Mystery Hunt 2014 - Part II: Individual Performance

My first mystery hunt was back in 2009. I had joined the unattached hunters list and was picked up by Palindrome. Well, “picked up” wasn’t the right word – assigned is more like it. I needed to know what team I was on so I could start making plans for how I was going to get up to Boston/how long to stay/other various details. When I got to the mystery hunt that year, I was amazed at how good the rest of my team was – and I definitely struggled on a bunch of puzzles. Fortunately I managed to find some places to shine (I was pretty good at the Combat Simulator unlocking, I figured out how the Combatant’s Guide to Zzylvaria worked at the end, and I got so far on I Can Haz Zyzzlburger? even though we didn’t solve it). However, I still left with the impression that my team was way more talented and skilled than I was. After all, these people have years of experience on me, they belong to some sort of National Puzzler’s League, and they have so many accomplishments behind them. Meanwhile, I’m a college freshman who hasn’t really done anything with myself. Unfortunately, as the years went on, I never really shook that feeling.

Fast forward to 2012, the Producer’s Hunt. There was one met puzzle that no one had even looked at, the Charles Dodgson Meta. Seeing that it was a combination of chess and scrabble, it seemed like it would be right up my alley. I’d tell the story, but Eric Berlin already has. My biggest Mystery Hunt battle scar was born.

Fast forward to the opening this year. On the plus side, I was happy to find out that it wasn’t actually an academic conference-themed hunt. On the minus side, it brought memories of that meta puzzle right back. When I came back to the team room after the opening I declared that if there was a chess meta puzzle that I wasn’t doing it. (Yeah right.) It did set a tone for the rest of the hunt – I was going to make up for the frustration of Charles Dodgson.

Looking back at Part 1 of my recap, something becomes really obvious – I spent a large part of my time focusing on big picture/metapuzzles. I had a direct hand in solving 5/10 metapuzzles (counting the Jabberwock deck). Of the other 5, 3 of them I wasn’t in the room for because I was preparing for the big QR runaround, and the other 2 were solved while I was asleep. I also went to a lot of interactions. I went to every HQ interaction I could, which ended up being slightly over ½ of them. (HQ people might remember me as the tallish guy in the bright red hoodie from Palindrome if the weekend and the people in it isn’t a complete blur to you. My summer camp experience is going to point towards the 2^nd being a much more likely possibility.) I definitely had my ear on the pulse of the team, and I focused on the big roadblocks that the team needed to progress.

This year I was a lot more relaxed during the hunt. Something about only having 12 puzzles open at a time relaxes you a lot more than the OH DEAR GOD WE’RE DROWNING IN PUZZLES from last year. Because I was a lot more relaxed, I got the time to calm down, eat without having to solve a puzzle at the same time, and just talk to some of my teammates during the hunt. One of the comments I got a couple times from people throughout the weekend was that I was a mini-Foggy. This made me feel awesome.

Perhaps I should explain for people not on Palindrome – when the Evil Midnight Bombers broke up back in 2009, Palindrome got Foggy. Foggy is the editor of P&A Magazine, he wrote the Puzzle Boat and has the Puzzle Boat II coming out soon, and overall he is awesome at puzzles. I spent a lot of my time working with Foggy this year. Almost all of the meta puzzles I worked on had his input (with the exception of the card deck, which had other people’s input). I ended up moving right next to him in the middle of working on the Tea Party meta and pretty much stayed there all weekend – usually I end up moving all around the room. On top of that, I went to get breakfast with Foggy on Sunday(?) morning, and he mentioned how we’d still be a day behind if it wasn’t for my help this year.

These complements meant the world to me. One of the reasons I feel better about being at the MIT Mystery Hunt than other puzzle competitions is because of the uncapped team size. I worry that if I participate in other puzzle competitions that I won’t pull my weight – that the team would be better off with someone else filling my spot. I look all around and see our team filled with amazing people and amazing solvers, and tons of years of experience. This year I felt like I was right up there with all of them.

Hopefully this will turn into a year of more puzzling (although being from Philly makes that tougher). BAPHL I think is a pair of Megabus rides away, and maybe I’ll be able to make it to DASH (depending on what cities offer it this year). I keep meaning to write a round of puzzles, maybe I’ll actually get around to doing that this year. I do know that this year is probably going to be rough for me, but the Mystery Hunt was a great way to start it off!

Part 1 is all about the individual puzzles that I took part in this year. Part 3 will be about the “magic” of Saturday night and my suggestions for next year.

Mystery Hunt 2014 - Part I: Individual Puzzles

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 3^rd 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 2^nd 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!)