Mystery Hunt thoughts
Thoughts on this year's Mystery Hunt from a member of Codex Magliabechiano.
Thought #1: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
That's clearly the most important thing to say. I had a fabulous time. Even though I was hunting remotely! Last year was bad: it was my first year solving remotely, and internet went down in my building, so I was solving with very flaky pirated wireless, and the whole thing was just intensely frustrating.
So this year, in constrast, I just don't have internet at home period. (We're getting it soon, but not soon enough.) But I knew that in advance. And I now have 24 hour access to my office at the university. Which is actually a fantastic place to solve because there's a printer, and all the office supplies I could want, and a kitchen to store food and make tea, and so on. So I had a good set-up. And Codex did fabulously with keeping in touch with remote solvers. Of course we're generally good about it, but I'm told this year was exceptionally good in terms of keeping in touch over the chat rooms and such. Certainly, I felt very connected. We had a webcam in one room so I could spy on people, and the coordinator on duty was always in the main chatroom, and people were very friendly about passing along information about the story behind the hunt and all that good stuff.
Thoughts #2 - n:
I also felt like I myself solved better than in any previous hunt. Of course a highlight for me was solving the Virtual Sectors meta. (I should also point out that Zazutalors deserves lots of credit for that. He and I had been discussing and basically agreed 20 hours earlier that that was how the puzzle should work. But somehow--probably through some combination of not having enough answers and making stupid mistakes--it just didn't work at the time.) Although it took 24 hours to solve (yes, seriously, it was 24 hours from when I first looked at it to when I solved it, though I did sleep and work on other things in between), I think it was a very well written puzzle. As I noted, we knew how we wanted to solve it pretty early on. If it took us forever to implement that successfully, it's at least mostly our fault. And when we did find the answer, it was immensly satisfying. Again, not just because it had taken so long, but also because the whole vowels theme worked so well: with the round title, the solution mechanism, and the answer itself.
Funny story: I had misspelled SEQUOIAS as SEQUIOAS in the spreadsheet that I was working off of. So I originally thought that the second part of the answer was VOWEL BUY O. So we actually called in and asked to buy an O specifically. I gather that HQ was a bit confused but accepted it. Once we realized the mistake, we came up with some other post hoc justifications for buying an O, such as:
-it's the only vowel missing from SUPERMANS ADVERSARIAL IMP
-it's the first and last vowel in CODEX MAGLIABECHIANO (Alternately, we should be buying a U since that's the only vowel our name *doesn't* contain.)
- O RLY?
Anyway, they told us they would give us an O. I think the idea was that the wheel was O-shaped. So I guess we got lucky. =)
The other two metas that I did substantial amounts of work on were Hiigara and Combat Sector. I don't have too much to say about Hiigara: it worked, it was thematic, yay. As for Combat Sector, it wasn't broken, but the final step could probably have used a bit more clueing. It's also possible that I was just too tired. We knew exactly what was going on with the dice. We somehow missed the errata when it first came out, so we were working with wrong letters for a while. And then... we may still have been even after we supposedly fixed it? The whole thing was kind of confusing in part because I think basically just one person figured out how the dice lined up. The rest of us understood in theory how it worked, but hadn't taken the time to check her work. And there were some questions about what order the numbers were in on these dice (whether they were standard d8s, in particular, and whether the numbers on opposite sides added up to a constant--I assume this is what HQ also had to fix at the last minute?) and everything was complicated by the fact that none of the people primarily working on this were actually on site, so we didn't have access to the physical dice... Anyway, lots of confusion, and in the end, I'm not sure whether the polyominoes I was working with the whole time were correct or not.
As for the next step of putting them together, I'm a bit disappointed to hear that the shape they formed was just a random one. Some people spent a long while trying to tile the inner part of the Zyzzlvania board. Personally, I was trying to play Tetris. Later I was just trying to form nice shapes with useful words in them, which I guess was in fact correct, but it didn't work for me. If my polyominoes had the wrong letters on them, then that's my fault and not the puzzle's. If mine were correct and I just couldn't get it to work, then I'm dissatisfied that the final shape they formed wasn't clued somehow.
Question: did the order in which the rewards were displayed on the website matter?
brokenwndw described this hunt as having easy puzzles and hard metas. I don't entirely agree that the puzzles were easy (and in fact I don't think he entirely meant it either), but it's sure true about the hard metas! I remember one of the things that really impressed me when I first started mystery hunting was how experienced hunters would solve metas with so few answers. But not in this hunt! By the time we solved a meta, we normally had something like all but one of the answers. And it seems that to a large extent that was part of their design. In a meta like Virtual Sectors, for example, where the solution already involves filling in a lot of missing letters, having extra missing letters from unsolved puzzles is just deadly.
