MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Recap

[A note about this blog: In 2022 hoping to post both things related to puzzlehunts (hunt recaps, etc.) as well as my own crosswords. These have and will continue to be been posted in separate categories, but I’ve now changed the url structure to be either /puzzles or /crosswords (and you can get the RSS feed for the category by appending /feed)]

Note: [This post is divided into my general thoughts and reactions about hunt, as well as specific, spoilery thoughts about individual puzzles. Feel free to ignore any and all sections you don’t care about.]

The MIT Mystery Hunt happened this past weekend, and as expected, it was an absolute blast that will likely be the highlight of my year. I love puzzlehunts, and it’s fun to do a puzzlehunt where I see everything and work with a small team, but boy is there something different about being on a larger team where it seems like a million things are happening at once. It’s both an adrenaline-filled experience with an excitement that nothing else can match, and I also get to focus on the puzzles that appeal to me more. I enjoy doing all types of puzzles, but it’s fun to look at a few puzzles that have unlocked, and just decide to do the obvious word puzzle. Even better, there’s a good chance other people will take care of the one I chose not to do.

And wow were there a lot of word puzzles. This made me very happy, because there’s now many griddy, wordy puzzles that I didn’t even get a chance to do during hunt. My itch for cryptics was also excellently scratched during this hunt; of our roles for puzzle interest, the @Cryptic role was definitely used well. I realize that cryptics have a big learning curve, can be intimidating for beginners, and are possibly the only common puzzle-type in hunts that some people just aren’t going to be able to do in the span of that weekend. That said, I think cryptics have continued to be common in puzzlehunts despite these factors because they’re just so fun and cool and they naturally lend themselves to really neat hunt-style gimmicks. I hope that this hunt exposed some people to cryptics, and even if they weren’t able to really learn about them during the weekend, that it’ll start the itch that makes more people get interested in learning about it. 

My team, NES, went into this year aiming for finishing the hunt, while realizing that it was a stretch goal. Last year we had only three rounds left (Giga, Clusters, Tunnels) with at least a few puzzles solved in each of the rounds. This year we finished 5/10 of the Pen Station metas right before 6pm on Sunday, which is probably pretty similar to where were would have been last year. It may have felt like we were very far from the end, but we still did great and I’m very proud of our team and how well we did.

I appreciate how Palindrome continued to let things run until wrap-up, and the 6pm-Sunday cutoff was merely a “soft ending” with interactions ending and hints slowing down. This feels pretty similar to last year, where we were told after the coin was found that interactions/hints might slow down on Sunday night/Monday morning, but we kept going until 10am. To be clear, this is an extremely reasonable thing to do. However, last year, the ending time was pre-announced and kept at 10am Monday morning, whereas this year there was no time announced. Thus when the email about the coin being found went out this year and it said things will continue until 6pm, I announced to our team that the hunt was ending at 6pm and we should try to get as far as we can by then, etc. I later understood what was going on, and that we could have easily kept solving as a team into Sunday night, but because of this mix-up in communication on my end, I think a lot of people left after 6pm who would have been willing to keep solving. There were groups of us that definitely kept solving late into the night, and we ended up solving 15-20 more puzzles based off of our graph (although they were distributed among the last five rounds and we never got enough to get another meta). Whereas last year there were definitely more of our team that kept solving into Sunday night and we ended up making a lot of progress.

This was unfortunate, but in the end wasn’t really a big deal. I’m sure if we had known what was up and I was better at communicating it to our team, then we would have solved more metas and probably come somewhat close to finishing, but we still had a great time over the weekend and I still got to solve puzzles for many many hours with a lot of my friends. I definitely can have a far too competitive mindset when it comes to puzzlehunts (I can’t wait for the solve graphs/submission log to find out exactly what place we were in and how well we really did) but it’s good to step back and just think about the puzzles we were able to solve.

Palindrome also seemed to have worked their own new innovations/decisions into the hunt. I’m curious what other people think of them. The first one I noticed, was that puzzles would sometimes confirm partials—that is, cluephrases would sometimes get a “This is a clue to this puzzle” message. I know this is something Mystery Hunt (and many other hunts) have historically avoided, but there are some hunts that have had it. I also noticed it wasn’t all the time; just some puzzles. I generally think this is the right move. If a cluephrase is tricky, it’s nice to know that yes, you’re doing the right thing. I think the main drawback of confirming partials is when it allows you to short-circuit the puzzle easier, by having it confirm a partial when you’ve narrowed it down to a set of partials by only doing half of the clues, for example. This is just to say that it felt like they did a good job of confirming partials when it felt like it was a good thing to have a confirmation that what you were doing was the right thing.

