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An Object at Rest Cannot Be Stopped.
So, now I'm going to talk more about some more specific Mystery Hunt experiences. As such, the may be misremembered. At some points, they probably give me more credit than I deserve, because I have a big head. There will be spoilers for the Boston and Kuala Lumpur antepuzzles, the Buenos Aires and Kuala Lumpur metapuzzles, Denial, Decode This, Hey, Look, a Grid!, Xanadu, and the endgame
Random's Biggest Mistake
Team Random (aka SPIES) designed and ran a very good Mystery Hunt. One of their innovations was the introductions of "antepuzzles"; the presentation of each round contained the information needed to get to the next round. Since this information was released as puzzles were opened (not when they were solved), these puzzles could be solved easily before their respective metapuzzles, letting teams into the next round.
Unfortunately, SPIES didn't do a great job of indicating that this is something that would happen. We were told that we'd need to find agents in other locations, but we weren't told how. We assumed that we'd be given the information when we solved the metapuzzle and met with the agent. Then, when we discovered the name "James Bond" hidden in the puzzle headers, we thought he was the agent for Boston (forgetting that we'd already been told it would be Ethan Hunt). But when we tried to meet James Bond with the Boston password, we were told that there was no agent by that name in this location. It wasn't until we'd met with our first agent that we figured out what to do with the extra information. In fact, there was an impromptu team meeting brought about by the fact that we had run out of puzzles to solve.
See, we'd been told that to meet agents, we'd need their locations and a password. It wasn't explained that we'd need to know their locations then find their passwords. So we thought that we might have somehow missed a password to connect us to James Bond. It was only our lack of anything else to do that drove us to give SPIES the information.
The puzzle wasn't hard to spot (it was certainly easier than the hidden metapuzzle of round one of the Matrix), it was just hard to use correctly. ACRONYM appears to have had a similar problem, based on this icon made by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
acroarcs based on the ACRONYM Wall of Quotes.
As biggest mistakes go, not so bad, really. (At least, not for us. Were there teams that were seriously hurt by this?) And when biggest mistakes are overcome early, it doesn't color perceptions as greatly as the better stuff closer to the end.
The Antechamber
And once we knew what to do with them, the antepuzzles were a lot of fun. The antepuzzle of Cambridge just flew by. I remember noticing the ordering mechanism, callingfoggyb over to see it, then watching him derive the answer almost instantly. Foggy worked through the Washington antepuzzle on his own pretty quickly. I think it was Zack who cracked the Moscow antepuzzle, and I was the one who put together the Kuala Lumpur antepuzzle.
One of my more prideful moments of the hunt was hearingthedan explain the antepuzzles to satch. The explanation ended with "and then foggyb or Tablesaw tells us what it means." This was, of course, before Dan was the one to crack the Buenos Aires antepuzzle.
A Place Where Nobody Dared to Go
I solved one puzzle solo in this hunt, Xanadu. It was shortly after I woke up to find that a whole lot of puzzles had been discovered and solved; I sat down with a laptop and saw a printout for this puzzle next to it. Someone had worked on it earlier and made some notes. Specifically, they had tried to think about locations on campus that the descriptions could refer to. I decided that the descriptions referred to actual fictional cities, and I resolved to find them, cursing myself for leaving my Dictionary of Imaginary Places at home. So I buckled down and started searching Wikipedia for likely cities until I found one from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I became obsessed with the idea that all of these cities were from the same book, and desperately looked for synopses (stupidly forgetting that I would be able to search inside the book on Amazon). Eventually I found a website for a hotel where the rooms are based on cities from the book. It only confirmed a few cities, but given what we knew about the metapuzzle, I was able to guess the answer.
The strangest thing about my solving was that the first city, the one that put me unshakably onto the scent of Italo Calvino, turned out to be completely wrong.
The Endgame and Backsolving Bitchery
I really wanted to go in for the endgame and runaround this year. Despite my misgivings about rustiness before the Hunt began, I felt that I was solving strong. I'd done a lot of work on general metapuzzles, and been abel to make some quick leaps of intuition. More importantly, I'd spent a lot of my spare time getting things ready for the endgame. So when the endgame started, I was one of four to run out to meet two already out . . .
Only to discover that that wasn't actually the endgame. When the endgame did come around, a lot more people volunteered to go. I was worried that it'd be too many, and I thought about sitting out. I decided to go anyway, but felt a bit awkward about it. In fact, the first two puzzles we faced during the endgame were hindered by our numbers, and I thought I might've made the wrong choice. At one point, we ran by headquarters, and I noticed my shoe was untied, so I stopped in, gave the remaining teammates an update, and dropped off my coat. I almost decided not to go on, but I did anyway.
