The Story of the Mystery Hunt
Jan. 24th, 2022 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomAnother year, another Mystery Hunt held remotely. I still miss going to Cambridge and seeing all my Mystery Hunt friends, but it was nice to be able to do puzzles with my partner K.! I'm gradually getting used to not seeing a lot of the puzzles, as my team has gradually evolved from a top-5 team ten years ago (even when we weren't trying to win) to a team that Gets Together And Solves Some Puzzles now, as we've gotten older (and, perhaps, as Hunt sizes have increased). And I think Hunting from home has contributed to that feeling for me, since (unlike at the Hunt in Cambridge in person) I'm not doing basically nothing all day but the Mystery Hunt, but also doing normal household things like cooking dinner, taking out the trash, and so on, which contributes to me seeing less of the Hunt itself.
I think Palindrome put together (with one significant exception) a really good Hunt this year! Basically all of the puzzles I worked on had interesting concepts and fair designs, and I enjoy the way Palindrome uses flavortext cluing. The "bookspace" theme was very broad, but not so much as to make the Hunt feel non-cohesive, and it enabled each round to have its own cohesive theme. (When the Hunt began and I saw that the theme of the first round was children's books, I was like "okay, and so I assume the next rounds will be other genres like mystery and horror," and I was very gratified when those did in fact turn out to be the next rounds.) The round themes seemed pretty well-implemented, in that each puzzle in a round made at least a decent effort to tie in to the round's theme in its content or flavortext, even in the opening rounds where every puzzle's title had to be the name of a children's book. Moreover, they did a good job tying puzzle answers in to the puzzle's theme or flavortext as well, which is nice both for the sake of elegance and because it makes backsolving feel more rewarding. (If you know one of the puzzles in this round must have the answer JAVELIN THROW, but you don't know which, maybe you should guess it for the puzzle whose title is "The Last Olympian"!)
Many recent Mystery Hunts have begun with "warmup rounds", so to speak—a self-contained round with somewhat easier puzzles that has a rewarding structure and conclusion of its own, which smaller or less experienced teams may still be able to complete and feel a sense of accomplishment. This Hunt actually had two such warmup rounds: the opening "Investigation" round, with 10 puzzles and a simple metapuzzle (helpfully flagged for new solvers with an explanation of what a metapuzzle is!), followed by the more complex "Ministry" round, with 25 puzzles, five metas, a meta-meta, and a concluding mini-runaround, still relatively compact and self-contained but with the feeling of a mini-Hunt, even with a prize at the end for teams that completed it. (This isn't counting the pre-Hunt "Star Rats" puzzle round that I never got around to looking at—and so the only thing I have to say about that is that, as always, I find fake Mystery Hunt themes a little tiresome.) Conceptually, I like this scheme a great deal—giving teams at a wider range of skill levels something that feels like full-Hunt experience. And I quite liked the internal structure of the Ministry round; I like the challenge of structures where you have to figure our which puzzle answers feed which metas. However...
The Investigation and Ministry rounds formed bottlenecks where you had to solve the round's meta before you could move on to the next round. The Hunt FAQ stated "Every time you solve a feeder (non-meta) puzzle, you unlock another puzzle.... If there are no more puzzles in that round to unlock, then it will unlock a puzzle in the earliest unlocked round that still has puzzles left to unlock," but that apparently wasn't true for the transition from the Ministry round to the main Bookspace rounds, and my team began to notice it as we solved the last few Ministry puzzles and saw no new puzzles being unlocked. That kind of bottlenecking can be extremely miserable for solvers, especially if they get stuck on a harder-than-expected puzzle. That's exactly what happened to us: we solved all five metas in the Ministry round, backsolved the answers to any individual puzzles we hadn't solved yet, and then the entire team had only one puzzle open for hours. And we got stuck and made no progress and had no idea what to do on that puzzle for quite some time (more on this below), meaning there was an hour or more during which our team had nothing to do except stare at a puzzle that we didn't know how to solve, until we were eligible to request hints on it. That's never a situation you want a solving team to be in. Fortunately for us it happened late at night, so many of our team members were asleep, and by the time the rest of the team woke up we had finally solved the meta and completed the Fruit Around puzzles, so there were multiple new puzzles open for the morning squad to dive into. But for those of us solving between 10pm and 2am PST, the Ministry bottleneck left us very frustrated. I understand that for plot reasons Palindrome didn't want to unlock the main Bookspace rounds until the Ministry meta-meta and Fruit Around had been completed, but I really don't think a team should ever be stuck with only one puzzle to work on until endgame of the whole Hunt.
