I have a lot of thoughts about this year’s hunt – it
generated a lot of mixed feelings and I feel like I need to say something. This
year has probably been the most motivated I have ever been to write a wrap-up
post. Hopefully it will be interesting for everyone else to read – especially since
I am not a fantastic writer (and a worse editor). This is going to be split up
into 3 parts because of length. (And I’m still debating on whether one will be
made public or not, since a bit more personal than the other two.)
This year was a solid, clean, well-timed hunt. It was clear
that [Alice] had two elephants on their back that they wanted to get rid of –
the 2004 hunt with weird puzzles and bad answers (I think, I wasn’t there for
that one) and the 2013 hunt and its super-difficulty and super-length. One was
their personal failure and the other was a growing trend in the mystery hunt
that threatened to engulf it. If any [Alice] members have any doubts as to the
quality of your hunt, don’t. Your team produced an amazing hunt – no doubts
about it. It was quite clear the time and effort you produced into making a
quality puzzle hunt, and it was time well spent.
Unfortunately, the thoughtfulness
that clearly came through in the puzzles only magnified the potential problem
that reared its head for Palindrome on Saturday night – which is pretty much
the reason for us “going crazy” with the answer responses. But let’s not get to
that right away. Let’s focus on the positive for a moment and touch on
individual puzzles.
Here are the puzzles I worked on this year:
Safety First – It was one of the first 3 puzzles we opened,
and knowing that I didn’t want to do either Build Your Own Sudoku or
Intersecting Personalities, I agreed to take the lead on this puzzle. (Also, I
thought the idea of making the first aid kit a puzzle was hilarious and was
curious as to how they succeeded at doing this.) I found the jigsaw pretty
quickly, and once someone on the team figured out what the puzzle was about,
recruited people who liked jigsaws. My main contribution then was organizing
info in our google spreadsheet for the answer. It wasn’t that I’m bad at
Jigsaws, but that it was that there were so many people who were super excited
about solving it that I didn’t want to stop them. Overall a nice intro puzzle.
Red Herring – Not a puzzle, but I started to spot Alice
characters written as clues in other puzzles and thought that we were dealing
with a Matrix-style hidden message in all the initial puzzles. Turned out to be
nothing though.
Black and White – I picked up the grids for this puzzle, and
noticed the interleaving pattern between the two texts. Then I left my team to
go exploring for the major thing I worked on during the MIT Round…
Finding cards – A couple team members who went to find
information for Upstairs, Downstairs reported seeing a card in between
buildings 16 & 56 on the first floor. We decided that going around and
finding the cards would be a good idea to do. I started out with a team of 3
people. We found 5 cards on the east side of campus and we reported back to
mark them. I then went out a second time by myself. I kinda wanted to explore
the campus by myself, since I’ve never really gotten a chance to do so. I asked
our team captain, Eric Berlin, to recall me when they had 2 metas solved. By the
time we had 2 metas solved, I had 1/3 of the card’s locations recorded
(including a lot of diamonds), and I was munching on girl scout cookies I had bought
from the Stata Center while I was trying to find information on the two cards
hidden in there. We solved the 3rd meta pretty quickly after that,
so it was time for the…
Cards/QR Runaround (Diamonds) – The Cheshire Cat came into
our room with a QR code informing us that there were cards hidden around
campus. I may have groaned a little too loudly about that. I grabbed a bunch of
people and we split into 3 groups – My group took Diamonds. The QR runaround
was awesome. I accidently grabbed diamonds, which meant that we were able to
consistently pass other groups because I knew where most of them were already. It
was kinda awkward when we were at the same place as another team solving the same
puzzle, but except for counting the rope-knots-accounting thing whose name
escapes me, it worked out. However, either we didn’t understand the final bit
of our trail worked or it was broken, because we could get the first 3 letters
from the student center rooms, but the last two kept eluding us. We ended up
using OneLook for FLE?? and started guessing things.
Jabberwock Interaction – This was overall a nice interaction,
despite the fact that it took us way too long to figure out that there was
diamonds, clubs and spades on the three locks. I’m going to blame the bad
lighting. That was totally it… *whistles innocently*
Playing Card Puzzle – I decided when I got back from the
Jabberwock that I was hungry as all hell and went to get dinner. When I got
back everyone was gathered in the food room, having identified the letter that
goes with each playing card. I left to do the white queen initial gift, and
when I came back there everyone had given up on the jigsaw puzzle. After a
little bit of fiddling around, I was able to prove that the 4 of Diamonds was
forced to be on the left-hand side, and from there the jigsaw dropped pretty
easily.
White Queen Initial Gift – I tend to be one of the first
people to notice when we unlock something new and one of the first people to
organize when we need a task done. So I called out that we needed a red
herring. Someone suggested that we could give her a “red hair ring.” I kinda
laughed it off, but then Amy actually volunteered to give her a ring made from
the tips of her hair. When someone volunteers their own hair in service of the
team, you don’t turn them down. It was pretty funny watching the White Queen
break character when she received it.
