Random Fish
Overall, I liked this year's Hunt. Massive bonus points for the writing team being who they were, for the theme, and for high production values (world map art and the treasure chest). Good job on metas and publishing plans for the School of Fish round. Meh about the story and missed opportunities. Endgame could have been improved a lot.
Warning: Puzzle spoilers ahead.
The writing team, One Fish, Two Fish, Random Fish, Blue Fish, is the current incarnation (sort of) of the team I started out on many years ago. We split about a decade ago, and they're the younger half that stayed associated with the dorm while the alums drifted off. So there's a sentimental connection there. Plus a great team name. I approve.
A couple months before, one of my friends on the writing team hinted that I would like this year's Hunt. Reading between the lines (that I would like this year's Hunt), I figured the theme was probably one of three things: fish (also clued by the team name), board games (unlikely, since the video game hunt was done recently), or anime (unlikely, this didn't seem to have generic enough appeal). So instead of taking my usual mushroom hat, I packing a fish pillow and some fish themed shirts.
As we filed into Kresge, there was a definite steampunk theme to the writing team's outfits, so I was getting a little worried about my prediction. Then Dr. Nautilus came on stage, announcing we would be solving 20,000* Puzzles Under the Sea. Ha! I guessed right!
*: plus or minus 20,000 puzzles
Dr. Nautilus informed us that she had discovered the existence of a mysterious new item that could revolutionize the steam-powered world - magnets. She believed there was a particularly large and powerful variety of magnets, called Nautilodestones, somewhere in the ocean. Before setting out, we would first have to upgrade our submarine to equip it for exploration. Once that was done, we could then venture ever deeper, possibly encountering strange things on the way. And there was a mystery sponsor listed on the sponsor slide. Potential plot twists all over the place!
As is now common practice, puzzles wouldn't unlock for a while, so I stopped off and got a sandwich for lunch. We noticed that although the website was 20000puzzles.com, the writing team had thought to register 2000puzzles.com and 200000puzzles.com to catch typos and redirected them - attention to detail like that boded well.
I looked at some puzzles in the opening wave, contributing a little bit to Takeout Ordering and much of Wordsearches Are a Piece of Cake. I probably bounced around for a little bit after that, but got called to work on Imba. Wait, I mean I got called to work on Speak of the Devil Fruit.
Actually, I got pulled into both at once, as different people saw these two puzzles and decided I would be the perfect one to work on them. Being in demand was an unusual feeling, since my puzzling skills are mediocre for our team. In these cases, though, it made sense - Imba was about StarCraft and Speak of the Devil Fruit was about One Piece, both of which it's entirely reasonable to think I would know about. I wish they hadn't come at around the same time so I could have spent more time on each of them.
It turned out someone else on our team was familiar with StarCraft but nobody who even recognized One Piece, so once we figured out what was going on I left Imba alone and worked on Speak of the Devil Fruit. I figured out most of it, just missing the final extraction step, and I thought it was a very good puzzle. The flavor text was appreciated, helping steer us away from many possible dead ends (as it points out, there is a lot of potential data in One Piece, far too much to do anything complicated, especially for a first round puzzle). Each step was reasonable, but it wasn't trivial either.
By the time I got back to Imba, it was (I think) solved to the final cluephrase, at which point whoever was working on it must have decided "solved in principle" and moved on. I did what it requested, then looked for the next puzzle to work on.
I don't remember what I worked on next, unfortunately. Perhaps it was staring at metas, or bouncing around between puzzles. By this point I believe we had unlocked enough to start seeing the ocean. As an aside, in my old dorm (where the writing team hails from), there was a room painted with fish puns (e.g. a painting of a jar of jam with tentacles as a jellyfish, a painting of a cartoon sun with a tail for a sunfish, etc.). The fish in the ocean for this hunt followed similar puns, and it was a nice nostalgic reminder.
I didn't work on these, but some amusing puzzles that stood out were the 10,000 Puzzle Pyramid (hey, look, we might actually hit 20,000 puzzles after all!) and A Puzzle Consisting Entirely of Random Anagrams. I might be mixing this up, but I believe the first year I did Hunt, the writing team had been underprepared and had felt forced to anagram clues to puzzles to make them harder. This left an impression on our team and probably others - random anagramming is considered poor form. Actually making a puzzle out of random anagrams (really permutations of the word "RANDOM") was a funny subversion of this unwritten rule.
It was around 2 AM and I was considering going back to the hotel and sleeping since I wasn't being very helpful. Then we found a treasure chest on the world map and I changed my mind.
Accessing the treasure chest got us delivery of an actual physical box. Oh man, the production values! This box was awesome, and I'm sad a lot of our team had gone to sleep and probably only saw it after pieces had been solved. During wrapup, the writing team said they spent a significant chunk of their budget making 60 of the chests. Anyway, the chest was a wooden box maybe 0.5' x 1' x 1.5'. There was a strange picture of some sort of dial printed on top, and the box was wrapped in segments of chain held together with 4 locks. The chain was fastened to the box with a screw.
I had previously mentioned my misadventures with locks during Hunt. This was another chance to get things right, this time more comparably than the puzzle in last year's runaround. I still tried unscrewing the chain, of course (perhaps a conditioned response from playing too many RPGs - you always try stuff that shouldn't work first just to see if there's anything hidden). Somewhat surprisingly, it just turned in place. Later, once we had opened the box, I saw they had put a nut on the screw but left both free to rotate. With the rest of the box having no visible fasteners (it was either glued or stapled together), it was clear we'd have to deal with the locks.
Or not - we decided the most important thing was to see what was inside and simply cut the chain.
