Puzzles in Alice-Land

[dr_whom]

Comments on some puzzles from the 2014 Mystery Hunt that I found noteworthy:

• Safety First. A fun puzzle, with the data provided in a cute way. I picked up our registration packs and went back to my teammates and was like "Here's our first aid kit, here's our tote bags; the tote bags are not a puzzle." "Is the first aid kit a puzzle?", they reasonably asked. And so they ransacked the bag and found that it was, before we had even discovered the puzzle page that clued it. (By the way, Alice Shrugged, if you're reading this—do you think now that the Hunt is over you could post the actual puzzle on the puzzle page, for posterity, so that future solvers can give it a go?)
• Bumblebee Tune-a. I don't actually have any comments on this one. I just wanted to make sure to highlight it to recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it yet (including non-puzzlers). It's delightfully odd and hilarious.
• Apocalypse. I'm fairly sure someone—novalis, I think?—wrote basically this exact same puzzle for an early HRSFA puzzle hunt. I can't find it in the HRSFA hunt archives, so maybe it was never actually used? But I'm certain I've seen this puzzle before, which helped a great deal in solving it this time.
• The Diamonds metapuzzle (solution). We solved this one in Cambridge as a result of Ricky (as usual our power solver) posting on our chat thread for this meta "they form a word square type thing… gotta run, someone finish it!"; so we did. We realized after we'd finished it that, though we'd drawn up the word square as a horizontal and vertical square, obviously we should have done it as a diamond, since it was the Diamonds meta. But no, at wrapup Dan pointed out something we'd missed (except maybe Ricky, I guess): that the puzzle titles for this meta all had "across" or "down" in them; so it was meant to be drawn horizontal-and-vertical after all, and the "diamond" thing was a coincidence. I do think puzzle titles are an underused avenue of information for metapuzzle-relevant data though. For the Craps Man round in 2011 I briefly thought about trying to use nicknames for die rolls as the puzzle titles (e.g., "Snake Eyes" for 1-1, "Yo!" for 5-6, "Easy 4" for 1-3, and so on), but I didn't pursue it because not all of the rolls we needed to use had unique nicknames; so we went with the original plan of just giving images of dice with each puzzle on the round page. I still think that using the titles would have been more elegant if we could have managed it, though presumably it would have made the round somewhat harder (and a lot harder to get testsolved).
• Uncommon Nonsense. I didn't work on this puzzle at all; I don't like diagramlesses very much, and once the people who were working on it figured out how it worked, well, my issues with phonetic crosswords and the like are well-documented. Looking over the solution for this one, though, it seems remarkably clean. There are only about two intersections I have serious objections to with regard to my own pronunciation—PASTA/SCOT depends on the father/bother merger and NOURISH/NURSE depends on the hurry/furry merger, neither of which merger is part of my dialect—but those are phonemic contrasts that are pretty rare in American English. OFFSHORE/DRAWER fails for me due to my weird pronunciation of DRAWER, but it also probably fails for someone with the hoarse/horse distinction; the WHEELS/OVERWEIGHT intersection fails with the which/witch distinction. I guess the puzzle has a couple of other potential issues involving things like pre-/r/ palatalization of /d/ and /t/, and some equivocation about syllabic /l/, which isn't too big a deal; and I guess I can forgive treating the middle syllable nucleus in CAPITOL as /ɪ/ rather than schwa, which even though it doesn't really work for most American English speakers they could probably convince themselves it was okay. This puzzle gets bonus points from me for correctly treating /er/ and /or/ as single phonemes, which I was talked out of on The Least You Could Do Is Phone Me.
• The Most Dangerous Night. I was stuck to a wrong idea about this puzzle for a while—I really wanted each clue to clue three movies—one for the first half, one for the second half, and one for both. So the two halves of the clue for Dogma could have clued The Da Vinci Code and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle also. That may just be because I really like clues that do that, though.
• The Tea Party metapuzzle. I was the one who led my team in the chase after the amazingly elegant red herring that a bunch of teams found in this meta. It's still hard to believe that the symmetries we found were a total coincidence, unintentional on the part of the writer, and even harder to believe that we extracted the answer without ever realizing how far off-track we were.