And it's a good thing I did, because I was pretty darn useful during the second half of the endgame. I caught up with my team during a somewhat muddled part of the runaround (made more muddled to me because I'd missed the beginning of it). Still, at the end of it, we had a puzzle that wouldn't yield anything other than "red herring." For a while, it didn't seem like there was any way to usefully apply any agent information to the puzzle to get different answers. We stalled while someone from HQ was dispatched to bring us the rest of First Kings from the King James Bible, which wasn't helpful (though we were glad we did it later). Then I realized that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's advice about interrogations (always answer in the form of a question when one's life is in "Jeopardy") would alter the index of the answers. And sure enough, it led us to our next location. (As a side note, that was one of my favorite puzzles of the Hunt. It was simple, but it worked very well under some difficult constraints.) Later, I was able to tell our math and logic people whether Moriarty lies or tells the truth on the first question based on my memory of notes left at headquarters.
But the most thrilling moment of the Hunt came during a backsolving check. At various points throughout the endgame, our contacts would ask us questions to verify that we actually knew the agents whose information we were using. The answer was a solution from the round in which that agent was contacted. So to prove that we knew James Bond, we needed to answer a question with an answer from the Cambridge round. There were two questions, and we only had to answer one of them, but these questions were the ones that were hardest to reach in each round, so each answer represented several other correct answers. We were answering most questions with ease, but we knew that the most difficult round to pass would be Buenos Aires (the home of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), where we several puzzles were unsolved, and one puzzle was still closed to us. And when our contact asked us who Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's favorite rapper was, we had no confirmed answers that fit.
But what we did have was unconfirmed answers. The Buenos Aires metapuzzle had an unusual ordering system. Every answer began with a phonetic letter and ended with a letter A through F or V through Z. For example, "Estevez" from Xanadu began with an "ess" sound and ended with a Z. Ordering the answers by last letter and reading the phonetic letters produced the meta answer "ninety heads" (A reference to the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). When we solved the metapuzzle, we also made some notes on possible backsolves. For example, the second letter in the solution was I, so one of the answers in the round was probably a word that started with an "eye" sound and ended with the letter B, like "iamb." We made some notes about these possible answers, but never called them in, since we didn't know (1) whether they were correct and (2) what puzzles they were connected with.
And as the team started murmuring about what the answer could be, I remembered those notes. And I remembered that the only possible answer that someone (not I) had come up with for a word beginning with "wye" and ending with the letter F was "Wyclef." And Wyclef was a rapper. So I said, "It's 'Wyclef'." It took a little while to be heard and believed, and I think I was too nervous to have explained it if anyone had demanded an explanation. I just kept saying, over and over, "The answer is 'Wyclef'," until everyone stopped talking and our contact accepted that that was our answer.
And it was right.
Later we learned that we hadn't solved the puzzle for the other question either. Moreover, none of the top three teams had solved either of the answer puzzles. And to top it all off, "Wyclef" was the answer to that one puzzle that we hadn't even seen yet.
That, by the way, was the moment when I knew we were going to win the Hunt.
More general thoughts later.
Random's Biggest Mistake
Team Random (aka SPIES) designed and ran a very good Mystery Hunt. One of their innovations was the introductions of "antepuzzles"; the presentation of each round contained the information needed to get to the next round. Since this information was released as puzzles were opened (not when they were solved), these puzzles could be solved easily before their respective metapuzzles, letting teams into the next round.
Unfortunately, SPIES didn't do a great job of indicating that this is something that would happen. We were told that we'd need to find agents in other locations, but we weren't told how. We assumed that we'd be given the information when we solved the metapuzzle and met with the agent. Then, when we discovered the name "James Bond" hidden in the puzzle headers, we thought he was the agent for Boston (forgetting that we'd already been told it would be Ethan Hunt). But when we tried to meet James Bond with the Boston password, we were told that there was no agent by that name in this location. It wasn't until we'd met with our first agent that we figured out what to do with the extra information. In fact, there was an impromptu team meeting brought about by the fact that we had run out of puzzles to solve.
See, we'd been told that to meet agents, we'd need their locations and a password. It wasn't explained that we'd need to know their locations then find their passwords. So we thought that we might have somehow missed a password to connect us to James Bond. It was only our lack of anything else to do that drove us to give SPIES the information.
The puzzle wasn't hard to spot (it was certainly easier than the hidden metapuzzle of round one of the Matrix), it was just hard to use correctly. ACRONYM appears to have had a similar problem, based on this icon made by
acroarcs based on the ACRONYM Wall of Quotes.As biggest mistakes go, not so bad, really. (At least, not for us. Were there teams that were seriously hurt by this?) And when biggest mistakes are overcome early, it doesn't color perceptions as greatly as the better stuff closer to the end.