A Puzzle with the Answer NORWEGIAN WOOD – I figured out
pretty quickly what was going on with this puzzle. Google gave me the appropriate
website on the first hit and then I saw how to make the tree. Turns out google
spreadsheets are not the best medium for making binary trees. Fortunately, it
was readable enough that someone else (whose name escapes me, sorry) was able
to swoop in and read the answer while I was stuck on trying to compare the tree
to a morse code decoding tree or trying to form a word from the first letters
of all the words of a given branch.
A Puzzle with the Answer I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND – Usually when
I tell the team we need to do some interaction challenge, I don’t get a lot of
responses. However, this one got a good response from the team and therefore I
didn’t end up going. When everyone got back, we apparently got through 5/7
legs. The guy who got the last leg of the race got a Sudoku and he didn’t
particularly like them, so he asked if anyone wanted to take the Sudoku from
him. I was surprised that I was the only one to volunteer. When we went the 2nd
time, I started making headway on the Sudoku, but not much. I had maybe 4 or 5
numbers filled in by the time I got the answer that fed into mine. I figured
out which numbers/letters were still possible for the circled squares, and came
up with SHARP as a possible answer word. I filled in two givens, and continued
solving, keeping track of what I added as I went. It turned out to work pretty
well, so I checked it and got to go back to HQ.
White Queen Meta – I figured out what was going on with the
red/white deal. I started getting the white sox and white album songs that
applied to ITS JUST A RED HERRING since I didn’t see any connection between the
answers given and the white sox/white album. Foggy was the one to push that the
references were backwards, and from there the meta fell fast. This was overall
an awesome meta and has gone into my bag of examples of what a good mystery
hunt meta should look like.
Tea Party Meta – I was obsessed forever on this one to
breaking the answers into 4 groups of 3 and trying to read an answer off that
way. My main contribution to this was basically to act as a sounding board for
Foggy’s ideas and check to make sure that he wasn’t making an error, and then
be astonished when someone from another room swoops in and saves our ass. We
were all very happy when this was solved. (I ended up sleeping for 6 hours in
the middle of solving this. I desperately needed it.)
Crow Facts – I’m pretty sure this was my favorite puzzle of
the Mystery Hunt this year. I offered my phone number to become spammed for
Crow Facts, and was calling out what I needed while updating the google doc
with all the crow facts. Fortunately someone else on our team watches Game of
Thrones and was able to identify all the quotes. Stuff like “There’s nothing
more sickening than a crow in love” kept me laughing the whole time. (There’s a
second part to this story, but that’ll be coming…)
Events Meta – I should not have gone to this event. It was
not really up my alley. I believe the only thing we were told about this event
beforehand was that we needed scissors. Other than that, it was a complete
guess about who to send. I would like to thank Aaron and the members of Super
Team Awesome for covering for terrible skill at building things. I will add
though that this was an awesome event idea, but not a very interesting event
meta. Woohoo! Balls are dropping down through machines and the answer pops out!
It’s really cool when your machine works, but there was little that was
actually made it feel like a meta puzzle. It just felt like the crappiest shell
meta ever.
Humpty Dumpty Meta – When I saw that were starting to get a
big picture jigsaw, I fired up the old Photoshop and started piecing the images
together. We started finding the correlation between answers and the poem, and
I confirmed that the indexing that we were doing was correct because we were
actually looking at Braille numbers and not letters. Nice, clean meta.
Stalk Me Maybe – This is an amazing idea for a puzzle. I
spent some time gathering information for this, but someone else solved it
since I had an opportunity to work on the meta in the middle of this puzzle.
Red & White Knights Meta – Chess metapuzzles pretty much
have my name written on them, so I started working on this one as soon as I
could. It took a couple tries to figure out how the answers worked to put
pieces on the board, but after a while we had over half of the white pieces on
the board and with the help of Dima, got the red knight’s path figured out. We
then had half the answer phrase, and after a bit of work and a lot of help from
Foggy, we managed to piece together the other half of the phrase. (It helped to
figure out the path that we wanted _A_E_ to become GAMES).
Runaround – You could tell that Palindrome was tired. Anyone
who wasn’t working on one of the puzzles
started falling asleep. Fortunately
the 8 hours (I think) between when we solved the R&WK Meta and when we
started the runaround caused us to get at least enough sleep in order to be
competent. I know I needed the 1.5 hour nap I took sometime after we called in
the Dan Katz White Heffalump favor. I know we took forever on the record player
(but that was super cool) and the bed we started to get with a bunch of clues
from one [Alice] about lock picking. When we got to the faerie chess puzzle, I
was super excited. I spent time learning the different pieces while my team
finished the nurikabe jigsaw puzzles, then I swooped in and placed the pieces
with Aaron checking my work. Finally when we got to the logic maze, I helped
out a little bit in the beginning, but was getting pretty tired and mentally
checked out.
That should be all the puzzles I had a hand in personally.
Part 2 will be a bit more about my performance in the hunt overall and Part 3
will be about the magic of Saturday night (and @CrowFacts!)
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