• The White Queen round structure and metapuzzle. This was probably my favorite puzzle-thing in the Hunt. Lots of writing teams, I'm sure, have idly talked about the idea of writing a round backward, with the metapuzzle first; but Alice Shrugged actually legitimately pulled it off, and did it with style. I mean, for most of the puzzles in the round, the conceit that what you have is the answer, and you need to find the title, is just about as silly as the Jeopardy! conceit that the clues are answers and the responses are questions; but the structure of the round really is such that you have to essentially solve the meta first and use that to unlock the puzzles, and it plays totally fair with that concept. (This is gonna be another entry in the "backsolving" category on devjoe's puzzle index, which is awesome.) My only quibble with the round structure is that it was a little unfair to allow us to backsolve answers to the dark red puzzles before we had any information with which to do so; my team spent ages trying to call in White Sox players for those. At least having done that gave us a head start on solving the actual meta for the round. I figured out how the meta actually worked, which was a nice ego boost after not having done much meta solving the last couple of Hunts, even though that may have just been because I was nearly the only member of the team awake and working at the time. I don't see why the final answer is read off in such a random order, though.
• A Puzzle with the Answer LYNN. This puzzle was a lot of fun. I like when puzzles can clue essentially nonsensical two-word phrases and make it work.
• Cruciform Heraldry. I guess part of my response to this puzzle was "How can there be exactly 26 cantons of Switzerland with nobody having based a puzzle on it before?!"—but given that nobody had, why, who knows how many sets of 26 might be left, waiting out there for some enterprising soul to base a puzzle around them! Anyway, I found this puzzle very elegant and satisfying, and am very pleased at having broken into the cryptogram by successfully Onelooking "??????-???-???????????".
• Saturdy & Sundy. It is a feature of the Mystery Hunt that sometimes you'll start working on a puzzle that looks interesting, discover it's all about some R&B artist you've never heard of, and end up solving it anyway just by guessing and Googling lyrics. It's a pretty cool experience to do that.
• Venntersections. And sometimes you solve two out of four subpuzzles of a puzzle, extract two out of four letters of the final answer, and then just pick a word that has those two letters and call it in and it's right. That's pretty cool too.
• Compose Yourself. Yay, the musical theater puzzle! A very nice way of cluing songs without letting you Google lyrics and without all of them being subject to song-identifier apps, and a clever answer extraction. I got to show off to my teammates my apparently unusual talent for knowing the names of musical-theater composers.
• Directions in Writing. This is the chief exception to my overall judgment that "I don't think I really felt blown away by awesomeness about any of the individual puzzles". This puzzle was super-awesome, you guys.
• Eggsam. I see from the Eggsam administration instructions that we "may not use or take notes during this eggsam". Allen, who took the eggsam for our team, totally did though.

I also want to add that the endgame runaround, though it seemed a bit long for an endgame runaround, was really well put together too—interesting different puzzle types, which couldn't have been done except on the runaround. Also, my team somehow solved the Duchess puzzle—which involved listening to clues recorded both forward and backward on a vinyl record—without actually ever hearing the backward clues, which were ostensibly necessary to disambiguate what items were being indicated. Lucky us?

Other puzzles I worked on and enjoyed, but don't have any comments on: Across the Hall, Cross-Pollination, A Puzzle with the Answer NOWHERE MAN, Wandering Stars, Marking Territory, the Red and White Knights meta, Let's Meet in the Middle, and the Caucus Race meta.

One thing about a smoothly-running Mystery Hunt is that you don't spend a lot of time getting frustrated with whatever you're working on and idly skimming through the other puzzles to find one that looks interesting, and your team doesn't have a huge backlog building up of unsolved puzzles to begin with. Which is great! But it means there's a huge number of puzzles you don't even see. While I was looking through the puzzle pages to write up these comments I found whole sequences of puzzles I didn't recognize. Perhaps I'll go back and give some of them a try at some point.

Great Hunt, everybody!