(no subject)

[dr_whom]

So, here's where I mention which puzzles in the 2007 Mystery Hunt I found especially enjoyable, interesting, or worthy of comment.

• This Puzzle Has Been Formatted to Fit Your Screen. This was one of my favorite puzzles in the first several rounds of this Hunt. Original concept, slick execution, not at all complicated, but subtle enough that each aha moment feels like an achievement.
  
• What's Wrong? As someone else out here in blogland commented, finally a trivia puzzle that doesn't depend on trying to figure out the proper search terms to Google for to find the correct answers to the clues! After writing the Jeopardy! puzzle from last year's Hunt, I noticed immediately that this puzzle's clues were formatted like Jeopardy! clues, although that being the case I'm kind of embarrassed that it took accidentally landing on J-Archive while Googling for correct answers for me to realize what the puzzle was actually about.
  
• One, Two, Three, Shoot! This one was just a hoot and a half to solve. Finally we know who would win in a fight—spontaneous combustion or Spam!
  
• Writing Nerds. Shakespearean insults is a great topic for a puzzle, and I had a lot of fun working on this one—this is the kind of puzzle where I'm always surprised to be able to extract enough data by inspection to be able to find the answer. I wish, though, that it had done more with the insults concept—it would have been better, for instance, if the answers to the clues were the characters being insulted, not the characters speaking. And extracting KNOBBY-KNUCKLED made me certain the answer was something-CUCKOLD, until someone called in KNOBBY-KNUCKLED and that was the answer itself.
  
• Thinking Outside the Box. Dude! A crossword puzzle on a Klein bottle! How come nobody's written one of those before? ...This is the first puzzle I mention when I tell people how cool this year's Hunt was. I don't know if it was my favorite, but it's definitely up there.
  
• Pyramid Scheme. A very solid variety cryptic which I enjoyed a lot. I'm very proud that I was able to solve perhaps about a quarter as many clues as Julian, our team's power cryptic-solver. We were so impatient to get started on this puzzle that we ended up solving about 80% of it without even looking at the grid.
  
• Embezzler's Quest. A puzzle with a great sense of humor, with somehow just enough data to solve it when at first glance we didn't even know where to start. Looking at the solution file, I see that the flavortext is a clue. I wonder if any team noticed that.
  
• UN-Speakable. So, this puzzle... doesn't work. And I mean, I've read a lot of complaining about its reliance on oblique flavortext cluing for the key step, but I found that once I tried approaching it from a different direction, the flavortext clue basically fell open to me. (Though I am kind of embarrassed to have been the first person on my team to realize that Furbish exists.) The problem with this puzzle is earlier than that. Someone proposed a phonetic crossword for the 2006 Hunt and I vetoed it because I figured that it would be impossible to do correctly, and it looks like I was right.
  
  A puzzle that depends on moderately-specialized subject matter—such as, say, the phonetics of multiple languages—should become easier the more the solver knows about the subject. That's not the case for this puzzle: the more you know about the phonetics of English, French, German, etc., the harder this puzzle is—because the puzzle is riddled with phonetic/phonological errors. A simple example: 4 Down is supposed to be French HAUTE MONDE, to be entered in six squares. (1) HAUTE MONDE has only five phonemes in it. (2) It is supposed to intersect with Spanish SANA and English SKEIN, neither of which has any phonemes in common with HAUTE MONDE. (3) HAUTE MONDE isn't French; monde is masculine, so HAUT MONDE (four phonemes) would be correct. The author could have almost dodged part of one of those problems by using SANO instead of SANA without changing anything else, but didn't. The puzzle is full of this stuff. If I had been trying to solve this grid, I would have assumed I was on the wrong track or had the wrong answers—the right answers simply don't fit.
  
• Round 8 Meta. I have little to add to what's already been said about this. I think to say the puzzle is broken is too strong. It is severely underclued, and its chief problem I think is that the right solution is both hard to do (because it's so hard to find a Senate seating chart) and not a-priori any more plausible than many other courses of action.
  
• Two Out of Three Ain't Bad. I was so impressed by this puzzle! I didn't even know you could do that with diagramless crosswords. It did get a little tedious toward the end, but overall a great puzzle. I am disappointed, though, that the SONDHEIM answer wasn't used for a puzzle with more Sondheimy content.
  
• Round 10 Meta. I liked this one: simple and elegant. And the cluing was very subtle—basically what cracked it for me was nothing but "The only station with a Q in the call letters also has a U." (Thanks, Jeff!) Also, it's the only meta I solved, so I have a bit of a soft spot for it. And it gave me an opportunity to go sing "March of the Sinister Ducks".
  

Well, that's it! Thanks again to Bombers for an excellent Hunt; and congratulations of course to Dr. Awkward. (Also congratulations to Noah, who guessed the outcome of the Hunt several days in advance with an error of less than one hour.) I look forward to seeing what Dr. Awkward produces for us next year!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

"How come nobody's written one of those before?"

Funny you should mention it. Both that puzzle, and this one (http://mit.edu/puzzle/www/07/puzzles/large_and_in_charge/) were on my "puzzles to write the next time we write a mystery hunt"-list. Though I'd planned on doing an ordinary grid on a projective plane (because that plays better with standard crossword symmetry). Adding more symmetry to do it on a Klein bottle, as Dan did, is better. And I was thinking of the latter as a meta, with some easier answers, of course (say BLOWFISH). Ah well, first come, first serve. And the Bombers did great jobs with both ideas.

Not that I actually solved either of those puzzles, of course.

Oh, and credit where credit's due, the suggestion for an IPA crossword of sorts during our hunt was from Reid. Though I guess since it was never accepted that was probably anonymous to you as a writing editors.

--noah

[mollishka.livejournal.com]

*quack, quack*!