(This is a preview to a recap/review of the 2019 MIT Mystery Hunt, which happened this month. Puzzles and solutions can currently be found here. The next few posts will contain many spoilers.)
We made a Mystery Hunt! Hope you liked it. I was proud of what we did.
As you can imagine, I’ve got lots to say about Hunt. But unlike the last couple of years, I don’t have a buffer week between now and the beginning of my semester; tomorrow I have orientation meetings (assuming my car can traverse the sheet of ice on my driveway) and Wednesday I’m in front of a class. I’m itching to talk about the project I had to keep secret for a year, but I don’t get paid to write about Hunt, so my Mystery Hunt posts (covering things like story/structure, my experience overseeing metas, puzzles I wrote, and a conversation about backsolving etiquette) may dribble out over the next month or so.
In the meantime, feel free to comment here about things you liked and disliked (let’s be constructive, please) about Hunt, puzzles you recommend that others look at, and/or questions you might have about the construction process. I’ll chime in if I have simple answers; deeper questions may give me something to talk about in my upcoming posts. My opinions do not necessarily reflect that of the entire team, of course.
Happy holidays!
Puzzlvaria 
Things I liked:
I think you really, really nailed the unlock structure this year. I’ve joined in discussions on this topic in a couple different forums over the past couple years, and as a member of a mid-strength team that doesn’t generally finish the hunt, we’ve felt really bottlenecked a few times, especially last year with Inside Out. I can’t speak to the experience of the top teams, of course, but things seems balanced really well for us this year. We churned through puzzles at a good rate through all of Friday and the beginning of Saturday, and once we started getting a little tired and puzzles started getting harder, we started getting Santa unlocks at a solid rate so there was always something meaningful to be working on.
I particularly enjoyed the Scavenger hunt this year. I wrote about it substantially on the /r/mysteryhunt reddit thread, so you can go look there, but everything about it was excellent.
Things I would have been happier to have seen done somewhat differently:
I felt like there wasn’t as much production value in the physical puzzles this year. It’s entirely possible I just happened to not work on/notice those puzzles this year, but I feel like in previous years there’s always been something really cool hanging out on a table in our HQ and everybody keeps walking past and wants to know ‘how did that puzzle work’?? The cut-out deck of cards from last year and the entire Treasure Chest round from 20,000 leagues are the best examples of this.
I wasn’t really a fan of the theme this year, though as I sit down to think about it I’m having a hard time identifying why, exactly. Part of the issue, I think, is that it just didn’t really make much sense. I introduced my girlfriend to the hunt this year, and in the days leading up I explained that previous hunts had themes like Inside Out, D&D, and Inception, which all seem like sensible themes. She got to our headquarters on Friday and asked what the theme was, and I was like, well, it’s sort of holidays, but it’s also sort of the Great Molasses Flood. But really it’s holidays, I guess? And in order to demonstrate, I pointed to…. Thanksgiving Town. It’s not really very evocative, y’know?
I think another problem with the theme was the meta structure you chose. In a ‘normal’ hunt with ‘normal’ metas, you have a round themed around something, and whatever that round’s theme is comes through very strongly as you try to figure out what its meta is. Like last year, Pokemon evolving into different answers makes that round’s theme really shine through. This year, there….. wasn’t really a ‘Thanksgiving Day’ meta. Yeah, I realize that pardoned Turkeys is really cute cross between Thanksgiving and Presidents, or that Football games is an interesting connection between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. But there’s no buildup to it. Instead you stare at two lists of answers and try to find the connection, and once you get the ‘ah-ha’ moment, things mostly solved themselves (at least in the ‘easier’ metas, for us). I think the theme would have been much stronger if, say, every single Thanksgiving answer was a food-related answer, because of course, and then there was some food-related meta.
I also thought that introducing the April Fool in the middle of the hunt confused things even more. I was present for the event, but it wasn’t really clear to me what his motives or intentions were — he said something about how the year used to start with him? or revolve around him? Which made me think he was actually the mayor of New Year’s Town? Or used to be? It was rather confusing.
