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Part 1 | Part 2
I might have gotten a little bit carried away in my write up of this year’s Mystery Hunt. So much so that I might have accidentally gone over the word limit for a single LJ post. In my defense, the longest hunt on record deserves the longest writeup on record...
The 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt
Preparation
Lots of excitement in the month leading up to hunt and also a lot to do, this because we were adding people to our roster and lots of things to sort out to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible
Just for the Halibut (out neighboring team for many years) was losing its captain (to IIF) and as he was the only member of the team who was actually local, it seemed unlikely that they would be able to continue to compete in their existing form. They’d approached me in the Spring about the possibility of a merge and over the summer we’d hammered out the details (not so much a merge as a friendly takeover or adoption).
Ken (their co-captain) wasn't sure exactly how many of his teammates would join us (as some were likely to migrate to different teams) but he wanted to find a place where they would be welcome and should they wish to do so, able to continue hunting together. This we could provide!
In an effort to ease the transition we made an effort to mingle our teams as much as possible in the year leading up to hunt. We went out to dinner after BAPHL 5 and participated in BAPHL 6 as a merged team. As there were a few members of IdM who were similarly interested in joining us (in desperation we’d merged mid-mysteryhunt in 2012) we similarly tried to do things with them (this was significantly easier as they were local which meant we spent most of the Spring and Summer working together on the Black Letter Game)
The result of all of this was that I had quite a lot more people than usual signed up to participate in Mystery hunt and as the time drew closer and more and more people came out of the woodwork I was really starting to worry that we might have TOO many people. Of course as my usual teammates seemed to be bailing left right and center (or coming down with the flu), had we not had so many new people I would have been worrying that we would once again find ourselves with less than ten people!
(In the end we had 26 full time participants, 8 casual solvers who showed up for a couple of hours over the course of the weekend and a handful of remote people who, true to form, I paid absolutely no attention to at all once hunt started. I assuaged my conscience on this by mailing each of them one of the team code wheels ahead of time so that they would feel loved and appreciated despite my callous disregard.)
Meanwhile my team was starting to get excited about hunt. In an effort to give the remotes a fighting chance, we’d opted for a team IRC channel, and Wednesday evening it was a happening place with people logging in from all over to make sure that it worked for them.
The e-mails had been flying fast and furious as well. I’d received a snail mail letter from “Enigma Valley Investment and Loan,” announcing a meeting about our new Mystery Hunt account and speculation was rampant. There was also an “inserted note” from an AHP about a special meeting that we should be sure at attend after the formal presentation. As this was clearly an EVIL bank, was this year’s hunt to have some sort of occupy theme?
We were also getting paranoid, rccap had spotted a suspicious looking ad in The Tech for a copy of the “2012 Beef-in-Review” publication and while MIT did have a beef club, no mention of a prior issue of this publication could be found anywhere on the web. As it was only $5-, we were clearly meant to acquire a copy so he sent off an e-mail and the rest of us tried to figure out how this could possibly be related to anything.
Thursday
As I’d been piling supplies in the hallway for the better part of a month, I was packed and ready by the time Thursday arrived. I’d also spent the entirety of Wednesday evening at the grocery store to acquire food for the team so the fridge was packed tight and waiting only for some prep cooking to be done.
I’d exchanged a few e-mail with Kyle who was clearly panicking about food and as he and a few of the other non-local Halibut had offered to throw some money into the pot if I picked up extra snack foods, I made one last run to Sam’s club when I got out of work. (Extra safety!toothpicks also dutifully acquired.)
As rccap had finished his PhD, his apartment was no longer quite as conveniently located as it had been so it was necessary to rethink a lot of our food plans. Fortunately he wasn’t finished with MIT completely and thanks to his new role as a post-doc we still had access to a lot of LNS resources. Most importantly there were a handful of refrigerators where we could stash things. As there was also a fairly nice lounge with a sink and high table, my sandwich assembly needs were taken care of and as such the plan for the afternoon was to take care of all the prep cooking.
I had cleverly recruited Jess as my helper and we got right to work! The lunch menu consisted of three different types of sandwiches (curried chicken salad, turkey with cheese, and hummus with veggies). While the later two didn’t require any prep work, I had two giant packages of chicken that needed to be turned into chicken salad so we got right to work cooking them. The other lunch time food option consisted of tomato, mozzarella and basil pasta salad so several packages of pasta needed to be cooked and separated into containers. Quickly evident that my usual pasta pan was not up to the task so off to the basement to fetch the giant lobster pot. One day I hope to cook an actual lobster in it but in the meantime it comes in very useful anytime I have to cook for a crowd!
While the food cooked we loaded the car. Quickly evident that it wasn’t all going to fit, at least not if I wanted Jess to ride with me. Good thing Mike would be caravanning down with us, just unfortunate that he had already filled Jess’s spot in his car (which amusingly enough was actually her car) with odds and ends.
In the end we got it all to fit and as the clock struck 6pm we were off! (Note to self: You’ve driven Jess’ car, it can only exceed 60 MPH on a downhill -- very impressed that Mike managed to keep up.)
As Just for the Halibut was a team comprised mostly of non-locals, most of them would arrive on Thursday evening and as such they had a tradition of going out for a team dinner on Thursday evening. As this seemed like an excellent tradition I was all for it and we had an 8pm reservation for 24 at the Cambridge Brewing Company.
Made it to Boston just after 7pm, snagged some excellently located street parking and headed up to team HQ to discover a whole slew of people already in attendance. Made a brief attempt to move some tables around as we waited for everyone else to show up but quickly evident that there were too many people in the room for said attempt to result in anything other than chaos.
Off to CBC with sauergeek leading the pack and had a nice meal. A bit disconcerting to realize that for the first time I didn’t know the names of everyone on my team and (while I’d brought sticky labels just in case) quite unwilling to admit that we might have grown big enough to need name tags. As such quite determined that I would learn everyone’s name and by the time dinner was over I’d managed it. (As almost everyone I didn’t know had made it to dinner, this worked out really well and I only had two more names that I had to learn over the course of the weekend. More confusingly, I swear that one of the people who went to dinner (Owen) never made it back for the rest of the weekend. Did something happen? I know I’m a terrible captain to only be noticing this now, but has anyone thought to check to make sure he’s still alive?)
People scattered when dinner was over but as just enough made it back to team HQ to help with setup I was content. Unloaded the cars and then started moving tables around in earnest. As I was quite determined that people were not to sit in solitary rows staring at the backs of each other’s heads, doubled up each row of tables. (Normally we triple them up but this year there would be too many people in the room to waste that much floor space.)
We were definitely missing bubblebabble and his handy little cart by the time we finished dragging load after load after load up from the car.
Due to our expanded team we’d asked for two rooms this year (and as between us, our three teams had had four rooms the year before, the room karma gods smiled on us and our wish was granted). As I didn’t want the team to fragment into separate factions, I was bound and determined that all solving would take place in our primary HQ and that the secondary room would be used for sleeping and storage. As we were looking to pack a lot of people into our main room, removing all unnecessary items was key in my mind to making everyone fit.
While Mike set up his “command station” in the corner of the room and dealt with tech issues (printers, wireless, etc), Kyle and Karthic started moving tables around for me. The other key advantage to having two rooms was that we could bring in extra tables. (Interestingly despite bringing in 4 or 5 tables from the extra room we only needed 2 extra chairs. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised as usually one of the key features of our setup is the giant stack of extra chairs - this year we actually used them all.)
Nearly 2am by the time we were done with setup and all very pleased that we hadn't waited until the next morning. Mike, Jess and Alex had volunteered to sleep in HQ while the rest of us slept next door but in the end Kyle decided that he would just stay up all night and go to sleep come morning (is it really a good idea to start with the sleep deprivation BEFORE hunt begins?)
Friday
Woken briefly in the middle of the night by a very confused custodian. While this wasn’t a problem, he seemed upset that facilities never bothers to warn them about Mystery Hunt weekend. He also seemed a bit confused by the sight of Alex in an eye patch and kimono.
Feeling unaccountably guilty that Kyle had stayed up all night so awake by 6:30am and off to visit the secret Stata Showers. Some temptation to just walk there in my pj’s (after all, it was Mystery Hunt) but some remnant of pride that hadn’t yet been eviscerated by the ravages of hunt halted me at the last moment and I threw a coat on. By the time I made it into the basement I was pleased that I had as MIT was bustling with early morning employees and I would have felt kind of awkward in my froggy pj’s. At least with the coat I could pretend they were sweatpants.
The shower turned out to be surprisingly decent for a secret public shower in the basement of a random building and refreshed I headed back to HQ to relieve Kyle. As it was still early and I was feeling lazy, opted for a ride on a conveniently located elevator. Not at all impressed when the doors of said elevator opened and I found myself standing on an outside street. Damn you Stata Center. A mad dash for building 26, so much for being warm and cozy. Note to self, don’t ever take that elevator again!
Fed the meter, checked e-mail and puttered around for a bit. (I was even a responsible captain and looked over the slides from the optional safety briefing I had failed to attend the evening before, ok so maybe not THAT responsible a captain.) Snagged Jess when she got up and headed up to the LNS lounge where the two of us proceeded to mass produce two vats of pasta salad and a giant heap of sandwiches for vegetarians and carnivores alike. (Hummus and vegetables count as a sandwich filling? Should I at least add cheese?)
Food assembled I sent it out to refrigerate in my car and fed the meter.
Back at HQ the team was starting to assemble and I was pleased to discover that I still remembered everyone’s name from the night before. (See?!?!?! We don’t need no stinking name tags!)
Entertained a few visitors as we waited for kick off, tacotortoise stopped by to shoot best_ken_ever with a nerf gun (alas best_ken_ever wasn’t in the room at the time so Kyle was forced to take one for the team) and a member of Death From Above came to see me to inquire about the responsibilities that running DASH entailed. They were concerned that DASH 5 might not make it to Boston and considering the wisdom of agreeing to run it. Too bad their HQ is locked away behind card access doors, otherwise I’d pull a Julia and visit them at 3am on Saturday morning when they’re at their weakest and as such unlikely to say no!