The Antechamber
And once we knew what to do with them, the antepuzzles were a lot of fun. The antepuzzle of Cambridge just flew by. I remember noticing the ordering mechanism, calling
foggyb over to see it, then watching him derive the answer almost instantly. Foggy worked through the Washington antepuzzle on his own pretty quickly. I think it was Zack who cracked the Moscow antepuzzle, and I was the one who put together the Kuala Lumpur antepuzzle. One of my more prideful moments of the hunt was hearing
thedan explain the antepuzzles to satch. The explanation ended with "and then foggyb or Tablesaw tells us what it means." This was, of course, before Dan was the one to crack the Buenos Aires antepuzzle.A Place Where Nobody Dared to Go
I solved one puzzle solo in this hunt, Xanadu. It was shortly after I woke up to find that a whole lot of puzzles had been discovered and solved; I sat down with a laptop and saw a printout for this puzzle next to it. Someone had worked on it earlier and made some notes. Specifically, they had tried to think about locations on campus that the descriptions could refer to. I decided that the descriptions referred to actual fictional cities, and I resolved to find them, cursing myself for leaving my Dictionary of Imaginary Places at home. So I buckled down and started searching Wikipedia for likely cities until I found one from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I became obsessed with the idea that all of these cities were from the same book, and desperately looked for synopses (stupidly forgetting that I would be able to search inside the book on Amazon). Eventually I found a website for a hotel where the rooms are based on cities from the book. It only confirmed a few cities, but given what we knew about the metapuzzle, I was able to guess the answer.
The strangest thing about my solving was that the first city, the one that put me unshakably onto the scent of Italo Calvino, turned out to be completely wrong.
The Endgame and Backsolving Bitchery
I really wanted to go in for the endgame and runaround this year. Despite my misgivings about rustiness before the Hunt began, I felt that I was solving strong. I'd done a lot of work on general metapuzzles, and been abel to make some quick leaps of intuition. More importantly, I'd spent a lot of my spare time getting things ready for the endgame. So when the endgame started, I was one of four to run out to meet two already out . . .
Only to discover that that wasn't actually the endgame. When the endgame did come around, a lot more people volunteered to go. I was worried that it'd be too many, and I thought about sitting out. I decided to go anyway, but felt a bit awkward about it. In fact, the first two puzzles we faced during the endgame were hindered by our numbers, and I thought I might've made the wrong choice. At one point, we ran by headquarters, and I noticed my shoe was untied, so I stopped in, gave the remaining teammates an update, and dropped off my coat. I almost decided not to go on, but I did anyway.
And it's a good thing I did, because I was pretty darn useful during the second half of the endgame. I caught up with my team during a somewhat muddled part of the runaround (made more muddled to me because I'd missed the beginning of it). Still, at the end of it, we had a puzzle that wouldn't yield anything other than "red herring." For a while, it didn't seem like there was any way to usefully apply any agent information to the puzzle to get different answers. We stalled while someone from HQ was dispatched to bring us the rest of First Kings from the King James Bible, which wasn't helpful (though we were glad we did it later). Then I realized that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's advice about interrogations (always answer in the form of a question when one's life is in "Jeopardy") would alter the index of the answers. And sure enough, it led us to our next location. (As a side note, that was one of my favorite puzzles of the Hunt. It was simple, but it worked very well under some difficult constraints.) Later, I was able to tell our math and logic people whether Moriarty lies or tells the truth on the first question based on my memory of notes left at headquarters.
But the most thrilling moment of the Hunt came during a backsolving check. At various points throughout the endgame, our contacts would ask us questions to verify that we actually knew the agents whose information we were using. The answer was a solution from the round in which that agent was contacted. So to prove that we knew James Bond, we needed to answer a question with an answer from the Cambridge round. There were two questions, and we only had to answer one of them, but these questions were the ones that were hardest to reach in each round, so each answer represented several other correct answers. We were answering most questions with ease, but we knew that the most difficult round to pass would be Buenos Aires (the home of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), where we several puzzles were unsolved, and one puzzle was still closed to us. And when our contact asked us who Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's favorite rapper was, we had no confirmed answers that fit.
But what we did have was unconfirmed answers. The Buenos Aires metapuzzle had an unusual ordering system. Every answer began with a phonetic letter and ended with a letter A through F or V through Z. For example, "Estevez" from Xanadu began with an "ess" sound and ended with a Z. Ordering the answers by last letter and reading the phonetic letters produced the meta answer "ninety heads" (A reference to the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). When we solved the metapuzzle, we also made some notes on possible backsolves. For example, the second letter in the solution was I, so one of the answers in the round was probably a word that started with an "eye" sound and ended with the letter B, like "iamb." We made some notes about these possible answers, but never called them in, since we didn't know (1) whether they were correct and (2) what puzzles they were connected with.
And as the team started murmuring about what the answer could be, I remembered those notes. And I remembered that the only possible answer that someone (not I) had come up with for a word beginning with "wye" and ending with the letter F was "Wyclef." And Wyclef was a rapper. So I said, "It's 'Wyclef'." It took a little while to be heard and believed, and I think I was too nervous to have explained it if anyone had demanded an explanation. I just kept saying, over and over, "The answer is 'Wyclef'," until everyone stopped talking and our contact accepted that that was our answer.
And it was right.
Later we learned that we hadn't solved the puzzle for the other question either. Moreover, none of the top three teams had solved either of the answer puzzles. And to top it all off, "Wyclef" was the answer to that one puzzle that we hadn't even seen yet.
That, by the way, was the moment when I knew we were going to win the Hunt.
More general thoughts later.