Mystery Hunt 2010 is over
Metaphysical Plant found the coin at 5:50 AM yesterday, bringing the Hunt to a conclusion in just under 42 hours.
My Beginner's Luck teammates and I managed to put on a successful, fun, and widely enjoyed Mystery Hunt that didn't run too long. I rate it as a success on every scale except the one concerning the internal stress level due to the number of things that needed to be fixed or completed on Friday, but other Hunt teams assure me that we are not alone in this regard. I have a lot of things and people to be grateful for not letting this slip into disaster, but rather than try to list them all here, I am just going to thank my entire team now, and mention details where appropriate in subsequent posts.
I have enough to write about this Mystery Hunt that it will probably take me more than a month to get it all posted, and the comments on individual puzzles will mostly be held until we have those puzzles posted publicly so you can look at the puzzle while reading my thoughts about it. So today, I'm going to write about the theme, and another work I created independently from this Hunt.
The theme for Mystery Hunt 2010 came about as a combination of ideas that various members have suggested, so no one member can be said to be its author. Primarily, it was a combination of these ideas suggested in January and February 2009:
My Beginner's Luck teammates and I managed to put on a successful, fun, and widely enjoyed Mystery Hunt that didn't run too long. I rate it as a success on every scale except the one concerning the internal stress level due to the number of things that needed to be fixed or completed on Friday, but other Hunt teams assure me that we are not alone in this regard. I have a lot of things and people to be grateful for not letting this slip into disaster, but rather than try to list them all here, I am just going to thank my entire team now, and mention details where appropriate in subsequent posts.
I have enough to write about this Mystery Hunt that it will probably take me more than a month to get it all posted, and the comments on individual puzzles will mostly be held until we have those puzzles posted publicly so you can look at the puzzle while reading my thoughts about it. So today, I'm going to write about the theme, and another work I created independently from this Hunt.
The theme for Mystery Hunt 2010 came about as a combination of ideas that various members have suggested, so no one member can be said to be its author. Primarily, it was a combination of these ideas suggested in January and February 2009:
- The "Groundhog Day" concept by Dart (proposed January 24th in email) was based on the reliving-history effect of the movie of this name. Teams would solve a short hunt that would end with the coin not being where it should be, and this opens to them a somewhat longer Hunt where the original puzzles show up in altered forms, along with other puzzles, and then the coin STILL isn't found, and then a 3rd and maybe even a 4th iteration of the Hunt eventually leads to finding the coin. We decided against this because it seemed impractical to make such a large portion of the Hunt consist of puzzles that could be re-solved differently, and also maybe it would be boring for the solvers, but we liked other aspects of the idea, and this led to a variety of suggestions involving time travel changing history.
- "The Curious Hunt for Benjamin's Button" would involve revisiting past hunts in reverse chronological order. This was canadianpuzzler's suggestion, with projectyl 's suggestion of a name.
- zebraboy3 suggested pretending that the Hunt had been going on for 300 years and revisiting "highlights" of fictional past Hunts. This reminded me of the fictional opening of MIT in 1713 in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, and I suggested doing something with it, but we ended up going a different way.
- tinhorn2 suggested the "Chrononauts" hunt, based loosely on the card game, involving traveling around to fix problems in history, though this concept is certainly not limited to that game. This (with suggestions from several people) evolved into a theme where the opening ceremony would have been the introduction to the 2010 MIT Sudoku Championship, interrupted by one wild-haired time-traveler who realizes that history is broken. Teams would have to solve a first round of apparent sudoku puzzles (most of which, for the sake of variety, would turn out to be rather different things), and there would be a puzzle (perhaps similar to the ante-puzzles from 2006) revealing a historical change that caused the situation currently observed (such as BRAD SCHAEFER KILLED BY NINJAS) and a meta-puzzle revealing a way to fix the historical change (FLATTEN NINJAS' TIRES, preventing them from driving from New York to Cambridge to perform the evil deed). This in turn leads to another historical problem (why are there ninjas in New York?) and subsequently to its explanation (YAKUZA TAKES OVER MAFIA) and fix (not proposed). This chaining together of historical changes was not used, but it influenced the form the final theme took.
- I suggested the idea of creating "missing" rounds in past hunts, and specifically the idea of writing rounds for the Escape Pods (the only game component of Escape from Zyzzlvaria not used in a meta puzzle) and for the Cowardly Lion (the only major character not to be used as part of a metapuzzle answer). Not used was a suggestion to add another "matrix" round to the 2003 Hunt where every answer had to be modified by one of the methods provided by the Training puzzles of that hunt. It didn't seem good to repeat too much from actual past hunts, so this was combined with Zebraboy's idea to have past fictional hunts going back 300 years.
- zebraboy3 suggested that a Hunt involving revisiting past Hunts would have a runaround involving visiting the locations of the coins in those hunts.