After 26 hours of grueling competition, the 30 members of Writhing in Ecstasy won the 30th Annual Kaleido Quiz sponsored by KURE, Iowa State’s student-run campus radio station.

The grand prize was a free party in the Maintenance Shop.

“It was a really good feeling to win,” said Andrea Manuell, a member of the winning team and a junior in biology.

From Friday at 3 p.m. to Saturday at 5 p.m., students from 15 teams were dispersed throughout campus, looking for trivial local facts and scavenger-hunt items. There were no size restrictions on the teams.

Disc Jockies would announce a question over the air and the teams had an average of 6 minutes to either phone in an answer or bring in the items. Points were awarded accordingly.

“It was a big success,” said Rob Wiese, KURE disc jockey and co-organizer of the event. “Some of the teams who participated last year said this year was even better.”

The winning team members were from Barker House in the old part of Richardson Court Association. Heidi Fay, a senior in marketing and French, helped organize her team. “We were in second place almost the whole time. … We didn’t know until the very end that we had won,” she said.

Writhing in Ecstasy racked up 20,200 points. The second-place team, Cerebral Frustration, had 20,085. That team won a double-cassette-deck stereo.

The third-place team was Punchin’ the Munchkin’ and the Hut of Lust with 18,840 points. Team members won a KURE-D.J.ed party.

Fourteen teams competed.

One scavenger hunt had team members go out to Clyde Williams Field at 3 a.m. Saturday morning to hunt for golf balls.

“We had about 45 people out in the snow looking for white golf balls. It was great, though some of them weren’t happy about doing it,” said Wiese, a senior in agricultural studies.

Another search required teams to buy an item from the Pleasure Palace, an “adult” store, and bring it back to radio station.

“We had to find a specific issue of Playboy, a back issue of Iowa State Daily and out-of-date [microwave] popcorn,” Manuell said.

Another traveling question had teams count the steps between the Campanile and Catt Hall.

During the competition, KCCI-TV from Des Moines traveled to Ames to interview some of the participants and ran a clip about the event on the Friday evening news.

Other prizes included free body piercing, gift certificates, lots of free pop from Coca-Cola and Pepsi and free food from McDonald’s, Pizza Pit and other Campustown businesses.

“It’s awesome to win,” Fay said. “The top teams had an internal rivalry; we really wanted to beat them.”

The competition turned into a come-from-behind victory by Writhing in Ecstasy. With less than an hour to go, the team was behind by more than 100 points. “In the last hour there were trivia questions and a music montage, but until we went to the radio station and they told us, we didn’t know we won,” Manuell said.