Another new thing was the option to unlock things with a “button”. I know this has been discussed in the past as a way to let teams who just want to see puzzles see more things, but those who don’t want to be overwhelmed and/or want to focus on getting a meta done can just not click the button. I’m pretty staunchly in the camp of not unlocking too much, since I secretly think smaller/newer teams may want more puzzles in the short-term, but that it will end up decreasing their fun in the long term due to probably solving less puzzles. But I also have seen enough people disagree with me that I think this option is probably a good thing. We ended up getting this sort of email on Saturday afternoon. It was a mistake and we didn’t actually have the option of unlocking more (which is good, because we were doing pretty well) but I was happy to know that this existed.

The structure was also something I thought was really well executed. The three-act structure was really great. I’m quite sure if I was just an undergrad with a smallish 15-20 person dorm team it would have been great to try and finish The Ministry by the end of hunt, and it would have been really satisfying. And of course, The Investigation would have been great to try and finish as a hunt newbie with a small 5 person team. Having checkpoints and intro rounds and similar have been a great thing in the mystery hunt and a big part of how the hunt is able to serve all it’s purposes and make all the teams happy. The problem has always been calibrating how long the intro should be. Should it be one round 5-10 puzzles with a meta? Should it be a third of the way through the hunt? Each option will be better for a different team. Having two separate checkpoints is a great way to make the hunt just that more versatile. I also observed that The Investigation and The Ministry would be natural first-and-second rounds for non-MIT puzzlehunt. This hunt basically took what would have been a great throughout-the-year hunt, and stuck on a third act that was multiple times longer and even harder! This is all to say that I thought this structure was great, and I hope it worked out well for teams that basically didn’t touch Pen Station.

The structure also combined two ideas of how a Mystery Hunt structure looks, which I thought was great. In my (probably uninformed) opinion, there’s sort of two ends to the spectrum of this:

1. Having many rounds with a meta + 10 puzzles on average. Each round can represent a different area/character/thing and this can really make the hunt feel like you’re traveling around and meeting new people. Pen Station definitely accomplished this feeling—every location felt very different and also very cohesive to itself, and this was really fun.
2. Having fewer, bigger rounds with elaborate meta and metameta structures (think 2018 Mystery Hunt). These can lead to very cool structures and I love the crazy things that can be done when you let yourself put a bunch of a puzzles in one round. The Ministry was a great example of this, with meta-matching and an extremely cool metameta to boot.

Both of these ends of the structure-spectrum are cool, so I’m glad I was able to enjoy both styles in this hunt. This isn’t to say that other hunts haven’t done this well: 2021 had both styles of rounds, and 2020 had the inner vs outer lands, but I thought this was particularly well-executed this year. Another thing that helped was the art. I’m not normally a person who cares too much about the art, but there’s no question that each Pen Station round felt unique and interesting, and the map of The Ministry made it truly feel like a sprawling web.

Puzzles

Now, I’ll talk about the individual puzzles I contributed on, or have something to say about (although there are certainly many others that I looked at, and either made no contribution or a very small one). I worked on a lot of puzzles and often jumped between them and went back to them. Since I can’t remember all of that, here they are in the order of the “All Puzzles” page (except metas last in the round). I’ll be freely spoiling these puzzles but I’ll try to keep spoilers limited to the puzzle I’m talking about. Also the usual disclaimer that if I’m critical, I’ll try to be constructive, but really you have to believe me that I greatly enjoyed this hunt and all of its puzzles, and I appreciate every person who put themselves out there by writing a puzzle.

The Investigation

The Messy Room – This was a pretty cool idea. Dropquote variants have been having a boom in the past year, and this was a great one. I appreciated the web interface, but it didn’t work very well for our team. We ended up just using the spreadsheet, but having both options was neat. We started off being very methodical and making sure we filled in every word and tracked every letter, but we soon realized the puzzle wasn’t actually that hard and we could just find the few longest words, get the quote and find the missing word pretty easily, so this puzzle took us longer than it had to, but still cool all around. Also the scroll bar is cursed.