Inside was a variety of objects, including a helpful inventory list. We were actually missing a die, which the writing team promptly sent over once they realized it was missing. There was a bag of dice and cards, a pile of laser-cut wooden pieces, an envelope with a jigsaw puzzle inside, a bag of chocolate coins with things embossed on them, a Rubik's cube with strange markings, a series of strings tied together, a piece of knitting, and a map. I wanted to look at everything all at the same time!
On second thought, it was good that the majority of the team was asleep - I got more time with the new puzzles. If more people had been awake I'm sure everything would have been whisked off and I wouldn't have gotten to play with everything.
The first puzzle we made real progress on was the dice and cards. There were 6 cards, each with a fictional character (e.g. Iron Man, Aquaman, Zaphod Beeblebrox) and 7 dice. We quickly figured out the dice weren't normal, though it took us a little while to determine what to do with the Iron Man die. We initially thought we had to try to break it open somehow, but fortunately lacked the tools to do it and discovered the magnetic behavior. We completely overlooked the color relating the dice to the cards, but fortunately that information was redundant with how the dice were rigged.
After solving that puzzle, I fiddled with the wooden pieces and helped sort the envelope of paper pieces. Somewhere in here I also solved the tangram-like puzzle obtained from the workshop runaround. By the time I got bored of this, people had categorized the coins and were trying to figure out what to do next. I noted that doing the simple, obvious number to letter mapping produced a word - not the final answer, as there was clearly more critical information, but it helped make progress. Somewhere in here we also got around to looking at the map under a blacklight (pretty obvious, since they had given us an LED and battery in the treasure chest and the map was suspiciously coated) and marked the hidden shovels.
I then spent the next couple hours fiddling with the locks. The difficult part was trying to do so without any proper tools (and preferably nondestructively) - I wound up getting the padlock with a bobby pin and a leatherman. As suspected, there was a clue inside the lock. Armed with the knowledge of the pattern we were looking for, A brute forced the word lock. Meanwhile, I scrounged up a Red Bull can and was able to shim open the combination lock. I spent some time with binder clips in an attempt to open the ward lock but was unsuccessful. With three out of four clues, though, there was a chance we could figure out the answer. Sure enough, after a while of staring at the treasure chest's lid we figured out how to interpret the diagram and got it. I felt pretty accomplished at this point (though I'd be just as happy to not see another answer-hidden-in-lock puzzle again).
We had gotten some more puzzles via time unlock and solving, and I quickly solved Toasting the Bagel. By this point, J had finished assembling the paper jigsaw but was stuck on extraction. I got up to speed on how the puzzle had worked and pointed out how to read off the final cluephrase.
At this point it was around 8 AM and the morning crowd started to trickling in, which was my cue to go back to my hotel to sleep.
I think I got back in a bit after noon, stopping for a sandwich on the way. Somewhat frustratingly, I didn't make much progress on any puzzle, just bouncing around. I think we had solved all the puzzles in the treasure chest round, noticed the implied grid on the map, and knew how we would eventually extract an answer, but were completely stuck trying to fit our answers into the grid. A lot of us stared at this meta unsuccessfully.
I took a break by going to do the Cthulhu interaction along with G. When we got there, it took us a few moments to realize another team was in the process of going through the interaction. This was weird because interactions are scheduled in advance, so collisions shouldn't happen. There was also no sign on the door indicating that we should wait, so we couldn't tell at first whether what we were seeing was expected or not. It turned out the other team had shown up out of turn, so we had to wait for them to finish. Once we got to go, I didn't really like the interaction - it felt a little much on the "read our minds" side of things, as it was a series of "Nope, the thing you guessed based on no information was wrong". If it had been fun, entertaining, or plotful, I would be more lenient, but I didn't think it was any of these things.
When we got back I was pulled into working on Image. Image is pretty awesome, but I don't want to spoil the solution. I'll just say that it takes a special kind of insanity to be able to come up with the idea for the puzzle and not immediately dismiss it as being impossible to construct. I'm glad they didn't though - Image is a great example of "I had no idea you could do that. This is @#$%^&* awesome."
I figured this was a good time to take a break and went to grab dinner, only to discover that it had gotten later than I thought and nearby places were closing or closed. Oh well. Puzzles will distract me.
When I got back I helped out a bit with Read Between the Lines. Then we finally unlocked duck conundrum, Connect the Ducks. There are a couple of us who typically do the conundrum, and we all dropped what were were doing and split off to a different room. On reading the instructions, we realized it would be more practical to use proxies rather than trying to do things ourselves, so we decided to use a bunch of stuffed animals.
One of the many nice things about not trying to win is that you get to work on the puzzles you want to work on rather than the ones that will help you win. Both our group and a remote team in San Francisco wanted to do the conundrum, and there was no hesitation in both groups working on it and wasting effort.
While gathering people and supplies, three team members who had never done a conundrum before decided to help. Partly because of having to explain things, partly because we took a long time to set up, and partly because we had too many people (I think one or two could have done this puzzle effectively, but we had 7), San Francisco beat us to the answer.
The conundrum turned out to be very straightforward, or maybe we're just old hands at it and careful enough to not make mistakes. This is a mild negative to me - I prefer conundrums which require (or at least encourage) interactions between people. Being social with your teammates is IMHO a unique feature of a conundrum (for example, 2014's conundrum was great), and I think there was a missed opportunity here. On the other hand, it's arguably better to err on the simple and straightforward side for a puzzle like this.
