tablesaw | Individual Puzzles at the Hunt. (Reply)

The actual puzzles for the Hunt aren't going to be up until this weekend, so I'll start on them now. I'm cutting the rest of this post because it will have spoilers for many Hunt puzzles. If you're interested in getting a chance to look at or solve them before you read the spoilers, you should probably wait until the Hunt is made publicly available. I'll make an announcement and relink to this post when that happens.

I think I'm going to talk about metas and structure separately. First, here are the puzzles I worked on:

Little Rascals

I predicted this puzzle back in June, though the format was different. This was the first puzzle I worked on. Dan and I sat down with this and were the first people in the Hunt to solve it. Once we realized that all of the answers were on I Can Has Cheezburger, things went pretty fast. And after a while, we just started looking at lolcats looking for the right enumerations. Which was fun.

Mystery Rallye

Most of my time on Monday was spent on this puzzle. After solving Little Rascals, I started paging through the puzzles we had, and I saw that one of them was a rallye. I'd learned about rallyes from

tinhorn2, who had brought a paper rallye to an LA puzzle party. And since I knew Tinhorn was on Palindrome, I figured this was a good thing for me to be a part of.

I was certainly an asset. I already knew about some of the traps and gimmicks that were used in the rallye, including misplaced instructions and misspelled words. I also knew that rallyes are designed to reset drivers to the same position, so that sometimes errors could be fixed without disrupting the entire course. But the puzzle was still very, very hard. It took a while for us to go through it once. Then it took a while for me to go through it alone a second time. And it was only then that I really started to reason my way through some of the more devious traps.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with this puzzle was that it was faster to backsolve than frontsolve.

portnoyslp spent hours and hours working on The World's Tallest Cryptic, and I would've been perfectly happy to be the guy in the corner spending hours and hours on this puzzle, but when the meta came down, the time for this puzzle was over.

Knots and Crosswords

Apparently this puzzle was too bizarrely hard. Spent some time looking at it with

brief_life, but never got anything good from it.

Remember This?

Spent a while looking for an extraction method for this, but never found it.

Spectral Analysis

ojouchan did the first work on this, making a few notes and guesses and recording the colors, but I ended up doing a bunch of this work while she did either the skit or the house of cards. For the most part, I solved it by booting up iTunes and listening to lots and lots of clips. The first half of the clips were pretty easy to nail, but the second half were harder, featuring more instrumentals and nondescript vocalists. And once we pulled out the index we discovered that the first half was not as important as the second half and the puzzle stalled.

When we got the enumerations, Ojou and I went back to work. We cleared out some wrong guesses and added a few new ones until I could guess the answer phrase. Now that I look closer, I think the phrase I pulled out was wrong. I'd thought it was "He's playing a new Les Paul," but it looks like I was missing a letter. Regardless, You Tube gave us an answer that fit our meta structure, so I called it in.

I think that, in general, the enumerations made this a much better puzzle. Some of the enumerations were giveaways, but not moreso than the clip for those puzzles. This year, we found that a lot of the image and music indentifications led us into a brick wall pretty quickly; I think that the creators and editors were did too much to make these puzzles "hard." Once you get stuck on a image or music ID, there's not a whole lot you can do other than keep showing it to people hoping somebody knows something. And with covers of "Over the Rainbow," it's harder to ID many of the songs. So go, go enumerations.

Alien Species

wesleyjenn and others had worked on this earlier identifying almost all of the Star Trek species, but this puzzle was just sitting waiting for an answer, so I picked it up.

After putting a few of the answers into Notepad (as I am wont to do), I remembered that somebody had joked about always reading down the diagonal (which had been used in at least two metas at that point) and I did the same. Although the result looked like gibberish, I wasn't put off, because it was a Star Trek puzzle. I plugged the answer into Memory Alpha and found that the diagonals were giving the names of obscure Star Trek characters. So I filled in some holes, got the characters species, and read across the diagonal again.

And got "POULARD".

It was kind of clued in the flavortext ("a little bird"), but it's an ugly answer that really didn't fit the rest of the puzzle. And the fact that the last step didn't lead to another Star Trek character or species was disappointing too. So the answer was a let down after I'd gotten so excited about approaching the end.

Manual Transmission

Too much flavor. There's a four paragraph story in front of this puzzle that is nothing but a red herring.