Peter Pan – This was the first puzzle I worked on. I was pleasantly surprised to see a cryptic in the first batch of open puzzles, although I expected to see a link to some intro to cryptics or something. Given they put the “This is a Metapuzzle” explanation on the first meta, I think putting something similar on this puzzle might have been nice. Regardless, it was very neat to see a relatively simple variety cryptic that also had a good puzzly aha moment.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – I didn’t actually fill the Garden for this one (although I wish I had–I love Rows Gardens!) but I came in to try to help extract. We had seen that some of the blooms could have the first letter removed to make another 5 letter word, but no one had noticed that some of them also worked for the clues. Unfortunately, this meant that we had about twice as many letters as we needed and it was hard to recover from there. We ended up backsolving this.

The Investigation – After opening this meta, I put down the first three words, and then other people started taking a good lead on this, so I let them and just tried to help with other puzzles. I think this meta was really cool though. It’s something that’s pretty easy and straightforward if you have all the answers, but it’s interestingly tricky to do without all the answers. I think that’s a really good property for a meta, but particularly an intro round meta.

The Ministry

The Boy with Two Heads – This was a neat phonetics-based puzzle. Puzzles based off of pronunciation can be fun because they eschew all the tools I would use on a puzzle like this, and require you to actually just think about it. It was also a good balance of sufficiently ambiguous clues that made the puzzle relatively simple, but also satisfyingly tricky to get done.

Harold and the Purple Crayon – We were pretty stuck on this one. When I joined it, people had already wrote down all the crayon colors and we tried everything under the sun on this one. It had been open for a while and hints were open, and we considered trying a hint on it, but that just made me more motivated to try and crack it. Eventually someone pointed out the bottom right picture looked like it had a “J” in it, so we tried assembling the pictures and got it. I’m still confused why there was extra red-herring pictures; maybe it was needed to make sure the ordering step was necessary and you couldn’t just jigsaw it? It just felt weird to have obvious puzzle content that was totally unused, although maybe it was part of something later that I didn’t see. I did like how the mechanism of the puzzle naturally made it so the image identification was easier, since the parts that were actually needed were colored in. It’s often hard to make a image with context but where you want a specific object it in without garish arrows, so this was cool to see.

The Last Olympian – This was quite a popular puzzle on our team, with a lot of people jumping to ‘the Percy Jackson puzzle’. I’m not sure I actually helped a lot, but I contributed some and also was able to read off the answer. It’s always fun to have answered a lot of clues and then have the aha that “oh duh, these all have x in common” where here it was having all the god words in the answers. The connection to olympic sports was also quite apt.

A Wrinkle in Time – This was the first puzzle I really worked on in The Ministry, and one I worked on for a while. The people who opened it first asked if anyone had heard of “Escape This Podcast” before, and I had, so I joined. I wasn’t particularly familiar with it, but I had listened to a recent episode or two. Identifying the episodes was slightly annoying, because some of the write-ups on the website are in .doc form and (1) aren’t searchable from google, unlike the pdfs and (2) aren’t readable by me because I don’t have Word. We ended up finding enough to get the cluephrase, but it was definitely slow going because I was confused by things like “Imagination Station” not showing up. Once we had the cluephrase, though, it turned out to be nontrivial to find their most recent episode, since there’s an episode list ON THE WEBSITE that stops at Season 7, which we didn’t realize until later is incomplete. Eventually we found the most recent episode we were looking for, and saw the tesseract, and knew we would need to find letters to put into it. It’s somewhat embarrassing that we didn’t see that all these fake locations repeated, but it took a while. In the meantime, I seriously considered listening to the whole 1.5 hour episode in case a hint was dropped at some point. The lesson learned was definitely to highlight things that were weird earlier, because as soon as we started marking all the locations that didn’t fit, it was immediately obvious. This was a really cool puzzle! But it took us MUCH longer than it should have, and that was mostly our fault.

Alexei Lewis – This was the only Ministry meta I really worked on. I wanted to work on it because as a music major who spent a lot of time in the Lewis Library, I felt a special connection. Plus, the first step appeared to be transcribing music, which was great. Funnily enough, we kept coming up with properties in our answers that could fit (eg. lots of letters with note names, like GET BOGGED DOWN WITH, which felt made for a music note meta). But soon after, people would steal our answers that we liked for their meta, and eventually we were left with three answers as all the metas were being solved or had been solved. From here, it didn’t take super long to find that they were album titles, and solve the meta from there. I’m still somewhat confused on why the audio file was given. The first thing we did was assume the notes were relevant, and transcribed it. The fact that it had no accidentals made it clear to me that the note values were important. And yet…it just wasn’t. It was only the words given. I suppose it’s a hint that it’s music-related, but the theme was already music-related. My proudest moment was being able to backsolve one of the last two answers (and my teammate quickly followed up with the other). I will insist that metas should never designed around how backsolvable they are (the puzzle is first!) but sometimes a meta leads to a very interesting backsolve. Rather than plugging a constraint into onelook, this was something that required some google-fu which is always fun.

