In addition to providing puzzlehunt-related content, this blog also serves as a somewhat accurate measurement of how busy I am at work; for example, based on the last post occurring in January and another one appearing this week, you might speculate that my course grades were recently submitted, and you’d be right. So with time on my hands than normal, let me chime in with some assorted thoughts on the puzzling world before, during , and after my spring semester.
* First and most time-sensitive, P&A has been missing almost as long as this blog, and I was happy to see that Foggy has found time to assemble an issue that’s being published this Saturday. Awkwardly, that’s the same day as the Rubiks Cube Puzzle Hunt; I believe this is from the same folks that brought you 123 123 in December, which was charming and accessible and hey, who’s that handsome gentleman at the top of the leaderboard? I’ll probably prioritize P&A for tradition’s sake (even though my top ten streak is broken), but I plan to check out Rubik later on.
* When I went to the Puzzle Hunt Calendar to grab the Rubik link, I also discovered for the first time that Puzzle Rojak 2 is in a week! I remember having fun with the first of these, and while parenthood has greatly reduced the frequency with which I can devote an entire weekend to puzzles, I hope I can squeeze some of this in with a Mystik Spiral team.
* Speaking of which, no, I did not win the Kentucky Derby a week and a half ago. As a long-time captain of Mystik Spiral named Dan, I was taken aback when I looked at the Derby lineup and saw a horse named Mystik Dan. If I were a deep believer in fate, I would have put a ton of money on Mystik Dan to win (which he did!!!) and become rich. In reality, I am only a shallow believer in fate, so I put a small amount of money on Mystik Dan to show and won twenty whole dollars. (I actually know multiple people who made significantly more money than I did because I was talking about this before the Derby. I have not received a cut.)
As MetaTerminal pointed out to me, a recent iteration of the New York Times Connections game (or as it should be called, the New York Times We Blatantly Ripped Off Only Connect And Then Blatantly And Spinelessly Publicly Denied It game) included “Duck” and “Katz.” I would advice everyone to bet on that day’s grid to win the Preakness.
* I also have some follow-up comments on my most recent blog posts. One of these was Part 0 of my Mystery Hunt writeup. Attentive readers will notice there was never a Part 1. I had a long list of specific puzzles and metas that I intended to talk about, but I never got around to writing those thoughts down. This was partially because my semester started, but also because it took a long time for solutions to be posted, which is contrary to recent practice of having the solutions ready to go before the event begins (which is also really helpful when it comes to editing and hinting). Now, I’m aware that many teams, including ours, were able to advance through the remaining puzzles after the Hunt ended. I acknowledge that having that opportunity was cool, and it’s possible that posting solutions would have minimized that accomplishment.
Of course, everyone knows my take on recent Mystery Hunts (it rhymes with “they’re too ducking strong”) and I really don’t hope that people look at the extended hinting and solving period and consider it an excuse to write too many puzzles for one weekend. There are plenty of online hunts in the current community that last more than a few days and give players time to chip away at the puzzles over time. But to those of us who have participated in it for decades, and especially those with MIT connections, Mystery Hunt is an event that is deeply tied to spending a weekend on campus. I know that making it accessible to remote teams has brought a lot of people in who may not care about that aspect, but I hope that constructors will remember those of us who do. (I have a lot of faith in Death and Mayhem in that regard.)
Anyway, because I never wrote a sequel post, and especially because I never wrote an extended piece about the puzzles, I feel like I came off as rather negative about this year’s Hunt. I am admittedly down on the length and some other big-picture aspects (as promising as the theme was, the story didn’t really work for me, and there were some interactions that rubbed my team the wrong way), but it’s worth noting that the average puzzle quality was really high, and in fact higher than I expected given the size of the constructing team, since big constructing teams often suffer from poor editing due to volume. Puzzles I really enjoyed and intended to write more about included Why the Romans Never Invented Logic Puzzles, Flamingo, Paris, Revolting Developments, and the Hell and Hydra metas. I also enjoyed The Hermit Crab and Amykos’ Briefs for egotistical reasons. And I had a lot to say about both Junky Logic and A Routine Cryptic as puzzles that started off amazing but overstayed their welcome (by about eight hours in the case of Junky Logic), but those rants are now lost to the ages. All in all, when I talked about the 2023 hunt, I legitimately thought the entire third act should have been cut both due to Hunt length and complexity of those puzzles. In contrast, there wasn’t any particular part of the 2024 Hunt that I found problematic; but as an event intended for one weekend, I think cutting three or four (or even five) cities and perhaps repurposing those puzzles for a sequel event would have caused this peg to fit more snugly into an MIT hole (in the ceiling of Hades).