On the other hand, I really want to compliment Palindrome for the thought and effort they put into accessibility for the Hunt. In many cases, they provided text transcripts for puzzles presented in audio format, and text descriptions for puzzles presented in image format. That wasn't always possible—there were some puzzles where any verbal description of the images would have given away too much of the puzzle, or where the audio element was untranscribable noise, for instance—but I appreciate that did this where they could!
I wish Hunt wrapup meetings would return to a greater emphasis on puzzle content. What I go to wrapup for is to learn about how the rounds and metas worked; I'm not that interested in the writing team's internal logistics, how artists were selected, etc.
What follows are some potentially spoiler-containing comments on specific puzzles!
A few other puzzles I worked on and enjoyed, but don't have any comments on: My First ABC, Crewel, the Herschel Hayden meta, the Randy and Riley Rotch meta, Called Onto the Carpet, the "Unfinished Symphonies" minipuzzle of Endless Practice, and Fruits Stickers (though I moved away from the puzzle after we solved the clues and identified the animals, before moving on to the step involving Japanese orthography and an anime series).
This was a great Hunt, notwithstanding the Ministry bottleneck and I wish I'd seen more of it. Next year, hopefully, back in Cambridge!
I think Palindrome put together (with one significant exception) a really good Hunt this year! Basically all of the puzzles I worked on had interesting concepts and fair designs, and I enjoy the way Palindrome uses flavortext cluing. The "bookspace" theme was very broad, but not so much as to make the Hunt feel non-cohesive, and it enabled each round to have its own cohesive theme. (When the Hunt began and I saw that the theme of the first round was children's books, I was like "okay, and so I assume the next rounds will be other genres like mystery and horror," and I was very gratified when those did in fact turn out to be the next rounds.) The round themes seemed pretty well-implemented, in that each puzzle in a round made at least a decent effort to tie in to the round's theme in its content or flavortext, even in the opening rounds where every puzzle's title had to be the name of a children's book. Moreover, they did a good job tying puzzle answers in to the puzzle's theme or flavortext as well, which is nice both for the sake of elegance and because it makes backsolving feel more rewarding. (If you know one of the puzzles in this round must have the answer JAVELIN THROW, but you don't know which, maybe you should guess it for the puzzle whose title is "The Last Olympian"!)
Many recent Mystery Hunts have begun with "warmup rounds", so to speak—a self-contained round with somewhat easier puzzles that has a rewarding structure and conclusion of its own, which smaller or less experienced teams may still be able to complete and feel a sense of accomplishment. This Hunt actually had two such warmup rounds: the opening "Investigation" round, with 10 puzzles and a simple metapuzzle (helpfully flagged for new solvers with an explanation of what a metapuzzle is!), followed by the more complex "Ministry" round, with 25 puzzles, five metas, a meta-meta, and a concluding mini-runaround, still relatively compact and self-contained but with the feeling of a mini-Hunt, even with a prize at the end for teams that completed it. (This isn't counting the pre-Hunt "Star Rats" puzzle round that I never got around to looking at—and so the only thing I have to say about that is that, as always, I find fake Mystery Hunt themes a little tiresome.) Conceptually, I like this scheme a great deal—giving teams at a wider range of skill levels something that feels like full-Hunt experience. And I quite liked the internal structure of the Ministry round; I like the challenge of structures where you have to figure our which puzzle answers feed which metas. However...
The Investigation and Ministry rounds formed bottlenecks where you had to solve the round's meta before you could move on to the next round. The Hunt FAQ stated "Every time you solve a feeder (non-meta) puzzle, you unlock another puzzle.... If there are no more puzzles in that round to unlock, then it will unlock a puzzle in the earliest unlocked round that still has puzzles left to unlock," but that apparently wasn't true for the transition from the Ministry round to the main Bookspace rounds, and my team began to notice it as we solved the last few Ministry puzzles and saw no new puzzles being unlocked. That kind of bottlenecking can be extremely miserable for solvers, especially if they get stuck on a harder-than-expected puzzle. That's exactly what happened to us: we solved all five metas in the Ministry round, backsolved the answers to any individual puzzles we hadn't solved yet, and then the entire team had only one puzzle open for hours. And we got stuck and made no progress and had no idea what to do on that puzzle for quite some time (more on this below), meaning there was an hour or more during which our team had nothing to do except stare at a puzzle that we didn't know how to solve, until we were eligible to request hints on it. That's never a situation you want a solving team to be in. Fortunately for us it happened late at night, so many of our team members were asleep, and by the time the rest of the team woke up we had finally solved the meta and completed the Fruit Around puzzles, so there were multiple new puzzles open for the morning squad to dive into. But for those of us solving between 10pm and 2am PST, the Ministry bottleneck left us very frustrated. I understand that for plot reasons Palindrome didn't want to unlock the main Bookspace rounds until the Ministry meta-meta and Fruit Around had been completed, but I really don't think a team should ever be stuck with only one puzzle to work on until endgame of the whole Hunt.
