I dream of puzzles

[dr_whom]

This year's Mystery Hunt happened!

I don't have that much to say about the overall plot or structure of this year's Hunt. The structure didn't seem particularly complex—which is totally fine, I should say! Nothing wrong with just writing a solid Hunt that consists of a series of rounds with metapuzzles. (I did enjoy the fact that a couple of the rounds had multiple mini-metas within them and an overall meta-meta.) And honestly my team didn't pay any attention to the plot of the Hunt whatsoever, up to the point of never even watching the videos that were released to us when new rounds were unlocked. The Hunt server problems were a pain, but I salute team Luck for hacking together a solution that got us through the Hunt.

I don't really like obvious fake themes, though. The dog show round was cute, but when people show up at Hunt kickoff and they're like "It's a dog show!" nobody for a second believed that that was the theme of the Hunt, and I just found it tiresome.

My solving experience was pretty up-and-down. The rounds my team got stuck on were the fourth and fifth—so I spent a while frustrated when those were the only new rounds we had open. Then as new rounds were released things picked back up again—until the last few hours of the Hunt, when we had finished most of the later rounds and still had nothing but those fourth and fifth rounds to go back to; and that was when our enthusiasm as a team really started to flag. That said, I did have all of the basic satisfying solving experiences you want to have at a Mystery Hunt: I managed to spot key ahas, find the answer extractions for puzzles that other people had been stuck on, work whole puzzles from beginning to end, and solve metapuzzles. So overall it was a pretty good Hunt for me, even though we didn't finish.

Now I'm going to skip to the part where I discuss specific puzzles I have comments on!

• The Dog Show round structure. I really like this as a structure for an intro round! Instead of making you solve puzzles to get all the inputs to the metas, you get 10 of the inputs for free, but you have to figure out which metas they feed. That makes the round and the metas overall a little bit easier than usual, which is good for an intro round; and it also makes for a slightly novel solving experience. You don't usually get interesting structural gimmicks like this in the easy intro round. I liked it.


• Always Amusing. When we got the clue phrase NAME OF GUEST in the Dog Show round, I was really hoping that that would clue CHRISTOPHER, since Christopher Guest directed an amusing movie about a dog show; but it was not to be. Oh well.


• Something for Everyone. I was working on another puzzle at the time, but watching my teammates realize "We solved all those flats without ever noticing there were dog names in them?!" was pretty hilarious. Also, to my surprise, I was the only person who remembered that the dogs in 101 Dalmatians were called Pongo and Perdita.


• The Tracking meta. This is a puzzle whose wrong track we pursued for a while was more satisfying than the actual correct solution. With five 5-letter puzzle answer, we first tried assembling them into a 5×5 grid and finding the two bonus answers in that Boggle-wise. When that didn't work, we realized that we were looking for a 16-letter solution, so the actual puzzle had to be building a 4×4 grid in which all 7 answers could be found, and then that grid would spell off the 16-letter answer. I kind of prefer that to the actual solution.


• Before and After. This was a great puzzle, but was MUTE MATH EQUATION really the best before-and-after clue they could come up with to extract an E? I mean, I guess it must have been, but.


• The Obedience Training meta. This was a really cute meta. I wonder how many teams called in FOOLPROOF BREEDERS and tried to backsolve FALA for the missing puzzle? (FALA is the name of a famous dog! It was thematic!) I know we did. GOOFPROOF was a distant second choice, but after deliberating for a while we called it in anyway since it was so much better than any possible third choice, and AGFA was at least a conceivable puzzle answer. (My job on the team this Hunt, a few different times, seems to have been "The one who recognizes weird quasi-words like AGFA and LLAREGGUB and UB IWERKS and says yes, that's a thing, we can call it in.")


• On the Road. I am so impressed that this puzzle was writable and solvable. I encountered this puzzle briefly at the beginning when people were solving clues and I was asked to identify the cities; I came back much later when the clues had been answered but no one had any idea what to do. The break-in was just when I noticed TASKER on the list of clue answers and said, well, TASKER is a weird word, but I know it's the name of a major street in Philadelphia; and then Allen Googled the first clue answer on the list and found "America's Cup Avenue" is a street in Newport, and then we were off and running. But... how were people supposed to figure out what the puzzle was about? Just by recognizing one street name and making a lucky guess? Either way, I'm very impressed that it works (and that we solved it!). I do see why people stopped me from writing puzzles in the past in which street routes spell out the shapes of letters, though; they're a pain to deal with.


• Crimes Against Cruciverbalism. Lol. I vaguely remember a New York Times crossword with this theme once, but there weren't errors in every entry. This was just a hilarious puzzle.


• Meet the Loremipsumstanis. Another puzzle where I had a wrong idea that I'm actively sad was wrong. You mean to tell me there's a puzzle using both Bacon Ipsum filler text and Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but answer extraction isn't via a Bacon cipher? That's just diappointing.


