored three goals but my opponent netted the ball 11 times against me in the 20-minute game. As for NFS, I just lost by two seconds,” sighed Roy.

In the evening, a treasure hunt was organised within the block. The four-member teams needed teamwork, wit and pace for this one. Six clues were given in a sequence, all related to names and houses of residents of the block. Once they cracked a clue and reached the required destination, they got the next clue.

But the last leg of the hunt took the teams an unusually long time. It was later discovered that this was because the final clue, that was written on a piece of paper and stuck outside a particular house, had been torn up by a child.

Once the organisers found this out, they revealed the clue to the team that had reached the penultimate clue first and they then sniffed their way to the stage, beneath which the treasure was placed.

“This is not the first time we won this annual treasure hunt and most people say that we win because we are senior to the others. But we firmly believe that whoever stays in the block for a year or two should be able to crack the clues,” said the winning team comprising Soujanya Bhowmick, Anaranya Majumdar, Soumik Nandy and Abhyutthan Sinha.

The coveted treasure was chocolates in gold wrapping paper.