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The Mystery Hunt is the best holiday
Jan. 22nd, 2019 06:34 pmI had a great time at the Mystery Hunt this year! It ran a little long—the coin wasn't found until 6pm Sunday, after the announced shutdown time. Most of the time when the Hunt runs long, though, my team tends to start burning out and losing enthusiasm around Sunday afternoon as we get frustrated with loads of puzzles we can't solve, but this time we were still excited and going strong when the Hunt ended. My only complaint really is that it seemed like our available puzzles were pretty sparse Saturday afternoon, and then a lot of puzzles dropped overnight, leaving us with a ton of puzzles on Sunday and not much time left to do them. If they'd unlocked some of them earlier, we would have had more to do on Saturday and more opportunity to get to the rest. I suspect that Setec was overreacting to how short their Hunt was in 2017—they wrote too little that year, so they tried to write a longer Hunt this year, and overcorrected. I'm not complaining, though; although it would have been nice to see the whole Hunt, I had a good time the whole weekend, and I personally think that late afternoon / early evening Sunday is the best time for the Hunt to end.
The holidays theme was a major success, in my opinion. It allowed for a variety of thematic territory as the different holidays have different associated concepts and motifs, while still maintaining an overall coherent feel for the Hunt. On average, the puzzle flavortext did a pretty good job tying in the puzzles to the theme of the holiday they were associated with. (Also, the flavortext did a good job of providing clues for the puzzles themselves, which is something I enjoy a lot, though perhaps I'm the only one on my team who feels that way.) And the plot—the molasses flood threatening the holiday towns—not only was Pretty Hilarious but also felt motivated by real life (the 100th anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood) in a way that is pretty rare for Mystery Hunt themes. And it allowed them to recognize Martin Luther King Day within the theme of the Hunt, via a community-service event. I'm also fond of the structure where they start with major holidays like Christmas, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, and then as you get deeper into the Hunt you get more oddball ones like Arbor Day and Bloomsday.
The main structural innovation this year was the organization of the metapuzzles: each meta was based on puzzles from two rounds, and you had to figure out which puzzles from each of the rounds fed the metas. I really like the gimmick where "figuring out which puzzles form the meta is part of the puzzle" (well, I like it from time to time, anyway); but in previous Mystery Hunts using that gimmick, to the best of my recollection, there were specific clues to meta assignment (e.g., the Little Black Book in 2009). Here there was nothing to go on except solving the metas and seeing which answers fit. The unlocking order helped a lot with that: the first meta used all the Christmas puzzles and some of the Halloween puzzles, and so solving that one made it possible to rule out some of the Halloween puzzles for the next metas, and so on. The structure of the Hunt thus complemented the structure of the metas themselves really well. Although we never got far enough to actually make use of it, the extra April Fool's metapuzzle was a neat way to use this meta structure to the advantage of the Hunt's plot/theme, as well, so it really made the Hunt feel like an overall well-connected unit.
My team never saw endgame, but I think the twist of having the manhole cover be hidden in the winning team's own solving space (April fool!) was brilliant and inspired.
My own experience of solving this Hunt involved a lot of answer extraction: there were a lot of puzzles that I didn't really work on in a substantive way but that I just dropped in on at the end and helped people figure out how to get a final answer out of the work they'd done so far. In several cases, they already knew how to extract the answer and just didn't have enough letters to read off the final phrase, and I came along and wheel-of-fortuned out the answer from the letters they had. Although that means there weren't a whole lot of puzzles that I worked on from beginning to end (other than, like, most of the crosswords, I guess), it means I got to see and make contributions to a lot of puzzles, and I like feeling useful in that way. And wheel-of-fortuning out answer phrases like that is something I like to think of myself as good at, so it was nice to see I've still got it.
Now, some comments on specific puzzles:
( Spoilers! )
Other puzzles I worked on and liked, but don't have specific comments about: Nobel Laureate, Spinning Tops, Theater Pieces, A Vexing Puzzle, Bitter Kittens Cross the Pond, the Valentine's Day / Presidents' Day meta, Insider Trading, No Shirt, Middle School of Mines, Climate Change, Chain of Commands.
Thanks to Setec for an excellent Hunt—I wish I'd been able to do more of it!
(And now, it's time for another holiday: back-to-school day!)
The holidays theme was a major success, in my opinion. It allowed for a variety of thematic territory as the different holidays have different associated concepts and motifs, while still maintaining an overall coherent feel for the Hunt. On average, the puzzle flavortext did a pretty good job tying in the puzzles to the theme of the holiday they were associated with. (Also, the flavortext did a good job of providing clues for the puzzles themselves, which is something I enjoy a lot, though perhaps I'm the only one on my team who feels that way.) And the plot—the molasses flood threatening the holiday towns—not only was Pretty Hilarious but also felt motivated by real life (the 100th anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood) in a way that is pretty rare for Mystery Hunt themes. And it allowed them to recognize Martin Luther King Day within the theme of the Hunt, via a community-service event. I'm also fond of the structure where they start with major holidays like Christmas, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, and then as you get deeper into the Hunt you get more oddball ones like Arbor Day and Bloomsday.
The main structural innovation this year was the organization of the metapuzzles: each meta was based on puzzles from two rounds, and you had to figure out which puzzles from each of the rounds fed the metas. I really like the gimmick where "figuring out which puzzles form the meta is part of the puzzle" (well, I like it from time to time, anyway); but in previous Mystery Hunts using that gimmick, to the best of my recollection, there were specific clues to meta assignment (e.g., the Little Black Book in 2009). Here there was nothing to go on except solving the metas and seeing which answers fit. The unlocking order helped a lot with that: the first meta used all the Christmas puzzles and some of the Halloween puzzles, and so solving that one made it possible to rule out some of the Halloween puzzles for the next metas, and so on. The structure of the Hunt thus complemented the structure of the metas themselves really well. Although we never got far enough to actually make use of it, the extra April Fool's metapuzzle was a neat way to use this meta structure to the advantage of the Hunt's plot/theme, as well, so it really made the Hunt feel like an overall well-connected unit.
My team never saw endgame, but I think the twist of having the manhole cover be hidden in the winning team's own solving space (April fool!) was brilliant and inspired.
My own experience of solving this Hunt involved a lot of answer extraction: there were a lot of puzzles that I didn't really work on in a substantive way but that I just dropped in on at the end and helped people figure out how to get a final answer out of the work they'd done so far. In several cases, they already knew how to extract the answer and just didn't have enough letters to read off the final phrase, and I came along and wheel-of-fortuned out the answer from the letters they had. Although that means there weren't a whole lot of puzzles that I worked on from beginning to end (other than, like, most of the crosswords, I guess), it means I got to see and make contributions to a lot of puzzles, and I like feeling useful in that way. And wheel-of-fortuning out answer phrases like that is something I like to think of myself as good at, so it was nice to see I've still got it.
Now, some comments on specific puzzles:
( Spoilers! )
Other puzzles I worked on and liked, but don't have specific comments about: Nobel Laureate, Spinning Tops, Theater Pieces, A Vexing Puzzle, Bitter Kittens Cross the Pond, the Valentine's Day / Presidents' Day meta, Insider Trading, No Shirt, Middle School of Mines, Climate Change, Chain of Commands.
Thanks to Setec for an excellent Hunt—I wish I'd been able to do more of it!
(And now, it's time for another holiday: back-to-school day!)