• Trubled Monicas. This puzzle was pretty hilarious too. When we got to the final clue phrase we misinterpreted it a couple of times and first we called in STA, and then when that was wrong we called in STARZ, and then when that was wrong we called in STARZZ. I'm glad STARZZ was right, or we probably would have had to move on to STARZZZ, and the rest of the team was already giving us funny looks.


• Crushed Petals. I was planning to go to bed at about 3am Friday night, but then we unlocked the Opus round and I stayed up to solve this puzzle. Daniel and I solved the grid and I went to bed hoping someone would figure out the answer extraction while I slept. No one did, but Saturday afternoon while Daniel was playing around with various ways of indexing into the grid I finally spotted the ONE and TWO hidden in the cells. A really clever and non-obvious but satisfying answer extraction.


• Words Search. We never got close to solving this. But two days before the Hunt, I discovered what3words.com and said, ooh, I hope there's a what3words puzzle in the Hunt. So I'm glad there was.


• King Arthur round structure. In this round, almost every puzzle involved an MIT campus runaround of some sort. I really think that's poor form, just as I would if there were a round of all Nikoli puzzles or all crosswords or whatever. The Mystery Hunt should involve the MIT campus, but basing an entire round on Doing Stuff On Campus is really hard on teams who find campus runarounds frustrating or inconvenient. I think these puzzles should have been spread out throughout the Hunt.


• The Scenic Route. We didn't solve this one either, but I'm proud of myself for figuring out the aha on an MIT campus trivia puzzle. We never quite figured out what we were supposed to be trying to index into for the second half, though; there seemed to be too many options to try. (Architects? Dedicatees? Looking at the solution, I find that you're supposed to index into the last name of the person the building is named after. After indexing into the full name of the sculptors in the first half, that seems pretty unmotivated.)


• The Lost Dream. I think we solved this without ever noticing that the strings we had to add to complete the words were Internet top-level domains. That probably would have made it a lot easier.


• The Dreamtime meta-meta. You have no idea how much time I spend staring at small grids of pixels trying to fit letters into them, so this meta was a blast for me. We started out only evaluating each meta answer against the clues for its own round, but when LIAKA wasn't the answer we figured out what to do soon enough.


• High Rollers. Another puzzle that we made harder for ourselves than we had to: we never noticed that you could order the path around the board by number of houses, so we actually came up with the wrong order. Fortunately what we got by doing that was MADEWELL IN CALL, so we just figured the order was underdetermined, and close enough. Did we just get lucky that the word breaks corresponded with the ambiguities in the path, or was that intentional? I also don't really know what motivates indexing starting from the third row of the board for the first house, rather than any of the other possibilities, but I'm glad we tried all of them.


• The Pam Ewing meta. Seth and I had the aha for this with three or four puzzles solved, but I didn't believe it could possibly be right—I thought it was too underconstrained to be more than a coincidence. Is there any principled relationship between the puzzle answer and the JR word? I mean, BEN & JERRY'S owns LIZ LEMON GREEK FROZEN YOGURT, and J CREW owns MADEWELL, but INJURY doesn't "own" OUT FOR THE SEASON. Are you just supposed to word-associate until you find a word with J_R in it? I mean, we solved it, it worked, but I'm still a little incredulous.


• The Indescribable, Amorphous Cryptic. This goes in the ranks of great Mystery Hunt variety cryptics. Good crossword clues, a fun twist, flavortext that guides you but doesn't hold your hand. Very nice.


• The Spectral, Daemoniac Web of Links. Also just a really good puzzle. It eventually turned out to work the way we expected it to work (more or less), with the link paths being a cryptogram for the clue answers, but we threw ourselves off by not finding the right clue for SUSQUEHANNA: We originally had it as just "River emptying into the Chesapeake". When we finished sorting out the clues and found that "with two branches" was left out, we fit it into the SUSQUEHANNA clue and found the 12132 pattern, matching the first letters of SUSQUEHANNA, that suggested cryptograms were right all along. The names embedded in the clue answers was a bit of an unexpected pattern, since it didn't have anything to do with what the puzzle had been about up to that point, but hey, we solved it, right?


• Triptychs. An excellent puzzle. We solved it with Scrabble tiles. 4-year-old Josephine helped by handing us the tiles we asked for. (Also I really like the answer extraction—it makes you have to solve all three boards to get it, in an elegant way.)


• One Starry Night. Every Hunt needs a few short, easy, and fun puzzles. This is the one from this Hunt that I've been recommending to my friends as a great example of that class. (I also solved it from beginning to end, which makes me favorably disposed toward it as well.)


