Hunt '09 Recap, Part 1: Inner Zyzzlvaria
(Note: In this and subsequent posts I mention a lot of people either by name or by NPL nom. I am not going even try to LJ-link them, since that would take forever.)
The Kickoff Ceremony
Awesome. I stayed at HQ for the '08 kickoff and Hunted remotely in '04, '06, and '07, so this was only my second kickoff ceremony, and the first where I saw large numbers of people I actually knew. Good times.
Charity Work
Tyler, Tin, and I grabbed this one right away. That... may not have been the best plan, tying up three of the team's best solvers in a long, long slog. It probably would've gone a lot quicker if we'd spreadsheeted it, but by the time we realized it'd be time-consuming enough to justify that, we were almost done anyway. We did mess up at some point, giving us a message juuust wrong enough to thwart guesses as to what it was supposed to be ("Who's AMERICA'S PERSEUS?"), but Tyler got us back on track.
The Thin Red Line
I heard the title for this, said, "Oh, okay, this is our annual MTBA puzzle," and was told that no, this was based another Boston landmark with a red line. I don't think it ever occurred to us that it could be both.
Pluto Meta
I had the key insight on this one, after briefly following a close-but-wrong path (LOVE-INS has all the letters of VENUS except the U, EMIGRES has all the letters of MARS except A, REUNITES has all the letters of... well, it could be SATURN or URANUS, which is why I abandoned that path.) This being the first round, I made the false assumption that the icons at the top of the puzzle pages were needed as an ordering mechanism; someone else thought to sort the answers in planetary order, and the meta fell. Gabby (I think?) quickly crafted some slingshots out of mechanical pencils and rubber bands, and of course Dart and I just had to be the ones to present them to the traders (get it?).
The Plutonian Transport Agency
I looked at this one after others had done the work of identifying the cars. They had already figured out that the puzzle was related to street-sweeping dates; I pointed out that the flavortext gave a specific month and asked if they had tried using the dates in that month as an ordering mechanism, and boom.
Invasion of the Micronauts
Half the team stared at this for something like a half hour, with no luck. We hit upon the idea that we needed words that went with these words pretty quickly, but we never discovered the additional constraint. (Edit: Actually, I was mistaken. Cram did forward-solve this.) We did hit upon a ridiculously plausible alternate solution, though: if you make an inverted version of the grid and put it next to the first one, you can make PASSING B(Y), BIKINI T(O)P, LUCKY D(U)CK, HUNT PAR(T)Y, BIG KA(H)UNA, and DO NOTHING, for the smallness-related answer YOUTH. (Yeah, yeah, I know, there's plenty of other potential second halves that fit those enumerations, and we knew Evil Midnight would know better than to do something that unconstrained. But still.)
The ATM Meta
I contributed nothing of value here, instead going down a complete blind alley - since our first three answers were isograms (words that used no letter more than once), I was convinced we were dealing with letter banks (a very thematically appropriate form of wordplay that plays nice with isograms).
The Comedy Planet, Featuring Sid!
Vraal and I grabbed this, sat down, and bashed our way through fairly quickly, with Tin offering some input as well. I'm always a fan of puzzles that, at first glance, seem to ask stupidly impossible things ("Er, spell 'yvtugohyo' for me?") but end up being tractable ("It's got to be 'light bulb.' That B is probably going to be an O, so try shifting thirteen... yep, that looks like something you'd pronounce that way.").
The Apples in Stereo
I showed up just in time to watch /dev (I think) get the final a-ha! on this one. I keep missing the produce puzzles in the Hunt; I heard about The Greater Good in '05 just as it was being finished up, too.
Good Will, Mystery Hunting
Another one I saw right at the end, but this one I think I actually helped. We'd just called in the wrong answer DIRECTOR, and I (and maybe others?) said, "Wait. Maybe try the director of Good Will Hunting?"
The Amazing Juggling Troupe of Duckkon Undrum V
Whee, my first on-site Konundrum. Prior to Hunt, Wes, Tin, and I called dibs on this, but when it was released Wes was beat-boxing the drum lines for the muted Rock Band puzzle and Tin was deep into the booze algebra puzzle, so we wound up building our juggling troupe from scratch anyway. /dev was our conflicted kleptomaniac (and designated instruction reader), Ertch was our crybaby, Dart was our do-gooder (and shortly after being killed off in the duck/antiduck reaction, acted as a very amusing Cthulhu, although that may have just been due to our collective exhaustion), Vraal was our crazed cultist, and I was our grumpy jerk. Hours and hours (and one glitch that forced us to do the entire longest routine over again) later, we had our answer, and a sizable chunk of Phase 1 had fallen without us, including two or three metas.
Your So-Called Second Life
While we were off juggling, Julia had to install Second Life on my computer for this one. I'm still trying to get the cooties out.
When I got back from the Konundrum, I was in need of sleep, so I struck out for Liz's dorm, which several BL'ers used as crash space. (Liz is awesome. This must be said.) When I got back the next morning, the remaining Phase 1 metas had been solved and the board game had only just been completed; I later learned that due to some suboptimal planning on the team's part, the only people left to do the board game when the time came were very sleep-deprived, and the process took much, much longer than it could have. Moral for 2011: plan sleep shifts.
Rendezvous at Zyzzlvaria Alpha
A few minutes after I showed up, Foggy/Harold came to lead us to Zyzzlvaria Alpha, where we found Jenn/Captain Blastoid clutching her injured leg in a closet. (A space closet, I guess. I dunno.) We got the premise of Phase 2, and headed back toward our HQ. Amusingly, that path took us through the same open area as Foggy and a clearly uninjured Jenn, who were walking back to their HQ; I think one of us (Vraal?) may have called out to them and taunted them about this, but I don't remember.