Left a few people (who didn’t want to brave the cold) behind to guard the room and headed over to Rockwell Cage for kickoff. Actually ended up chatting with dalryaug (captain of Luck and my head puzzle guy for WARTRON:BOSTON) on the walk over. Gave him one of our official team code wheels after first making him promise that he wouldn’t use it to win this thing! I need him!
Rockwell Cage turned out to be a gym building. A table and two projectors were set up on the floor for the presentation by Enigma Valley Investment and Loan and hunters lined the bleachers. Quite pleased to see that Codex was out in force protesting. Their actual signs seemed to be in disagreement about what the actual issue was, but the point is that they were protesting something.
Checked in my team, received a complimentary first aid kit, (“this is not a puzzle”) and found a comfortable spot on the floor from which to observe the festivities.
Eventually a well dressed gentleman called us to order and explained why we were there. The gist of his explanation was that after winning the coin at last year’s Mystery Hunt, Manic Sages had decided that they deserved a tropical vacation (apparently as there are rather a lot of them they hadn’t been able to fund said vacation from the team kitty) so they had sold/invested/traded the coin to Enigma Valley Investment and Loan and as such we were now all account holders.
The banker went on the explain the terms of our account (with a 50 year minimum waiting period before we could make a withdraw, they weren’t exactly what I would call good terms). As he talked a powerpoint presentation flickered behind him, someone had altered the slides and they begged us to stay behind after the presentation.
Who were we to argue with the mysterious hacker? Curious we remained seated and no sooner had the banker departed than Alyssa P. Hacker (apparently a well known figure from one of the MIT courses) came out from behind the curtain to talk to us. This was a disaster, an emergency, Mystery Hunt as we knew it was in danger and there was only one solution; a bank heist! It was up to us to infiltrate Enigma Valley Investment and Loan’s security system and steal back the coin!
We had our task and with the puzzle server not set to go live for another hour (no doubt as a safety precaution to insure innocent people weren’t trampled beneath a wave of frantic hunters) we headed leisurely back to HQ. Fed the meter, liberated the sandwiches, dealt with the sudden and unexpected failure of our IRC server to deal with so many logins from the same IP address (ivo_b set up a new one for us on a private server on a moments notice) and were just generally ready to go when 1:30 rolled around.
E-mail from hunt HQ, they were having technical difficulties and the hunt would go live at 2pm, tried to refrain from frantically pressing reload on the page and entertained ourselves by taking an official team photo.
Time ticked slowly by and then all of a sudden with a great rush of energy it was 2pm! Grabbed a set of progress cards and started writing out puzzle titles for the board as my teammates dove in.
Eleven minutes later, just as I finished arranging the cards on the board, someone shouted out an answer, we had our first solve! The first round of puzzles were meant to look like files on the bank’s server and one of the files (entitled PASSWORD REMINDER) was clearly the meta. As each of the sub-puzzles featured a randomly shaped grid into which to input your answer it seemed certain that we would be overlaying them on the main grid when we were done. As people were hard at work on all of the puzzles, rather than interjecting myself into the process I cut out each of the indicated shapes in preparation for the answers.
By the time I finished we had two more answers and it was clear not only that we were looking for people’s names but also that the number of boxes on each puzzle indicated the number of letters in the solution.
I glanced at jagheterlelle in horror. We were expecting to be better than usual thanks to the infusion of new blood, but we weren’t expecting to be this much better. What if we were to accidentally win? Nightmare scenarios of trying to write a Mystery Hunt while simultaneously running WARTRON:BOSTON flashed through my head and from the look on her face she was facing the same fears.
She later admitted that she leapt on the opportunity to do a run around (THE THOMAS CROWN SCARE) for the simple reason that it got her out of the room and away from all of the successful puzzle solving.
The remaining puzzles (and the meta) fell surprisingly quickly and before we knew it we were on to the "real" first round of the hunt. Apparently Enigma Valley Investment and Loan had recruited a crew of experts to design their security system and it was up to us to convince this same team of experts to help us thwart the security system they’d designed.
First up was Danny Ocean (famous for this casino heists) and strangely enough in order to convince him we had to solve some puzzles. We dove in and almost immediately hit a wall. These were hard! (I’m not above admitting that I gave a sigh of relief, it wasn’t that we were suddenly miraculously good at puzzle solving, rather the introductory puzzles had been fairly straightforward. This was more like the experience I expected, banging our heads into walls and grinding along with no real progress to speak of. Now it felt like a Mystery Hunt!)
Here I should take a moment to say that as someone who has done a Mystery Hunt with a team of five I was really pleased to see that Manic Sages had chosen to start things off with an introductory round. I know that in our first year we would have loved this sort of a kindler/gentler introduction to hunt. I’ve written about it before but morale wasn’t exactly high that first year and a tractable little mini-hunt probably would have padded the initial shock. So thank you Sages for adding that element even if in this particular year it caused me some undue panic.
As I’m actually only ever interested in spacial logic puzzles tackled RANDOM WALK with the help of Dennis and Kyle.
These turned out to be a series of math mazes where you had to use the given numbers to create a path through each of the grids. Quickly apparent that these particular mazes were HARD! Managed the first couple (small ones) before discovering that despite being larger the ones with holes in them were actually easier to do by hand. As Kyle was busy writing a little program to solve them (and the ones without the holes were easier for his program to understand) this worked out well.
Each of the puzzles featured one or two sections of colored blocks the shape and color of which corresponded to a larger grid. Said grid was divided into 2x3 cells which even without the flavor text strongly suggested braille.
As I’m trying to get better about not feeling like I have to finish every step in its entirety before moving on to the synthesis stage of a puzzle, I started filling in the final grid and narrowing down our letter options as we went along. As such quickly realized that we either doing something very wrong or we weren’t dealing with just simple braille letters but rather extended braille. Suspicious, we carried on, after all we’re fallen afoul of the extended braille trap before, it’s just feels so messy.
Eventually we arrived at the phrase “trail following insect” followed by a bunch of garbage that we eventually realized was the extended braille method of saying (3). To quote rccap, “Holy shit, for the first time ever, using extended braille was actually the right thing to do!”
Many hours had passed with me nearly completely oblivious to the comings and goings of my teammates as I worked on that puzzle so a bit guiltily I resumed my captain’s duties once we were done.
Fortunately my team is used to such neglect and they’d sent two (well dressed) people to a live casino event around 7pm. (In the end the choice of of who was determined based on the availability of outfits as Matt was far too tall for the dress that jagheterlelle had picked out for him.)
As inkmark had taken care of the dinner order while I was distracted not actually all that much to feel guilty about.
The dinner in question was Indian takeout and as I had cleverly sent out a google-form to my teammates earlier in the week asking what kind of food items they were interested in, I’d like to think it wasn’t all that hard an order to put together.
As the form in question asked for preferences on both Friday night’s dinner (Indian food) and Saturday night’s (pizza) I should note that we’re a very polarized team on the topic of mushrooms and should we ever need to split in half I think the mushroom question will prove a handy dividing line.
Indeed almost every respondent to the form had something, either positive or negative to say about mushrooms. Apparently there can be no middle ground.
I regret to inform you pro-mushroom types that I’m going with the anti-mushroom faction and you’ll have to find your own captain.
Mushrooms or not, dinner was tasty and well received.
Spent some portion of the evening taking care of various captain’s duties. Updated the solve board, took out the garbage and dealt with the issue of a pungent odor in our sleeping room. Fun times!
Saturday
Our next live event was slated for midnight and as everyone else seemed happy with what they were working on, rccap and I decided to go. Said event was a DESSERT PARTY and upon arrival we were handed a selection of “tasty” snacks. Said items included a caesar salad and an assortment of what turned out to be hostess (or at least look-alike products as otherwise Manic Sages really would have had to mortgage the coin to buy the twinkies).
Made ourselves comfortable on the floor with people from some other teams and quickly discovered that each of the items came with a napkin that featured a letter. It seemed that there were two letters per food item and between the group of us we were quickly able to acquire them all.
The salad plate had a line of text on the bottom which when caesar shifted (so glad I brought an official team code wheel) told us that the “INITIAL OF FOOD BECOMES A”. (For example in the case of the twinkies we would shift the T to an A and then using the same shift find a new value for the letter pairs we were given.) Once we’d done this to the letters it seemed to give us an answer phrase of “WAIT VS GO.
While we weren’t the only group to come up with this answer phrase it wasn’t at all what the hunt organizers were looking for and nobody seemed to have any better ideas. There was some confusion as to one of the food items, while we knew it was a Hostess item, we weren’t entirely clear what it was called, was it a dingdong? a hoho? a yodel? a swiss roll? or something else entirely? Even the internet wasn’t all that clear on the issue, apparently this particular confection had something of a clouded provenance being passed along and re-branded by one distributor after another. Event organizers unwilling to specify just insisting that everything was a Hostess product (while not coming right out and SAYING the word Hostess of course).
Everyone in agreement that the ordering was set for us (defined by the order in which we had been handed each treat) but we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Since WAIT VS GO clearly wasn’t the answer (a few teams had tried calling it in) maybe it was an instruction? A suggestion? Were they asking us to make a decision? A few of the groups decided they’d had enough and headed back to their respective HQ’s but I was willing to play this out. What would they do if we just sat down and refused to leave as one of the options seemed to be suggesting?
Made ourselves comfortable at a table to wait it out.
This was apparently not the action that the event organizers had in mind and eventually they chivied us from the room so that they could lock up and a whole bunch of us found ourselves abandoned in the stairwell. OK, so that hadn’t been the right approach, now what?
Batted around ideas as a group for awhile and tried a few more things but no real traction. As we’d been there for over an hour at this point decided we were done. Clearly there was something else going on here. Kind of depressing to head home from a live event without having solved it, and frustrating that the people running the event weren’t willing to do anything other than hint Hostess again and again.
As we’d sent two people to a casino night a few hours earlier and they too had returned empty handed this looked like a bad sign for the live events.
Back at team HQ we discovered that a giant bag of cut up photographs had been acquired in our absence (JIGSAW PUZZLE). These pieces had been dumped in a heap in the middle of a table and a few people were hard at work trying to assemble them. As putting together a jigsaw puzzle seemed more relaxing than any of the other options, I made myself comfortable and dove in.