Noirleans

The Downtown Murders – This was an incredibly cool puzzle. I remember looking at all the data, and just saying “how the heck is this going to turn into a sudoku? it has to, right?” and eventually a teammate was like “ah it’s a killer sudoku” and it all made sense in an excellent aha moment. I had not done the data collection, so I only noticed the first time they mention “dragnet” (which is a lesson to just reread the puzzle if you’re coming in after data collection) and then also an excellent connection to the theme of the whole puzzle. Once we wrote out the puzzle, we all agreed that it looked absolutely impossible. Eventually though, we found an in, and slowly but surely made progress on it. My teammate actually did most of the logic work on this one, but I thought it was such a cool puzzle that managed to be both an interesting pure logic puzzle, while also incredibly thematic. Getting the second sudoku was a bit of a surprise, but it was nice that it was a bit different (we knew we wouldn’t be missing squares, and having the three-size constraint). I actually helped do this one, and it was pretty fun. We had some trouble understanding how to rank the 3-card poker hands—at first we thought we should just rank all possible hands—but once we realized we should use the cages it all worked out nicely. This was one of my favorite puzzles in the hunt that I worked on.

The Hound of the Vast-Cur Villes – I got roped into this one to do the cryptic, but I ended up helping apply the voting method that someone had found. Once we had the allocations, though, I wanted to just sum up the columns, or treat the five-digits as a number of allocations. I never got the zip code connection, and it turned out one of our answers was wrong, so we were getting nonsense out. Other people solved this later, but I thought the voting system extraction was cool.

Once is Happenstance – This was another neat puzzle that we needlessly struggled with. We were able to put in the words, get the ASCII characters, fill in the second part, but we had a heck of a time filling in the bottom. We never got that “c” and “ea” meant the obvious thing (coincidence and enemy action), so we thought we were missing something big. In addition to the use of the Thai and Hebrew numeral, we thought there was a whole mechanism we were missing. We thought the things we would get from those numbers would mean things in those languages, and given that we were getting what looked like nonsense, we just thought we had made mistakes or were missing things in the “c” and “ea” parts. Eventually though, we did the obvious thing and got the answer, but it probably took an hour longer than it should have. Despite our experience, it was cool to see a puzzle commit to the theme!

Trickster Tales – I ended up doing a few of the minipuzzles in this one, which was a fun. A set of minipuzzles that are mostly word puzzles is exactly up my alley! This also oozed of the Labor Day sets, in the styling, the type of puzzles, and the ability to name the puzzles after mythological beings that I’ve mostly never heard of before. I mentioned this aloud several times which made it cool to find out that indeed this was about the Labor Day sets. While I worked on it, we never figured out how to match the titles (we were trying to do so semantically, based on mythologies, names, etc.), but others eventually got it.

The Case of the Missing Component – This was by far our teams’ biggest fail at a meta. We picked up on Morse, and noticed that Ks and Os looked pretty good (although we had no clue why). We also realized the flavor text was cluing cats. We found the perfect connection between cats and mystery, which is Macavity the Mystery Cat (of Cats the Musical). Not only was there a wealth of material from the musical that we could use, but there are Macavity awards for mystery novels, which seemed like there HAD to be a connection from which we could get an ordering. In addition, with the answers we had, we could absolutely spell “MACAVITY” and make some pun off of it. This fit so incredibly well that it was impossible to get away from Macavity until we had to get multiple hints to convince us to not use him. This meta was fine looking back at it, but it’s impossible for us to not see Macavity as the superior choice to base this meta off of, especially considering many of us knew of Macavity/Cats the musical, and none of us had heard of the book series that was actually used. We didn’t actually eliminate MACAVITY from being in our morse letters until we solved The Downtown Murders, our second-to-last solve in the round. What made it worse was that we needed a V to get MACAVITY, which would have been OOOK, and when we got to the step of translating the 3-card poker hands, we saw that it could totally be a cryptogram of SONGBOOK, NOTEBOOK, etc. So it was comical how long Macavity remained at the forefront of this meta for us. Like I said, the meta was good, but I hope Macavity will remain a meme on our team for a while.