On the other hand, I really want to compliment Palindrome for the thought and effort they put into accessibility for the Hunt. In many cases, they provided text transcripts for puzzles presented in audio format, and text descriptions for puzzles presented in image format. That wasn't always possible—there were some puzzles where any verbal description of the images would have given away too much of the puzzle, or where the audio element was untranscribable noise, for instance—but I appreciate that did this where they could!
I wish Hunt wrapup meetings would return to a greater emphasis on puzzle content. What I go to wrapup for is to learn about how the rounds and metas worked; I'm not that interested in the writing team's internal logistics, how artists were selected, etc.
What follows are some potentially spoiler-containing comments on specific puzzles!
- Where the Wild Things Are. I was a little surprised that one of the puzzles for which they had sent out physical components was so early in the Hunt! But I suppose it makes sense—they don't want to send out a ton of physical puzzles if people might never actually unlock the puzzles that they were for. This puzzle didn't really seem to have a necessary reason to be sent out as a physical puzzle—I don't think there's anything stopping you from solving it from just a pdf of the puzzle, but the booklet makes a nice souvenir. I also appreciate that there seem to have been quite a few puzzles in this Hunt consisting of a bunch of independent mini-puzzles that people could split up and solve, making the puzzle have the structure of a mini-round with a metapuzzle of its own, which makes for a nice collaborative solving structure. In this particular puzzle I'm not totally convinced that Barney the Dinosaur is unambiguously holding up one finger—he doesn't really have fingers, just sort of undifferentiated paws; or are we supposed to be counting his thumb?—but overall this was a cute, simple minipuzzle-based puzzle for a warmup round.
- Teach Us, Amelia Bedelia. A Mystery Hunt phenomenon I quite enjoy is when I start solving a puzzle that looks like straightforward clue solving, or some cute wordplay gimmick, and it turns out to depend on some pop-culture body of knowledge that I don't know anything about, but it's still fun for me to keep working on the puzzle—maybe looking up the information I need, maybe depending on the teammate who noticed the connection while I continue to do the wordplay portion of the puzzle. That's my experience with this puzzle: the fact that I don't know anything about Among Us didn't stop me from enjoying continuing to work on the puzzle once Among Us knowledge became necessary. The same is true for Lord of the Flies from later in the Hunt, with Survivor.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This was an interesting puzzle to work on, and K. and I spent a while trying to solve the clues and place the words before another teammate figured it out. My main comment here is this: the puzzle instructions state how "a typical Fraternal Twins puzzle" works, before explaining that "this is not a typical Fraternal Twins puzzle". Is "Fraternal Twins puzzle" actually a "typical" well-known puzzle type? I've never heard of it before, and moreover I can't even find any evidence of its existence via Google.
- Just a Dream. When we were in the answer-extraction phase of this puzzle, we could tell we were on the right track by reading off the titles of the extra movies because they looked like they were spelling out words, but not an intelligible phrase: at one point we had something like MAIN LM THE RR KING JRT and were trying to make sense of that (THE RR KING JRT looks like it could be pointing at The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien). K. and I noticed that some of our movie titles were alphabetized with an initial The, like The Matrix, and some had the initial The deleted; once we fixed that it improved a bit but still wasn't an intelligible phrase, and then I started at it for a bit and said, let's call in MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. And, as K. pointed out later, this kind of laid bare some of the assumptions and priorities that one picks up by doing a lot of puzzle hunts, which aren't necessarily apparent to new people, because when I suggested that, K. was like, why?, that's not actually what our letters spell. And I was like, sure, but it's very likely that we've identified some of these movies incorrectly, or made some other error we're not aware of, and what we have is close enough to MARTIN LUTHER KING JR that it could just be the result of making a couple of errors in a puzzle with that as its answer. So the moral here is, the priority in a Mystery Hunt puzzle isn't actually making sure you have the right answer to all the clues, or finding and correcting your mistakes, but just doing enough work that you can figure out the puzzle answer from the partial, noisy data that you have; and that's something that new solvers might not realize until you point it out to them.
