Oh, you can't help that. We're all mad here.
This year's hunt was very well written and tested, and I think it's easily one of the better ones I've participated in: the puzzle quality was high, the theme was very well done, and there were a bunch of nice touches that I hope will become standard.
Unlike last year, I managed to get a reasonable amount of sleep beforehand. Actually, I even got reasonable amounts of sleep during Hunt. Part of it was making a conscious effort to sleep, part of it was actually having a hotel room close to our headquarters (as opposed to my friend's place across campus).
Warning: Puzzle spoilers ahead.
Last year, I mentioned that I was worried about the quality of this year's Hunt, between that year's debacle and that this year's writing team had been responsible for the Time Bandits Hunt.
This year, kickoff was in Kresge. Appropriately for the auditorium, and as suggested by the pre-Hunt messages, it began with John Galt giving the keynote speech for the 33rd Annual Conference on Maturing Young Scientific Theories: Emerging Resolutions for Yielding Heuristic Unphysics using Noncomputation Techniques. He claimed there were too many puzzles that defied convential analysis, but could be explained by Heuristic Unphysics. My favorite line in the entire Hunt was his explanation that since Consciousness is Identification, all we needed to solve puzzles was more Consciousness - i.e. don't sleep. He also made fun of puzzles from Time Bandits, which suggested both that the writing team had learned from their mistakes and had a sense of humor about it, both good signs.
Partway through his speech, a mysterious voice interrupted, which eventually revealed itself to be the Cheshire Cat. Wonderland was spilling over to our world, and naturally we had to try to restore balance.
On the way back to HQ, I stopped along the way for lunch at a new-to-me restaurant called Clover. It was vegetarian, so I wasn't expecting much. By the time I got back, puzzles were available, but I skipped them in favor of eating. My brussels sprout sandwich was amazing.
I started with Technical Program Committee Report. Before Hunt, each team had been asked to submit an abstract for the conference. Odd, given that we doubted we'd actually have to give the speech (and would have been in trouble if we had). This puzzle made it clear why - the writing team had woven our submissions together into a puzzle. We had fun matching teams up with titles - many were obvious, but some were misleading. It was also amusing to see what other teams had come up with.
Next was Find Your Way Across. I theorized the extraction mechanism early on but it took a while to get to the point where we could actually carry it out.
I briefly dropped in on Across the Hall to help out with final extraction.
Did a bit of work on Disemvoweled and had the aha of recognizing the grid for Hedgehogs and Flamingos, though we had trouble fitting our uncertain answers together and I gave up before we made progress. Fortunately other people persevered and finished them.
Soon after that the White Queen round was released (note that what you see there is a little different from what we originally saw, there were almost no answers in the grid). This was my favorite round of the hunt, themewise. We wouldn't finish the round until 5 PM Saturday, but it was immediately obvious how it would play out. You see, in normal rounds, you get puzzles, solve them to produce answers, and put together answers to get the answer to the metapuzzle. As you might recall from Through the Looking-Glass, the White Queen experiences time backwards, so naturally her round started with the "answer" to the metapuzzle, then you had to figure out the answers, then the titles of the puzzles, and finally redo things to get the real metapuzzle answer. I thought it brilliantly played with the standard notion of how a round worked and combined it with the theme of the hunt.
It was getting late so I decided to get some sleep. This is uncharacteristically early for me during Hunt, but I felt we were overstaffed for the puzzles we had unlocked and wanted to see if I could actually maintain a reasonable sleep schedule.
I got back in around 9 AM, one of the first people back. As I was catching up on the night's progress, I noticed we had missed an 8 AM event. Events this year were specifically called out as being necessary if you wanted to "organize next year's conference" (i.e. win) - good thing we didn't care about that, as nobody had been awake and able to go then.
I worked on Guess What I'm Thinking, which was a mastermind-like game. I tried to automate guessing to avoid tediousness and errors, but was kept hitting errors and eventually did the first one by hand. Other teammates had parallelized the other portions, so there wasn't much else for me to do on this. Plus, I heard there was an on-campus team puzzle and wanted to get up and move around.