Lake Eerie

🔔🦇🦇🦇 – This was a pretty neat puzzle. I like phonetic puzzles that don’t require futzing around with IPA and deciding exactly how to transcribe something, but require you to just think and sound it out in order to see things. The actual word search part of this was pretty neat, but I enjoyed how the clue “What this grid also is” loomed over us with both excitement and dread at what it could be. The idea ended up pretty neat as once we figured it out, it told us where to look for more words in order to make the grid connected. Overall I thought this puzzle was cool and even though it had pretty distinct, different parts to it, it was fun from start to end.

Called onto the Carpet – This was an enjoyable variety-grid-word-puzzle that I always enjoy, but this had the extra thematic oomph that made it great. The spreadsheet template was also exactly what was needed to make sure there was no needless annoyance and confusion. This is a bit of an inside joke with my friends, but I also greatly appreciated the clue “The O in REO” because it became a bit of a meme to us after we noticed it verbatim in multiple puzzles in the same Puzzle Boat. I’m glad I was correct that it ended up being a Foggy Brume puzzle based solely off of that clue.

Jump Scares – Another variety cryptic that I immediately jumped on. I enjoy this type of cryptic where you have to fill-in yourself, since it requires just answering more clues on their own, rather than just getting a crossing and looking for definition words that fit. Quite fun, and I got to use my knowledge of random monsters/scary things that I used to make my Haunted House puzzle in the Inexact hunt.

Lord of the Flies – I spent a while on this puzzle. The acrostic was surprisingly easy, and I was proud of my limited Survivor knowledge being able to recognize the names as being contestants, and recognize the seasons hidden in the clues. I needed someone else to come in and figure out who the “Common Rivals” were, since I was trying to match the contestants we had to a unique clued season. It definitely feels like reality shows like this are a rich dataset so I was happy to see this puzzle.

The Mad Scientists Assistant – This is one of those puzzles that just seems like a lot and is intimidating to start. The clues were just ambiguous and tricky enough that it was quite hard to find where to start, and once we did, it seemed like a mountain to climb to finish the rest of them, but we did. And as expected, it got easier over time. Doing this at 5am is—depending on your view—either the worst or the best time to do a puzzle like this where there’s no big aha, but just a lot of playing around with words. It probably also seems longer than it is, because it probably took us an average length of time for a hunt puzzle. It was fun though, and it was quite satisfying to see all the grids magically connect together in our spreadsheet.

The Quest Coast

Curious Customs – This is probably both my favorite puzzle in the hunt, and the puzzle I am most salty about. This was a very cool idea that constantly broke my brain as I just couldn’t comprehend how it would keep generating new patterns, and yet it was before my very eyes. This was very fun to solve. However, we made two critical mistakes that meant we didn’t catch the other. We had a mistake early on in the top of our grid while we were still solving clues, and it got copied over while another teammate tried to figure out what the horizontal period would be. They proved (correctly, but using our incorrect data) that it was a period of 10 going across. This made perfect sense to us because then we would get a 3×10 grid that would be great for braille. We expected five letters, and it started giving FOQ.. so we assumed that’s where the forks and mirrors would come into play. Now we would have noticed upon filling out the rest that the period was in fact only 5 long, but we made yet another mistake while filling the grid that made the right half actually different from the left half, so it seemed perfectly correct that the period was 10 long. And so we ended up with four mirrors and it was really not clear what to do with four mirrors, and we never solved it. Even still, I’m not entirely convinced we would have figured out what to do with the mirrors, but we certainly would have had a better chance with the correct set-up. Regardless of our folly on the extraction, I still think this was my favorite puzzle in the hunt.

Once Upon a Time in the Quest – Others in my team had done most of the work, but my contribution was (1) confirming that, “yes, indeed, this rune appears to be referencing Peter Pan” and failing to figure out what to do with the frog image, and (2) noticing the first letters of the other realms matched the picture at the top, allowing us to just solve the puzzle anyway. This was a pretty cool idea though, extra information hidden in puzzles is pretty neat thing and I think it fit this meta quite well. It was also humorous when we realized that one was referencing a puzzle we had backsolved after getting stuck at extraction, and wondering if we should try to get a hint on a puzzle we had already solved.