The Kickoff Ceremony
Awesome. I stayed at HQ for the '08 kickoff and Hunted remotely in '04, '06, and '07, so this was only my second kickoff ceremony, and the first where I saw large numbers of people I actually knew. Good times.
Charity Work
Tyler, Tin, and I grabbed this one right away. That... may not have been the best plan, tying up three of the team's best solvers in a long, long slog. It probably would've gone a lot quicker if we'd spreadsheeted it, but by the time we realized it'd be time-consuming enough to justify that, we were almost done anyway. We did mess up at some point, giving us a message juuust wrong enough to thwart guesses as to what it was supposed to be ("Who's AMERICA'S PERSEUS?"), but Tyler got us back on track.
The Thin Red Line
I heard the title for this, said, "Oh, okay, this is our annual MTBA puzzle," and was told that no, this was based another Boston landmark with a red line. I don't think it ever occurred to us that it could be both.
Pluto Meta
I had the key insight on this one, after briefly following a close-but-wrong path (LOVE-INS has all the letters of VENUS except the U, EMIGRES has all the letters of MARS except A, REUNITES has all the letters of... well, it could be SATURN or URANUS, which is why I abandoned that path.) This being the first round, I made the false assumption that the icons at the top of the puzzle pages were needed as an ordering mechanism; someone else thought to sort the answers in planetary order, and the meta fell. Gabby (I think?) quickly crafted some slingshots out of mechanical pencils and rubber bands, and of course Dart and I just had to be the ones to present them to the traders (get it?).
The Plutonian Transport Agency
I looked at this one after others had done the work of identifying the cars. They had already figured out that the puzzle was related to street-sweeping dates; I pointed out that the flavortext gave a specific month and asked if they had tried using the dates in that month as an ordering mechanism, and boom.
Invasion of the Micronauts
Half the team stared at this for something like a half hour, with no luck. We hit upon the idea that we needed words that went with these words pretty quickly, but we never discovered the additional constraint. (Edit: Actually, I was mistaken. Cram did forward-solve this.) We did hit upon a ridiculously plausible alternate solution, though: if you make an inverted version of the grid and put it next to the first one, you can make PASSING B(Y), BIKINI T(O)P, LUCKY D(U)CK, HUNT PAR(T)Y, BIG KA(H)UNA, and DO NOTHING, for the smallness-related answer YOUTH. (Yeah, yeah, I know, there's plenty of other potential second halves that fit those enumerations, and we knew Evil Midnight would know better than to do something that unconstrained. But still.)
The ATM Meta
I contributed nothing of value here, instead going down a complete blind alley - since our first three answers were isograms (words that used no letter more than once), I was convinced we were dealing with letter banks (a very thematically appropriate form of wordplay that plays nice with isograms).
The Comedy Planet, Featuring Sid!
Vraal and I grabbed this, sat down, and bashed our way through fairly quickly, with Tin offering some input as well. I'm always a fan of puzzles that, at first glance, seem to ask stupidly impossible things ("Er, spell 'yvtugohyo' for me?") but end up being tractable ("It's got to be 'light bulb.' That B is probably going to be an O, so try shifting thirteen... yep, that looks like something you'd pronounce that way.").
The Apples in Stereo
I showed up just in time to watch /dev (I think) get the final a-ha! on this one. I keep missing the produce puzzles in the Hunt; I heard about The Greater Good in '05 just as it was being finished up, too.
Good Will, Mystery Hunting
Another one I saw right at the end, but this one I think I actually helped. We'd just called in the wrong answer DIRECTOR, and I (and maybe others?) said, "Wait. Maybe try the director of Good Will Hunting?"
The Amazing Juggling Troupe of Duckkon Undrum V
Whee, my first on-site Konundrum. Prior to Hunt, Wes, Tin, and I called dibs on this, but when it was released Wes was beat-boxing the drum lines for the muted Rock Band puzzle and Tin was deep into the booze algebra puzzle, so we wound up building our juggling troupe from scratch anyway. /dev was our conflicted kleptomaniac (and designated instruction reader), Ertch was our crybaby, Dart was our do-gooder (and shortly after being killed off in the duck/antiduck reaction, acted as a very amusing Cthulhu, although that may have just been due to our collective exhaustion), Vraal was our crazed cultist, and I was our grumpy jerk. Hours and hours (and one glitch that forced us to do the entire longest routine over again) later, we had our answer, and a sizable chunk of Phase 1 had fallen without us, including two or three metas.
Your So-Called Second Life
While we were off juggling, Julia had to install Second Life on my computer for this one. I'm still trying to get the cooties out.
When I got back from the Konundrum, I was in need of sleep, so I struck out for Liz's dorm, which several BL'ers used as crash space. (Liz is awesome. This must be said.) When I got back the next morning, the remaining Phase 1 metas had been solved and the board game had only just been completed; I later learned that due to some suboptimal planning on the team's part, the only people left to do the board game when the time came were very sleep-deprived, and the process took much, much longer than it could have. Moral for 2011: plan sleep shifts.
Rendezvous at Zyzzlvaria Alpha
A few minutes after I showed up, Foggy/Harold came to lead us to Zyzzlvaria Alpha, where we found Jenn/Captain Blastoid clutching her injured leg in a closet. (A space closet, I guess. I dunno.) We got the premise of Phase 2, and headed back toward our HQ. Amusingly, that path took us through the same open area as Foggy and a clearly uninjured Jenn, who were walking back to their HQ; I think one of us (Vraal?) may have called out to them and taunted them about this, but I don't remember.