The hint didn't help much either. The hint was "answers can be both numbers and words," but that was ambiguous. The first three answers we got led to words then numbers, so we didn't realize that two pictures led to words then words, and the other two led to words then numbers. The picture of the base wasn't the best use either because several baseball experts confirmed that the base in the picture was first base (or base 1). Also, when we finally saw the clue to look at the newspaper clipping, instead of taking the word "written" like we were meant to, we used it to discover the date of the newspaper.

So we had 130 091807 202 1 and four paragraphs of flavor. Guess where we spent the next few hours looking? For what was clearly meant to be an easier puzzle, this one had far too many flaws to be simple.

Magnetic Poetry

Stared at this one for a little while, and was just about to research 493 when I decided I was bored and tired. Now I feel stupid.

The Bottom Line

Sometimes a small mistake can be multiplied. I asked the people who had worked on this before me if they'd gone into a subway car; they had, but they hadn't found the right information. Eventually someone else went underground and found out that the answers were there, but it wasn't me.

Character Witness

Now this is a flawed puzzle that seems to match the high points and the low points of the Hunt. According to

devjoe, we were the only people to solve this puzzle, and we did it late Sunday. This puzzle was almost entirely complete (we were missing the ferret) for a very, very, very long time. And unlike other similar puzzles, it stayed one we wanted to solve until close to the end.

So there were two big issues with this puzzle, both of which were addressed in hints. First, everyone was on a soccer team despite the aha having nothing to do with soccer. This put everyone on the wrong track for a good while.

Second, the extraction method was far too bizarre to be workable. When hints were opened to us, we asked for a hint on the puzzle, and instead of a nudge to the aha, we got an explanation of the extraction which was something like this: "The numbers have to be added to or subtracted from a set of two digit years, but it is a list of years different from the list of years that we already had (when the characters were first introduced)." Come again? We had to use this process later, and it never seemed elegant or reasonable.

But on the other hand, there was initially a pretty good time identifying the characters in the puzzle (although I think Oscar Wildcat was only spotted because someone remebered a link from

toonheadnpl's journal). And the aha was very good and very well clued. On Saturday, I'd sat down trying to think about "reproduction," but I couldn't think of anything that could include the very recent Ratatouille and the very obscure Queer Duck. It wasn't until Sunday, when I idly typed "reproduction" into Google, that I saw "sexual reproduction" and asked, "Have all of these animals been cloned?" I looked over and saw Greg and I think maybe Evan, and we all new the answer was yes.

And then, just as we were in the middle of getting the dates of cloning, Thedan came in from a meeting with

fuldu to tell us that the Black Book metas were now obsolete.

Still, I'm very surprised that we were the only team to solve this one. With the sports distraction and the extraction confusion taken out of the equation with hints, the aha was reasonable, given "reproduction" in the flavor and the fact that the image was reproduced identically. I wonder if any team that wasn't privy to hinting got the aha but couldn't get the extraction.

Big Musical Number

Like Spectral Analysis, except we never got enumerations. At a certain point, nobody on the team could id any more songs, and there was no way to pull any other information out of what we had. So we worked around it.

Frontal Lobotomy

I helped id the Absolut ads, but couldn't make anything out of it. Even when our team got hints we couldn't get them to work right.

Campsite

Almost everything had been ided when I got to this one. My attention was directed to it because our team had decided to ask for a hint on it, but we were afraid that we wouldn't know what to say to the hinters. So Thedan's decision was to put it late in the hint queue, and have a bunch of people work on it so that we had something to say when we got called.

Shortly after that, I thought that "stealing a boat" looked familiar. It turns out that Googleing for "girl 'steal a boat'" gets you to Gilmore Girls pretty fast, and the puzzle went downhill from there. I wasn't too thrilled about using the number of lines of puzzle dialogue as an index, but it didn't take too long to find it. In fact, we were done before anyone managed to call us with a hint.

Although stealing a boat waspretty dead-on, I still think that the Gilmore Girls should have been clued better. There was no way to divine the connection from the IDed references, and the L/R thing for Lorelai and Rory was to well camouflaged to be anything more than a confirmation. I wonder if this puzzle was originally meant to have a different title (which had to be changed for metapuzzle reasons.)

Confession

My favorite puzzle in the Hunt. When it was released, I shuffled it over to Ojou, but stayed with it. Pretty much everyone on the team who was around helped with ids for the characters, and then we sat around trying to get the aha. The crack for this one was extremely well-clued and brilliantly straightforward, though. We tossed out a bunch of theories, all of which seemed to be shot down whenever we tried to apply them to Thnikkaman. So I looked up Thnikkaman and saw, "The Thnikkaman is the alter ego of Bubs, wearing a pair of flashy sunglasses and a piece of paper taped to his chest with 'tH' written on it." So I asked, "Do all of these guys have things on their chest?" and of course we all realized they did. Because it was their confession, see? They had to get something off their chest. Brilliant.