• Gravitational Pull. Another puzzle we solved without solving it. It was clear that some of the letters in the grid had to be entered in lowercase and some in uppercase, but it wasn't clear quite which at the beginning of the puzzle; so to save time we wrote them all in uppercase and then marked the ones that were supposed to be lowercase in red. Then we noticed that the grid squares with two letters in them could be replaced by a single letter to still spell words... and we spent quite some time experimenting with which letters we could replace them with. We certainly didn't notice that they were just the letters you got by compressing the letters in the cell into a single letter, like "rn" to "m" or "ln" to "h"—in part because we never actually wrote down any lowercase letters! So nonetheless, eventually we figured out which letters to substitute anyway ("ln" to "h" was the last one we found, converting "alna" to "aha"), and were able to extract ANSWER'S THIRTEEN OWL. And the answer wasn't THIRTEEN OWL, but kvarko suggested, well, "13" looks a little like B, so maybe we should call in BOWL? And it's as we were calling that in that Seth finally realized that that oddball longshot kvarko had guessed was actually the whole point of the puzzle. So... the "aha" was the last thing we found in this puzzle in more ways than one.


• The Man in the Moon. Like Crushed Petals, this is a crossword puzzle that I solved the grid before going to bed, and hoped someone would solve the answer extraction before I woke up, and no one did. But we never found the answer extraction after I woke up either, and looking at the solution I see why. I mean, I can allow that maybe we should have made the connection between GROUT / IS / LAYS / IMPS etc. and RETILE / LIVES / INTERS / LICHES etc.—though honestly that connection is a little tenuous too—but getting from CRTCHAKA and POWERIZE to GRIN feels like a really unreasonable leap to me. CRTCHAKA to me reads like "non-word, these letters in this order are not where you should be looking" more than anything else. It's too bad; it's a really good crossword, but the answer extraction really doesn't work for me.


• The Endymion meta. A really well-constructed meta; we were all really delighted with it when we solved it. It tied in the theme of the round really well, with a unusual and creative way of mapping puzzle answers to letters. The well-constructedness of this meta made it especially great for the last round; as the last meta we solved, it allowed us to more or less end the Hunt on a high note. (Well, except for going back to try to finish the Arthur and Opus rounds, which we couldn't. But still.)

Other puzzles I liked but don't have any comments on: the Whistle Training meta (I didn't even work on this; I just found out about it afterward!); Ladder Dogs; How Far?; Emergency Deportation; It's a Long Story; the Dreamtime Day 2 meta; Who?

That's really a ton of puzzles I liked, and almost no real clunkers. Thanks to team Luck for a great Hunt, and see you all next year!

Comments

[doctorskuld.livejournal.com]

We had a huge issue with Man on the Moon. We never got grin because, as you said, CRTCH AKA POWERIZE to grin was just too far of a leap for us to make. The crossword was great, but I feel like Luck didn't do enough testsolving or editing to let that extraction slip through like that.

We felt that was the theme of the overall Hunt, "more editing needed." We got the Pam Ewing solution fairly late, again, because of the lack in consistency between the cluing. Arthur was also hard for us, because Codex has low MIT-student/alum membership, and a huge chunk of us are remote. We would have also preferred that this be spread out throughout the Hunt.

The Endymion solve was also really hard for us, because we felt that some of the design trappings could have been done away with. We spent forever on constructing what we called the "Sheep Clock" because we were absolutely sure that the different rotations and mirrors of the sheep had something to do with the ordering or some answer transformation. This is something that should have been flagged up during testsolving as, "This could lead people astray."

[codeman38.livejournal.com]

The worst part is that on Codex, we managed to come up with a sensible misreading of the Man in the Moon clue that still produced a meta-appropriate answer.

(We interpreted "CRT CH AKA" as a set of abbreviations. What's a cathode ray tube-- i.e., terminal-- character that could also be known as powerize? CARET, which even happens to be "CRT" when disemvowelled. And "A" in the Moon alphabet is shaped like a caret!)

Edited to add: Oh, yeah, I forgot about how we ended up going even further down that wrong path. After CARET turned out to be wrong, we called in CONTROL, because control characters are a thing, "control" could also mean "powerize" in a sense, and the caret symbol is used as shorthand for the control key. Then, when *that* failed, we tried CTRL, because clearly the use of abbreviations in the clue had to be significant...

[davidglasser.livejournal.com]

The thing about the Man in the Moon extraction is that it was sort of a "do the same thing again" mechanism... Except not actually! If the weird clues in the puzzle had also been missing matching letters it would have made more sense...

Btw was the name of that puzzle entirely random?

[dr_whom]

I think the name of the puzzle is, the theme of the round is the Moon, and the man in the moon is "ambiguous and cryptic".

[codeman38.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is exactly what bugged me about the final extraction-- that it wasn't an exact parallel to the similar bits from earlier in the puzzle. There was nothing to suggest that even one half of the clue phrase would be missing a letter, much less *both* halves.

I think Codex did even consider "crotch a.k.a. powerize" as an interpretation at one point, but of course that didn't turn up anything meaningful, so we abandoned it. It never occurred to us that "powerize" could have been missing a letter as well. (And I helped solve an earlier puzzle that clued "powder" as "power" with an added D, even!) "Powerize" just sounded too much like a word that was meant to be taken verbatim.