The puzzle whose answer was I Want To Hold Your Hand (a White Queen puzzle, so what we really was the title of the puzzle) turned out to be a puzzle relay, similar to math relays in high school. Teams would send a number of people (dependent on team size, bigger teams needed more people) to solve minipuzzles. All puzzles except the first required input from the previous puzzle; once you solved your puzzle you ran it over to the next person. Also, teams had to finish everything by the time limit -- in our case, 35 minutes -- or else they would collect all material before teams were allowed to try again. One catch was that we had to assign ourselves positions without knowing what minipuzzle we would get; I ended up last. My puzzle turned out to be a sudoku. Either it was hard or I've gotten bad at sudokus ever since I discovered Google Goggles solves them (or both), because I made almost no progress. Fortunately for my ego, I wasn't the only one with issues and never received my input.
We regrouped and shared what we remembered about the puzzles. The first few were easy, and for all of them except mine we remembered enough to reconstruct most of the answers. We strongly suspected that we would get the same minipuzzles again, so someone else volunteered to do the sudoku, while those who wanted a break and coffee took the early easy ones.
The second run did better, this time getting to the last leg of the relay pretty quickly, but the sudoku again proved to be our undoing. The other person made basically no more progress than me. At this point, however, we knew more constraints on the possible puzzle solution, so decided to go back to our HQ and try to work out the answer based on what we knew.
It turned out we still didn't have enough information based on just the things we learned from the event, but the additional constraint from re-backsolving the White Queen meta was enough to let us finish.
At this point I hit a slump. All puzzles seemed to be being worked on, and so (along with a bunch of others) I tried staring at the two metas we had open. Even though we had most of the answers for both, I got nowhere. This was a little demoralizing for me personally - as a team, we weren't really trying to win so the strong metasolvers were probably off doing other things, but I felt like I should be able to do something given most of the answers and a bunch of time.
Then we finally got one the Tea Party meta, unlocked the Red and White Knights round, and suddenly there were fresh, interesting puzzles.
I tried Callooh Callay, World! but our remote team proved quicker at it (they probably had more than just one person looking at it) so I helped with Walk Across Some Dungeons, completing a number of the levels. Towards the end more people piled on, so I wasn't the first to complete the last few levels. Still, a nice diversion.
Solving Walk Across Some Dungeons opened this year's Duck Konundrum, and I (along with the other standard Konundrumers) immediately jumped on it. Well, immediately after dinner. Yet again, food before puzzles.
This Konundrum seemed more forgiving than ones in the past, with a lot of checksumming. We made it through without any errors, though we also spent a lot of time recording things in case we had to backtrack.
We finished the Konundrum around 2 AM, and I thought it would be a good idea to update myself on the state of team before I went to sleep. I managed to make a few contributions to the Humpty Dumpty meta, which we solved shortly thereafter. Sometime around then we received news that One Fish, Two Fish, Random Fish, Blue Fish had found the Coin. Well, duh, with a team name like that, how could they not win? :)
We didn't have much of the Caucus Race done, so after poking at it for a little bit I finally went back to the hotel and slept.
Knowing we probably wouldn't finish a round and a half while most people were sleeping and that the Hunt had been won (so was not horribly broken), I once again -- to my surprise -- had no problems sleeping. When I came back in the last few puzzles had been time released to us, and I jumped on The Revenge of Yuki Nagato Episode 00.
This turned out to not go so well. Of the puzzles I saw during this Hunt, I think I enjoyed it the least, which was unfortunate because I wanted to like it. Identifying the characters being played was easy, but we hit a wall trying to figure out what to do next. There was too much information, and the uneven recording quality made it unclear what were unimportant accidents and what were actual clues. In fact, we never solved it, and reading the solution after Hunt, I'm not sure we ever would have in any reasonable time.
Fortunately, though, we had solved the final and made it to the runaround about three hours before the Hunt ended.