New You City

❤️ & ☮️ – Other team members had identified the referenced song, and figured out the lines that go in the blanks, and I joined it to try and extract. I failed miserably. I was absolutely convinced that the “count” in the flavor text mean the lengths of the high and low words, since they were never too long. There was also a wealth of things into index into, including the things we filled into the blanks, the song names (since they were given alphabetical by song name), etc. We had to take a hint in order to get what we were really doing. This was a neat puzzle and the source material is great, it was just a tad frustrating to have one of those puzzles with 20 columns of different indexing and sorting. I felt like the real mechanic could have been slightly better clued, especially when it’s as clever as this one, but it’s entirely possible I was too laser-focused on different interpretations of “counting” the high and low words (I definitely also tried counting the instances of those words in the lyrics of the songs, and the LLPP lyrics). The source song is great though, and as someone who hasn’t really gotten into Eurovision, it definitely made me want to pay attention to it more.

Book Reports – I didn’t actually participate in this (although I strongly considered doing the Periodic Table of Puzzle Types, as it’s something I’ve already thought about somewhat, but it seemed others were doing enough of the tasks) but I wanted to heap praise on Palindrome for this one. There are different ways to do the scavenger hunt, and in my opinion, this was the completely correct way. I gather it’s similar to Taskmaster from 2019 (which seems cool in retrospect and I LOVE the show Taskmaster, but I was on a team that was far too new and small to get anywhere close to reading that one in 2019) but I just wanted to be clear how good I thought this scavenger hunt was, so that future teams might emulate it. The decision to open it up as early as possible was ultimately what lead to us doing it. I would be willing to bet that if we unlocked it on Saturday night like we would have otherwise, that we would not have done it, and yet for the first time, I have seen a scavenger hunt get solved! The normal/hard versions of the tasks were great, and a lot of them were really tempting to do. I’m also generally more of a fan of “fun creative task” than find a bunch of things, anyway. It also felt well-scaled to us, since our expected problem was that we clock in at a large team size (77 this year) but we also have a lot of people who just hang out for a bit—which is totally fine! I suspect that as a team that’s still mostly students, we have a smaller than average active-solvers-to-team-size ratio, and that could lead to it being scaled way too hard for us. It really felt like the tasks were so fun and interesting, that if we had to do the maximum of 100 points, we could have easily done it. Basically, I think the combination of good tasks and the brilliant move to just open it up earlier to teams made it very appealing to us, and I’m glad we did it—I loved looking at our team’s submissions.

Lentalgram – I am ALWAYS into a Pokemon puzzle and having it be about the new Snap was great. I noticed the “REQUEST NAMES” clue immediately, so I recorded the request names just by googling the pokemon in the pictures. I then did the word puzzle at the top, which led us to the silly versions of the names. We then had three columns of information (the request name, the silly request name, and the one-word clue answers) and three distinct numbers that were clearly for indexing (the likes, the professor’s stars, and Rita’s hearts). It seemed natural to biject these somehow, and there were even some ways to think about it (the professor’s stars were consistently smaller numbers, so those might go with the one-word clues, and Rita talks very sillily compared to the professor, so probably her numbers go with the silly request names) but no columns were giving anything. We did notice that the professor and Rita did comment in different orders sometimes, but we assumed that either we were missing a big aha, or that was the order you read in after extracting from Rita’s words and the professor’s words. We started recording other things, like the target pokemon in the requests, and the locations they were in (all unique!), the islands they were on, etc. This ended up as another spreadsheet-of-20-columns-of-indexing-puzzle. We ended up needing a hint to get the answer, but with this puzzle, I remain confounded how this was supposed to work. The one thing we knew was that either (1) the crossword clue answers or (2) the silly request names would be used, since that was the only reason to do the separate word puzzle, and (2) was generally harder to get, so those should definitely be used. And yet, it seems this part was entirely not needed for the puzzle? It’s possible it was used in some later challenge/metameta like the Quest Coast meta, but it was an extreme red herring for us because it looked important to the puzzle. I also remain confused why the professor and Rita are commenting out of order sometimes, because this just made it more clear to me that they were representing different indices. Despite my frustration with this puzzle, I still appreciate the content, and it did make me quite happy when I was able to do the post-solve submission by using the pokeball I have, as well as my Vaporeon plush and Pikachu amiibo to make it look like they had reversed the roles and attacked the trainer.

