Happy 2014, everyone! Yes, it's almost the end of January, but, as I've alluded to, I'm not posting much these days. It's time, though for my recap of the MIT Mystery Hunt, which rebounded from a difficult 2013 with a very successful event put on by Team [entire text of Atlas Shrugged]. I enjoyed myself thoroughly, and Team Luck finished in what many consider "best place," i.e. second, the highest team that doesn't have to design next year's Hunt. Congratulations to Random, assuming they actually wanted to do it! [More after the jump.]
But back to the beginning. On Friday morning, teams packed into the Kresge Auditorium for kick-off, a dry Randian lecture. Surely this couldn't be the theme of the Hunt, could it? No, of course not. Before too long, the Cheshire Cat showed up, asking solvers to track down the creatures that had slipped into MIT from Wonderland. At the end, the organizing team's new name was revealed: Alice Shrugged. Perfect. How on Earth had a Wonderland theme not been done before now? For whatever reason, it hadn't, and we were enjoying it now.
After solving three small metapuzzles (round-finishing puzzles that use the other answers) to trap the creatures, we went on a runaround to slay the Jabberwock, the fearsome beast terrorizing Wonderland. But we'd soon learn that he wasn't the real enemy. Who was? Have you guessed yet? Yes, Alice herself! After hearing this sudden twist, we entered the Wonderland stages. Three rounds involved helping out other characters in Wonderland; doing so unlocked three more rounds, each of which would reveal one of Alice's weaknesses. Armed with all this information, we went on the final runaround, solving three more "live" puzzles to obtain the items we'd need to exploit Alice's flaws. Placing these items strategically in a hedge maze (set up on the squares of Lobby 7) allowed us to ship Alice out of Wonderland. A meeting with the White Rabbit ended our Hunt, though I'm told that the winning team had to go around closing all the holes, finding the Rabbit's watch (the coin, the Hunt's MacGuffin) in the last one.
No explanation can really do it justice, so I kept it brief. I urge you to go to the beginning and peruse all the clever puzzles and plot. Here are the puzzles I got to see in my team's forty hours of solving, sorted by rounds, as there's no way I can remember the order in which I did stuff. I'll try to keep things spoiler-free; if you'd like to see the answer, just click Solution at the top right of each page.
Build Your Own Sudoku -- One of the first puzzles of the Hunt, and I was eager to attack it, as were several teammates. We adjourned to the breakout room and insights came from all corners as we knocked it out. A satisfying start.
Opposites Are Not Downbeats -- Another puzzle that has little chance against a group of solvers in a Google doc. We found the last clue to be the hardest part.
I Came Across a Japanese Rose Garden -- Another one that got ganged up on. I screwed us up by making a bad assumption that threw off some data, but it wasn't too bad.
Ring Around the Music -- I didn't actually work on this, as such; I'd just like to note how pissed off I was that my backsolve (i.e. deduction of the answer from metapuzzle information) of IMPLAUSIBILITY was wrong. I know I wasn't alone in this.
Local Shorts -- To my knowledge, I was the first to look at this puzzle and latched onto the concept pretty quickly; the eighth one down on the left was a dead giveaway. Others jumped in to help with the skyline identification and the subsequent ordering.
Across the Hall -- This is a type experienced Hunters have seen before, and it too was susceptible to a group attack in a spreadsheet. I wasn't around for the less familiar second stage that finished the puzzle.
The Most Dangerous Night -- Largely flailed at this one. Even after getting the idea, I found the identification very difficult.
The Tea Party metapuzzle -- I solved a meta I solved a meta I solved a meta oh holy crap I solved a meta!! This was my sixth Mystery Hunt as a solver, and I'd never before had the thrill of being the one to crack the ultimate puzzle of a round. At an idle moment, when there was nothing else I really felt like working on, I decided to noodle on this. Others had already figured out how the answers were grouped, so all the data (minus a couple of unfound answers) was there for me. After a few moments of reading and learning, I had an idea for how it might fit together, and I moved in front of our answer board to try it. Three good-looking letters in, my pulse began to race. Was this actually going to work? I shakily penciled in the other letters I could get, and the answer was clear. I silently bounded back to my computer and slammed in the answer, then nervously paced for a good five minutes while I waited for the confirming call. When it came, I couldn't resist letting out my loudest yell of triumph in the hallway. Sorry, startled teams. Looking back over it now, the funny thing is that I contributed almost nothing to solving the base puzzles in this round, presumably because I was focused elsewhere.
Now, a big reason this meta remained for me to solve was that, unbeknownst to me, a red herring had entrapped several members of my team, as it did to other teams. This puzzle has thus drawn some criticism. As you might guess, I'm not really buying it. I have a hard time believing that a puzzle is broken when a guy who's never solved a Mystery Hunt meta before has one idea and gets it in fifteen minutes, and I'm not too keen on the idea that I got lucky. Plenty of puzzles have promising false paths; it's impossible to eliminate them all without making the puzzles laughably easy.