Quite nice to have a task that involved ones hands but not an awful lot of ones mind as it meant that we could chat amicably without distracting our attention from the puzzle -- which was probably exactly what we needed. Not everyone working on this particular puzzle of course and quite amusing to see the look on Mark’s face when he glanced up for the first time in hours and took in the pile of puzzle pieces for the first time.
As we worked it was quickly evident that each of the puzzles were cut in the same pattern and all fairly certain that each one would turn out to be missing a piece or two. It would be many hours (and already daylight) before we managed to assemble enough of the puzzles to complete the solve, but we were right and it was nice to have something so straightforward (albeit time consuming). In the end there were 49 puzzles each with 49 pieces - many of which were a variation on the color brown. Fortunately we were able to assemble enough of the puzzles to extract the answer and could ignore the final pile of nearly identical brown bits.
I wasn’t actually around for the final solve, this because while I’m allowed to stay up as late as I want on Saturday night, my team is very adamant that I go to bed at reasonable hour on Friday. (While most people probably wouldn’t consider 4am to be a “reasonable hour”, I finally caved to pressure and like a recalcitrant child I was sent to bed.)
Dragged myself out of bed mid-morning, showered and then dragged Kyle up to the LNS lounge to help me produce the next round of sandwiches. While a novice sandwich maker compared to Jess, he caught on quickly and by the end had figured out the trick to creating a wrap that wouldn’t instantly fall apart.
My teammates all seemed pleased to see the sandwiches and with their ravenous hunger taken care of I was able to turn my attention to the puzzles that had opened up in the night. Amongst our new puzzles was a spacial logic one called PORTALS that involved solving 10 different types of spacial logic puzzle simultaneously.
I say simultaneously because each of the puzzles had a series of colored squares where the information from one puzzle got “ported” to the correspondingly colored puzzle. It looked fabulous (and as, based on the special rules it didn’t appear to be easily machine solvable, it was all MINE!)
Staked out a corner of a desk and started working and was soon joined by Tal and Supriya. As the room was feeling mighty crowded and we were going to want some room to spread out the different puzzles, borrowed rccap’s ID card and headed up to the LNS lounge where we proceeded to make ourselves quite comfortable at one of the big tables.
Some guilt that I had effectively abandoned my teammates, but not enough to make me do much about it. Did make the occasional trip downstairs (for refills on chips, bacon (a Saturday morning team tradition) and lemonade) but for the most part the three of us were quite happy to camp out at the table. Tal ended up leaving (or possibly just abandoning us) mid-afternoon and we snagged Dennis (with whom I had done the math grids the day before) to take her place.
As we needed to get Dennis up to speed anyway, this seemed like an excellent time to check our work so we printed out a clean copy of the puzzle and the three of us went back through what we had done so far. All in agreement with the steps that had gotten us thus far, we got back to work. As we were afraid of making a mistake, quickly determined that the best process was for us each to work individually on a small copy of the puzzle. When one of us found a way forward we would present it to the entire “committee” and only if we were all in agreement would we commit it to the master copy.
Daylight faded and still we worked. At one point the room was invaded by a number of our other teammates who were finding the craziness in our main HQ too overwhelming to work in. Alas, after many hours of mostly silence punctuated only occasionally by cries of discovery, I in turn found the new arrivals somewhat overwhelming and as such ended up fleeing back to our main HQ for awhile.
Dinner came and went (this time jagheterlelle took responsibility for placing the food order which was good as not only was the mushroom divide alive and well, it seemed unlikely that we could combine any two pizza toppings in a combination that more than one person would eat. Apparently at Camelot they have a “pizza solver” for just this reason. Enter the likes and dislikes of a group of people and it will tell you exactly how many and what kinds of pizza to order. Clearly we’re going to have to implement that for next year. )
Headed back upstairs to continue working on PORTALS once dinner was over as Dennis and Supriya were completely unwilling to commit anything to the master copy without the approval of the full committee.
Sunday
Supriya had originally intended to go home in time for dinner, and then by early evening, and then by midnight. In the end I don’t think she left until dawn but none of us were willing to walk away from this puzzle.
It had been slow going at first. You’d find one little thing, and then ten minutes later, another little thing but as the hours blurred together and the grids filled in, more and more things became dependent on each other and as such the puzzle was starting to yield bigger rewards for each incremental step.
Meanwhile as we got into the overnight hours, bathroom breaks were getting more interesting which is to say that somewhere around midnight I walked into the bathroom down the hall, flipped on the light and screamed in surprise to find a woman standing in front of me. Apparently she had been sleeping on the couch (why is there a couch in the bathroom?) and I’d woken her.
“OMG, I’m so sorry.”
I washed my hands and fled the bathroom as quickly as possible, turning off the light so she could go back to sleep on my way out.
I swear I mentioned it to Dennis and Supriya as I was quite confused by the whole thing but we’d forgotten all about it a few hours later when Supriya got up to use the bathroom. She came back in hysterical laughter. Apparently the woman was homeless and the two of them had had a bit of a conversation. Alas by this point Supriya’s brain was fried and she was suffering from severe sleep deprivation, the result of which was that when the woman told her that one day she’d have her own place and wouldn’t have to do this, Supriya’s only response was “I hear ya!” After that we resolved to use a different bathroom.
Somewhere around 3 or 4am we had a big breakthrough on the “snake” portion of PORTALS that sent a ripple effect through the rest of the puzzles nearly closing out “creek”, “norinori” and “corral”. As this had filled in large sections of real estate I decided that it was probably worth looking to see if we had enough data to extract a solution. As the rules of each puzzle (even the slitherlink) clearly indicated how one was to differentiate between shaded (black) and empty (white) squares, it seemed worthwhile to see how the squares overlapped between the ten puzzles. We had been given a grid of letters the same size as the other grids so it seemed worthwhile to discover what would happen if one were to black out all of the squares that were black in any of the puzzle grids. Would there be any left over letters when we done? Yes, but nothing particularly interesting thought we did call in one or two of the things (sex) that were revealed.
As we felt like we were really close to the entire puzzle falling apart (or according to Supriya, coming together) we called down to team HQ. Was there someone less tired who could come take a look at where we were and help us think of a different extraction method?
Evan knocked on the door a few minutes later and we showed him what we had and where we were. He seemed surprised that the extraction method I’d tried hadn’t proven more useful but didn’t have a whole lot else to offer us and as he had a puzzle that he was really interested in cracking we thanked him for his time and sent him on his way. Ken came up soon after and we roped him in a bit more effectively.
Supriya had finally given in to common sense (or at least to the realities of the dawning day) and headed home but Dennis and I were unwilling to let it go. As extraction attempts weren’t getting us anywhere we decided to try a brute force attempt. As “statue park” was probably the least completed of all of the puzzles the three of us turned our attention to it. The rules of the puzzle called for placing 12 pentominoes into the grid such that each was used exactly once, none of them touched, and all the white spaces surrounding them were connected.
There was a little bit of work done in the top left corner of the puzzle, enough that not every shape would fit there and by comparing the results of what each would do to the corresponding puzzles, we felt confident that only one of the pieces could possibly fit there.
Using this new information we pushed forward. “Snake” fell almost instantly and a few of the other puzzles started to follow suit. We moved back and forth, from one puzzle to the next, propagating the information and feeling strangely hopeful. Alas it was not to be, and we came up hard against an inconsistency. Somewhere we’d introduced an error and while we had a series of photographs to provide us with some versioning information, there was no way to tell where the error had crept in.
Crestfallen we turned our attention back to the extraction. We’d spent a LOT of time working on this puzzle and we’d gotten pretty far, there had to be some way to salvage a solution.
Word had gone out earlier in the day that hunt HQ was willing to give hints as it was already quite clear that hunt was proving harder than expected (indeed a few of our teammates had friends amongst the Sages and those friends had been by to visit earlier. Apparently we were only one meta behind the lead teams and as we’d only solved the opening round and Danny Ocean, that was a frightening thought).
Put in a request for a hint and very pleased when someone showed up to help us a little while later. Not much hope that there was any way that he could help us correct our error so focused instead on what we had to do to extract a solution. Apparently we were more tired than we thought we were as the answer (to the extraction method) had been staring us in the face. The word grid featured grey cells in the same locations as the colored cells in the other grids and the letters inside of them clearly told us to “CAESAR SHIFT BY TOTAL BLACKS ONLY USE IF ODD”. Wow, I feel like a moron for missing that.
Worse, we didn’t have nearly enough of the grids accurately filled in to actually follow the instructions. Heartbroken we stared at each other. Three people had worked for 14 solid hours and we had nothing.
Demoralized we called it a night (or a morning as it was past dawn). Back in the room I handed PORTALS to jagheterlelle with strict instructions that I was never to see it again and then I headed to bed where despite my desires to the contrary I proceeded to continue trying to solve it in my sleep.
Four hours later I sat straight upright from a dead sleep. I had an idea! Threw on clothes and raced into the other room where I found rccap and Steph between me and my puzzle. Resisted the urge to rip it away from them and tried not to cry when they insisted on asking me questions about it rather than just letting me see it so that I could try my idea.
“We know what to do with it!” they told me excitedly. “Yeah, I know,” I told them, “there’s an error and we have no idea where.”
Printed out a clean copy of the puzzle and took it back to an earlier state when we were confident about what we’d done. (Is it sad that I could do that from memory? And probably still can?)
Gifted them with a copy of the data so that they could see if they could get any further, and then, as I was entirely single minded about what I wanted to do and so fixated that I couldn’t even stand the idea of talking to people, fled to rccap’s office where I proceeded to spend the next three hours putting my idea into practice.
As I was quite determined that we be able to salvage something from all the work we’d done, I’d printed out several copies of the letter grid and one by one I went through each of the other puzzles and recorded how many blacks, whites and unknowns we had for each square on the grid.
Once I had the data recorded, I went through and figured out how many blacks each cell could have. Once I had that number I did the appropriate caesar shifting and the result was a list of every possible letter value for each cell.