Of course, that didn't mean things were over. We still had to restore balance to the universe and kick Alice out of Wonderland back to MIT. But even though we had received three items and discovered Alice's three weaknesses, we weren't ready yet. We had a set of three cards with Wonderland characters on them, a clear plastic mat with a record track molded into it, and an allen wrench. We wanted a mirror, something with down, and some sort of game. We would have to interact with three more Wonderland characters to turn what we had into what we needed.
These interactions could be done in any order, and we were directed to the Lion and the Unicorn, where the Unicorn had managed to finally win, and in a fit of rage the Lion had smashed up the boardgames they were playing. We were given a pile of wooden polyominos (whose squares were blue and green) with chess pieces glued to them, three empty boards with Nurikabes etched into them, and some copies of a chess variant. We had to reassemble the three boards, then work out where to place a missing piece on each board to achieve checkmate (Black to move, but White can then checkmate). Conveniently, our set of three cards were turned into the pieces we needed, and upon solving the boards we were presented with a giant, ~3 foot tall plastic black king.
We had to wait a while for the next location to free up, as other teams were on endgame too. Eventually we got to see the Duchess, whose baby would not stop crying; we would have to come up with a way to make it happy. There was a table piled with of items (including a plush bonsai kitten), and sure enough, buried in the pile was a record player. Unfortunately, we were told there was no electricity in Wonderland, so had to improvise a speaker with a needle, tape, and paper. Manually playing the record produced a voice listing various items. All the items on the table were labeled with letters, so it was obvious it would end up spelling something out. Unfortunately, it was really hard to make out what the voice was saying, and there were some items which there were two of. We eventually played it enough times that the record was starting to deteriorate, and had realized that there was a voice going backwards as well when other people staring at the letters we had gotten so far managed to pull out the answer - we had to sing The Walrus as a lullaby for the baby. This calmed it down, and in reward the Duchess let us pick an item as a reward. Naturally, we opted for the mirror.
The final character was the King of Hearts. On entering the room we noticed a piece of white furniture, sort of like a flat pinball table. The headboard was covered in mirror writing. The King was unhappy with his Wonderkea bed and wanted to disassemble it so he could return it. Clearly a job for our final item, the allen wrench.
The only problem was that there was no place to use it.
Examining the table, we noted the four indentations on either side could be pushed out. Each was a 2x4, labeled in increments from 1 to 7. They moved freely, however, and prodding them had no discernible effect. Sometime around then, someone noticed the backwards L on the headboard was like the allen wrench, but it was unclear what the connection was. A pointed out that the only thing that could work was if the headboard was magnetic, which would be ridicu-- *clunk*.
There was a magnetic latch in there after all! Pulling it released the surface of the table a bit, but it quickly stopped, bringing a flashback to the Time Bandits endgame.
One of the items we had received during the Time Bandits Hunt was a lockpick, and at one point in the runaround we were given a locked box. These obviously went together, but picking locks can be hard. It was very late (well, early), and so I suggested simply disassembling the box by unscrewing the sides, bypassing the lock.
There was nothing in it.
There were multiple teams bunched up on the runaround that year, and we eventually timed out and got moved on without solving the room, but I later learned the thing we were looking for was inside the lock itself. By bypassing the lock, we had missed the exact thing we were looking for.
It was obvious the table was a giant lock that we would have to pick. This year, we'd do it right.
It was still rather annoying. At one point we weren't making progress and I decided that my guess at the table's innards was off - instead of 8 independent pins, perhaps there were only 4 and the purpose of two 2x4s was so you had better control over the position. The King let us continue that way for a little bit before hinting that there were actually 8 and that the correct settings were prime numbers. A couple more attempts and we were able to unlock the bed enough to retrieve a pillow.