After the conundrum, I spent some time staring at the ocean metameta but didn't get anywhere. It didn't help that the person who had been staring at it for hours and tried to get us up to speed had made a reasonable but fatally incorrect assumption about how to assemble pieces. The only useful thing I ended up doing the rest of the night was calling in the answer to Benny Lava, where we had extracted the final cluephrase a while before but nobody had done the final step.
By this point the coin had been found, so I felt OK going back to my hotel and sleeping.
I didn't want to miss us finishing, so got back in around noon. We were down to only a few puzzles. Surprisingly, the treasure chest meta was still unsolved, as was the ocean metameta. And of course, we hadn't gotten the Atlantis metameta yet. Since the coin had been found, the writing team opened up their hinting system to cover metapuzzles, which I thought was a smart move.
As an aside, the concepts for the ocean metameta and Atlantis metameta were amusing. When talking about metapuzzles, it's common to distinguish between a "pure" meta, i.e. one that just uses the round answers, and a "shell" meta, which introduces additional information that you plug answers into. The ocean metameta and Atlantis metameta were literal shell metas - the ocean one involved assembling a turtle's shell, while each meta for Atlantis earned you a physical seashell.
With some hinting, we figured out the obvious thing we had overlooked on the treasure chest meta and solved it. This got us the last piece for the ocean metameta. Overnight, people had figured out how to assemble the pieces nicely. This had annoyed the guy who had been staring at it for a day, since they had done it independently and he felt left out. Sometimes, though, it's helpful to have a fresh set of eyes start from scratch.
I joined the group working on the ocean metameta, and we solved the logic puzzle to the point where I could squint at our progress and make out the answer. Less than 10 minutes later, the team working on the Atlantis metameta solved their puzzle and we prepared to go for the post-metameta tasks.
Having worked on the ocean metameta, I naturally went with the team doing that runaround. We were told to go to the 3rd floor of Lobby 7. On the way there, I saw a team contorting themselves on the floor of Lobby 7, obviously making pictures of some sort. That must be endgame-related, as (apart from events) there's no other time that many puzzlers would be gathered outside their headquarters.
Anyway, we met a whale with a case of indigestion from eating the wrong things. He asked if we would be willing to step inside his stomach and try to sort things out. Of course! What could possibly go wrong?
There were three stations we had to solve in order. At the first station was four plates and 12 candies. We were told we had to figure out the right set of arrangements of the candies to make his four stomachs happy. Since the candies differed in number, color, type, and wrapping, it was clear we needed to create four sets.
The second station had a single plate and a few bags of jelly beans, each bag differing in number and color. We were told the whale had been feeling odd recently and hoped we could even him out, so we tried various combinations until we found the grouping that resulted in an even number of each color on the plate.
The final station had a 3x3 grid, three squares of which had been filled with candies similar to the first station. We were told the whale hoped we could help balance out his diet. On a nearby table was bags of candy and other parts needed to assemble them, so we constructed the right pieces to finish the magic Set square.
On doing this, the whale announced he was feeling better and rewarded us with a swordfish that we might find useful later.
We got back to our headquarters shortly before the Atlantis runaround team. It turned out they had had to run up and down the Green building, so we had clearly picked the right team to be on - snacking on candy as we stood around and solved puzzles vs. running up and down many flights of stairs? Not really a contest. They had picked up a map to the Nautilodestone.
We cleaned up our room while waiting for the writing team to schedule us for the endgame runaround. Once the call came, we headed out and met our Atlantean tour guide (who happened to be played by L, the same person who played Dr. Nautilus). However, on the way to the Nautilodestone, she accidentally awoke a very grumpy Kraken, who challenged us to prove our worth before she would let us get a Nautilodestone. We had to prove our teamwork, knowlege, friendship, communication, and perception. This structure was obviously to let the writing team parallelize endgame if multiple teams arrived at the same time.
The first task we had to do was knowledge, which turned out to be basically Family Feud. We had to guess the most common answers people (presumably on the writing team) had come up with to various questions.
After getting enough right, we moved on to the next task, friendship. There were a variety of fish stickers hidden around, and we had to take selfies with them to prove that we were friends. Fortunately, the writing team accepted the pillow as a teammate, which was useful as a number of stickers were in inconvenient locations. It was much easier to hold the pillow up rather than trying to contort people to get the framing right.
Once we had taken enough selfies, we moved on to teamwork. There was a delay here as we had to wait for another team to finish and for them to set up again. It turned out to be a giant wordsearch, maybe 5' x 30'. Although there were lots of words to find, we noticed puzzle answers were amongst them, and those were clearly the important ones. During the puzzle's introduction, there had been a clue that we should care about semaphore, so we looked for intersecting pairs. However, we were running low on time and eventually the writing team decided to skip us over the task to keep things moving along.
Next was perception, where we were taken to an anglerfish's lair (R had a nice costume, complete with dangly light). We were shown clippings and heard soundclips from various puzzles in the Hunt and had to name the puzzle they were found in. Once we had identified enough, we moved on.
The last task was in Lobby 7 and was about communication. We split into a large and a small team. The small team went up to the second floor while the large team was given a word to communicate to them using only their bodies, which is what I had expected based on what I had happened to see during the ocean runaround.
The first word we had was "seahorse", which was pretty easy. For the second word, I went with the small group to the second floor. Unfortunately, on seeing the picture, I had to recuse myself because I was pretty sure it was actually the same one I had happened to see (and hear people discussing) during the ocean runaround. My teammates eventually realized the picture was of a "shipwreck".
