Earlier this semester, I participated in an event called Competitive Cryptanalysis through one of my classes, Code and Codebreaking. During the event, there were several teams competing to find the objects designated in the messages. We needed to cryptanalyze the given messages and determine the location of the objects, then retrieve them without getting shot by the other teams (with nerf guns). The main purpose of this event was to put to use the different techniques we (the students) learned in the Code and Codebreaking class in order to break the encryption on a message in a specified amount of time. This gave us the “real-world” stress of time constrained cipher breaking (but with nerf gun weapons and zipties as the objects), as we had only done untimed homework assignments in the past. Overall, the experience was a good bonding exercise with my team, and a great way to practice a series of skills that we had learned over the course of the semester.