CRUMS Puzzlehunt Recap

This is perhaps a tad late, but I’d like to recap the excellent CRUMS Puzzlehunt that took place the week after December 12th. I was curious what it was going to be like, with just six puzzles and even and unlocking structure. It was more or less what I expected, with more challenging puzzles on average and was overall a good experience. This is a good thing to keep in mind—that I definitely enjoyed this puzzlehunt—because a lot of the rest is criticizing (hopefully constructively). This is in part perhaps because I’ve been recently thinking more as a puzzle constructor, so I’ve found it helpful to think about decisions I would have done differently.

First of all, I was not so pleased with the earliness of this hunt. Starting at 10am Eastern is early for me, someone in the Eastern time zone but with the sleep schedule of a college student. But my friends from time zones further west were not so happy. My team agreed with each other to just pretend it started at 1pm Eastern so we could all sleep in a bit more. It was sad to then find out that we missed the chance at the (very cool!) 1st/2nd/3rd place medals for the earlier puzzles. But I think our decision was definitely worth it as otherwise I would have been much grumpier.

Mixed Drinks was the first puzzle we did, and I suspect the first puzzle most people did since it looked fun and it indeed was. Everyone loves word grid puzzles. Nothing much to say about this, except that I was weirded out by the clue “Bavarian camp locale” cluing a concentration camp. Yuck.

/r/vexillologygreatcirclejerk was the next puzzle I worked on and definitely earns the title in my book of Best Puzzle Title. /r/vexillologycirclejerk is one of my favorite niche humor subreddits and I enjoyed the connection. Identifying the flags was fun and cool. Drawing the great circles between the points was neat. In an act of great stupidity I wrote down the intersections to be San Marino, Vatican, Singapore, and failed to solve the puzzle for hours. Perhaps it was because the enumeration given was nine and there was nine geodesics drawn so I thought there would be an extraction (perhaps using airport codes, which seemed neat to me). Eventually typing in CITYSTATE felt like a “I’m very dumb” moment, which is totally my fault, but I feel like the puzzle would not have been any less fun for people if it had clued the “something in common” part, and it would have made it significantly more fun for me.

Spaghetti Stack was very cool, and fun, but very long. It was smooth until we got totally blocked by the pictures of the throw and the sodium, which we never figured out until solutions were posted that it was BLANKETNA. Because of this it took us a while to get any of the ones that fed to, until we finally got it by guessing the final one would be GOOD NIGHT. This was also made much more difficult by NICETIES having many six letter words it could be and basically needing GOOD NIGHT to be able to get it. If it were just a bit smoother in this one specific spot it would have saved us hours on the puzzle. I have no clue if other teams had the same experience, though. Overall I liked the idea and enjoy these kinds of puzzles, and having it at a larger scale was nice, I just think we ended up with a more frustrating experience than we probably should have had.

Text Adventure was awesome! So many of the phrases were making us laugh out loud. I think my favorite was the “has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?” one but there were many highlights, like the “I am the walrus” one and the “Shane Nelson roars I am the key and kicks your shins”. All-around fun puzzle! The final extraction was surprisingly thematic.

Inflation was by far my favorite puzzle. Diagramlesses are my favorite type of puzzle so I’m incredibly biased, but this was very nifty and very impressive. At first we were getting worried about the quality with the two-letter entries, but all was forgiven and more when we realized the true theme of the puzzle.

Disorientation was the last puzzle we solved. We solved it on Sunday after the first hints were released, but I insist that I figured out what to do while I was falling asleep and didn’t get up to actually do the puzzle. Early on I did the logic puzzle and didn’t know what to do. Eventually, I realized the Murder on the Orient express connection in the flavor text (which I was very disappointed at not recognizing earlier, as an Agatha Christie fan), but still didn’t get what to do. When I realized what was happening I very much wanted to get out of bed and turn on my computer and draw out the connections. This was also cool, but then the intermediate phrase told us to look at the coach plan. This was a neat connection but we struggled (too much, in my opinion) on extracting that. Part of it was a mistake on our part, but I do believe that the specific extraction needed was pretty ambiguous, which is always frustrating. That is, there were so many thing you could index into, and exactly how, and in what order, that it was a little frustrating. Particularly when the intermediate cluephrase could have just as easily gone straight to the answer and there still would have been plenty of fun puzzle. The coach plan connection was neat, but I’m not sure it was worth it.

Locked Room Murder (the meta) was a sticking point for us. I love murder mystery visual novels so this felt right up my ally. I really really enjoyed reading the testimonies and building the story in my head of what happened, and eventually writing down descriptive lists of what all happened. It was also very cool to actually be able to figure out who did it and when/how. We also figured out that we were to drop letters in each of the rooms the people went it. But we could not figure out exactly how to drop it. Should we include Scarlet’s real movements? Why wasn’t there enough letters in the answers to drop? It felt ambiguous, and the problem with an extraction like this is that if you have the smallest thing wrong then the output can look like garbage.

You’ll notice, if you solved the puzzle or looked at the solution, that at no point did we realize the (admittedly elegant) part that the paragraphs could be read in order and this gave the rules for letters to drop. Eventually we solved it by just guessing that some people dropped multiple letters in a room at a time. This was maybe the 15th thing we tried because it felt wrong, since there was no indication (to us) on when there were multiple letters dropped, when there easily could have been some indication of when this happened. I know I eventually typed a long rant into the feedback form about how poor this was, which I do feel bad about. But here’s why I’m not super happy with reading the solution. Even though it was more clean than I thought, the real solution essentially got rid of all the figuring-out-the-order-of-things-by-reading, which was actually the part I found most fun in the puzzle. It’d be annoying to just be able to skip all that by having almost all the deduction be given to you by the paragraphs orders. I also think if some mechanic like that is vital to your extraction, it shouldn’t be possible to get all the way through the puzzle without noticing it, like we did. Part of the reason I also discounted something like this early on was that not all the testimonies had the same number of paragraphs, although it’s clear now that the last few just had 8 instead of 9, but I think it easily could have been modified a bit to all have the same number of paragraphs. People can end in the hallway, since Peacock did anyway.

Another problem with how we got stuck, was that we decided to take both hints early, and to us, both hints were utterly useless and needlessly cryptic. I have no clue how unique our meta experience was, but I definitely noticed on the leaderboard that a decent number of teams had all six feeders solved but not the meta for a while. This makes me think that we at least weren’t the only ones who struggled in some way with a meta that, in concept, wasn’t really that hard. I really think this could have been fixed by just being willing to have better flavor text. Some of the info in the hints for the meta definitely could have just been in the flavor text. I think in general this hunt didn’t want to clue extractions in the flavor text as much as my tastes prefer, and that looking at the hints, they seemed a bit needlessly cryptic. Getting a hint and not being able to progress because you can’t understand what the hint is telling you has to be one of the worst feelings in a puzzlehunt, so really should be avoided at all costs. It’s possible my puzzle tastes are just different from people, but I would have had a much smoother experience with just a bit more direct flavoring overall in the hunt, and wouldn’t have lost any fun value for me.

Again, this was a great hunt, and I really do hope they write another! More challenging and meaty hunts are always welcome and some of the ideas were great. I greatly enjoyed the actual “puzzly” steps in every puzzle, it’s just that the other problems took up a disproportionate amount of my time over the weekend.