Finally we had all the items necessary to defeat Alice, who had kidnapped the White Rabbit. We were brought to the last puzzle, a hedge maze. We would have to trick her into stumbling into a wormhole back to MIT while also getting her to drop the White Rabbit. We were given instructions with her movement rules and a description how how each item we picked up affected her. The giant chess piece made her sleep for a turn, the mirror scared her, and the pillow caused her to sneeze and drop the rabbit. We split up into small groups to work on it and eventually came up with a solution. Alice and the Rabbit behaved just as we predicted (and were good enough sports to stay in character, despite the late hour), resulting in a free Rabbit and Alice banished back to MIT.
I think that of the teams who finish, there are three interesting places: First, second, and last. Obviously, if you're first, you've done the best. If you're second, you're almost as good as first, but with the added bonus of not having to write next year. And if you're the last team to finish, you got the most mileage out of Hunt - you saw everything and got to puzzle the longest.
We solved the hedge maze about an hour after Hunt HQ said they would close down, making us the last team to finish the 2014 Hunt.
Overall, this was one of the best Hunts I've ever participated in. Obviously necessary was the quality of the puzzles - most were fun and worked well. The theme was nicely worked into the Hunt. The importance of events was clearly communicated beforehand. They didn't need to fall back on the "get out of puzzle free" mechanics of recent years or give hints. The first round was a minihunt for smaller teams - apparently about 30 teams actually finished that round, which I think is fantastic.
Incidentally, I think it's amusing that at 24 puzzles + arguably 5 more (3 metas, runaround, and cards), the first round is close to the size of the entire 1994 Hunt, which was 32 puzzles.
The only thing I might find fault with was that at some points in this Hunt, and much sooner than normal, it felt like we were bottlenecked on puzzles. But that was really our fault for having a large(ish) team and not focusing on metas, so our person-to-open puzzle ratio was high. I don't think Hunt should cater to gigantic teams, so it's not something to change. Maybe I should have relaxed and interacted with my team more. A large portion of Hunt is the chance to see people I haven't seen for a while, after all.
Although I didn't use it much, I liked the innovation of the immediate feedback system - upon solving a puzzle, you could rate it on fun, rate it on difficulty, and add a freeform comment. Giving feedback while it's fresh makes it less likely you'll forget later.
Unlike last year, I managed to get a reasonable amount of sleep beforehand. Actually, I even got reasonable amounts of sleep during Hunt. Part of it was making a conscious effort to sleep, part of it was actually having a hotel room close to our headquarters (as opposed to my friend's place across campus).
Warning: Puzzle spoilers ahead.
Last year, I mentioned that I was worried about the quality of this year's Hunt, between that year's debacle and that this year's writing team had been responsible for the Time Bandits Hunt.
This year, kickoff was in Kresge. Appropriately for the auditorium, and as suggested by the pre-Hunt messages, it began with John Galt giving the keynote speech for the 33rd Annual Conference on Maturing Young Scientific Theories: Emerging Resolutions for Yielding Heuristic Unphysics using Noncomputation Techniques. He claimed there were too many puzzles that defied convential analysis, but could be explained by Heuristic Unphysics. My favorite line in the entire Hunt was his explanation that since Consciousness is Identification, all we needed to solve puzzles was more Consciousness - i.e. don't sleep. He also made fun of puzzles from Time Bandits, which suggested both that the writing team had learned from their mistakes and had a sense of humor about it, both good signs.
Partway through his speech, a mysterious voice interrupted, which eventually revealed itself to be the Cheshire Cat. Wonderland was spilling over to our world, and naturally we had to try to restore balance.
On the way back to HQ, I stopped along the way for lunch at a new-to-me restaurant called Clover. It was vegetarian, so I wasn't expecting much. By the time I got back, puzzles were available, but I skipped them in favor of eating. My brussels sprout sandwich was amazing.
I started with Technical Program Committee Report. Before Hunt, each team had been asked to submit an abstract for the conference. Odd, given that we doubted we'd actually have to give the speech (and would have been in trouble if we had). This puzzle made it clear why - the writing team had woven our submissions together into a puzzle. We had fun matching teams up with titles - many were obvious, but some were misleading. It was also amusing to see what other teams had come up with.