Special Ops

Like everyone else, I stared at this one. I thought of a few things, but couldn't make image manipulators work the way I wanted them to. No idea how it works.

Son of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos

I liked this puzzle, but I came into it too late to do anything about it. I was working with some people who had gotten a lot done on vocabulary, and I was starting to see a bit more how the grammar worked. I was starting to reason out how verbs worked when the final metas fell and we were suddenly going into endgame. I wish I'd gotten started on this one sooner, because for what it was, it was pretty straightforward.

Talk to Me

And now comes the rage.

I started talking about this puzzle on Thedan's post. I spent a lot of time on this one getting nowhere. Or rather, I assumed I was getting nowhere but in fact, there was nowhere else to go.

Talk to Me was nineteen rows of five pictures. The first column was bordered with a different column and set apart. Also, every picture in the first column was connected to an audio file.

I picked this puzzle up after

ennirol and

lunchboy abandoned it. The first thing I saw was Ennirol's notations on the sound files. After searching for information on one of them, I found a reference to Navajo Code Talkers, which seemed capital-I Interesting. I called Ennirol over to help and we quickly nailed down the Navajo words based on her general transcription and the Navajo Code Talkers' Dictionary. We also soon noticed that we could connect the translated Navajo word to the picture in the first column and to one of the pictures in the second column. For example, the first row had a picture of candy, the navajo word for "apple" and one of the pictures was of Jacks. Candy apple, apple jacks.

Up to this point, lots of fun. But where do we go from here?
Well, we try indexing the position of the picture into the first column, the Navajo word, the Navajo translation, and the final picture. Nothing. We try indexing into the syllable of the Navajo word. Nothing. We try indexing the number of syllables in the Navajo word into the final word. Nothing. We try making cimilar word chains between rows or between the other pictures in the rows. Nothing.

Looking at the puzzle more closely, I realize that the puzzle does not need the Navajo pronunciations at all. Theoretically, a person could find the connections between the first picture and the last picture without any intervening step. It'd be difficult, but this is the Mystery Hunt, I've seen worse. So the extraction method logicaly has to make some use out of Navajo. And this makes sense, because in the Navajo Code, there are several Navajo words that translate to letters like a standard phonetic alphabet. I look for some way to extract these Navajo Phonetic Alphabet words out of the puzzle. Nothing.

After a while, I give up. I put everything I have into a file and send it to the list. I try to get other people to look at the puzzle because I want it solved.

I've spent time on this puzzle. I've come up with fabulous directions that it could go, but none of them fit. Surely, I think, the answer must be equally fantastic, if not moreso.

But no.

Eventually, we backsolve the puzzle. We don't understand the answer.

After we've found the coin, we are told that the next step was to take the second letter of the final words of the word chain.

Then the rage.

I've tried not to talk about it because of the rage.

Now that I've calmed down and thought about it more, I think the rage stems from the extraction being two things: unobvious and uninteresting. That doesn't sound like much, but for this puzzle, it's a lot.

See, when I criticized Alien Species, it's mainly because that extraction was uninteresting. It's slightly unobvious too; reading the diagonal is fairly common, but it usually gets some form of hinting. But in Alien Species, the fact that it was uninterest and not obviously obvious was okay because when you looked at the puzzle, there really wasn't anything else to do. You might try to create an index based on which Trek series the picture of the species came from, but even that seems like a stretch. The road ran out, so you looked around where you were and found something uninteresting.

In Talk to Me, as I've said, it seemed like there were so many more places to go and so many different things to do. When there's all of that other more interesting information that's part of the puzzle, it barely makes sense to look for something uninteresting but obvious, like an acrostic. To expect solvers to abandon all of that interesting stuff to start looking for places where maybe the letters might line up correctly is absurd and insulting.

And it leaves the entire Navajo aspect untouched. Listening to the Navajo files is not necessary to solve the puzzle as designed. And yet the title and the flavor text both direct your attention to the Navajo. What's more, it squanders Navajo Code Talkers as an idea for a puzzle.

So, rage.

I'll be writing more, but I need a break first. The process of solving a hunt, then running a hunt, then solving a hunt again, and then getting ready to write and run another hunt has gotten me thinking about these puzzles differently, and I feel like I need to say more than what was cool and what wasn't.

Individual Puzzles at the Hunt.