Post–Palindrome Hunt Palindrome Post

[dr_whom]

Okay, actually only the title of the post is a palindrome.

Now that I've had several days to recover from the 2008 Mystery Hunt, I figured it was time to get down some of my thoughts about it while it's still fresh in my mind.

This was a mammoth of a Hunt: 118 puzzles, not counting metas and the structural aspects that needed to be figured out, almost all very difficult; and it was only with a really rapid time-release system, and eventually some vigorous hinting, that it was eventually brought in at a reasonable time. I suspect this just may have been an overreaction to the last couple years of under-40-hour Hunts, just as the shortness of the SPIES Hunt was an overreaction to the over-64-hour lengths of the Matrix and Time Bandits Hunts. Anyhow, the length of the Hunt, difficulty of the puzzles, and the rapidity of time-release was on occasion pretty overwhelming to my team; it would have been nice if some of the somewhat easier puzzles had been nearer the beginning of the Hunt; starting off with "Let's Ask the Dead Guy" and "Odd One Out" in the opening set was a bit of a blow. About an hour before the Hunt actually ended, my team (Metaphysical Plant) sort of noticed that we had basically stopped solving puzzles, and were notified that the Evil Midnight Bombers had found the coin while we were actually closing up our HQ and having our debriefing meeting. So, congratulations again to them on finishing a very difficult Hunt.

It occurred to me after the fact that this Hunt seems like two Hunts with very clever and devious structural ideas tacked together: the Hunt where you have to determine which puzzles go together into metapuzzle groups on the basis of what SPIES called "ante" data; and the Hunt where each round has an extra puzzle that doesn't fit the meta, and those are extracted to constitute an additional meta. These are both good Hunt structures (though the first one is fairly similar to the Monopoly Hunt) but I think in this Hunt they only interacted half as well as they ought to. That is, the "whodunit" theme I think did a good job of integrating the dossiers with the address-book puzzles and motivating the roles they played with respect to each other in the plot, and I gather—from what I understand of the way it worked—that endgame managed to make the data from the two halves of the Hunt interact in a way that actually managed to simulate solving the murder mystery.

On the other hand, the meta that depended on the "extra" puzzles from each dossier seemed to have less plot relevance than it seemed they (no pun intended) warranted. But when we solved that meta, it was just another motive-and-alibi exactly like all the other dossiers. From a plot perspective, why were those puzzles scattered among the other dossiers and connected to the warrant against us (i.e., the solvers), if it was exactly the same plot-wise as an ordinary dossier round? Also, I was pretty disappointed that the "black book" metas had no purpose other than to open the dossier rounds, which means that once the rapid time-release schedule had opened all the dossier rounds, the black-book metas became totally redundant. Time release should make more puzzles available, but I don't think it should make the work you've already put into earlier puzzles (or metapuzzles) wasted.

I seem to have whined a lot above. I just want to stress that I did have a good time solving this weekend. There were a lot of puzzles I enjoyed quite a lot; all the metas were really solid, intricate, and clever in their conception, including the ones my team didn't solve; and as I said I enjoyed the murder-mystery theme and plot a lot. The puzzles, though difficult, were also very clean and conceptually interesting. My compliments to qaqaq, fuldu, especially ericberlin, and everyone else.

Later: comments on specific puzzles!

Comments

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Quick note about the length of the hunt: I am nigh-positive that they were actually shooting for something between 40 and 48 hours; the length was unintentional.

Do be sure to read Eric's writeup, too.

[dr_whom]

Oh, I have no doubt that the extraordinary length was unintentional, just as the extraordinary shortness of the SPIES Hunt was unintentional. But even if you're aiming for moderate length, it's easier to overshoot rather than undershoot if the negative examples fresh in your mind are of too-short rather than too-long Hunts. A lot of the talk on the blogs after the last couple of Hunts, as I recall, was basically 'Teams are too good; Hunts will never go past 6am on Sunday again.' If that's the conventional wisdom, it's easy to go overboard in trying to make the Hunt a little longer than the last couple were.