Next was Find Your Way Across. I theorized the extraction mechanism early on but it took a while to get to the point where we could actually carry it out.
I briefly dropped in on Across the Hall to help out with final extraction.
Did a bit of work on Disemvoweled and had the aha of recognizing the grid for Hedgehogs and Flamingos, though we had trouble fitting our uncertain answers together and I gave up before we made progress. Fortunately other people persevered and finished them.
Soon after that the White Queen round was released (note that what you see there is a little different from what we originally saw, there were almost no answers in the grid). This was my favorite round of the hunt, themewise. We wouldn't finish the round until 5 PM Saturday, but it was immediately obvious how it would play out. You see, in normal rounds, you get puzzles, solve them to produce answers, and put together answers to get the answer to the metapuzzle. As you might recall from Through the Looking-Glass, the White Queen experiences time backwards, so naturally her round started with the "answer" to the metapuzzle, then you had to figure out the answers, then the titles of the puzzles, and finally redo things to get the real metapuzzle answer. I thought it brilliantly played with the standard notion of how a round worked and combined it with the theme of the hunt.
It was getting late so I decided to get some sleep. This is uncharacteristically early for me during Hunt, but I felt we were overstaffed for the puzzles we had unlocked and wanted to see if I could actually maintain a reasonable sleep schedule.
I got back in around 9 AM, one of the first people back. As I was catching up on the night's progress, I noticed we had missed an 8 AM event. Events this year were specifically called out as being necessary if you wanted to "organize next year's conference" (i.e. win) - good thing we didn't care about that, as nobody had been awake and able to go then.
I worked on Guess What I'm Thinking, which was a mastermind-like game. I tried to automate guessing to avoid tediousness and errors, but was kept hitting errors and eventually did the first one by hand. Other teammates had parallelized the other portions, so there wasn't much else for me to do on this. Plus, I heard there was an on-campus team puzzle and wanted to get up and move around.
The puzzle whose answer was I Want To Hold Your Hand (a White Queen puzzle, so what we really was the title of the puzzle) turned out to be a puzzle relay, similar to math relays in high school. Teams would send a number of people (dependent on team size, bigger teams needed more people) to solve minipuzzles. All puzzles except the first required input from the previous puzzle; once you solved your puzzle you ran it over to the next person. Also, teams had to finish everything by the time limit -- in our case, 35 minutes -- or else they would collect all material before teams were allowed to try again. One catch was that we had to assign ourselves positions without knowing what minipuzzle we would get; I ended up last. My puzzle turned out to be a sudoku. Either it was hard or I've gotten bad at sudokus ever since I discovered Google Goggles solves them (or both), because I made almost no progress. Fortunately for my ego, I wasn't the only one with issues and never received my input.
We regrouped and shared what we remembered about the puzzles. The first few were easy, and for all of them except mine we remembered enough to reconstruct most of the answers. We strongly suspected that we would get the same minipuzzles again, so someone else volunteered to do the sudoku, while those who wanted a break and coffee took the early easy ones.
The second run did better, this time getting to the last leg of the relay pretty quickly, but the sudoku again proved to be our undoing. The other person made basically no more progress than me. At this point, however, we knew more constraints on the possible puzzle solution, so decided to go back to our HQ and try to work out the answer based on what we knew.
It turned out we still didn't have enough information based on just the things we learned from the event, but the additional constraint from re-backsolving the White Queen meta was enough to let us finish.
At this point I hit a slump. All puzzles seemed to be being worked on, and so (along with a bunch of others) I tried staring at the two metas we had open. Even though we had most of the answers for both, I got nowhere. This was a little demoralizing for me personally - as a team, we weren't really trying to win so the strong metasolvers were probably off doing other things, but I felt like I should be able to do something given most of the answers and a bunch of time.
Then we finally got one the Tea Party meta, unlocked the Red and White Knights round, and suddenly there were fresh, interesting puzzles.