The third word unexpectedly ramped up the difficulty. I was back in the large group for this one, and we were supposed to clue "Dr. Nautilus". The nautilus wasn't too bad, though it generated a lot of similar guesses, like "snail". Cluing doctor, on the other hand, turned out to be hard. We first tried a red cross (four of us happened to be wearing red), but the guessing team compltely missed this. We then tried making a rod of Asclepius, but that didn't make it across either.
At this point the writing team took pity on us and relaxed the rules, allowing us to mime things. Some of us tried acting out a doctor's visit - tapping a knee to check for a reflex, and so on. No dice. We dragged L in, who cooperated by miming her actions during the opening skit. No dice. We made a giant letter N, which I think finally got the point across.
We later learned that the guessing team had completely forgotten about kickoff, which was pretty much the only time Dr. Nautilus had shown up. Oops.
After having completed the five tasks, we were led to the back of 26-100, where we used our swordfish to cut through an impentrable kelp forest (represented by green crepe ribbons hanging from the corridor's ceiling). We entered the stage to see some of the writing team seated in the audience, waiting for us. The Kraken was there too, in front of a table with a bunch of "rocks" on it. She grudgingly admitted we had proven our worth and were allowed to take one stone, but only one of them was the Nautilode stone we were searching for. An assistant came up and made some "fine tuning" to our detector from the workshop metameta, taking the tangrams and giving us a metal detector. I took it and sure enough, only one of the stones reacted. We had finished the Hunt!
As I've said before, I like the idea of making Hunt more accessible to teams. The first part of the Hunt being sort of self contained (in this case, the workshop) is great. I also liked that so many teams got to finish - a lot of effort goes into writing Hunt, and having more people experience it seems like a no-brainer. Opening up more aggressive hinting once the coin was found was a good way to accomplish this while maintaining fairness for the winner.
At wrapup, the writing team mentioned that part of the motivation for the easier School of Fish puzzles was to let more people experience the feeling of having solved a puzzle entirely by themselves. I personally think the really satisfying feeling is knowing you figured out some critical insight for a puzzle, and also getting to work on it with other people. If you're the only one who worked on it, you get the former by default but miss out on the latter. And in practice, having easier puzzles didn't mean I got to solo solve - there was a good chance someone else had already snapped up the puzzle and insta-solved it, or that a bunch of us were looking for something to work on and saw a fish puzzle at the same time.
On the other hand, I liked the other reason the writing team gave for the fish puzzles, which was publishing a book of them. Again, I like making Hunt available to more people, and this seems like a good way to do it. To be clear, I'm not advocating for dumbing down Hunt for the sake of accessibility, just figuring out what parts might be appealing to a broad audience and making them available.
On yet another hand, I had mixed feelings about the variety of puzzle difficulty - it's weird to have warmup-level puzzles like Eh? in the same event as in-depth puzzles like Image or the 10,000 Puzzle Pyramid. There seemed to be more uncertainty about how much work you'd actually have to do this year than in previous years, where I felt the difficulty was more even.
With one exception (I'm looking at you, Spotted Tower), the metas struck me as elegant and well written. Even the ones we got stuck on for long periods of time (Treasure Chest, Ocean metameta, but I'm not sure about Atlantis metameta since I didn't look at it) were obvious in retrospect and more of a "how could we have missed that cluing" rather than "this needed more playtesting".
I think the weakest part of this Hunt was endgame. By the time we got to it, I wasn't really in the mood for another couple hours of activity - I had expected to be done. It's unclear to me whether endgame played a part in selecting the winning team, but the mere possibility that it did raises an eyebrow. Both the friendship and teamwork tasks would have benefitted from a larger team, and getting through endgame faster because you have a bigger team seems unfair. If the task difficulty scales with team size, that just moves the problem - then you argue over whether the scaling was fair or if it favored smaller/bigger teams. Better to avoid this altogether with a shorter endgame (or one that clearly does not influence the winner).
I did like the idea that the team as a whole could do activities together, and ones with easily tweakable difficulty. I'm just not convinced about the execution.
Endgame felt artificial (I've heard rumors that it was tacked on at the last minute to extend the length of Hunt, but that seems like a poor justification), since the items we found earlier only came in use at the very end of endgame. I wouldn't have minded as much if their use had been interspersed (such as in last year's Hunt), since there'd be some feeling of wrapping up the story. As it was, the items felt superfluous.
Come to think of it, story was another thing that could be improved. The point of Hunt is puzzles, of course, but there's an extra bonus in my eyes if a story unfolds while the Hunt progresses. This year it didn't really feel like there was a story. IMHO having a good story makes for better memories. Perhaps the open structure of this year's Hunt made it harder to weave a story vs. one where rounds are released sequentially.
Speaking of story, I kept anticipating plot twists that never materialized. The progress system was named DEEP and during kickoff Dr. Nautilus mentioned that we'd have to keep going deeper to find the Nautilodestone. I was half-expecting an Inception twist.
When the 10,000 Puzzle Pyramid came up, I expected a plot twist that would make us do (similar?) puzzles again (maybe a mirror or parallel universe) so that we would actually reach 20,000 puzzles.
There was also the mystery sponsor, who I thought might turn out to be some plot-important thing (e.g. introduce a financial backer for our underwater expedition as we left the lab, but then it turns out they were also doing ______, which would cause problems when...). To my disappointment, the mystery sponsor turned out to only be the New England Aquarium. I mean, it is awesome they were a sponsor, it just seemed like such a wasted opportunity. I have no idea why they couldn't have been named during kickoff.
I liked the feeling of having anticipated (sort of) the theme and coming prepared. It didn't give me an advantage at all, but felt more fun to be prepared. Or maybe that's just my inner fish talking.