- Billie Barker meta. This was the first meta we solved in the Ministry round, and I'm very proud of having had the aha moment for it. BEEBLEBROX was our hook, since it was the only 10-letter answer in the round, and my teammates had zeroed in on the fact that it had a lot of repeated B's and E's and were looking for words with repeated letters to fill the other slots in this meta (which ironically turned out to be important for a different meta, but not this one); and I noticed that despite the repeated letters in BEEBLEBROX, every horse in the grid landed on a different letter, and moreover there were exactly 26 horses in the grid, and of course that's what cracked the meta open for us. Overall I thought the Ministry metas were very impressive, and figuring out which puzzle answer goes to which meta was just the right level of difficulty.
- The Ministry meta-meta. Okay, this meta-meta. I've already talked about how we were stuck on it and bottlenecked for hours. Here's why we were stuck on it. First of all, we (I) got the blind-men-and-the-elephant connection based on the flavortext pretty fast. So it seemed evident that what we needed to do was think of something that met the five criteria in the metapuzzle answers: something SOMEWHAT BUGGY, with a MULTIPART COMPOSITION, that was EVEN IN WIDTH, has a COLORFUL HEAD, and GOES ON LONGER THAN WAR AND PEACE. We couldn't see our way to any other guidance on what this might be; I think K. suggested at some point around here that we might have to order the five Minister characters from left to right according to the elephant painting, but we couldn't see what implications that might have. So we just sat around trying to brainstorm literary references that might fit those criteria; at one point K. thought of THE VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR as something that met all of those criteria and made sense given the theme and plot of the Hunt so far, and I was very confident in it, but it wasn't right. So we basically we just sat and stared for an hour or so at this puzzle until we were allowed to request hints for it, and we received an oblique hint to the effect that we should be applying the five criteria to the round's puzzle answers. I'm grumpy about that because, as a meta-meta, it had no indication that the round puzzle answers, rather than just the meta answers, should be involved in solving it; the flavortext suggested that the five criteria should be five qualities all shared by a single thing (as in the elephant story), not qualities which might be true or false of each of a whole list of things. Even after that, we still needed a second hint because we didn't know how to interpret "COLORFUL HEAD": our first thought was it referred to phrases that begin with a color word, like GOLDEN BAMBOO, but that was the only such answer in the round; then we thought it meant words that began with C, or maybe contained a C, the "head" of the word COLORFUL itself. The second hint told us it referred to words beginning with any of the letters ROYGBIV, and I think that's a stretch as well. Finally when we solved the meta-meta and got the answer A VORACIOUS BOOKWYRM RAN AMOK, the resulting art revealed that the bookwyrm was the Very Hungry Caterpillar after all! So it seems like we went through two levels of poorly-clued steps, while having no other puzzles to look at, to reach a solution that we had basically guessed without having to do all those other steps. At wrapup Palindrome said that 60% of teams had called in THE VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR; I wonder how many of them had the same reasoning as we did.
- Fruit Around. It was also a little discouraging to solve the Ministry meta-meta, hoping to finally unlock new rounds of puzzle, and then discover that only one new puzzle had been unlocked, and so we were still bottlenecked! Fortunately the resulting puzzle both (a) consisted of several mini-puzzles, rather than literally being only a single puzzle, and (b) was easy. The main thing I want to say about this is that I really like the structure of using the five mini-puzzles' content, rather than their answers, to associate them with the five fruits (apple, pear, plum, strawberry, and cherry). It's, in effect, a mini-meta that you have to solve with actual knowledge from the solving of the individual puzzles, not just their answers, and I appreciate that. It would be much harder to pull off fairly as a regular round meta, but as the mini-meta to a set of mini-puzzles it's very cute.
- Once is Happenstance. I didn't actually work on this puzzle at all, but I did get to play the part of a debugging rubber duck in solving it: I saw it listed as "needs insight" on our collaboration server, popped into the discussion for it, and asked the people who had been working on it to explain it to me in case I could help, and in the process of explaining it to me they figured out a key aha they'd been missing.