Does Any Kid Still Do This Anymore? – I mostly wanted to work on this puzzle because the title was silly, and luckily someone else had done the trigram hell part of it, and took out the station names. My teammate then proposed that the sentences were Bart’s chalkboard gags and I had never been so confident an idea was right in my life. I was 100% sure it was the right idea before I even googled the first one, because it just made so much sense and was such a cool/funny idea. As you can guess, I liked this puzzle, but I was (jokingly) disappointed when we got the answer that (1) we wouldn’t have to make our own chalkboard gag and (2) they didn’t take this chance to make a Star Trek puzzle (although I see now there was one later in the hunt that we didn’t get to).

This or That – When I got here, the British/US terms had been found, and the DC heroes identified. I assumed that we would need to somehow still use the “British equivalent” idea somewhere, but eventually we decided to just look for the Marvel versions and it all worked out. I was surprised that these ideas felt a bit disjoint, but I now see that there was a cluephrase we missed (but that I appreciate was there). It’s a cool idea, regardless.

49ers – I didn’t actually do any of the work on this puzzle, but it lead to my proudest moment in the hunt. While I was sitting in a call with a teammate waiting for a hint request to come back on another puzzle, they offered to explain to me their progress on 49ers in the hopes we could try to extract there next. Upon opening the spreadsheet though, I immediately cut them off and said “I see you’ve made different 7×7 crossword grids, is this a 7xwords puzzle?” and shared with them what that was, and they went to try and match up the days and start getting letters. I then noticed the acrostic of “Malaika” in the clues and I knew that this was 100% correct. I don’t think I have ever gotten an aha on a stuck puzzle so quickly and I probably have peaked.

Word Search of Babel – Another puzzle I didn’t do any of the work on, but upon getting the answer, the people who were working on the puzzle pinged me about 20 times and told me that a Nancy Drew submission was needed. I am pretty into the Nancy Drew PC games, so this was super fun. I am not a good writer, but I am a Nancy Drew fan, so at the risk of embarrassing myself, I’ll share my submission here, entitled “Nancy Drew and the Mystery Hunt”:

Nancy pulled out her notepad and began to jot down ideas. “You gotta use the spreadsheet, Nance,” Bess reminded her. Nancy grumbled to herself, and opened up, only to see a permission error. An “It’s Locked” echoed throughout the room to an eyeroll from Deirdre. After getting set up and seeing what looked like hieroglyphics and five extraneous tabs each labeled with some form of ‘George’s extraction sheet don’t touch’, Nancy felt overwhelmed. But after staring at it, the gears seemed to turn. “If we sort by this…and index using this…and randomly anagram…it spells out NOW DO IT AGAIN”. Victory!

Introspection – This was an awesome meta puzzle. It seemed like there was no way we were getting letters at a fast enough rate—even if they were increasing in frequency—to get anything out without getting a lot of the answers. A lot of the letter combinations we had looked kinda bad, maybe plausible though. A teammate actually suggested that maybe we should Vigenere with our team name as the key, but it didn’t do much to the text we had. Eventually after we got one more submission in (9 out of 13 total) we found “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo” and we were off to the races. We already had the key idea, so it didn’t take much longer after that.

Recipeoria

Sunday Dinner – I started listening to the audio files, immediately recognized the reference, and thought “wow, either this is actually Will Shortz or there’s a really good impersonator among Palindrome”. I also recognized Foggy Brume in the second audio clip from his streams, so it was fun to listen to that conversation. I was quite proud of being able to recognize that the first names were all crossword constructors (mostly from Zhouqin and Joon) without seeing the hidden cluephrase (which again, I appreciate slightly hidden cluephrases that can be skipped, but are there for those who don’t get the reference). It was fun to then realize that I had basically re-solved theme sets for previous Sundays. The presentation of this puzzle was just great, because it was fun to hear people giving insane answers to Will Shortz’s questions. It was a little unfortunate that I could have just ignored the audio file since a transcript was given in the Copy to clipboard, but I suppose it would have been annoying to deal with otherwise. Definitely one of my favorite puzzles in the hunt.

Shopping List – It was funny when someone on our team had the Weird Al aha, because OF COURSE all these foods would be connected by him. I did wish our first idea of “Spaghetti Tacos” from iCarly was on the right track though. And oh man, seeing the video after solving was crazy, with a lot of “is that…? there’s no what that’s actually him, right?” Clear highlight of the hunt.

