(no subject)

[dr_whom]

Now that I've had time to recover from not only the Mystery Hunt but also Vericon, I'm going to post some thoughts on a few of this year's Mystery Hunt puzzles.

• Police Lineup. This is a very well put-together "list of clues"–type puzzle, with the job of cluing how the puzzle works divided up very skillfully between the puzzle data itself and the flavortext (and that hilariously creepy picture). We could have very easily totally stalled out on solving it if one member of my team hadn't discovered this poster from a Seattle production of A Chorus Line which recreated the same standing order and labeled the characters' names. Why, though, does the flavortext say "Sometimes you find the one... and sometimes you come up with zero" instead of "sometimes you come up with nothing," which would have clued binary just as well and also used the titles of two songs from A Chorus Line?
  
  
• World of Comics. 'Look in this morning's paper for the answer' is an excellent "stunt" puzzle, and we spent some time asking ourselves if that could possibly be what we were supposed to do. A shout out to X2 for this also, but World of Comics pulled it off with more subtlety and style, not least because it was a lot easier to believe that qaqaq could have planted a puzzle answer in a New York Times crossword puzzle than that a nationally syndicated mainstream comic strip would have been conspiring with the Mystery Hunt authors.
  
  
• Nationwide Hunt. All I have to add to the compliments that this puzzle has already received is to note the obvious care that qaqaq took to write a clue that could be solved with only three or four out of six words. That right there is a great example of a well-balanced puzzle.
  
  
• Input/Output. This is a puzzle of a type that was all too common in this Hunt: an elegant and enjoyable puzzle where, when we finished the interesting part, we hit a wall at trying to extract an answer from it. There's nothing unreasonable about putting the five word chains in some order and then taking the initials of the inputs and outputs of each chain, but there's nothing that makes it more reasonable than any other approach you might try for answer extraction, and it isn't self-confirming because the order that the five bigrams are put in is arbitrary. This is a case where a little flavortext cluing, or even explicit instructions, would have gone a long way—because as I said, the main part of the puzzle, building the input/output machine, was lots of fun to work on and solve.
  
  
• Common Thread. An innovative low-information word puzzle. I was fairly amazed working on it and solving it, as the small set of letters known to us in each unclued entry still came together to make a word. We never did figure out what the "clues" in the final word chain meant, though, or how the first three word chains related to the final one, if at all.
  
  
• Wise Guys. An extremely elegant puzzle, because its theme pervades it at every step of the way. The theme of the puzzle is the fable about the blind men and the elephant, and so its mini-runaround begins at a mural of the blind men and the elephant; the target of the runaround is described in terms of the characteristics of its sub-parts, as in the fable; the answer extraction is Braille, for the blind men; the answer itself is TRUNK, for the elephant. Charming and brilliant.
  
  
• Picture Puzzle. Perhaps my favorite or second-favorite puzzle of this Hunt. The "assembly required" crossword is my favorite variety-crossword type, and doing it "diagramless" put a challenging twist on it. And the answer extraction, which was subtly but effectively clued, yielded an extremely cute picture of a zebra. Oddly, the existence of the connect-the-dots answer extraction may have made the crossword easier to solve, since it imposed some constraints on the locations of the answers with respect to each other; we noticed the constraint, though we didn't understand the nature of it until we were finished.
  
  
• Eight Not-So-Deadly Sins. I just think it's hilarious that we (and presumably everyone else) worked on this puzzle on Friday night and Saturday morning, when we couldn't get in touch with anyone who could actually help us answer the clues.
  
  
• Son of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos. The original Realm of Unspeakable Chaos was my favorite puzzle from the 2001 Hunt, and the new puzzle carried the same idea even farther. The text had to have been very carefully written in order to be translatable just from the lexicon and grammar found in the previous puzzle, plus the occasional carefully placed Greek loanword. We got this puzzle at 3am, just when I was planning to go to sleep, but bluefaith and I fell on it immediately and did the translation—one of the advantages of being on the overnight shift was that few enough people on my team were active that I basically got my choice of puzzles; and this one was quite a lot of fun. We never solved it because we never got the answer extraction, but that wasn't the puzzle's fault—it just never occurred to us to put the letters in the right order to read the clue. And the interesting part was awesome.
  
  
• The New Jersey Turnpike metapuzzle. The kind of mind that can notice that the number and orientation of the New Jersey Turnpike rest stops is the same as the number and orientation of the alkali metals and halogens is the kind of mind I want writing puzzles. The answer, SALT AL'S STREET, combined the two themes of the puzzle very nicely: SALT for the alkali metals and halogens, and STREET for the Turnpike. When I solved it, I was working with partial information and guessed SALT HIS STREET; jumping to the conclusion that H. Lombardi was the witness for this group, I called that answer in to H. Lombardi—who told me, "Are you sure you're talking to the right person? I'm not Al." So I immediately figured that it must be AL'S instead of HIS and called it in correctly. But I'm still not sure whether H. Lombardi was (a) deliberately giving me a hint, (b) honestly misunderstanding me (thinking I'd actually said AL'S and wondering why I'd called it in to H. Lombardi instead of Al Hamilton), or (c) letting something slip by accident. All three seem plausible.
  
  My team only figured out two of the six Little Black Book groups for ourselves, before the groupings were revealed by time-release: the New Jersey group and the Brady Bunch group. Looking over the Little Black Book after the Hunt, I've started noticing lots of hints embedded in addresses and e-mail addresses that my team never picked up on at all, even for metas that we eventually solved: Tibetan restaurants! Birthplaces of presidents, and the names of their wives! The very words "species", "genus", "family", and so on! A lot of care went into constructing those address-book entries, and I have a pretty high opinion now of the cleverness of the puzzle of sorting the entries into groups—even if my team only identified two groups, and ignored most of the clues that were supposed to help us find the rest.
  

Other puzzles I worked on and liked, but don't have any particular comments on: Hold Your Tongue, Cross-Examination, At the Crossroads, the "Presidents' fathers" metapuzzle, Cluesome, The Goodwin Manuscript, Write-Offs, At the Beach.

My compliments once more to Palindrome, and congratulations to Midnight Bombers; I look forward to next year's Hunt!

Comments

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Stop by and chat, if you like. A few passing notes--in a fit of tiredness, I just typed the ten first letters of the chain ends in "Input/Output" into an anagrammer, and only noticed the bigram-anagram after. (Thank heavens.)

And: I also called SALT HIS STREET to H. Lombardi. In my case, though, a woman called us, so it was very clearly wrong and I rather stumbled through saying "we wanted to salt his street..." No hints for us, but I got "AL'S" right away once I hung up.

[dr_whom]

If I'm in Williams, I will stop by.

Your experience with SALT HIS STREET leads me to suspect (c), out of my three possibilities, I suppose. They wouldn't do that kind of deliberate hinting for Plant but not IIF; and if at least two teams came up with HIS, it's more likely that they anticipated it as a possible wrong answer also. I guess?

[dalryaug.livejournal.com]

Your description of what happened during the call makes me think I might have been the person you talked to, but I'm not completely sure. If this was the case, then it was b. I don't think we actually anticipated that people would be calling in HIS, honestly.

[zdenka]

You were at Vericon? Argh, I'm sorry I didn't run into you. It's true that I spent most of my con time sick with a cold, running around madly, and/or buried in long events that took my full concentration . . .

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

Hi, couple years late here, but it made me happy to see that you liked World of Comics, which was pretty much my first solo construction of any puzzle ever. I still can't really believe Garry Trudeau agreed to be in on the puzzle, and I really wish I'd had him do something cooler than just telling me what would be in the comic, since it sounded like he was willing to do a lot more.