Note to self: Do a better job remembering to eat. I only ate three meals over the course of three days (a sandwich on Saturday and Sunday, then post-Hunt dinner).
Warning: Puzzle spoilers ahead.
The writing team, One Fish, Two Fish, Random Fish, Blue Fish, is the current incarnation (sort of) of the team I started out on many years ago. We split about a decade ago, and they're the younger half that stayed associated with the dorm while the alums drifted off. So there's a sentimental connection there. Plus a great team name. I approve.
A couple months before, one of my friends on the writing team hinted that I would like this year's Hunt. Reading between the lines (that I would like this year's Hunt), I figured the theme was probably one of three things: fish (also clued by the team name), board games (unlikely, since the video game hunt was done recently), or anime (unlikely, this didn't seem to have generic enough appeal). So instead of taking my usual mushroom hat, I packing a fish pillow and some fish themed shirts.
As we filed into Kresge, there was a definite steampunk theme to the writing team's outfits, so I was getting a little worried about my prediction. Then Dr. Nautilus came on stage, announcing we would be solving 20,000* Puzzles Under the Sea. Ha! I guessed right!
*: plus or minus 20,000 puzzles
Dr. Nautilus informed us that she had discovered the existence of a mysterious new item that could revolutionize the steam-powered world - magnets. She believed there was a particularly large and powerful variety of magnets, called Nautilodestones, somewhere in the ocean. Before setting out, we would first have to upgrade our submarine to equip it for exploration. Once that was done, we could then venture ever deeper, possibly encountering strange things on the way. And there was a mystery sponsor listed on the sponsor slide. Potential plot twists all over the place!
As is now common practice, puzzles wouldn't unlock for a while, so I stopped off and got a sandwich for lunch. We noticed that although the website was 20000puzzles.com, the writing team had thought to register 2000puzzles.com and 200000puzzles.com to catch typos and redirected them - attention to detail like that boded well.
I looked at some puzzles in the opening wave, contributing a little bit to Takeout Ordering and much of Wordsearches Are a Piece of Cake. I probably bounced around for a little bit after that, but got called to work on Imba. Wait, I mean I got called to work on Speak of the Devil Fruit.
Actually, I got pulled into both at once, as different people saw these two puzzles and decided I would be the perfect one to work on them. Being in demand was an unusual feeling, since my puzzling skills are mediocre for our team. In these cases, though, it made sense - Imba was about StarCraft and Speak of the Devil Fruit was about One Piece, both of which it's entirely reasonable to think I would know about. I wish they hadn't come at around the same time so I could have spent more time on each of them.
It turned out someone else on our team was familiar with StarCraft but nobody who even recognized One Piece, so once we figured out what was going on I left Imba alone and worked on Speak of the Devil Fruit. I figured out most of it, just missing the final extraction step, and I thought it was a very good puzzle. The flavor text was appreciated, helping steer us away from many possible dead ends (as it points out, there is a lot of potential data in One Piece, far too much to do anything complicated, especially for a first round puzzle). Each step was reasonable, but it wasn't trivial either.
By the time I got back to Imba, it was (I think) solved to the final cluephrase, at which point whoever was working on it must have decided "solved in principle" and moved on. I did what it requested, then looked for the next puzzle to work on.
I don't remember what I worked on next, unfortunately. Perhaps it was staring at metas, or bouncing around between puzzles. By this point I believe we had unlocked enough to start seeing the ocean. As an aside, in my old dorm (where the writing team hails from), there was a room painted with fish puns (e.g. a painting of a jar of jam with tentacles as a jellyfish, a painting of a cartoon sun with a tail for a sunfish, etc.). The fish in the ocean for this hunt followed similar puns, and it was a nice nostalgic reminder.
I didn't work on these, but some amusing puzzles that stood out were the 10,000 Puzzle Pyramid (hey, look, we might actually hit 20,000 puzzles after all!) and A Puzzle Consisting Entirely of Random Anagrams. I might be mixing this up, but I believe the first year I did Hunt, the writing team had been underprepared and had felt forced to anagram clues to puzzles to make them harder. This left an impression on our team and probably others - random anagramming is considered poor form. Actually making a puzzle out of random anagrams (really permutations of the word "RANDOM") was a funny subversion of this unwritten rule.
It was around 2 AM and I was considering going back to the hotel and sleeping since I wasn't being very helpful. Then we found a treasure chest on the world map and I changed my mind.
Accessing the treasure chest got us delivery of an actual physical box. Oh man, the production values! This box was awesome, and I'm sad a lot of our team had gone to sleep and probably only saw it after pieces had been solved. During wrapup, the writing team said they spent a significant chunk of their budget making 60 of the chests. Anyway, the chest was a wooden box maybe 0.5' x 1' x 1.5'. There was a strange picture of some sort of dial printed on top, and the box was wrapped in segments of chain held together with 4 locks. The chain was fastened to the box with a screw.
I had previously mentioned my misadventures with locks during Hunt. This was another chance to get things right, this time more comparably than the puzzle in last year's runaround. I still tried unscrewing the chain, of course (perhaps a conditioned response from playing too many RPGs - you always try stuff that shouldn't work first just to see if there's anything hidden). Somewhat surprisingly, it just turned in place. Later, once we had opened the box, I saw they had put a nut on the screw but left both free to rotate. With the rest of the box having no visible fasteners (it was either glued or stapled together), it was clear we'd have to deal with the locks.
Or not - we decided the most important thing was to see what was inside and simply cut the chain.