I tried Callooh Callay, World! but our remote team proved quicker at it (they probably had more than just one person looking at it) so I helped with Walk Across Some Dungeons, completing a number of the levels. Towards the end more people piled on, so I wasn't the first to complete the last few levels. Still, a nice diversion.
Solving Walk Across Some Dungeons opened this year's Duck Konundrum, and I (along with the other standard Konundrumers) immediately jumped on it. Well, immediately after dinner. Yet again, food before puzzles.
This Konundrum seemed more forgiving than ones in the past, with a lot of checksumming. We made it through without any errors, though we also spent a lot of time recording things in case we had to backtrack.
We finished the Konundrum around 2 AM, and I thought it would be a good idea to update myself on the state of team before I went to sleep. I managed to make a few contributions to the Humpty Dumpty meta, which we solved shortly thereafter. Sometime around then we received news that One Fish, Two Fish, Random Fish, Blue Fish had found the Coin. Well, duh, with a team name like that, how could they not win? :)
We didn't have much of the Caucus Race done, so after poking at it for a little bit I finally went back to the hotel and slept.
Knowing we probably wouldn't finish a round and a half while most people were sleeping and that the Hunt had been won (so was not horribly broken), I once again -- to my surprise -- had no problems sleeping. When I came back in the last few puzzles had been time released to us, and I jumped on The Revenge of Yuki Nagato Episode 00.
This turned out to not go so well. Of the puzzles I saw during this Hunt, I think I enjoyed it the least, which was unfortunate because I wanted to like it. Identifying the characters being played was easy, but we hit a wall trying to figure out what to do next. There was too much information, and the uneven recording quality made it unclear what were unimportant accidents and what were actual clues. In fact, we never solved it, and reading the solution after Hunt, I'm not sure we ever would have in any reasonable time.
Fortunately, though, we had solved the final and made it to the runaround about three hours before the Hunt ended.
Of course, that didn't mean things were over. We still had to restore balance to the universe and kick Alice out of Wonderland back to MIT. But even though we had received three items and discovered Alice's three weaknesses, we weren't ready yet. We had a set of three cards with Wonderland characters on them, a clear plastic mat with a record track molded into it, and an allen wrench. We wanted a mirror, something with down, and some sort of game. We would have to interact with three more Wonderland characters to turn what we had into what we needed.
These interactions could be done in any order, and we were directed to the Lion and the Unicorn, where the Unicorn had managed to finally win, and in a fit of rage the Lion had smashed up the boardgames they were playing. We were given a pile of wooden polyominos (whose squares were blue and green) with chess pieces glued to them, three empty boards with Nurikabes etched into them, and some copies of a chess variant. We had to reassemble the three boards, then work out where to place a missing piece on each board to achieve checkmate (Black to move, but White can then checkmate). Conveniently, our set of three cards were turned into the pieces we needed, and upon solving the boards we were presented with a giant, ~3 foot tall plastic black king.
We had to wait a while for the next location to free up, as other teams were on endgame too. Eventually we got to see the Duchess, whose baby would not stop crying; we would have to come up with a way to make it happy. There was a table piled with of items (including a plush bonsai kitten), and sure enough, buried in the pile was a record player. Unfortunately, we were told there was no electricity in Wonderland, so had to improvise a speaker with a needle, tape, and paper. Manually playing the record produced a voice listing various items. All the items on the table were labeled with letters, so it was obvious it would end up spelling something out. Unfortunately, it was really hard to make out what the voice was saying, and there were some items which there were two of. We eventually played it enough times that the record was starting to deteriorate, and had realized that there was a voice going backwards as well when other people staring at the letters we had gotten so far managed to pull out the answer - we had to sing The Walrus as a lullaby for the baby. This calmed it down, and in reward the Duchess let us pick an item as a reward. Naturally, we opted for the mirror.