While it told us to “only use if odd”, we hadn’t been sure if this meant that you only shifted the cells with an odd number of blacks or if you completely disregarded the letter in them but now that I had worked out a list of all of the possible values it seemed certain that the you disregarded them completely. (There was one section of the grid that we’d managed to fill in on all of the puzzles and the result was a series of 7 cells only one of which turned out to contain a letter, an “L” -- you would have had complete gibberish had you tried to keep the unshifted letters.)
This was unfortunate as while we could easily have forced a computer to search for words if we knew that every cell had to contain a letter, telling a computer that a cell was one of two or three letters or nothing at all was a bit trickier and while I consulted a number of (both puzzling and programming) experts on the team nobody could think of a way to do it.
All that work for nothing.
Recognizing that there was little else that could be done and not wanting anyone else to suffer the same frustration as the tiniest of mistakes was enough to destroy everything, I wandered back downstairs and left a helpful message attached to the PORTALS card on the progress board. “Do not attempt.”
Mike, Jess and Ross had made sandwiches in my absence so helped myself to a curried chicken salad one and looked around to see what I had missed.
Talk about a dereliction of duty, I’d effectively ignored my team for the last 24 hours. Guilt ridden I set about getting us back on track. Updated the solve board, double checked the solutions wall, picked up trash and took out both the garbage and recycling.
While I’d like to think I’d done a pretty good job of organizing food (particularly the platters of lunchtime sandwiches), I (and everyone else), had expected the hunt to end around noon on Sunday and as such we were starting to run out of things. While there was still plenty of tea, we were running low on drinks so I gave Alex rccap’s ID card and sent him up to the lounge to make two more gallons of lemonade. While it wouldn’t last long it was something at least.
Amused to note the spice puzzle that someone had left laying out on the table. Clearly this was Manic Sages answer to the white powder puzzle of two years ago. (Lots of little baggies of pot instead of cocaine.)
We’d solved the Danny Ocean meta at some point (though not with the use of a grid as subsequent hints to all teams would later suggest) and had received an invitation from Manic Sages to come complete a “training module”. The invitation called for six team members to visit building 24 at an appointed time to participate in a physical puzzle (apparently a few of our teammates had taken part in a different training module earlier the same morning).
Since I was looking a little demoralized, rccap suggested I go, so with inkmark, Mike S, Evan, Ken and Sean in tow I led the way to building 24. (How convenient that we were heading to almost the same room as IdM had occupied the year before, useful because it was cold out and I knew an indoor method of getting there.)
Given a sheet of paper that explained the rules of the activity we were about to participate in. Apparently one of our teammates had to elude a series of guards. Fortunately these guards had a very predictable pattern of movement so we merely had to figure out where each guard would be at each point in time and make sure that our teammate never came within their line of sight.
Did some initial strategizing as we waited but hard to come up with more than a very basic outline of a plan until we saw what we were dealing with. Fortunately we didn’t have long to wait and soon enough we were led upstairs to a small classroom where a grid had been drawn out on the floor in colored tape. The entrance and exit of the maze was clearly marked and once our teammate exited his task was to ring a bell (not provided) to summon all the guards to lunch.
All guards (and our player) were to move simultaneously. Guards would continue in a straight path until they encountered an obstruction at which point red guards would turn right and blue guards would turn left. Fortunately the guards were only paid to look at the end of their movement turn (which meant that they didn’t look up and see anything until after they had completed their turns -- this seemed like quite a large flaw in the security system.) The guards would only notice you if you were directly in their line of sight or in one of the eight spaces surrounding them.
We had planned to take turns going through the maze but ended up sending inkmark in first and he did such a good job (getting almost to the end before being noticed) that it just made sense to send him back in to retrace his steps.
Final solution involved having him move through the maze fairly quickly to a section of six blocks where by stepping through them in a particular order he could waste a little bit of time (necessary as we had to wait until the guard blocking the exit turned away) while simultaneously eluding the guard who was coming up behind him. We made it through on our third try and as I actually contributed to the solution I left feeling quite pleased with myself. How nice to not only succeed but to to have personally contributed to that success.
Kind of mind blowing to have a glimpse of the kind of manpower that Manic Sages possesses. They had six team members in that room (4 guards, a facilitator and a photographer) and all that those people had been doing (for who knows how long) was walking in circles as teams tried to sneak a person by them. My little team would never be able to sacrifice that many people to one cause for such a prolonged amount of time.
Back at HQ, Mike, Jess and Alex were preparing to leave. “What?!?!??!?!?! You’re leaving?!?!?!?! But it’s not over yet.” Apparently they were exhausted and as it seemed certain that it had to end at any moment they figured they might as well head home so they could sleep in their own bed. Losers!
Went back to poking at puzzles as they packed up and only just remembered to double check that Mike (who had moved my car on Friday afternoon) had given me back my keys. “Um, where is my car exactly?”
Manic Sages had started handing out “options” (though I couldn’t seem to stop calling them “buttkiss” thanks to last year’s hunt). They’d been trickling them out slowly as rewards for live events and the like but now the floodgates opened. A new e-mail from APH informed us that they’d be giving us 100 every hour (as we need 100 for a free solve that was effectively a free solve every hour, we looked around at each other in horror. Clearing Game Control was worried.)
Amused to note that there was a Mornington Crescent puzzle. (THE WORLD SERIES OF MORNINGTON CRESCENT. Glanced through it briefly and Karthik and I in complete agreement, it didn’t matter what it said, the ONLY possible answer was “Mornington Crescent”. Don’t they know how to play? (Actually having read the solution, I’m a bit concerned that at least one of the Sages thinks it’s a real game.)
Perhaps I’d spent too much time listening to rccap and sallythetimid muttering frantically to each other as they worked on TIME CONUNDRUM. (Apparently no ducks were harned in the making of this puzzle, rather for the first time we had “a duck conundrum that starts with no ducks, ends with no ducks, has no ducks created or destroyed at any point and yet, there are DUCKS!” Even better It was also the only time that one could fix the puzzle by adding more ducks!)
Amusingly, we had apparently called in an incorrect answer (RED HERRING) to this puzzle sometime on Saturday morning, this was particularly interesting because we hadn’t yet unlocked the puzzle when the call came through. This was also worrisome, particularly to a physicist like rccap, so worrying that he actually went ahead and called it in when the puzzle opened for the simple reason that he wanted to avoid a paradox. (Safety first!)
Maybe I had ducks on my mind, but at one point I wandered out into the hallway and encountered a time traveling duck who handed me a container of homemade ice cream sandwiches. (At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.) Apparently the difference between a good team and a great team is the availability of homemade ice cream sandwiches!
Getting on towards Sunday evening and people were still hard at work. (These puzzles were hard and each one of them seemed to have an extra layer even above the usual ridiculous layers of a typical hunt puzzle.) Morale not nearly as bad as I might have feared however. While it was slow going, we really were solving things and while speculation was rampant about when (if ever) this hunt was going to end, people seemed happy. As people also seemed like they were in it for the long haul, went about organizing something for dinner.
Opted for Chinese food as it is the one hunt standby that we hadn’t yet partaken in. Polled the room as to people’s preferences (“seriously you WANT to eat bean curd??!?!?!”) and placed an order. inkmark only had a few hours left before he had to leave so while I walked to the restaurant to pick up the food, he fetched his car, arriving at the restaurant to give me a ride back to campus at approximately the same time I emerged victorious with the food. (Which is to say, I ran into another duck in the hallway -- perhaps the lack of sleep was leading to delirium?)
Back to work when dinner was over, my first task to organize the progress board a little bit more effectively. We had a lot of puzzles that had a significant amount of work done on them. Clearly it was time take a second look at them. People broke up into groups and one by one the puzzles started to fall.
The free solves were continuing to pour in so a brief discussion as to how we best wanted to utilize them. The Indiana Jones round was split into three “adventures” each of which seemed to end with a mini-meta which in turn led to a super-meta. As we already had a few solves within the three rounds, this seemed like a good place to focus our attention. (Besides, we’d heard a rumor that no team had yet solved the super-meta so that seemed like the thing to do.)
There were a few puzzles within the three rounds that people had invested time and energy into and wanted to finish on their own, so we went through and labeled a bunch of the puzzles with a “no options” tag so we wouldn’t accidentally call one of those in (though we did request that people at least prioritize those so that we could work on the meta). The result was that between determined solvers and free answers, the rest of the Indiana Jones puzzles fell quickly.
Mildly concerned when best_ken_ever lost his silly putty in the light fitting and then risked life and limb trying to retrieve it. Not certain the provided first aid kit contained enough bandages for the carnage that seemed likely to ensue.
Also, why isn’t there any chocolate left?!?!?!? This is not OK, though it did cause me to remember that we still had cheese and sandwich supplies upstairs in the LNS lounge. “Do you guys want me to go get the last of the cheese?”
“YES!”
Alas it was not to be as neither rccap nor I in possession of his ID Card. Shit! Where was it? A quick call to Alex determined that he had accidentally taken it home with him, so much for the last of the team food supplies.
Took a quick look at SNAKE one of the three mini-metas in the Indiana Jones round. It seemed to be a simple snake logic puzzle (after PORTALS I certainly knew the rules to that kind) but while it seemed obvious that we were looking to plot the answers to the rest of the puzzles in the round on the grid, not quite sure where to start. I tried plotting out the letter frequencies in hopes that that might make it easier to find a starting place, but as there were at least 4 of each letter in the grid, that didn’t really help either. As nyren and Steph had taken a look at it earlier and been unable to figure out how to approach it I set it aside in favor of something else.
Getting late by this time and Karthik starting packing up to leave us. “What?!?!??! You can’t leave us!” Apparently he could and worse, he was going to. “Fine,” I muttered angrily, “see if I care, I’ll just move your name pin to the section for ‘people who don’t love us anymore’.”
“It’s already done,” he informed me and indeed it was, he’d attached it right to the card itself, he really didn’t love us anymore.
PART 2
I might have gotten a little bit carried away in my write up of this year’s Mystery Hunt. So much so that I might have accidentally gone over the word limit for a single LJ post. In my defense, the longest hunt on record deserves the longest writeup on record...
The 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt
Preparation
Lots of excitement in the month leading up to hunt and also a lot to do, this because we were adding people to our roster and lots of things to sort out to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible
Just for the Halibut (out neighboring team for many years) was losing its captain (to IIF) and as he was the only member of the team who was actually local, it seemed unlikely that they would be able to continue to compete in their existing form. They’d approached me in the Spring about the possibility of a merge and over the summer we’d hammered out the details (not so much a merge as a friendly takeover or adoption).