Moving on from the metas, two puzzles stick out in my mind as being totally awesome. The first is Sorry, Wrong Number, which I was basically guaranteed to love because I love any puzzle that involves identifying showtunes. And the only thing better than simply identifying showtunes is identifying showtunes that are presented in unusual ways! I loved mindspillage's description of this puzzle as a musical Stoop task. In addition to enjoying the way identification worked, I was really happy with answer extraction: music puzzles can be so fun, but it's sad when after an awesome musical puzzle, answer extraction ends up just being text-based (take the first letter of the artist blah blah blah...). In this case, answer extraction was very nicely built into the musical aspect of the puzzle.
My other favorite puzzle in the hunt was On Beyond Zyzzlvania. It was fun and silly and gleefully thematic, and it gave me the excuse to say things like "we also have fuddle thnad floob" in all seriousness. It was a very friendly puzzle to solve: if you thought something fit, it almost certainly did. (Like a logic puzzle without the annoying need to be 100% sure about everything.) Rather than being about tricking or stumping you, it just made you look at words and notice fun things about them (these all contain items of clothing!), with just enough little surprises (rhyming matters!) to keep it interesting.
Another puzzle that deserves mention is (that one with the musical cryptic whose name I don't remember). I didn't work very much on it, but again, musical identifications *plus* a cryptic? Awesome! How could you not love it? (Answer: In fact, you couldn't not love it. There were *so* many people trying to work on this puzzle at once that it was basically solved before I could do more than identify a song or two. The only thing that kept me away from this puzzle was its overwhelming popularity.)
So in summary, as you can probably tell, I'm exceptionally pleased with this hunt. The Bombers have a great sense of puzzle design. There's still a puzzle or two that I don't know how to solve (I mean, in addition to all the puzzles I never even looked at), but so far everything seems really solid and well-constructed. All the puzzles made sense, the metas were varied and original, the theme was hilarious. It ran a bit long, but not so much that it was problematic, in my opinion.
(With regards to its length, I think I would have managed that better if I were on site: I didn't sleep much on Saturday night because I was worried that the hunt would end while I was asleep. Clearly I should have waited another day before worrying about that! If I were on site, I would have been able to sleep more on Saturday night, knowing that someone would wake me up if we were actually approaching endgame. And a few extra hours of sleep on Saturday night would have made a huge difference by late Sunday evening.)
I will do everything in my power to be onsite next year. I miss you, Codex! (Have I mentioned how ridiculously fun Codex is to solve with? Because seriously, they're all awesome!)
Thought #n+1: I seriously want to play Escape from Zyzzlvania. I hear that some of my teammates did right after the hunt ended. They say it's a great game for 4am but wouldn't necessarily recommend it for any other time. So, who's up for a 4am game of Escape from Zyzzlvania next time I'm in Boston?
Thought #1: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
That's clearly the most important thing to say. I had a fabulous time. Even though I was hunting remotely! Last year was bad: it was my first year solving remotely, and internet went down in my building, so I was solving with very flaky pirated wireless, and the whole thing was just intensely frustrating.
So this year, in constrast, I just don't have internet at home period. (We're getting it soon, but not soon enough.) But I knew that in advance. And I now have 24 hour access to my office at the university. Which is actually a fantastic place to solve because there's a printer, and all the office supplies I could want, and a kitchen to store food and make tea, and so on. So I had a good set-up. And Codex did fabulously with keeping in touch with remote solvers. Of course we're generally good about it, but I'm told this year was exceptionally good in terms of keeping in touch over the chat rooms and such. Certainly, I felt very connected. We had a webcam in one room so I could spy on people, and the coordinator on duty was always in the main chatroom, and people were very friendly about passing along information about the story behind the hunt and all that good stuff.
Thoughts #2 - n:
I also felt like I myself solved better than in any previous hunt. Of course a highlight for me was solving the Virtual Sectors meta. (I should also point out that Zazutalors deserves lots of credit for that. He and I had been discussing and basically agreed 20 hours earlier that that was how the puzzle should work. But somehow--probably through some combination of not having enough answers and making stupid mistakes--it just didn't work at the time.) Although it took 24 hours to solve (yes, seriously, it was 24 hours from when I first looked at it to when I solved it, though I did sleep and work on other things in between), I think it was a very well written puzzle. As I noted, we knew how we wanted to solve it pretty early on. If it took us forever to implement that successfully, it's at least mostly our fault. And when we did find the answer, it was immensly satisfying. Again, not just because it had taken so long, but also because the whole vowels theme worked so well: with the round title, the solution mechanism, and the answer itself.
Funny story: I had misspelled SEQUOIAS as SEQUIOAS in the spreadsheet that I was working off of. So I originally thought that the second part of the answer was VOWEL BUY O. So we actually called in and asked to buy an O specifically. I gather that HQ was a bit confused but accepted it. Once we realized the mistake, we came up with some other post hoc justifications for buying an O, such as:
-it's the only vowel missing from SUPERMANS ADVERSARIAL IMP
-it's the first and last vowel in CODEX MAGLIABECHIANO (Alternately, we should be buying a U since that's the only vowel our name *doesn't* contain.)
- O RLY?