The final character was the King of Hearts. On entering the room we noticed a piece of white furniture, sort of like a flat pinball table. The headboard was covered in mirror writing. The King was unhappy with his Wonderkea bed and wanted to disassemble it so he could return it. Clearly a job for our final item, the allen wrench.
The only problem was that there was no place to use it.
Examining the table, we noted the four indentations on either side could be pushed out. Each was a 2x4, labeled in increments from 1 to 7. They moved freely, however, and prodding them had no discernible effect. Sometime around then, someone noticed the backwards L on the headboard was like the allen wrench, but it was unclear what the connection was. A pointed out that the only thing that could work was if the headboard was magnetic, which would be ridicu-- *clunk*.
There was a magnetic latch in there after all! Pulling it released the surface of the table a bit, but it quickly stopped, bringing a flashback to the Time Bandits endgame.
One of the items we had received during the Time Bandits Hunt was a lockpick, and at one point in the runaround we were given a locked box. These obviously went together, but picking locks can be hard. It was very late (well, early), and so I suggested simply disassembling the box by unscrewing the sides, bypassing the lock.
There was nothing in it.
There were multiple teams bunched up on the runaround that year, and we eventually timed out and got moved on without solving the room, but I later learned the thing we were looking for was inside the lock itself. By bypassing the lock, we had missed the exact thing we were looking for.
It was obvious the table was a giant lock that we would have to pick. This year, we'd do it right.
It was still rather annoying. At one point we weren't making progress and I decided that my guess at the table's innards was off - instead of 8 independent pins, perhaps there were only 4 and the purpose of two 2x4s was so you had better control over the position. The King let us continue that way for a little bit before hinting that there were actually 8 and that the correct settings were prime numbers. A couple more attempts and we were able to unlock the bed enough to retrieve a pillow.
Finally we had all the items necessary to defeat Alice, who had kidnapped the White Rabbit. We were brought to the last puzzle, a hedge maze. We would have to trick her into stumbling into a wormhole back to MIT while also getting her to drop the White Rabbit. We were given instructions with her movement rules and a description how how each item we picked up affected her. The giant chess piece made her sleep for a turn, the mirror scared her, and the pillow caused her to sneeze and drop the rabbit. We split up into small groups to work on it and eventually came up with a solution. Alice and the Rabbit behaved just as we predicted (and were good enough sports to stay in character, despite the late hour), resulting in a free Rabbit and Alice banished back to MIT.
I think that of the teams who finish, there are three interesting places: First, second, and last. Obviously, if you're first, you've done the best. If you're second, you're almost as good as first, but with the added bonus of not having to write next year. And if you're the last team to finish, you got the most mileage out of Hunt - you saw everything and got to puzzle the longest.
We solved the hedge maze about an hour after Hunt HQ said they would close down, making us the last team to finish the 2014 Hunt.
Overall, this was one of the best Hunts I've ever participated in. Obviously necessary was the quality of the puzzles - most were fun and worked well. The theme was nicely worked into the Hunt. The importance of events was clearly communicated beforehand. They didn't need to fall back on the "get out of puzzle free" mechanics of recent years or give hints. The first round was a minihunt for smaller teams - apparently about 30 teams actually finished that round, which I think is fantastic.
Incidentally, I think it's amusing that at 24 puzzles + arguably 5 more (3 metas, runaround, and cards), the first round is close to the size of the entire 1994 Hunt, which was 32 puzzles.
The only thing I might find fault with was that at some points in this Hunt, and much sooner than normal, it felt like we were bottlenecked on puzzles. But that was really our fault for having a large(ish) team and not focusing on metas, so our person-to-open puzzle ratio was high. I don't think Hunt should cater to gigantic teams, so it's not something to change. Maybe I should have relaxed and interacted with my team more. A large portion of Hunt is the chance to see people I haven't seen for a while, after all.
Although I didn't use it much, I liked the innovation of the immediate feedback system - upon solving a puzzle, you could rate it on fun, rate it on difficulty, and add a freeform comment. Giving feedback while it's fresh makes it less likely you'll forget later.