Ken (their co-captain) wasn't sure exactly how many of his teammates would join us (as some were likely to migrate to different teams) but he wanted to find a place where they would be welcome and should they wish to do so, able to continue hunting together. This we could provide!
In an effort to ease the transition we made an effort to mingle our teams as much as possible in the year leading up to hunt. We went out to dinner after BAPHL 5 and participated in BAPHL 6 as a merged team. As there were a few members of IdM who were similarly interested in joining us (in desperation we’d merged mid-mysteryhunt in 2012) we similarly tried to do things with them (this was significantly easier as they were local which meant we spent most of the Spring and Summer working together on the Black Letter Game)
The result of all of this was that I had quite a lot more people than usual signed up to participate in Mystery hunt and as the time drew closer and more and more people came out of the woodwork I was really starting to worry that we might have TOO many people. Of course as my usual teammates seemed to be bailing left right and center (or coming down with the flu), had we not had so many new people I would have been worrying that we would once again find ourselves with less than ten people!
(In the end we had 26 full time participants, 8 casual solvers who showed up for a couple of hours over the course of the weekend and a handful of remote people who, true to form, I paid absolutely no attention to at all once hunt started. I assuaged my conscience on this by mailing each of them one of the team code wheels ahead of time so that they would feel loved and appreciated despite my callous disregard.)
Meanwhile my team was starting to get excited about hunt. In an effort to give the remotes a fighting chance, we’d opted for a team IRC channel, and Wednesday evening it was a happening place with people logging in from all over to make sure that it worked for them.
The e-mails had been flying fast and furious as well. I’d received a snail mail letter from “Enigma Valley Investment and Loan,” announcing a meeting about our new Mystery Hunt account and speculation was rampant. There was also an “inserted note” from an AHP about a special meeting that we should be sure at attend after the formal presentation. As this was clearly an EVIL bank, was this year’s hunt to have some sort of occupy theme?
We were also getting paranoid, rccap had spotted a suspicious looking ad in The Tech for a copy of the “2012 Beef-in-Review” publication and while MIT did have a beef club, no mention of a prior issue of this publication could be found anywhere on the web. As it was only $5-, we were clearly meant to acquire a copy so he sent off an e-mail and the rest of us tried to figure out how this could possibly be related to anything.
Thursday
As I’d been piling supplies in the hallway for the better part of a month, I was packed and ready by the time Thursday arrived. I’d also spent the entirety of Wednesday evening at the grocery store to acquire food for the team so the fridge was packed tight and waiting only for some prep cooking to be done.
I’d exchanged a few e-mail with Kyle who was clearly panicking about food and as he and a few of the other non-local Halibut had offered to throw some money into the pot if I picked up extra snack foods, I made one last run to Sam’s club when I got out of work. (Extra safety!toothpicks also dutifully acquired.)
As rccap had finished his PhD, his apartment was no longer quite as conveniently located as it had been so it was necessary to rethink a lot of our food plans. Fortunately he wasn’t finished with MIT completely and thanks to his new role as a post-doc we still had access to a lot of LNS resources. Most importantly there were a handful of refrigerators where we could stash things. As there was also a fairly nice lounge with a sink and high table, my sandwich assembly needs were taken care of and as such the plan for the afternoon was to take care of all the prep cooking.
I had cleverly recruited Jess as my helper and we got right to work! The lunch menu consisted of three different types of sandwiches (curried chicken salad, turkey with cheese, and hummus with veggies). While the later two didn’t require any prep work, I had two giant packages of chicken that needed to be turned into chicken salad so we got right to work cooking them. The other lunch time food option consisted of tomato, mozzarella and basil pasta salad so several packages of pasta needed to be cooked and separated into containers. Quickly evident that my usual pasta pan was not up to the task so off to the basement to fetch the giant lobster pot. One day I hope to cook an actual lobster in it but in the meantime it comes in very useful anytime I have to cook for a crowd!
While the food cooked we loaded the car. Quickly evident that it wasn’t all going to fit, at least not if I wanted Jess to ride with me. Good thing Mike would be caravanning down with us, just unfortunate that he had already filled Jess’s spot in his car (which amusingly enough was actually her car) with odds and ends.
In the end we got it all to fit and as the clock struck 6pm we were off! (Note to self: You’ve driven Jess’ car, it can only exceed 60 MPH on a downhill -- very impressed that Mike managed to keep up.)
As Just for the Halibut was a team comprised mostly of non-locals, most of them would arrive on Thursday evening and as such they had a tradition of going out for a team dinner on Thursday evening. As this seemed like an excellent tradition I was all for it and we had an 8pm reservation for 24 at the Cambridge Brewing Company.
Made it to Boston just after 7pm, snagged some excellently located street parking and headed up to team HQ to discover a whole slew of people already in attendance. Made a brief attempt to move some tables around as we waited for everyone else to show up but quickly evident that there were too many people in the room for said attempt to result in anything other than chaos.
Off to CBC with sauergeek leading the pack and had a nice meal. A bit disconcerting to realize that for the first time I didn’t know the names of everyone on my team and (while I’d brought sticky labels just in case) quite unwilling to admit that we might have grown big enough to need name tags. As such quite determined that I would learn everyone’s name and by the time dinner was over I’d managed it. (As almost everyone I didn’t know had made it to dinner, this worked out really well and I only had two more names that I had to learn over the course of the weekend. More confusingly, I swear that one of the people who went to dinner (Owen) never made it back for the rest of the weekend. Did something happen? I know I’m a terrible captain to only be noticing this now, but has anyone thought to check to make sure he’s still alive?)
People scattered when dinner was over but as just enough made it back to team HQ to help with setup I was content. Unloaded the cars and then started moving tables around in earnest. As I was quite determined that people were not to sit in solitary rows staring at the backs of each other’s heads, doubled up each row of tables. (Normally we triple them up but this year there would be too many people in the room to waste that much floor space.)
We were definitely missing bubblebabble and his handy little cart by the time we finished dragging load after load after load up from the car.
Due to our expanded team we’d asked for two rooms this year (and as between us, our three teams had had four rooms the year before, the room karma gods smiled on us and our wish was granted). As I didn’t want the team to fragment into separate factions, I was bound and determined that all solving would take place in our primary HQ and that the secondary room would be used for sleeping and storage. As we were looking to pack a lot of people into our main room, removing all unnecessary items was key in my mind to making everyone fit.
While Mike set up his “command station” in the corner of the room and dealt with tech issues (printers, wireless, etc), Kyle and Karthic started moving tables around for me. The other key advantage to having two rooms was that we could bring in extra tables. (Interestingly despite bringing in 4 or 5 tables from the extra room we only needed 2 extra chairs. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised as usually one of the key features of our setup is the giant stack of extra chairs - this year we actually used them all.)
Nearly 2am by the time we were done with setup and all very pleased that we hadn't waited until the next morning. Mike, Jess and Alex had volunteered to sleep in HQ while the rest of us slept next door but in the end Kyle decided that he would just stay up all night and go to sleep come morning (is it really a good idea to start with the sleep deprivation BEFORE hunt begins?)
Friday
Woken briefly in the middle of the night by a very confused custodian. While this wasn’t a problem, he seemed upset that facilities never bothers to warn them about Mystery Hunt weekend. He also seemed a bit confused by the sight of Alex in an eye patch and kimono.
Feeling unaccountably guilty that Kyle had stayed up all night so awake by 6:30am and off to visit the secret Stata Showers. Some temptation to just walk there in my pj’s (after all, it was Mystery Hunt) but some remnant of pride that hadn’t yet been eviscerated by the ravages of hunt halted me at the last moment and I threw a coat on. By the time I made it into the basement I was pleased that I had as MIT was bustling with early morning employees and I would have felt kind of awkward in my froggy pj’s. At least with the coat I could pretend they were sweatpants.
The shower turned out to be surprisingly decent for a secret public shower in the basement of a random building and refreshed I headed back to HQ to relieve Kyle. As it was still early and I was feeling lazy, opted for a ride on a conveniently located elevator. Not at all impressed when the doors of said elevator opened and I found myself standing on an outside street. Damn you Stata Center. A mad dash for building 26, so much for being warm and cozy. Note to self, don’t ever take that elevator again!
Fed the meter, checked e-mail and puttered around for a bit. (I was even a responsible captain and looked over the slides from the optional safety briefing I had failed to attend the evening before, ok so maybe not THAT responsible a captain.) Snagged Jess when she got up and headed up to the LNS lounge where the two of us proceeded to mass produce two vats of pasta salad and a giant heap of sandwiches for vegetarians and carnivores alike. (Hummus and vegetables count as a sandwich filling? Should I at least add cheese?)
Food assembled I sent it out to refrigerate in my car and fed the meter.
Back at HQ the team was starting to assemble and I was pleased to discover that I still remembered everyone’s name from the night before. (See?!?!?! We don’t need no stinking name tags!)
Entertained a few visitors as we waited for kick off, tacotortoise stopped by to shoot best_ken_ever with a nerf gun (alas best_ken_ever wasn’t in the room at the time so Kyle was forced to take one for the team) and a member of Death From Above came to see me to inquire about the responsibilities that running DASH entailed. They were concerned that DASH 5 might not make it to Boston and considering the wisdom of agreeing to run it. Too bad their HQ is locked away behind card access doors, otherwise I’d pull a Julia and visit them at 3am on Saturday morning when they’re at their weakest and as such unlikely to say no!
Left a few people (who didn’t want to brave the cold) behind to guard the room and headed over to Rockwell Cage for kickoff. Actually ended up chatting with dalryaug (captain of Luck and my head puzzle guy for WARTRON:BOSTON) on the walk over. Gave him one of our official team code wheels after first making him promise that he wouldn’t use it to win this thing! I need him!
Rockwell Cage turned out to be a gym building. A table and two projectors were set up on the floor for the presentation by Enigma Valley Investment and Loan and hunters lined the bleachers. Quite pleased to see that Codex was out in force protesting. Their actual signs seemed to be in disagreement about what the actual issue was, but the point is that they were protesting something.
