KGB puzzhunt: Geller Hotel
KGB ran a puzzle hunt today, and we won!
The theme was that you are a guest at a convention for psychics. The archnemesis drugs your drinking water to inhibit your psychic abilities, and kidnaps the keynote speaker, and it's up to the intrepid guests to uncover the mystery/conspiracy/etc.
18 teams of 4, with a little over a dozen puzzles in 6 hours. They made this hunt "Safari"-style, so nearly every puzzle was either a doing a runaround, or doing something at the end of a runaround. They asked everyone to stay in character when doing puzzles with a staff member, which I expected to be annoying, but was actually fun. None of the puzzles had a gimmick that took more than 10 minutes to uncover, yet they did well to not make things too easy either. A couple puzzles had parallelism issues; since nearly all of the puzzles were "go there and do this", generally only 1-2 teams could be "doing this" concurrently and the rest had to stand in line.
Most of the puzzles - the important ones, at least - resolved to a superpower that you had acquired (or re-acquired?). These were used to infiltrate the vault for the final meta: psychic suggestion to distract the guard, telekinesis to open the door, invisibility to fool the security camera, etc. There were a couple amusing stories at the postmortem of people who tried to use abilities at the wrong time.
Cell phones were mandatory; all three of my teammates owned one, so I was off the hook again. I really should get one someday. Text messages were issued throughout the hunt - most of them were simply plot coupons, but others announced important things like the times of pizza and the postmortem.
The meta was set up so that it could only be executed once, so other people didn't really get to enjoy all the work that went into it. Two teams made into the vault (the second place team had only two people!) and once we uncovered the documents confirming the conspiracy, we were whisked from Baker to Wean for a final puzzle, where we unlocked a box containing the missing keynote speaker. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, all the _other_ teams got a cellphone text message ordering them to run out to the CFA lawn (they would later learn that this was so that the evil corporation could execute them, which apparently translated as playing freeze-tag.) This made for quite a shock when we ran back from Wean to CFA to see all 70 other players out on the lawn running around. Our fearless keynote speaker saved the day and we went to the postmortem.
KGB really don't take themselves seriously very often, except for CTFWS, but they did tonight, and I was very impressed.
Next weekend there is another puzzle event going on, but sadly two of the four from today are already committed to a separate team. Not sure if random matching will triumph.
The theme was that you are a guest at a convention for psychics. The archnemesis drugs your drinking water to inhibit your psychic abilities, and kidnaps the keynote speaker, and it's up to the intrepid guests to uncover the mystery/conspiracy/etc.
18 teams of 4, with a little over a dozen puzzles in 6 hours. They made this hunt "Safari"-style, so nearly every puzzle was either a doing a runaround, or doing something at the end of a runaround. They asked everyone to stay in character when doing puzzles with a staff member, which I expected to be annoying, but was actually fun. None of the puzzles had a gimmick that took more than 10 minutes to uncover, yet they did well to not make things too easy either. A couple puzzles had parallelism issues; since nearly all of the puzzles were "go there and do this", generally only 1-2 teams could be "doing this" concurrently and the rest had to stand in line.
Most of the puzzles - the important ones, at least - resolved to a superpower that you had acquired (or re-acquired?). These were used to infiltrate the vault for the final meta: psychic suggestion to distract the guard, telekinesis to open the door, invisibility to fool the security camera, etc. There were a couple amusing stories at the postmortem of people who tried to use abilities at the wrong time.
Cell phones were mandatory; all three of my teammates owned one, so I was off the hook again. I really should get one someday. Text messages were issued throughout the hunt - most of them were simply plot coupons, but others announced important things like the times of pizza and the postmortem.
The meta was set up so that it could only be executed once, so other people didn't really get to enjoy all the work that went into it. Two teams made into the vault (the second place team had only two people!) and once we uncovered the documents confirming the conspiracy, we were whisked from Baker to Wean for a final puzzle, where we unlocked a box containing the missing keynote speaker. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, all the _other_ teams got a cellphone text message ordering them to run out to the CFA lawn (they would later learn that this was so that the evil corporation could execute them, which apparently translated as playing freeze-tag.) This made for quite a shock when we ran back from Wean to CFA to see all 70 other players out on the lawn running around. Our fearless keynote speaker saved the day and we went to the postmortem.
KGB really don't take themselves seriously very often, except for CTFWS, but they did tonight, and I was very impressed.
Next weekend there is another puzzle event going on, but sadly two of the four from today are already committed to a separate team. Not sure if random matching will triumph.