The Mystery Hunt is amusing

The big story from this year's Mystery Hunt, I guess, is the restrictions and confusion around overnight solving. About a week before the Hunt, the organizers, team Left Out, announced that MIT was refusing to waive their official policy against on-campus events taking place between 1am and 7am, and so teams would have to vacate their reserved solving rooms overnight and would not even be allowed to do on-campus puzzle data gathering between those hours. After what I can only assume was an intense series of negotiations between Left Out and Puzzle Club on the one hand and MIT administration on the other hand, they eventually decided that teams with MIT student members could remain in their rooms, and you could do Hunt activities in MIT public spaces overnight as long as you wore an official Mystery Hunt name tag. (My team didn't have to vacate our room, as it turned out, because we didn't reserve it through the Hunt organizers, but there was some confusion on that point at various times.) Left Out did a heroic job making sure the Hunt could go on as usual under the circumstances, and I really want to salute the last-minute work they must have had to do.

I don't want the overnight issues to overshadow what I think really should have been the big news from this Hunt, which is this: Left Out finally instituted automated answer checking. When I started doing the Hunt, the way you confirmed a correct answer was that you phoned the organizers' official Hunt phone line and they would tell you if your answer was correct or not. At peak times you might spend a long time getting busy signals and waiting to get your answer confirmed. In 2006, when my team ran the Hunt, we switched to a system where you click a button on the website to put your team on a queue, and then someone on the organizing team would call you back to check your answer, and with small changes that was basically the system for 15 years. This year Left Out finally bit the bullet and made the change everyone knew had to happen eventually: you just type your answer and click "submit", and the system instantaneously tells you if you're correct or not. Past writing teams had resisted instituting that in part because it makes it easy to just spam guesses until you get the right answer; but Left Out had a system that imposed a time delay on answer checking if you submitted too many wrong answers for a puzzle too quickly, and that usually worked as sufficient disincentive for too much guessing. Having a fanfare play for everyone on the team who had the Hunt page open when anyone on the team submitted a correct answer was an inspired decision; it really made the answer confirmations seem like a celebratory communal team event rather than just one person's accomplishment.

Another Hunt-wide innovation I liked a great deal was the Penny Passes—the reward for attending events was a pass that would let you unlock a new puzzle in a round of your choice. In a Hunt with pretty strict unlocking—basically you unlock a new puzzle when you solve a puzzle—these were a good tool to keep the Hunt moving and keep people from getting stuck, without just handing out free answers as some teams have done in the past (which seems much more high-stakes!).

I liked the overall round structure of the Hunt—it wasn't too complicated, but I appreciated the difference between the more straightforward inner rounds and the more experimental outer rounds.( spoilers about the structures of later rounds )

My team didn't quite manage to solve the Creative Pictures meta, and never even made enough progress on the other three outer rounds to get a sense of what their structures were or how they worked, so we really only saw about two-thirds of the Hunt. We haven't been trying to win since 2010, but over the past ten years we've moved from still being a top-5 team to a top-10 team to a top-20 team, as we get farther from our peak and other teams put more effort into improving their solving. It's an interesting adjustment to make: I'm still used to, even if we don't get to endgame, getting a solid idea of the structure of the Hunt and how its rounds worked; and this year we barely even got into the last three rounds and didn't get a chance to experience whatever interesting meta structures they contained. I was a little disappointed about missing out on some of the key parts of the Hunt that I'm used to seeing.

The Hunt opened with the literal, real-life on-stage wedding of two members of the writing team, and honestly I felt a little weird about it? The invitation they sent out a week before the Hunt was just an alteration of the invitation we had sent around for Mario and Peach's wedding in the 2011 Mario Hunt; it both seems a little inappropriate of them to literally just copy our team's design, and certainly didn't make it clear that this wedding (unlike the one in 2011) was going to be real. And so there I am unexpectedly a guest at an intimate moment in the lives of two people I don't know; I'm glad they got to have their wedding in a venue that was meaningful for them, but it felt inappropriate for them to be imposing their important personal moment on everyone who was just there to solve puzzles. The Hunt theme fakeout in the middle of the ceremony was pretty funny... but the segue from the wedding to the actual Hunt theme seemed very awkward and tacked-on. Maybe I would have felt better about having a wedding at Hunt kickoff if the wedding actually had something to do with the Hunt, since introducing the actual Hunt theme is what kickoff is for?

That said, the theme of the Hunt was delightful and I definitely would not have preferred a Hunt that was actually wedding-themed. Left Out really nailed the aesthetic of the cheesy, past-its-prime, low-budget amusement park; I loved the mismatched collection of mascots. And the overall amusement park theme allowed for a lot of fun sub-themes. I think the writers did a really good job of keeping the puzzles on-theme in each round, either through the actual puzzle content or just the flavortext. The pressed-penny souvenirs were maybe my favorite component of the Hunt: they were a vehicle for the endgame puzzle, of course, but they also put a nice capstone on each round, tied in to the Mystery Hunt as an institution by being "coins", and perfectly fit the thematic aesthetic as cheap souvenirs from a cheap amusement park; and moreover, they were just fun to make. They had a station set up in a room on campus where you would feed a penny into the press and turn the crank yourself to flatten it and print the puzzle/souvenir symbols on it. The Left Out members running the workshop when I went to get the Spaceopolis penny were kind of perfectionists, making me run four or five pennies through the press till I got one they were satisfied with (I spent five cents doing that!), but after I got back to the team's solving space I saw why: some of the other pennies we had gotten from earlier rounds were not as well flattened, and you could still see the Lincoln Memorial on them, obscuring the puzzle-relevant symbols. During cleanup at the end of Hunt, I nabbed the penny I pressed to add to my collection of Hunt souvenirs.

Here are my spoilery thoughts on some of the specific puzzles that I worked on and thought were noteworthy:
( Spoilers within! )

Puzzles I worked on and liked, but don't have much to say about: Moat-er Boats, The Scottish Display; Goldilocks; Gallery of Tomorrow; Sand Witches; the Witches' Hut metapuzzle; The Holy Cup of the Raven-God; Teacups; Dog.

Congratulations to Left Out on an excellent and very entertaining Hunt; I just wish I'd been able to see more of it!