Inside was a variety of objects, including a helpful inventory list. We were actually missing a die, which the writing team promptly sent over once they realized it was missing. There was a bag of dice and cards, a pile of laser-cut wooden pieces, an envelope with a jigsaw puzzle inside, a bag of chocolate coins with things embossed on them, a Rubik's cube with strange markings, a series of strings tied together, a piece of knitting, and a map. I wanted to look at everything all at the same time!
On second thought, it was good that the majority of the team was asleep - I got more time with the new puzzles. If more people had been awake I'm sure everything would have been whisked off and I wouldn't have gotten to play with everything.
The first puzzle we made real progress on was the dice and cards. There were 6 cards, each with a fictional character (e.g. Iron Man, Aquaman, Zaphod Beeblebrox) and 7 dice. We quickly figured out the dice weren't normal, though it took us a little while to determine what to do with the Iron Man die. We initially thought we had to try to break it open somehow, but fortunately lacked the tools to do it and discovered the magnetic behavior. We completely overlooked the color relating the dice to the cards, but fortunately that information was redundant with how the dice were rigged.
After solving that puzzle, I fiddled with the wooden pieces and helped sort the envelope of paper pieces. Somewhere in here I also solved the tangram-like puzzle obtained from the workshop runaround. By the time I got bored of this, people had categorized the coins and were trying to figure out what to do next. I noted that doing the simple, obvious number to letter mapping produced a word - not the final answer, as there was clearly more critical information, but it helped make progress. Somewhere in here we also got around to looking at the map under a blacklight (pretty obvious, since they had given us an LED and battery in the treasure chest and the map was suspiciously coated) and marked the hidden shovels.
I then spent the next couple hours fiddling with the locks. The difficult part was trying to do so without any proper tools (and preferably nondestructively) - I wound up getting the padlock with a bobby pin and a leatherman. As suspected, there was a clue inside the lock. Armed with the knowledge of the pattern we were looking for, A brute forced the word lock. Meanwhile, I scrounged up a Red Bull can and was able to shim open the combination lock. I spent some time with binder clips in an attempt to open the ward lock but was unsuccessful. With three out of four clues, though, there was a chance we could figure out the answer. Sure enough, after a while of staring at the treasure chest's lid we figured out how to interpret the diagram and got it. I felt pretty accomplished at this point (though I'd be just as happy to not see another answer-hidden-in-lock puzzle again).
We had gotten some more puzzles via time unlock and solving, and I quickly solved Toasting the Bagel. By this point, J had finished assembling the paper jigsaw but was stuck on extraction. I got up to speed on how the puzzle had worked and pointed out how to read off the final cluephrase.
At this point it was around 8 AM and the morning crowd started to trickling in, which was my cue to go back to my hotel to sleep.
I think I got back in a bit after noon, stopping for a sandwich on the way. Somewhat frustratingly, I didn't make much progress on any puzzle, just bouncing around. I think we had solved all the puzzles in the treasure chest round, noticed the implied grid on the map, and knew how we would eventually extract an answer, but were completely stuck trying to fit our answers into the grid. A lot of us stared at this meta unsuccessfully.
I took a break by going to do the Cthulhu interaction along with G. When we got there, it took us a few moments to realize another team was in the process of going through the interaction. This was weird because interactions are scheduled in advance, so collisions shouldn't happen. There was also no sign on the door indicating that we should wait, so we couldn't tell at first whether what we were seeing was expected or not. It turned out the other team had shown up out of turn, so we had to wait for them to finish. Once we got to go, I didn't really like the interaction - it felt a little much on the "read our minds" side of things, as it was a series of "Nope, the thing you guessed based on no information was wrong". If it had been fun, entertaining, or plotful, I would be more lenient, but I didn't think it was any of these things.
When we got back I was pulled into working on Image. Image is pretty awesome, but I don't want to spoil the solution. I'll just say that it takes a special kind of insanity to be able to come up with the idea for the puzzle and not immediately dismiss it as being impossible to construct. I'm glad they didn't though - Image is a great example of "I had no idea you could do that. This is @#$%^&* awesome."
I figured this was a good time to take a break and went to grab dinner, only to discover that it had gotten later than I thought and nearby places were closing or closed. Oh well. Puzzles will distract me.
When I got back I helped out a bit with Read Between the Lines. Then we finally unlocked duck conundrum, Connect the Ducks. There are a couple of us who typically do the conundrum, and we all dropped what were were doing and split off to a different room. On reading the instructions, we realized it would be more practical to use proxies rather than trying to do things ourselves, so we decided to use a bunch of stuffed animals.
One of the many nice things about not trying to win is that you get to work on the puzzles you want to work on rather than the ones that will help you win. Both our group and a remote team in San Francisco wanted to do the conundrum, and there was no hesitation in both groups working on it and wasting effort.
While gathering people and supplies, three team members who had never done a conundrum before decided to help. Partly because of having to explain things, partly because we took a long time to set up, and partly because we had too many people (I think one or two could have done this puzzle effectively, but we had 7), San Francisco beat us to the answer.
The conundrum turned out to be very straightforward, or maybe we're just old hands at it and careful enough to not make mistakes. This is a mild negative to me - I prefer conundrums which require (or at least encourage) interactions between people. Being social with your teammates is IMHO a unique feature of a conundrum (for example, 2014's conundrum was great), and I think there was a missed opportunity here. On the other hand, it's arguably better to err on the simple and straightforward side for a puzzle like this.
After the conundrum, I spent some time staring at the ocean metameta but didn't get anywhere. It didn't help that the person who had been staring at it for hours and tried to get us up to speed had made a reasonable but fatally incorrect assumption about how to assemble pieces. The only useful thing I ended up doing the rest of the night was calling in the answer to Benny Lava, where we had extracted the final cluephrase a while before but nobody had done the final step.