Checked in my team, received a complimentary first aid kit, (“this is not a puzzle”) and found a comfortable spot on the floor from which to observe the festivities.
Eventually a well dressed gentleman called us to order and explained why we were there. The gist of his explanation was that after winning the coin at last year’s Mystery Hunt, Manic Sages had decided that they deserved a tropical vacation (apparently as there are rather a lot of them they hadn’t been able to fund said vacation from the team kitty) so they had sold/invested/traded the coin to Enigma Valley Investment and Loan and as such we were now all account holders.
The banker went on the explain the terms of our account (with a 50 year minimum waiting period before we could make a withdraw, they weren’t exactly what I would call good terms). As he talked a powerpoint presentation flickered behind him, someone had altered the slides and they begged us to stay behind after the presentation.
Who were we to argue with the mysterious hacker? Curious we remained seated and no sooner had the banker departed than Alyssa P. Hacker (apparently a well known figure from one of the MIT courses) came out from behind the curtain to talk to us. This was a disaster, an emergency, Mystery Hunt as we knew it was in danger and there was only one solution; a bank heist! It was up to us to infiltrate Enigma Valley Investment and Loan’s security system and steal back the coin!
Click to viewWe had our task and with the puzzle server not set to go live for another hour (no doubt as a safety precaution to insure innocent people weren’t trampled beneath a wave of frantic hunters) we headed leisurely back to HQ. Fed the meter, liberated the sandwiches, dealt with the sudden and unexpected failure of our IRC server to deal with so many logins from the same IP address (ivo_b set up a new one for us on a private server on a moments notice) and were just generally ready to go when 1:30 rolled around.
E-mail from hunt HQ, they were having technical difficulties and the hunt would go live at 2pm, tried to refrain from frantically pressing reload on the page and entertained ourselves by taking an official team photo.
Time ticked slowly by and then all of a sudden with a great rush of energy it was 2pm! Grabbed a set of progress cards and started writing out puzzle titles for the board as my teammates dove in.
Eleven minutes later, just as I finished arranging the cards on the board, someone shouted out an answer, we had our first solve! The first round of puzzles were meant to look like files on the bank’s server and one of the files (entitled PASSWORD REMINDER) was clearly the meta. As each of the sub-puzzles featured a randomly shaped grid into which to input your answer it seemed certain that we would be overlaying them on the main grid when we were done. As people were hard at work on all of the puzzles, rather than interjecting myself into the process I cut out each of the indicated shapes in preparation for the answers.
By the time I finished we had two more answers and it was clear not only that we were looking for people’s names but also that the number of boxes on each puzzle indicated the number of letters in the solution.
I glanced at jagheterlelle in horror. We were expecting to be better than usual thanks to the infusion of new blood, but we weren’t expecting to be this much better. What if we were to accidentally win? Nightmare scenarios of trying to write a Mystery Hunt while simultaneously running WARTRON:BOSTON flashed through my head and from the look on her face she was facing the same fears.
She later admitted that she leapt on the opportunity to do a run around (THE THOMAS CROWN SCARE) for the simple reason that it got her out of the room and away from all of the successful puzzle solving.
The remaining puzzles (and the meta) fell surprisingly quickly and before we knew it we were on to the "real" first round of the hunt. Apparently Enigma Valley Investment and Loan had recruited a crew of experts to design their security system and it was up to us to convince this same team of experts to help us thwart the security system they’d designed.
First up was Danny Ocean (famous for this casino heists) and strangely enough in order to convince him we had to solve some puzzles. We dove in and almost immediately hit a wall. These were hard! (I’m not above admitting that I gave a sigh of relief, it wasn’t that we were suddenly miraculously good at puzzle solving, rather the introductory puzzles had been fairly straightforward. This was more like the experience I expected, banging our heads into walls and grinding along with no real progress to speak of. Now it felt like a Mystery Hunt!)
Here I should take a moment to say that as someone who has done a Mystery Hunt with a team of five I was really pleased to see that Manic Sages had chosen to start things off with an introductory round. I know that in our first year we would have loved this sort of a kindler/gentler introduction to hunt. I’ve written about it before but morale wasn’t exactly high that first year and a tractable little mini-hunt probably would have padded the initial shock. So thank you Sages for adding that element even if in this particular year it caused me some undue panic.
As I’m actually only ever interested in spacial logic puzzles tackled RANDOM WALK with the help of Dennis and Kyle.
These turned out to be a series of math mazes where you had to use the given numbers to create a path through each of the grids. Quickly apparent that these particular mazes were HARD! Managed the first couple (small ones) before discovering that despite being larger the ones with holes in them were actually easier to do by hand. As Kyle was busy writing a little program to solve them (and the ones without the holes were easier for his program to understand) this worked out well.
Each of the puzzles featured one or two sections of colored blocks the shape and color of which corresponded to a larger grid. Said grid was divided into 2x3 cells which even without the flavor text strongly suggested braille.
As I’m trying to get better about not feeling like I have to finish every step in its entirety before moving on to the synthesis stage of a puzzle, I started filling in the final grid and narrowing down our letter options as we went along. As such quickly realized that we either doing something very wrong or we weren’t dealing with just simple braille letters but rather extended braille. Suspicious, we carried on, after all we’re fallen afoul of the extended braille trap before, it’s just feels so messy.
Eventually we arrived at the phrase “trail following insect” followed by a bunch of garbage that we eventually realized was the extended braille method of saying (3). To quote rccap, “Holy shit, for the first time ever, using extended braille was actually the right thing to do!”
Many hours had passed with me nearly completely oblivious to the comings and goings of my teammates as I worked on that puzzle so a bit guiltily I resumed my captain’s duties once we were done.
Fortunately my team is used to such neglect and they’d sent two (well dressed) people to a live casino event around 7pm. (In the end the choice of of who was determined based on the availability of outfits as Matt was far too tall for the dress that jagheterlelle had picked out for him.)
As inkmark had taken care of the dinner order while I was distracted not actually all that much to feel guilty about.
The dinner in question was Indian takeout and as I had cleverly sent out a google-form to my teammates earlier in the week asking what kind of food items they were interested in, I’d like to think it wasn’t all that hard an order to put together.
As the form in question asked for preferences on both Friday night’s dinner (Indian food) and Saturday night’s (pizza) I should note that we’re a very polarized team on the topic of mushrooms and should we ever need to split in half I think the mushroom question will prove a handy dividing line.
Indeed almost every respondent to the form had something, either positive or negative to say about mushrooms. Apparently there can be no middle ground.
- i like mushrooms
- No mushrooms (just on whatever I will eat, other people are allowed to eat them) :)
- Mushroom.
- mushrooms are my favorites, but I'm not picky.
- mushrooms
- The vast majority of the vegetarian items on the menu are awesome, except for the mushroom one
- I'll eat pretty much any vegetarian pizza as long as it doesn't have mushrooms
- Anything is fine so long as there's some without mushrooms
- I don't like onions or mushrooms
- I am fairly flexible don't like olives or mushroom (i can pick around if needed).
- mushrooms are a pro, but without is fine as well.
- Mushrooms are awesome. Don't believe the haters.
- anything on the vegetarian menu is fine. As long as there are no mushrooms.
- Mushrooms are fine. As apparently we're all on about these.
- anything vegetarian with no mushrooms is fine.
- DIE MUSHROOMS DIE DIE DIE YOU EVIL FUNGAL THINGS.
- Yay Mushrooms!
I regret to inform you pro-mushroom types that I’m going with the anti-mushroom faction and you’ll have to find your own captain.
Mushrooms or not, dinner was tasty and well received.
Spent some portion of the evening taking care of various captain’s duties. Updated the solve board, took out the garbage and dealt with the issue of a pungent odor in our sleeping room. Fun times!
Saturday
Our next live event was slated for midnight and as everyone else seemed happy with what they were working on, rccap and I decided to go. Said event was a DESSERT PARTY and upon arrival we were handed a selection of “tasty” snacks. Said items included a caesar salad and an assortment of what turned out to be hostess (or at least look-alike products as otherwise Manic Sages really would have had to mortgage the coin to buy the twinkies).
Made ourselves comfortable on the floor with people from some other teams and quickly discovered that each of the items came with a napkin that featured a letter. It seemed that there were two letters per food item and between the group of us we were quickly able to acquire them all.
The salad plate had a line of text on the bottom which when caesar shifted (so glad I brought an official team code wheel) told us that the “INITIAL OF FOOD BECOMES A”. (For example in the case of the twinkies we would shift the T to an A and then using the same shift find a new value for the letter pairs we were given.) Once we’d done this to the letters it seemed to give us an answer phrase of “WAIT VS GO.
While we weren’t the only group to come up with this answer phrase it wasn’t at all what the hunt organizers were looking for and nobody seemed to have any better ideas. There was some confusion as to one of the food items, while we knew it was a Hostess item, we weren’t entirely clear what it was called, was it a dingdong? a hoho? a yodel? a swiss roll? or something else entirely? Even the internet wasn’t all that clear on the issue, apparently this particular confection had something of a clouded provenance being passed along and re-branded by one distributor after another. Event organizers unwilling to specify just insisting that everything was a Hostess product (while not coming right out and SAYING the word Hostess of course).
Everyone in agreement that the ordering was set for us (defined by the order in which we had been handed each treat) but we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Since WAIT VS GO clearly wasn’t the answer (a few teams had tried calling it in) maybe it was an instruction? A suggestion? Were they asking us to make a decision? A few of the groups decided they’d had enough and headed back to their respective HQ’s but I was willing to play this out. What would they do if we just sat down and refused to leave as one of the options seemed to be suggesting?
Made ourselves comfortable at a table to wait it out.
This was apparently not the action that the event organizers had in mind and eventually they chivied us from the room so that they could lock up and a whole bunch of us found ourselves abandoned in the stairwell. OK, so that hadn’t been the right approach, now what?
Batted around ideas as a group for awhile and tried a few more things but no real traction. As we’d been there for over an hour at this point decided we were done. Clearly there was something else going on here. Kind of depressing to head home from a live event without having solved it, and frustrating that the people running the event weren’t willing to do anything other than hint Hostess again and again.
