Once of CMU's traditions is Spring Carnival, which among other things involves a midway of carnival game booths built and operated by campus organizations. These booths are judged on design, appearance, construction, relevance to the organization, and adherence to the yearly carnival theme, and there are 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prizes awarded in each of the three divisions (frat, sorority and independent). KGB semi-regularly enters an independent booth, and during the years I was an undergrad, entered three booths, two of which I chaired.
In addition to these pages which I maintain, KGB has it's own pages on Spring Carnival
KGB's 1995 Booth was chaired by Amy McGovern, but mostly designed by Eric Moore and Matt Andrews. The carnival theme that year was Cartoons, and we did Peter and the Wolf. The game was originally intended to be a laser -based auto scoring shoot the wolf type thing, but the electronics never got finished. So what ended up happening was that we used the laser and visually determined hits on the targets. We also went over time on building, and so ended up being disqualified from competition, even though we still finished and operated the booth.
Here are some pictures...
The '96 carnival theme was Board Games, and as it happens there is an old Avalon Hill board game called 'Kremlin'. As this was my first time chairng booth, I decided to stick with just re-using the 'barn' that KGB built a few years ago, and has kept since, and just change what went on top. Our game was a simple, but surprisingly popular bean bag toss, and we ended up getting 3rd place.
Here are some pictures...
After our sucessful return to the booth competition arena in '96 , Eric Moore had related to me the long held desire on the part of many past KGB Booth doers to build what could be considered the ultimately perfect KGB Booth: Baba Yaga's Hut. We talked about it, and he managed to make me as excited about it as they had all been. The difference was that I might actually manage to do it, having now a collective of seasoned builders and the drive and desire to raise the necessary capital.
It would be perfect in many ways: as Russian folklore, it would fit the organization perfectly, there was already music that had to be played in it: (Mssoursky's A Hut on Fowl's Legs from Pictures at an Exhibition) and the techinical and design feat of making a booth stand on two legs would be astounding in it's own right.
But that was in Spring '96...
In Fall '96 our treasury was somewhat low, and the theme of Carnival was TV Shows. Baba Yaga's hut just couldn't work for that, but we came up with Rocky and Bullwinkle. That could have been done well, but I wasn't going to be the one to do it. I was also Service Vice President of Kappa Chapter right then, and I did not have the time to be booth chair. So if it was going to happen, it fell to James Cheney, who had been on both of the previous booths, and had been my 2nd in command for Kremlin, to be the Chair. The organization voted to go ahead, but by the beginning of Spring '97 it was realized that there just wasn't enough interest in the organization to keep doing it, and so losses were cut, and the booth was canceled.
During the whole 96-97 school year, I'd had rumbling in the back of my head, the dream of Baba Yaga's hut, and set about determining what would be necessary to actually do it. I decided that if we had $2000+(entry fee), and a dedicated core of at least 10-12 people we could do it. So I set about raising money through the traditional KGB method of TShirt Sales. At the same time, I started building the whole booth in 3d CAD. It may seem that that is a little extreme, but once you've seen the booth designs below, I hope you'll realize that is was in fact completely necessary. (and a great help to boot)
One of my constraints on designing the booth was that I couldn't destroy any of KGB's barn. So whereas the sides of the Hut needed to be about 5ft wide, we had a whole lot of 4' wide walls from the barn. So I had to design spiffy little 1' funky shaped walls that both extened the 4 footers to be as long as they needed to be, and also allowed for the 45 degree angles that the octagonal hut shape would require. From there on, I was convinced of the abosulte necessity of perfect precision in the design, and proceeded to model the whole thing in MiniCAD.
With the help of a huge number of people, we built the various sections of the booth during the months leading up to carnival, and erected it on Midway. The Hut won us the 1st place Independant Booth award, and Regan Merante's t-shirt design for the booth won the Booth T-Shirt Contest as well! It was a complete clean sweep.
Here are some designs, draftings and renderings.
Here are some pictures of the actual booth.