- Jump Scares. I missed out on a lot of the crossword-type puzzles in this Hunt, but I found this one and I'm glad I did. I love a good variety cryptic and this one was a ton of fun to solve. Also, K.'s friend M. was interested in joining in with us to solve a few puzzles, and it was his first Hunt and I was a little worried about finding puzzles that he'd enjoy, but he showed up during this puzzle and loves cryptics, so I was able to show him the ropes with a puzzle he liked.
- Everybody Must Get Rosetta Stoned. The phonological manipulation was a delightful gimmick for this puzzle, and K. and I had a great time listening to the clues and trying to figure them out; and I'm a big fan of the solving mechanism of "reverse a process to understand the clue, and then reapply the process to get the answer". I also want to commend the author of the puzzle for correctly treating /ɚ/ as a single English phoneme, rather than the sequence /əɹ/ it's often described as; for instance, reversing the order of phonemes in O'Connor /oʊkɑnɚ/ correctly produced /ɚkɑnoʊ/ in this puzzle, not /ɹəkɑnoʊ/. K. and I didn't figure out the Nobel Prize connection for the puzzle and went to bed without finishing it; when I woke up the next morning other teammates had figured it out and extracted the answer DECLINE A NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE, but hadn't actually submitted anything to accomplish the task. Since the coin had already been found, I didn't want to do anything elaborate, so I just translated the phrase Nobel Prize for Literature into Latin, declined that noun phrase, and emailed it in.
- Bad Beginnings. So, I love puzzles whose gimmicky is that each clue has two answers, and at first I assumed that was what this is, but pretty soon I noticed that each answer I was able to come up with only fit in the first set of blanks for its clue. So I figured the second set of blanks had to be for something different, but I didn't know what, and dragged in my teammate kvarko from the puzzle she was working on. She realized that the title and flavortext were cluing the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, and from there the puzzle turned into another great Hunt puzzle genre: the puzzle whose purpose is to acquaint the solver with some amusing or interesting body of work that they have to read to solve the puzzle. This was just delightful, one of my favorite recent Hunt puzzles; I really admire the work done to make the clues work as two-answer clues for movies and corresponding Bulwer-Lytton winners.
- Introspection, the New You City round meta: I didn't work on this meta at all, but I want to tip my hat to both the round and its meta. It managed several tricky accomplishments, with style: (a) packing all (or most) of the puzzles whose solutions asked the solvers to perform creative tasks into a single round, (b) having those tasks still be the answers to the puzzles, in that the tasks themselves are what fed into the meta, rather than just having answers handed to you once you complete the task; (c) still requiring you to perform the tasks, rather than just identify them, in order to solve the meta; and, most sneakily, (d) creating a puzzle that actually appeared different to different teams, in a way that both was totally fair and went beyond the limits of what people ordinarily expect to see in Mystery Hunt puzzles.
- Hell's Kitchen: The main thing I want to say about this puzzle is that, although it's got almost 200 clues, it's not necessary to solve all of them in order to figure out what's going on and get enough letters of the final answer to call it in. The connection of the puzzle answer, DEVILED HAM, to the theme of the puzzle itself helped a great deal in getting there, and so I really respect this puzzle for being solvable while being not as long as it looks.
- Midterm of Unspeakable Chaos: This was the last puzzle I worked on before the Hunt officially closed up shop, and what a one to go out on. I've loved all of the Unspeakable Chaos puzzles (well, I never did the one from 2003), and this was a worthy entry in the tradition. It seemed a little less complicated than most of the previous ones (which was nice for me given that I wanted to finish it before Hunt HQ closed), but still a lot of fun to solve. (And I'm very grateful to Palindrome for providing a glossary and grammar, rather than making us dig through past puzzle solutions to cobble it together ourselves.) The answer extraction for this puzzle was hilarious, and I loved the self-referential clue about the word zefolu, and the fact that of course a language like Chaotic has a simple, monomorphemic verb meaning 'write one's answer in a circle of a specified color'.
A few other puzzles I worked on and enjoyed, but don't have any comments on: My First ABC, Crewel, the Herschel Hayden meta, the Randy and Riley Rotch meta, Called Onto the Carpet, the "Unfinished Symphonies" minipuzzle of Endless Practice, and Fruits Stickers (though I moved away from the puzzle after we solved the clues and identified the animals, before moving on to the step involving Japanese orthography and an anime series).
This was a great Hunt, notwithstanding the Ministry bottleneck and I wish I'd seen more of it. Next year, hopefully, back in Cambridge!