As we’d sent two people to a casino night a few hours earlier and they too had returned empty handed this looked like a bad sign for the live events.
Back at team HQ we discovered that a giant bag of cut up photographs had been acquired in our absence (JIGSAW PUZZLE). These pieces had been dumped in a heap in the middle of a table and a few people were hard at work trying to assemble them. As putting together a jigsaw puzzle seemed more relaxing than any of the other options, I made myself comfortable and dove in.
Quite nice to have a task that involved ones hands but not an awful lot of ones mind as it meant that we could chat amicably without distracting our attention from the puzzle -- which was probably exactly what we needed. Not everyone working on this particular puzzle of course and quite amusing to see the look on Mark’s face when he glanced up for the first time in hours and took in the pile of puzzle pieces for the first time.
As we worked it was quickly evident that each of the puzzles were cut in the same pattern and all fairly certain that each one would turn out to be missing a piece or two. It would be many hours (and already daylight) before we managed to assemble enough of the puzzles to complete the solve, but we were right and it was nice to have something so straightforward (albeit time consuming). In the end there were 49 puzzles each with 49 pieces - many of which were a variation on the color brown. Fortunately we were able to assemble enough of the puzzles to extract the answer and could ignore the final pile of nearly identical brown bits.
I wasn’t actually around for the final solve, this because while I’m allowed to stay up as late as I want on Saturday night, my team is very adamant that I go to bed at reasonable hour on Friday. (While most people probably wouldn’t consider 4am to be a “reasonable hour”, I finally caved to pressure and like a recalcitrant child I was sent to bed.)
Dragged myself out of bed mid-morning, showered and then dragged Kyle up to the LNS lounge to help me produce the next round of sandwiches. While a novice sandwich maker compared to Jess, he caught on quickly and by the end had figured out the trick to creating a wrap that wouldn’t instantly fall apart.
My teammates all seemed pleased to see the sandwiches and with their ravenous hunger taken care of I was able to turn my attention to the puzzles that had opened up in the night. Amongst our new puzzles was a spacial logic one called PORTALS that involved solving 10 different types of spacial logic puzzle simultaneously.
I say simultaneously because each of the puzzles had a series of colored squares where the information from one puzzle got “ported” to the correspondingly colored puzzle. It looked fabulous (and as, based on the special rules it didn’t appear to be easily machine solvable, it was all MINE!)
Staked out a corner of a desk and started working and was soon joined by Tal and Supriya. As the room was feeling mighty crowded and we were going to want some room to spread out the different puzzles, borrowed rccap’s ID card and headed up to the LNS lounge where we proceeded to make ourselves quite comfortable at one of the big tables.
Some guilt that I had effectively abandoned my teammates, but not enough to make me do much about it. Did make the occasional trip downstairs (for refills on chips, bacon (a Saturday morning team tradition) and lemonade) but for the most part the three of us were quite happy to camp out at the table. Tal ended up leaving (or possibly just abandoning us) mid-afternoon and we snagged Dennis (with whom I had done the math grids the day before) to take her place.
As we needed to get Dennis up to speed anyway, this seemed like an excellent time to check our work so we printed out a clean copy of the puzzle and the three of us went back through what we had done so far. All in agreement with the steps that had gotten us thus far, we got back to work. As we were afraid of making a mistake, quickly determined that the best process was for us each to work individually on a small copy of the puzzle. When one of us found a way forward we would present it to the entire “committee” and only if we were all in agreement would we commit it to the master copy.
Daylight faded and still we worked. At one point the room was invaded by a number of our other teammates who were finding the craziness in our main HQ too overwhelming to work in. Alas, after many hours of mostly silence punctuated only occasionally by cries of discovery, I in turn found the new arrivals somewhat overwhelming and as such ended up fleeing back to our main HQ for awhile.
Dinner came and went (this time jagheterlelle took responsibility for placing the food order which was good as not only was the mushroom divide alive and well, it seemed unlikely that we could combine any two pizza toppings in a combination that more than one person would eat. Apparently at Camelot they have a “pizza solver” for just this reason. Enter the likes and dislikes of a group of people and it will tell you exactly how many and what kinds of pizza to order. Clearly we’re going to have to implement that for next year. )
Headed back upstairs to continue working on PORTALS once dinner was over as Dennis and Supriya were completely unwilling to commit anything to the master copy without the approval of the full committee.
Sunday
Supriya had originally intended to go home in time for dinner, and then by early evening, and then by midnight. In the end I don’t think she left until dawn but none of us were willing to walk away from this puzzle.
It had been slow going at first. You’d find one little thing, and then ten minutes later, another little thing but as the hours blurred together and the grids filled in, more and more things became dependent on each other and as such the puzzle was starting to yield bigger rewards for each incremental step.
Meanwhile as we got into the overnight hours, bathroom breaks were getting more interesting which is to say that somewhere around midnight I walked into the bathroom down the hall, flipped on the light and screamed in surprise to find a woman standing in front of me. Apparently she had been sleeping on the couch (why is there a couch in the bathroom?) and I’d woken her.
“OMG, I’m so sorry.”
I washed my hands and fled the bathroom as quickly as possible, turning off the light so she could go back to sleep on my way out.
I swear I mentioned it to Dennis and Supriya as I was quite confused by the whole thing but we’d forgotten all about it a few hours later when Supriya got up to use the bathroom. She came back in hysterical laughter. Apparently the woman was homeless and the two of them had had a bit of a conversation. Alas by this point Supriya’s brain was fried and she was suffering from severe sleep deprivation, the result of which was that when the woman told her that one day she’d have her own place and wouldn’t have to do this, Supriya’s only response was “I hear ya!” After that we resolved to use a different bathroom.
Somewhere around 3 or 4am we had a big breakthrough on the “snake” portion of PORTALS that sent a ripple effect through the rest of the puzzles nearly closing out “creek”, “norinori” and “corral”. As this had filled in large sections of real estate I decided that it was probably worth looking to see if we had enough data to extract a solution. As the rules of each puzzle (even the slitherlink) clearly indicated how one was to differentiate between shaded (black) and empty (white) squares, it seemed worthwhile to see how the squares overlapped between the ten puzzles. We had been given a grid of letters the same size as the other grids so it seemed worthwhile to discover what would happen if one were to black out all of the squares that were black in any of the puzzle grids. Would there be any left over letters when we done? Yes, but nothing particularly interesting thought we did call in one or two of the things (sex) that were revealed.
As we felt like we were really close to the entire puzzle falling apart (or according to Supriya, coming together) we called down to team HQ. Was there someone less tired who could come take a look at where we were and help us think of a different extraction method?
Evan knocked on the door a few minutes later and we showed him what we had and where we were. He seemed surprised that the extraction method I’d tried hadn’t proven more useful but didn’t have a whole lot else to offer us and as he had a puzzle that he was really interested in cracking we thanked him for his time and sent him on his way. Ken came up soon after and we roped him in a bit more effectively.
Supriya had finally given in to common sense (or at least to the realities of the dawning day) and headed home but Dennis and I were unwilling to let it go. As extraction attempts weren’t getting us anywhere we decided to try a brute force attempt. As “statue park” was probably the least completed of all of the puzzles the three of us turned our attention to it. The rules of the puzzle called for placing 12 pentominoes into the grid such that each was used exactly once, none of them touched, and all the white spaces surrounding them were connected.
There was a little bit of work done in the top left corner of the puzzle, enough that not every shape would fit there and by comparing the results of what each would do to the corresponding puzzles, we felt confident that only one of the pieces could possibly fit there.
Using this new information we pushed forward. “Snake” fell almost instantly and a few of the other puzzles started to follow suit. We moved back and forth, from one puzzle to the next, propagating the information and feeling strangely hopeful. Alas it was not to be, and we came up hard against an inconsistency. Somewhere we’d introduced an error and while we had a series of photographs to provide us with some versioning information, there was no way to tell where the error had crept in.
Crestfallen we turned our attention back to the extraction. We’d spent a LOT of time working on this puzzle and we’d gotten pretty far, there had to be some way to salvage a solution.
Word had gone out earlier in the day that hunt HQ was willing to give hints as it was already quite clear that hunt was proving harder than expected (indeed a few of our teammates had friends amongst the Sages and those friends had been by to visit earlier. Apparently we were only one meta behind the lead teams and as we’d only solved the opening round and Danny Ocean, that was a frightening thought).
Put in a request for a hint and very pleased when someone showed up to help us a little while later. Not much hope that there was any way that he could help us correct our error so focused instead on what we had to do to extract a solution. Apparently we were more tired than we thought we were as the answer (to the extraction method) had been staring us in the face. The word grid featured grey cells in the same locations as the colored cells in the other grids and the letters inside of them clearly told us to “CAESAR SHIFT BY TOTAL BLACKS ONLY USE IF ODD”. Wow, I feel like a moron for missing that.
Worse, we didn’t have nearly enough of the grids accurately filled in to actually follow the instructions. Heartbroken we stared at each other. Three people had worked for 14 solid hours and we had nothing.
Demoralized we called it a night (or a morning as it was past dawn). Back in the room I handed PORTALS to jagheterlelle with strict instructions that I was never to see it again and then I headed to bed where despite my desires to the contrary I proceeded to continue trying to solve it in my sleep.
Four hours later I sat straight upright from a dead sleep. I had an idea! Threw on clothes and raced into the other room where I found rccap and Steph between me and my puzzle. Resisted the urge to rip it away from them and tried not to cry when they insisted on asking me questions about it rather than just letting me see it so that I could try my idea.
“We know what to do with it!” they told me excitedly. “Yeah, I know,” I told them, “there’s an error and we have no idea where.”
Printed out a clean copy of the puzzle and took it back to an earlier state when we were confident about what we’d done. (Is it sad that I could do that from memory? And probably still can?)
Gifted them with a copy of the data so that they could see if they could get any further, and then, as I was entirely single minded about what I wanted to do and so fixated that I couldn’t even stand the idea of talking to people, fled to rccap’s office where I proceeded to spend the next three hours putting my idea into practice.
As I was quite determined that we be able to salvage something from all the work we’d done, I’d printed out several copies of the letter grid and one by one I went through each of the other puzzles and recorded how many blacks, whites and unknowns we had for each square on the grid.