Cross-Pollination -- My first big stressor of the Hunt. I was part of the crossword solving, naturally, and they went pretty fast once we got the twist. The folding, though... mercy. Trying to do it on our smallish, lead-smeared grids was a problem; we eventually printed larger, clean versions of the grids we needed. And the folding seemed a bit inscrutable at times to my clumsy hands. Also, at one point, I made one flower out of the wrong grid; fortunately, I took note of which letters had come up and took the corresponding positions in the correct puzzle. In the end, I folded two flowers, and this plus teammates' efforts was enough to get us there.
Falling Into Place -- I got a lot of frustration out of this before concluding that others were doing it better and closing the window. I jumped back in later to help put together the grid.
Round Tripper -- I mostly gathered data on this one; failure to understand the meaning of the two-digit numbers was a big duh moment for me.
Another Puzzle with the Answer SULLIVAN -- I love cryptic clues, but was able to get only a few of the wordplay-only ones here.
Kroskuro -- I was in a decently sized group for this one, and I'm very proud of us for finishing the entire grid without using any of the Kakuro information. Unfortunately, this was necessary to get the final answer, and I adjourned for a few hours of sleep before it was achieved.
Walk Across Some Dungeons -- I took a brief stab at the team's latest level in this one, getting stymied by server lag. Realizing that others had a better grasp on the game, I dropped out to ease the load on the server at least a little.
Hole Wizard -- Another one in which I just helped out with data, recording the diameters of the holes in our spreadsheet as a teammate with the recommended software called them out. I am told this was useful, so hooray.
Stalk Us Maybe -- The puzzle that took the most time off of my life. Finding the hometown data was extremely difficult and prone to inaccuracy, to the point where I couldn't make sense of the end of the message. The team took several abortive looks for the puzzle's answer, finally finding it long after I had dropped out for the sake of my sanity.
Marking Territory -- Unfortunately, while this Shikaku variant looked attractive at first, it was similarly maddening. It defeated just about everyone who looked at it. At one point, I thought a teammate had one solution, but when I copied it over, I noticed that it violated one rule in one location, and it resisted all efforts to make small changes to fix it. I scribbled in large letters a very bad word on the grid I was marking, then went for a walk.
Modern Cubism Artist -- A colleague had already had the first insight necessary, and I helped drive it home from there. I collected the words as my teammates called them out and filled the criss-cross in short order.
Sledgehammered -- The puzzle for which I most got to flex my cruciverbal muscle. Teammates had already deciphered most of the clues, so it turned into a good solve.
The Great Collapse -- I had the first key breakthrough on this, but splintered off while teammates finished it. Kinda wish I'd stayed with it; this one was very cool.
A Curious Incidence -- I did pretty much nothing on this aside from recording which letters of the alphabet looked the same when reflected as in the title. It was an idle contribution, but apparently it came in handy.
Top Shelf -- I identified some of the whiskies, but hadn't had either of the insights that would have been necessary to get the final message. We were wrapping up the final meta at this point, so it got abandoned.
Cards Against Wonderland -- I took part in this event early Saturday morning, which called for one or two teammates who weren't easily offended. We played this special version of Cards Against Humanity that Alice Shrugged had printed up courtesy of a member who happened to be a co-creator of the game. Outstanding production value, but I wish they had asked for people with ties to MIT to attend; there were a lot of in-jokes that went over my head and diminished my enjoyment somewhat. There was no real puzzle to be had here; after playing for an hour, we received the answer.
Nurikabe and chess -- This was our third puzzle of the runaround, the last one before we'd go to the hedge maze to banish Alice from Wonderland. It involved solving three Nurikabe puzzles, assembling the resulting patterns out of wooden tiles with chess pieces (some standard, some unorthodox) glued to them, then placing an additional Wonderland-themed unorthodox piece on each board to guarantee mate. After contributing precisely zero to our titanic struggles on the first two runaround puzzles, I was pleased to take charge at the beginning here and solve two of the Nurikabes.
Whew! Our team finished at 4:30 AM Sunday, so we went for about forty hours. I think that's a perfect length; after all of it, I still had time to enjoy most of Sunday and Monday with my friends outside of the heated Hunt environment. I wish the wrap-up had been just a little bit earlier, since I had very little time after it before having to head to the airport. But that's a minor quibble; it was undoubtedly a very successful weekend. My heartiest thanks to Atlas/Alice Shrugged for an outstanding Hunt filled with cleverness and, clearly, rigorous playtesting. It was particularly heartening given that the organizing team had many members in common with the group that put on the notorious Time Bandits event of 2004. Just goes to show what some experience can do. Random has a difficult act to follow.
I'd like to post some of my favorite tweets from this year's Mystery Hunt, but since Twitter's search function is absolutely abysmal, perhaps I'll learn to use Storify and save that for a later entry. For now, I hope everyone had a great time!