The time has come to celebrate the apple harvest, the first in three years! The trees are making up for lost time by producing a massive crop of apples. Hooray! We intend to make all sorts of apple products: cider and vinegar, and perhaps hard cider, “molasses”, apple butter, apple leather and dried apples.

Participants will get fresh cider to take home, along with vinegar and possibly molasses and other apple products after they are processed.

We have obtained a new electric apple grider and a new, smarter cider press. Both should make cider production faster and less tiring, but we still have the old maximizer and press, so two cidering operations could be working at the same time. The plan is to put all the small pressings into a 200 gallon cistern, so as to make one cider comprised of perhaps 30 distinct apple varieties.

There is also this: we want to mount a formal, well-played game in the so-called Mazyrinth.

I pledge that this version of the Mazyrinth game will be highly intriguing and engaging, offering the satisfaction of achieving many intermediary goals and the challenge of choosing a winning strategy from a bewildering multiplicity of alternatives. The plan was to do this at the end of the Aestival, two weeks ago, but Hurricane Debby saturated the field and everyone was too worn out from coping with the storm to set the game up.

Fifty-two tiles, two each of every letter in the alphabet, are distributed randomly in the maze. Teams use cell phone cameras to photograph sequences of letters that spell dictionary words of six letters or more. Extra points are awarded for finding longer words and for using close to or all of the alphabet. The game is simple but complex; hard to be sure of the most efficient way to harvest words among thousands of possibilities.

Members of the winning team will be have their tickets refunded and will each receive a free Fall Subscription Box. The goal is to have four teams in competition, each with four players. The length of the game is one hour. You can sign your team up by selecting the ticket link below.

The gameplay process and first-person experience of players and teams will be well-documented. A drone will record the movement of the game and players will wear hats of their team’s color as they run madly around the paths—or think more and run less. We’ll have some players carry go-pros, Meta glasses, or similar devices to record their strategizing, frustrations, triumphs.

There will be barbecue, our own smoked salmon, the best corn and tomatoes in the world, and so on. Also, the six new bedrooms and four new bathrooms of the Fieldhouse will be available for the first time, so more of us will be able to sleep in conventional beds than at previous Chthonic events.