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Puzzles from S.P.I.E.S.
Jan. 16th, 2006 11:06 amHere's a list of the puzzles I contributed to from the 2006 Mystery Hunt, with some of my thoughts about them. Obviously there are numerous spoilers below.
( Actually, they're in here )
Wow, that was really long; I must have written a lot of puzzles, and of course as an editor I had a bit of a hand in a lot more that I haven't mentioned. I was really pleased with the way this Hunt turned out, except the fact that it was too short—we put a lot of effort into making sure it wouldn't bottleneck people and run overlong, and seem to have erred too far in the other direction. We seem to have overestimated the difficulty of a lot of parts of it: we made sure the meta-meta was solvable even if one meta proved unsolvable; we tried to make antepuzzle solutions backsolvable from meta solutions in case an ante was unsolvable; some teams moved rapidly through the first few rounds only to hit a roadblock at an event that wouldn't happen for hours because we figured it would take longer to reach. The biggest failing of the Hunt was the bottlenecking capability of the early events for teams that reached those rounds early; IIF in particular got very frustrated when they got stuck on Connect Four and couldn't make any progress until after Russian Brunch.
That said, though, I'm very proud to have been involved in putting together this Hunt; and I wouldn't mind winning again sometime.
My favorite puzzles in this Hunt that I didn't write include the following: No Silver Lining, Counting Your Chickens..., Blue Steel, Pen Rose, the Moscow meta (solution), 783658, Badness 10000, Louder Than Words, Decode This, Pipe Dream, Succeeding men in youth do count things rare, The Scrambler, Wry, Ergo Dead, All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy, Fusion, and Syncopation.
(This post was actually written January 2009.)
( Actually, they're in here )
Wow, that was really long; I must have written a lot of puzzles, and of course as an editor I had a bit of a hand in a lot more that I haven't mentioned. I was really pleased with the way this Hunt turned out, except the fact that it was too short—we put a lot of effort into making sure it wouldn't bottleneck people and run overlong, and seem to have erred too far in the other direction. We seem to have overestimated the difficulty of a lot of parts of it: we made sure the meta-meta was solvable even if one meta proved unsolvable; we tried to make antepuzzle solutions backsolvable from meta solutions in case an ante was unsolvable; some teams moved rapidly through the first few rounds only to hit a roadblock at an event that wouldn't happen for hours because we figured it would take longer to reach. The biggest failing of the Hunt was the bottlenecking capability of the early events for teams that reached those rounds early; IIF in particular got very frustrated when they got stuck on Connect Four and couldn't make any progress until after Russian Brunch.
That said, though, I'm very proud to have been involved in putting together this Hunt; and I wouldn't mind winning again sometime.
My favorite puzzles in this Hunt that I didn't write include the following: No Silver Lining, Counting Your Chickens..., Blue Steel, Pen Rose, the Moscow meta (solution), 783658, Badness 10000, Louder Than Words, Decode This, Pipe Dream, Succeeding men in youth do count things rare, The Scrambler, Wry, Ergo Dead, All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy, Fusion, and Syncopation.
(This post was actually written January 2009.)
