Recap: DaroCaro’s Pixar Puzzle Hunt

This past Friday I took a shot at the DaroCaro puzzlehunt. I had really no idea where it was going to lie on the puzzle-quality spectrum so I tried to go in with as open a mind as possible. The website was very pretty and seemed high quality (and I appreciated seeing someone else willing to use github pages), but Pixar as a theme isn’t something that really excites my jimmies.

Overall, I really enjoyed it! The puzzles were mostly very creative and all had very strong theming, and I think this made up for any kinks throughout the hunt. The authors seemed to make the hunt that they wanted to make, rather than feel bound by traditions or unwritten rules, and this usually works out well.

The biggest place this stood out was in the metapuzzle. Instead of a normal metapuzzle where the answers were heavily used, there was just simple, obvious indexing into the answers leading to a separate puzzle involving the movies, and a neat rehash of all the puzzles. I might have been slightly disappointed at the lack of a more traditional puzzle, but as I said earlier, I think it’s always better for authors to write what they want to write rather than what they feel obligated to write. The way they handled the metapuzzle was a great way to not write a “real” metapuzzle, but still give the hunt a sense of connectedness and satisfactory ending point. In turn, this also allowed them to write the answers for the puzzles, and be able to get very thematic answers with puns that you’d normally only see in meta answers. I have no shame in admitting to how long I laughed at JACK JACK OF ALL SPADES.

Another huge highlight was the tools provided for solvers. Having the drawing tool is really great for puzzles that would otherwise be a pain to print out. Although I only used it for one or two puzzles, I think it’s a great option. Providing google sheets templates for the criss-cross grids was EXCELLENT. I have always been lamenting the lack of this in other puzzles, particularly with barred crossword grids, as it provides just an annoying step before actually doing the puzzle. Finding a good crossword parser recently has made this much better, but it still feels like something that should be accessible to everyone. I hope more puzzle authors take example from this.

One thing I thought was strange was that the leaderboard always ranked by number of puzzles solved, rather than finishing the hunt as a priority as I would expect. I think my team was about the 10th or so to finish the hunt, but because we waited until Saturday to finish up the last couple puzzles, we ended up in 54th place. It’s possible that the inclination to do it this way was the result of not focusing on the metapuzzle, as I mentioned above. When your focus is on the puzzles rather than the metapuzzle then perhaps this ranking makes sense. Regardless, they made all the rules quite clear ahead of time, so I’m certainly not complaining, I just found it an interesting thing to think about.

As for some thoughts about specific puzzles I particularly enjoyed or those I had a bone to pick with:

Charming But Cryptic: Using a criss-cross grid for a cryptic rather than a traditional cryptic grid is dangerous because it requires all your clues to be quite clean, as you might only get one crossing for an entry. Luckily this was quite clean! The extraction was neat of reading full words, and the clues were breezy but not trivial (to me, that is); exactly what I wanted.

Helium Cupacity: Extremely thematic, and I always enjoy a puzzle where nothing makes with what you’ve written down, but then after a (not too hard) aha moment, it all makes sense and fits in. Even better if the aha makes everything hilarious and giggly like this one.

Highway Petrol: It’s impressive how thematic this puzzle was, and it’s a really neat idea. It’s a pretty simple way to amplify a sudoku while still keeping it pretty easy. What was really strange about this puzzle was how hard interpreting the intermediate cluephrase was. We struggled with it and it seems we weren’t alone (based on them buffing the clue upon entering the phrase). It really shouldn’t have been hard, as in retrospect it was really obvious. But at least for us, we wrote down the correct middle numbers, but then couldn’t figure out what to do with them. I think the problem is that even though it’s really impressive that they found a thematic word to fit it, because it seems to impossible, viewing them as alphanumeric is never something we thought to try. They just don’t seem like numbers that it would work with (since they come from a sudoku grid, so presumably would have to be an index, or a reordering of something). I’m really not sure how to make this clearer without just a totally different final extraction. I also think based on the way they clarified the intermediate message made it clear they also didn’t know why it was hard, since I don’t think that message is particularly helpful.

Math is Math and Must You Pile the Food Sky High?: Both of these were straightforward, but satisfying puzzles and I enjoyed them. Not much else to say.

Stargazing: I though this was probably the weakest puzzle in the hunt. Certainly everything else in the hunt made it overall enjoyable, but this puzzle basically boiled down to answering a bunch of trivia questions, and then doing a fairly tedious star identification. Both of these steps were entirely unrelated. I think I overall enjoyed the star identification, though I suspect that I’m in the minority on this, as it’s mostly just googling the star and hoping you get a good enough star chart, and there was no shortage of stars. Furthermore, the final step was pretty weak. Picture identification is almost always a weak final extraction, and this was no exception. My first thought was to try all the Pac-Man ghosts and a bunch of other things before I finally tried “ghost”, giving the intermediate phrase to look for another name for a ghost. What? There’s a bunch of names for ghosts. I know, I’ve tried to use them for a puzzle before. I understand the thematicness of the answer, but it’s something I never would have guessed (and I suspect the authors knew this because they put a message explaining the connection upon giving the correct answer). In fact, if I didn’t have the letter from the metapuzzle and the power of OneLook, I’m sure our guess log would have been even longer than it already was.

Overall though, I definitely had a good time and hope the authors make another one sometime. I’ll definitely participate! The world could always use more good puzzlehunts.