By this point the coin had been found, so I felt OK going back to my hotel and sleeping.
I didn't want to miss us finishing, so got back in around noon. We were down to only a few puzzles. Surprisingly, the treasure chest meta was still unsolved, as was the ocean metameta. And of course, we hadn't gotten the Atlantis metameta yet. Since the coin had been found, the writing team opened up their hinting system to cover metapuzzles, which I thought was a smart move.
As an aside, the concepts for the ocean metameta and Atlantis metameta were amusing. When talking about metapuzzles, it's common to distinguish between a "pure" meta, i.e. one that just uses the round answers, and a "shell" meta, which introduces additional information that you plug answers into. The ocean metameta and Atlantis metameta were literal shell metas - the ocean one involved assembling a turtle's shell, while each meta for Atlantis earned you a physical seashell.
With some hinting, we figured out the obvious thing we had overlooked on the treasure chest meta and solved it. This got us the last piece for the ocean metameta. Overnight, people had figured out how to assemble the pieces nicely. This had annoyed the guy who had been staring at it for a day, since they had done it independently and he felt left out. Sometimes, though, it's helpful to have a fresh set of eyes start from scratch.
I joined the group working on the ocean metameta, and we solved the logic puzzle to the point where I could squint at our progress and make out the answer. Less than 10 minutes later, the team working on the Atlantis metameta solved their puzzle and we prepared to go for the post-metameta tasks.
Having worked on the ocean metameta, I naturally went with the team doing that runaround. We were told to go to the 3rd floor of Lobby 7. On the way there, I saw a team contorting themselves on the floor of Lobby 7, obviously making pictures of some sort. That must be endgame-related, as (apart from events) there's no other time that many puzzlers would be gathered outside their headquarters.
Anyway, we met a whale with a case of indigestion from eating the wrong things. He asked if we would be willing to step inside his stomach and try to sort things out. Of course! What could possibly go wrong?
There were three stations we had to solve in order. At the first station was four plates and 12 candies. We were told we had to figure out the right set of arrangements of the candies to make his four stomachs happy. Since the candies differed in number, color, type, and wrapping, it was clear we needed to create four sets.
The second station had a single plate and a few bags of jelly beans, each bag differing in number and color. We were told the whale had been feeling odd recently and hoped we could even him out, so we tried various combinations until we found the grouping that resulted in an even number of each color on the plate.
The final station had a 3x3 grid, three squares of which had been filled with candies similar to the first station. We were told the whale hoped we could help balance out his diet. On a nearby table was bags of candy and other parts needed to assemble them, so we constructed the right pieces to finish the magic Set square.
On doing this, the whale announced he was feeling better and rewarded us with a swordfish that we might find useful later.
We got back to our headquarters shortly before the Atlantis runaround team. It turned out they had had to run up and down the Green building, so we had clearly picked the right team to be on - snacking on candy as we stood around and solved puzzles vs. running up and down many flights of stairs? Not really a contest. They had picked up a map to the Nautilodestone.
We cleaned up our room while waiting for the writing team to schedule us for the endgame runaround. Once the call came, we headed out and met our Atlantean tour guide (who happened to be played by L, the same person who played Dr. Nautilus). However, on the way to the Nautilodestone, she accidentally awoke a very grumpy Kraken, who challenged us to prove our worth before she would let us get a Nautilodestone. We had to prove our teamwork, knowlege, friendship, communication, and perception. This structure was obviously to let the writing team parallelize endgame if multiple teams arrived at the same time.
The first task we had to do was knowledge, which turned out to be basically Family Feud. We had to guess the most common answers people (presumably on the writing team) had come up with to various questions.
After getting enough right, we moved on to the next task, friendship. There were a variety of fish stickers hidden around, and we had to take selfies with them to prove that we were friends. Fortunately, the writing team accepted the pillow as a teammate, which was useful as a number of stickers were in inconvenient locations. It was much easier to hold the pillow up rather than trying to contort people to get the framing right.
Once we had taken enough selfies, we moved on to teamwork. There was a delay here as we had to wait for another team to finish and for them to set up again. It turned out to be a giant wordsearch, maybe 5' x 30'. Although there were lots of words to find, we noticed puzzle answers were amongst them, and those were clearly the important ones. During the puzzle's introduction, there had been a clue that we should care about semaphore, so we looked for intersecting pairs. However, we were running low on time and eventually the writing team decided to skip us over the task to keep things moving along.
Next was perception, where we were taken to an anglerfish's lair (R had a nice costume, complete with dangly light). We were shown clippings and heard soundclips from various puzzles in the Hunt and had to name the puzzle they were found in. Once we had identified enough, we moved on.
The last task was in Lobby 7 and was about communication. We split into a large and a small team. The small team went up to the second floor while the large team was given a word to communicate to them using only their bodies, which is what I had expected based on what I had happened to see during the ocean runaround.
The first word we had was "seahorse", which was pretty easy. For the second word, I went with the small group to the second floor. Unfortunately, on seeing the picture, I had to recuse myself because I was pretty sure it was actually the same one I had happened to see (and hear people discussing) during the ocean runaround. My teammates eventually realized the picture was of a "shipwreck".
The third word unexpectedly ramped up the difficulty. I was back in the large group for this one, and we were supposed to clue "Dr. Nautilus". The nautilus wasn't too bad, though it generated a lot of similar guesses, like "snail". Cluing doctor, on the other hand, turned out to be hard. We first tried a red cross (four of us happened to be wearing red), but the guessing team compltely missed this. We then tried making a rod of Asclepius, but that didn't make it across either.