Anyway, they told us they would give us an O. I think the idea was that the wheel was O-shaped. So I guess we got lucky. =)
The other two metas that I did substantial amounts of work on were Hiigara and Combat Sector. I don't have too much to say about Hiigara: it worked, it was thematic, yay. As for Combat Sector, it wasn't broken, but the final step could probably have used a bit more clueing. It's also possible that I was just too tired. We knew exactly what was going on with the dice. We somehow missed the errata when it first came out, so we were working with wrong letters for a while. And then... we may still have been even after we supposedly fixed it? The whole thing was kind of confusing in part because I think basically just one person figured out how the dice lined up. The rest of us understood in theory how it worked, but hadn't taken the time to check her work. And there were some questions about what order the numbers were in on these dice (whether they were standard d8s, in particular, and whether the numbers on opposite sides added up to a constant--I assume this is what HQ also had to fix at the last minute?) and everything was complicated by the fact that none of the people primarily working on this were actually on site, so we didn't have access to the physical dice... Anyway, lots of confusion, and in the end, I'm not sure whether the polyominoes I was working with the whole time were correct or not.
As for the next step of putting them together, I'm a bit disappointed to hear that the shape they formed was just a random one. Some people spent a long while trying to tile the inner part of the Zyzzlvania board. Personally, I was trying to play Tetris. Later I was just trying to form nice shapes with useful words in them, which I guess was in fact correct, but it didn't work for me. If my polyominoes had the wrong letters on them, then that's my fault and not the puzzle's. If mine were correct and I just couldn't get it to work, then I'm dissatisfied that the final shape they formed wasn't clued somehow.
Question: did the order in which the rewards were displayed on the website matter?
brokenwndw described this hunt as having easy puzzles and hard metas. I don't entirely agree that the puzzles were easy (and in fact I don't think he entirely meant it either), but it's sure true about the hard metas! I remember one of the things that really impressed me when I first started mystery hunting was how experienced hunters would solve metas with so few answers. But not in this hunt! By the time we solved a meta, we normally had something like all but one of the answers. And it seems that to a large extent that was part of their design. In a meta like Virtual Sectors, for example, where the solution already involves filling in a lot of missing letters, having extra missing letters from unsolved puzzles is just deadly.
Moving on from the metas, two puzzles stick out in my mind as being totally awesome. The first is Sorry, Wrong Number, which I was basically guaranteed to love because I love any puzzle that involves identifying showtunes. And the only thing better than simply identifying showtunes is identifying showtunes that are presented in unusual ways! I loved mindspillage's description of this puzzle as a musical Stoop task. In addition to enjoying the way identification worked, I was really happy with answer extraction: music puzzles can be so fun, but it's sad when after an awesome musical puzzle, answer extraction ends up just being text-based (take the first letter of the artist blah blah blah...). In this case, answer extraction was very nicely built into the musical aspect of the puzzle.
My other favorite puzzle in the hunt was On Beyond Zyzzlvania. It was fun and silly and gleefully thematic, and it gave me the excuse to say things like "we also have fuddle thnad floob" in all seriousness. It was a very friendly puzzle to solve: if you thought something fit, it almost certainly did. (Like a logic puzzle without the annoying need to be 100% sure about everything.) Rather than being about tricking or stumping you, it just made you look at words and notice fun things about them (these all contain items of clothing!), with just enough little surprises (rhyming matters!) to keep it interesting.
Another puzzle that deserves mention is (that one with the musical cryptic whose name I don't remember). I didn't work very much on it, but again, musical identifications *plus* a cryptic? Awesome! How could you not love it? (Answer: In fact, you couldn't not love it. There were *so* many people trying to work on this puzzle at once that it was basically solved before I could do more than identify a song or two. The only thing that kept me away from this puzzle was its overwhelming popularity.)
So in summary, as you can probably tell, I'm exceptionally pleased with this hunt. The Bombers have a great sense of puzzle design. There's still a puzzle or two that I don't know how to solve (I mean, in addition to all the puzzles I never even looked at), but so far everything seems really solid and well-constructed. All the puzzles made sense, the metas were varied and original, the theme was hilarious. It ran a bit long, but not so much that it was problematic, in my opinion.
(With regards to its length, I think I would have managed that better if I were on site: I didn't sleep much on Saturday night because I was worried that the hunt would end while I was asleep. Clearly I should have waited another day before worrying about that! If I were on site, I would have been able to sleep more on Saturday night, knowing that someone would wake me up if we were actually approaching endgame. And a few extra hours of sleep on Saturday night would have made a huge difference by late Sunday evening.)
I will do everything in my power to be onsite next year. I miss you, Codex! (Have I mentioned how ridiculously fun Codex is to solve with? Because seriously, they're all awesome!)
Thought #n+1: I seriously want to play Escape from Zyzzlvania. I hear that some of my teammates did right after the hunt ended. They say it's a great game for 4am but wouldn't necessarily recommend it for any other time. So, who's up for a 4am game of Escape from Zyzzlvania next time I'm in Boston?