Once I had the data recorded, I went through and figured out how many blacks each cell could have. Once I had that number I did the appropriate caesar shifting and the result was a list of every possible letter value for each cell.
While it told us to “only use if odd”, we hadn’t been sure if this meant that you only shifted the cells with an odd number of blacks or if you completely disregarded the letter in them but now that I had worked out a list of all of the possible values it seemed certain that the you disregarded them completely. (There was one section of the grid that we’d managed to fill in on all of the puzzles and the result was a series of 7 cells only one of which turned out to contain a letter, an “L” -- you would have had complete gibberish had you tried to keep the unshifted letters.)
This was unfortunate as while we could easily have forced a computer to search for words if we knew that every cell had to contain a letter, telling a computer that a cell was one of two or three letters or nothing at all was a bit trickier and while I consulted a number of (both puzzling and programming) experts on the team nobody could think of a way to do it.
All that work for nothing.
Recognizing that there was little else that could be done and not wanting anyone else to suffer the same frustration as the tiniest of mistakes was enough to destroy everything, I wandered back downstairs and left a helpful message attached to the PORTALS card on the progress board. “Do not attempt.”
Mike, Jess and Ross had made sandwiches in my absence so helped myself to a curried chicken salad one and looked around to see what I had missed.
Talk about a dereliction of duty, I’d effectively ignored my team for the last 24 hours. Guilt ridden I set about getting us back on track. Updated the solve board, double checked the solutions wall, picked up trash and took out both the garbage and recycling.
While I’d like to think I’d done a pretty good job of organizing food (particularly the platters of lunchtime sandwiches), I (and everyone else), had expected the hunt to end around noon on Sunday and as such we were starting to run out of things. While there was still plenty of tea, we were running low on drinks so I gave Alex rccap’s ID card and sent him up to the lounge to make two more gallons of lemonade. While it wouldn’t last long it was something at least.
Amused to note the spice puzzle that someone had left laying out on the table. Clearly this was Manic Sages answer to the white powder puzzle of two years ago. (Lots of little baggies of pot instead of cocaine.)
We’d solved the Danny Ocean meta at some point (though not with the use of a grid as subsequent hints to all teams would later suggest) and had received an invitation from Manic Sages to come complete a “training module”. The invitation called for six team members to visit building 24 at an appointed time to participate in a physical puzzle (apparently a few of our teammates had taken part in a different training module earlier the same morning).
Since I was looking a little demoralized, rccap suggested I go, so with inkmark, Mike S, Evan, Ken and Sean in tow I led the way to building 24. (How convenient that we were heading to almost the same room as IdM had occupied the year before, useful because it was cold out and I knew an indoor method of getting there.)
Given a sheet of paper that explained the rules of the activity we were about to participate in. Apparently one of our teammates had to elude a series of guards. Fortunately these guards had a very predictable pattern of movement so we merely had to figure out where each guard would be at each point in time and make sure that our teammate never came within their line of sight.
Did some initial strategizing as we waited but hard to come up with more than a very basic outline of a plan until we saw what we were dealing with. Fortunately we didn’t have long to wait and soon enough we were led upstairs to a small classroom where a grid had been drawn out on the floor in colored tape. The entrance and exit of the maze was clearly marked and once our teammate exited his task was to ring a bell (not provided) to summon all the guards to lunch.
All guards (and our player) were to move simultaneously. Guards would continue in a straight path until they encountered an obstruction at which point red guards would turn right and blue guards would turn left. Fortunately the guards were only paid to look at the end of their movement turn (which meant that they didn’t look up and see anything until after they had completed their turns -- this seemed like quite a large flaw in the security system.) The guards would only notice you if you were directly in their line of sight or in one of the eight spaces surrounding them.
We had planned to take turns going through the maze but ended up sending inkmark in first and he did such a good job (getting almost to the end before being noticed) that it just made sense to send him back in to retrace his steps.
Final solution involved having him move through the maze fairly quickly to a section of six blocks where by stepping through them in a particular order he could waste a little bit of time (necessary as we had to wait until the guard blocking the exit turned away) while simultaneously eluding the guard who was coming up behind him. We made it through on our third try and as I actually contributed to the solution I left feeling quite pleased with myself. How nice to not only succeed but to to have personally contributed to that success.
Kind of mind blowing to have a glimpse of the kind of manpower that Manic Sages possesses. They had six team members in that room (4 guards, a facilitator and a photographer) and all that those people had been doing (for who knows how long) was walking in circles as teams tried to sneak a person by them. My little team would never be able to sacrifice that many people to one cause for such a prolonged amount of time.
Back at HQ, Mike, Jess and Alex were preparing to leave. “What?!?!??!?!?! You’re leaving?!?!?!?! But it’s not over yet.” Apparently they were exhausted and as it seemed certain that it had to end at any moment they figured they might as well head home so they could sleep in their own bed. Losers!
Went back to poking at puzzles as they packed up and only just remembered to double check that Mike (who had moved my car on Friday afternoon) had given me back my keys. “Um, where is my car exactly?”
Manic Sages had started handing out “options” (though I couldn’t seem to stop calling them “buttkiss” thanks to last year’s hunt). They’d been trickling them out slowly as rewards for live events and the like but now the floodgates opened. A new e-mail from APH informed us that they’d be giving us 100 every hour (as we need 100 for a free solve that was effectively a free solve every hour, we looked around at each other in horror. Clearing Game Control was worried.)
Amused to note that there was a Mornington Crescent puzzle. (THE WORLD SERIES OF MORNINGTON CRESCENT. Glanced through it briefly and Karthik and I in complete agreement, it didn’t matter what it said, the ONLY possible answer was “Mornington Crescent”. Don’t they know how to play? (Actually having read the solution, I’m a bit concerned that at least one of the Sages thinks it’s a real game.)
Perhaps I’d spent too much time listening to rccap and sallythetimid muttering frantically to each other as they worked on TIME CONUNDRUM. (Apparently no ducks were harned in the making of this puzzle, rather for the first time we had “a duck conundrum that starts with no ducks, ends with no ducks, has no ducks created or destroyed at any point and yet, there are DUCKS!” Even better It was also the only time that one could fix the puzzle by adding more ducks!)
Amusingly, we had apparently called in an incorrect answer (RED HERRING) to this puzzle sometime on Saturday morning, this was particularly interesting because we hadn’t yet unlocked the puzzle when the call came through. This was also worrisome, particularly to a physicist like rccap, so worrying that he actually went ahead and called it in when the puzzle opened for the simple reason that he wanted to avoid a paradox. (Safety first!)
Maybe I had ducks on my mind, but at one point I wandered out into the hallway and encountered a time traveling duck who handed me a container of homemade ice cream sandwiches. (At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.) Apparently the difference between a good team and a great team is the availability of homemade ice cream sandwiches!
Getting on towards Sunday evening and people were still hard at work. (These puzzles were hard and each one of them seemed to have an extra layer even above the usual ridiculous layers of a typical hunt puzzle.) Morale not nearly as bad as I might have feared however. While it was slow going, we really were solving things and while speculation was rampant about when (if ever) this hunt was going to end, people seemed happy. As people also seemed like they were in it for the long haul, went about organizing something for dinner.
Opted for Chinese food as it is the one hunt standby that we hadn’t yet partaken in. Polled the room as to people’s preferences (“seriously you WANT to eat bean curd??!?!?!”) and placed an order. inkmark only had a few hours left before he had to leave so while I walked to the restaurant to pick up the food, he fetched his car, arriving at the restaurant to give me a ride back to campus at approximately the same time I emerged victorious with the food. (Which is to say, I ran into another duck in the hallway -- perhaps the lack of sleep was leading to delirium?)
Back to work when dinner was over, my first task to organize the progress board a little bit more effectively. We had a lot of puzzles that had a significant amount of work done on them. Clearly it was time take a second look at them. People broke up into groups and one by one the puzzles started to fall.
The free solves were continuing to pour in so a brief discussion as to how we best wanted to utilize them. The Indiana Jones round was split into three “adventures” each of which seemed to end with a mini-meta which in turn led to a super-meta. As we already had a few solves within the three rounds, this seemed like a good place to focus our attention. (Besides, we’d heard a rumor that no team had yet solved the super-meta so that seemed like the thing to do.)
There were a few puzzles within the three rounds that people had invested time and energy into and wanted to finish on their own, so we went through and labeled a bunch of the puzzles with a “no options” tag so we wouldn’t accidentally call one of those in (though we did request that people at least prioritize those so that we could work on the meta). The result was that between determined solvers and free answers, the rest of the Indiana Jones puzzles fell quickly.
Mildly concerned when best_ken_ever lost his silly putty in the light fitting and then risked life and limb trying to retrieve it. Not certain the provided first aid kit contained enough bandages for the carnage that seemed likely to ensue.
Also, why isn’t there any chocolate left?!?!?!? This is not OK, though it did cause me to remember that we still had cheese and sandwich supplies upstairs in the LNS lounge. “Do you guys want me to go get the last of the cheese?”
“YES!”
Alas it was not to be as neither rccap nor I in possession of his ID Card. Shit! Where was it? A quick call to Alex determined that he had accidentally taken it home with him, so much for the last of the team food supplies.
Took a quick look at SNAKE one of the three mini-metas in the Indiana Jones round. It seemed to be a simple snake logic puzzle (after PORTALS I certainly knew the rules to that kind) but while it seemed obvious that we were looking to plot the answers to the rest of the puzzles in the round on the grid, not quite sure where to start. I tried plotting out the letter frequencies in hopes that that might make it easier to find a starting place, but as there were at least 4 of each letter in the grid, that didn’t really help either. As nyren and Steph had taken a look at it earlier and been unable to figure out how to approach it I set it aside in favor of something else.
Getting late by this time and Karthik starting packing up to leave us. “What?!?!??! You can’t leave us!” Apparently he could and worse, he was going to. “Fine,” I muttered angrily, “see if I care, I’ll just move your name pin to the section for ‘people who don’t love us anymore’.”
“It’s already done,” he informed me and indeed it was, he’d attached it right to the card itself, he really didn’t love us anymore.
PART 2