At this point the writing team took pity on us and relaxed the rules, allowing us to mime things. Some of us tried acting out a doctor's visit - tapping a knee to check for a reflex, and so on. No dice. We dragged L in, who cooperated by miming her actions during the opening skit. No dice. We made a giant letter N, which I think finally got the point across.
We later learned that the guessing team had completely forgotten about kickoff, which was pretty much the only time Dr. Nautilus had shown up. Oops.
After having completed the five tasks, we were led to the back of 26-100, where we used our swordfish to cut through an impentrable kelp forest (represented by green crepe ribbons hanging from the corridor's ceiling). We entered the stage to see some of the writing team seated in the audience, waiting for us. The Kraken was there too, in front of a table with a bunch of "rocks" on it. She grudgingly admitted we had proven our worth and were allowed to take one stone, but only one of them was the Nautilode stone we were searching for. An assistant came up and made some "fine tuning" to our detector from the workshop metameta, taking the tangrams and giving us a metal detector. I took it and sure enough, only one of the stones reacted. We had finished the Hunt!
As I've said before, I like the idea of making Hunt more accessible to teams. The first part of the Hunt being sort of self contained (in this case, the workshop) is great. I also liked that so many teams got to finish - a lot of effort goes into writing Hunt, and having more people experience it seems like a no-brainer. Opening up more aggressive hinting once the coin was found was a good way to accomplish this while maintaining fairness for the winner.
At wrapup, the writing team mentioned that part of the motivation for the easier School of Fish puzzles was to let more people experience the feeling of having solved a puzzle entirely by themselves. I personally think the really satisfying feeling is knowing you figured out some critical insight for a puzzle, and also getting to work on it with other people. If you're the only one who worked on it, you get the former by default but miss out on the latter. And in practice, having easier puzzles didn't mean I got to solo solve - there was a good chance someone else had already snapped up the puzzle and insta-solved it, or that a bunch of us were looking for something to work on and saw a fish puzzle at the same time.
On the other hand, I liked the other reason the writing team gave for the fish puzzles, which was publishing a book of them. Again, I like making Hunt available to more people, and this seems like a good way to do it. To be clear, I'm not advocating for dumbing down Hunt for the sake of accessibility, just figuring out what parts might be appealing to a broad audience and making them available.
On yet another hand, I had mixed feelings about the variety of puzzle difficulty - it's weird to have warmup-level puzzles like Eh? in the same event as in-depth puzzles like Image or the 10,000 Puzzle Pyramid. There seemed to be more uncertainty about how much work you'd actually have to do this year than in previous years, where I felt the difficulty was more even.
With one exception (I'm looking at you, Spotted Tower), the metas struck me as elegant and well written. Even the ones we got stuck on for long periods of time (Treasure Chest, Ocean metameta, but I'm not sure about Atlantis metameta since I didn't look at it) were obvious in retrospect and more of a "how could we have missed that cluing" rather than "this needed more playtesting".
I think the weakest part of this Hunt was endgame. By the time we got to it, I wasn't really in the mood for another couple hours of activity - I had expected to be done. It's unclear to me whether endgame played a part in selecting the winning team, but the mere possibility that it did raises an eyebrow. Both the friendship and teamwork tasks would have benefitted from a larger team, and getting through endgame faster because you have a bigger team seems unfair. If the task difficulty scales with team size, that just moves the problem - then you argue over whether the scaling was fair or if it favored smaller/bigger teams. Better to avoid this altogether with a shorter endgame (or one that clearly does not influence the winner).
I did like the idea that the team as a whole could do activities together, and ones with easily tweakable difficulty. I'm just not convinced about the execution.
Endgame felt artificial (I've heard rumors that it was tacked on at the last minute to extend the length of Hunt, but that seems like a poor justification), since the items we found earlier only came in use at the very end of endgame. I wouldn't have minded as much if their use had been interspersed (such as in last year's Hunt), since there'd be some feeling of wrapping up the story. As it was, the items felt superfluous.
Come to think of it, story was another thing that could be improved. The point of Hunt is puzzles, of course, but there's an extra bonus in my eyes if a story unfolds while the Hunt progresses. This year it didn't really feel like there was a story. IMHO having a good story makes for better memories. Perhaps the open structure of this year's Hunt made it harder to weave a story vs. one where rounds are released sequentially.
Speaking of story, I kept anticipating plot twists that never materialized. The progress system was named DEEP and during kickoff Dr. Nautilus mentioned that we'd have to keep going deeper to find the Nautilodestone. I was half-expecting an Inception twist.
When the 10,000 Puzzle Pyramid came up, I expected a plot twist that would make us do (similar?) puzzles again (maybe a mirror or parallel universe) so that we would actually reach 20,000 puzzles.
There was also the mystery sponsor, who I thought might turn out to be some plot-important thing (e.g. introduce a financial backer for our underwater expedition as we left the lab, but then it turns out they were also doing ______, which would cause problems when...). To my disappointment, the mystery sponsor turned out to only be the New England Aquarium. I mean, it is awesome they were a sponsor, it just seemed like such a wasted opportunity. I have no idea why they couldn't have been named during kickoff.
I liked the feeling of having anticipated (sort of) the theme and coming prepared. It didn't give me an advantage at all, but felt more fun to be prepared. Or maybe that's just my inner fish talking.
Note to self: Do a better job remembering to eat. I only ate three meals over the course of three days (a sandwich on Saturday and Sunday, then post-Hunt dinner).