Another thing I wanted to mention, since I didn’t see another place to talk about this, was that it was cool to have multiple rounds where all the answers shared a common trait. For example in this round, all the answers were clearly foods, but something more was needed for the meta. I’m not sure that’s something I’ve seen much, but it also appeared to be the case for the Heartford round, where we were getting all names of people, and you could also count New You City. It’s an interesting way to make a round even more thematic. Obviously it limits the kinds of metas you can write, so it’s not something you’d want all the time, but it was quite effective in this hunt.

Later Rounds

Recipeoria was the last round we finished before 6pm, and after that we did some post-solving, but with a much lighter team, and we unlocked all the rounds (I think by accident) so I jumped between rounds. As such, I’ll combine all the other puzzles I want to talk about.

Music of the Heart (Heartford) – I saw weird time signatures so I immediately jumped on this one with a couple of fellow music nerds, hoping for a music theory puzzle (after Alexei Lewis let me down a tad in that regard). This didn’t end up being that either, but it did end up being a fun, breezy puzzle of seeing all the weird lyrics used in musicals. This puzzle probably took us 10-15 minutes from start of solving to finish, but it was greatly appreciated.

Double Entendre (Whoston) – I enjoy these types of twin crosswords because they effectively solve like a diagramless (my true favorite type of puzzle) and this was just fun in that sense, especially once we realized we were getting opposites. We stared at the completed grid for a good bit, but luckily someone came up with contranyms after not too long, which was really neat as all of those words are extremely surprising and cool.

Rotton Little Scamps (Whoston) – I’m not sure why, but I’m always drawn to this puzzle type when it shows up in Puzzle Boats, etc. I started finding a few words, but we quickly realized we weren’t going to use all the squares in every word, which made it much more of a challenge, but still satisfying. I’m not sure how, but one of my teammates found the Yule Lads which are just inherently hilarious and I’m glad to now know about them. We also took an embarrassingly long time to figure out we had to add “THE” to the final answer; I’m impressed at how ungooglable the final cluephrase is. I’m going to keep bringing up the “Doorway-sniffer” in casual conversation and you can’t stop me.

Spy Game (Whoston) – I’m intrigued by Decrypto, and am familiar with the rules, despite never having actually played it. It’s a fun game to reverse engineer, and felt much, much more approachable than Watership Down (an earlier puzzle about reverse engineering the given words in a clue-giving game). At first we expected a similar gimmick about word transformations leading to incorrect guesses, but it worked out much smoother than I anticipated. It was slick to use cryptic wordplay (and to be honest, I should have expected that from the start with a name like Decrypto). We had some trouble with extraction, because there was a lot of structure in the games that it seemed like we were going to have to use; for example, the wrong guesses were always in the same number, and belonged to the same different number. This blinded us a bit from seeing the much simpler extraction, but it was still a cool puzzle.

You Took The Fifth (Reference Point) – I immediately jumped on this one post-6pm because I am a massive Ace Attorney fan. Using objection.lol is such a great idea for a puzzle that I was sad to cross it off my puzzle ideas list when Teammate’s hunt did essentially what I was going to do, but better. I was a little disappointed that the Copy-to-clipboard essentially meant that we could immediately paste it into our spreadsheet and turn an Ace Attorney puzzle into just a word puzzle. But it still used the interjections from the game and was a fun, quick word puzzle that I was really happy about. Also, at first I was a little annoyed that it was Phoenix and Mia with Mia on the prosecutor’s side, instead of an actual prosecutor like Edgeworth, but I’m now imagining that this is just a game Phoenix and Mia used to play that has a similar playful vibe to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s “questions” game.

The Puzzly Conclusion

I’m not quite sure I needed to write that long of a blog post, so if anyone read it, then good for you! Now all that’s left to do is wait in eager anticipation of next year’s hunt. Expectations will be quite high for teammate given their excellent hunts, but I have full faith they’ll do a great job no matter what. X could happen and Y could happen and who knows what 2022 will bring, but I do hope Mystery Hunt will return to campus. An in-person event would be so much fun again. Can’t knock Palindrome for doing a great job with a virtual hunt, though. Truly it felt much more interactive than just another online hunt, which is big part of what I want out of Mystery Hunt. 2022 was another Mystery Hunt I’ll look back on fondly, and I hope it’s also followed by a lot of great online hunts in the coming year as well.