* My other most recent post was about Boda Borg and Level99. In that essay, I presented a lot of differences between these two locations, and one that I mentioned but did not emphasize was that I dislocated my shoulder at Boda Borg, but not at Level99. Level99 recently opened their second location at Providence (a stone’s throw from my workplace if you can throw a stone halfway across town), and I’ve been to the new location twice. I haven’t counted, but I would estimate that it’s about half made up of half rooms that exist in the Natick location, and about half new content. Most of the new stuff is really good, which is not surprising since most of the old stuff is really good.
However, our first visit was marred significantly by the fact, and I swear to you that I am not making this up, that I DISCLOCATED MY SHOULDER AGAIN. This time it came as more of a surprise since it was the result of falling forward into a wall instead of trying to swing from a rope, though in some ways it was also less of a surprise because at least this time I could immediately tell what had happened. That did not make it less painful. I’m still in physical therapy and have a follow-up doctor’s appointment tomorrow, but I have mostly been using the arm normally (if a bit cautiously), and as I said above, I’ve actually been back to Level99 Providence since the injury, though I stayed away from physically intense rooms and might do so permanently. I recently became aware of a place called Time Mission that exists in Rhode Island and recently expanded to New York state, and which looks very Level99-adjacent but with a bit more story-based theming, as the individual challenges represent portals to other times. I’m hoping to try this place some time this summer, with a primary goal of keeping my arm attached to my body.
* There’s one more event from this semester I haven’t talked about, which is very near and dear to my heart: the Brown Puzzle Hunt. This also deserves its own post, and it might get one tangentially about choice in puzzlehunts (part of the hunt mechanism involved partially blind choices about which rounds to open first… I have strong opinions about this in general, and it was especially relevant in a hunt where some of the rounds were heavily interactive and the website was often unresponsive). I thought last year’s event was surprisingly good for a first iteration, and also surprisingly hard. I really like hard puzzles (within reason), but I was worried they might make the hunt inaccessible to Brown students who were only casual puzzle solvers. I mentioned this to people on the construction team beforehand, and they suggested they knew this was an issue and were working on it… I didn’t really see much evidence that it was addressed. But again, I like hard puzzles. So I liked this.
We increased our five-person team from last year to six people by adding Jackie (who paradoxically both is brilliant and has stayed married to me for almost ten years now), but two members (Wil and Jen) decided not to travel to Providence, so our on-campus contingent dwindled a bit. Also, none of the in-person members were going to be able to come back to campus on Sunday, so since Game Control was shutting down for quiet hours at midnight, we had a hard deadline. Unlike remote teams, we received one puzzle nuke each for participating in two events, and by the end we ended up nuking a puzzle tied to an in-person interaction that hadn’t started yet (which felt sketchy, but again, midnight deadline).
While we worked out the last two metapuzzles (one of which, the Data meta, is an all-timer as far as I’m concerned) and began the runaround, we lost Jackie to child care and then Dee to a train schedule, leaving Andrew and I as a duo to finish the last couple legs of the runaround (quote from one of them involving chemicals: “Should I touch it?” “No, you should definitely not touch it.”) We completed the last interaction less than ten minutes before midnight and were the only team to finish before things shut down for the night. Mission accomplished!
One thing I really respect about the Brown Puzzle Hunt is that whether or not they’re getting the difficulty right, the event themes and design are deeply rooted in Brown culture; as a former grad student and current faculty member, I don’t have the undergrad perspective, but I can recognize a lot of it and “feel” other parts of it, if that makes sense. I’ve had some frustrating conversations about the Mystery Hunt where people basically say, “Well, if you want it to have MIT culture, just change the rules so MIT students write it every year!” (These are frustrating because for years the Hunt felt very MIT-affiliated under the current rules, even when a team with many non-students took a turn writing it… you can learn things about the school you’re visiting.) That said, it’s really cool that so many undergrads have come out of the woodwork to write for Brown Puzzle Hunt, many of whom are not puzzle aficionados but are happy to contribute story, art, or just time. Going to an undergrad school with a significant puzzle culture did a lot to shape my life, and it makes me happy that some Brown students may start having the same experience. The kids are all right.
* I think the longer and more rambling a blog entry is, the shorter and more abrupt the ending should be.