Things I didn’t personally have a problem with, but other members of my team did:
The meta structure. Personally, I thought it was super novel. Then again, I didn’t really work on the metas much this year. The chief complaint was that after you’ve solved one meta from a town (or two), it can be really discouraging to work on further puzzles for that town because they might end up being irrelevant. It also strongly *encourages* backsolving, because if you can avoid doing ‘wasted’ work by determining which puzzles aren’t relevant for unsolved metas (by backsolving), you can save a lot of wasted effort. At least one person on the team more or less refused to work on any Halloween puzzles until we called in THE WOLFS HOUR and RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION on those puzzles. The fix was generally agreed to be ‘once you solve a meta, tell us which puzzles feed that meta’. In retrospect, that could have let us know too early that each town had an answer that went to April Fool’s Day town.
As long as I’ve mentioned backsolving, I guess I might as well start the discussion you’re probably going to have here at some point — clearly, we called in a couple Halloween backsolves to a lot of puzzles. We quickly realized that our callbacks for incorrect backsolves were being intentionally and severely throttled. Any submission for THE WOLFS HOUR or RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION took 20-30 minutes to hear back, and correct responses to other puzzles happened nearly instantly (so we’re confident it wasn’t an issue of being backed up at the beginning of hunt).
I don’t personally mind the throttling, but some clearer communication on the topic would have been nice. After the third 20+ minute turnaround I asked the member of Setec who called if they had anything they’d like to tell us about backsolving, to which the response was, if I recall correctly, “Backsolving is officially discouraged” which struck me as a very strange response. Later we got a vaguely-worded email from Setec about backsolving, which referenced guessing answers “based on outside information, in ways that don’t seem to be working”. However, 2 of our first 4 backsolve attempts for Halloween Town were actually successful, so it was actually working quite well. I’d also dispute that backsolving is ‘based on outside information’. The email then said “this is okay in moderation” and absent any other directive from Setec we assumed that calling in backsolves every 20 minutes was the established acceptable threshold, and so we continued to stick with it.
LikeLike
Of course, it now occurs to me that we got a pair of CYOA books, which were pretty amazing, even if we couldn’t figure out what to do after finding all the times Jack Skellington was explicitly mentioned, and assuming that ‘Jack’ was not a sufficient ‘explicit reference’. So perhaps my point about production value of physical items isn’t quite fair.
LikeLike
I don’t want to write an essay in response to every comment, but there’s a whole lot of information in these last two paragraphs that is inaccurate, likely due to miscommunication within your team. (And you didn’t say what team you’re on, so I have no context to work from.) To clarify while previewing a future post:
* We did not throttle backsolved answers while still accepting other answers. As far as I’m aware, if we stopped calling a team for a while, we stopped calling that team for everything (usually for about 10 minutes).
* If we did this, we told the team on the phone. So if you were in this boat (which you wouldn’t be after only two incorrect backsolves, but if your 2 out of 4 then became 2 out of 8 in the span of ten minutes, or if you were submitting multiple guesses without waiting to hear back from us, you would be) you were informed verbally. I can’t guarantee that the person on your end of the phone informed your whole team.
* “Backsolving is officially discouraged” is not a Setec directive and never has been, so this was either misstated by an AD HOC representative, or misquoted by you or whoever heard it on the phone. As I’ll talk about in a future post, there’s arguably a line to be drawn, though it’s hard to locate that line, between informed targeted backsolving, and clogging the queue with brute-force backsolving that ties up the lines for teams trying to solve the puzzles. Again, I don’t know who you are, so I don’t know whether your team was ever in the “penalty box,” and if so, what they did to end up there.
(On a totally separate note, in response to the theme not being “sensible,” one of our team members was wondering you’ve seen The Nightmare Before Christmas? We really only used that as a jumping-off point, but if you didn’t realize that world pre-existed, it may have felt less natural.)
LikeLike
I was on the Providence Transplantations, and I was personally manning the phone at this time. I will admit I may not be recalling things 100% accurately, but I am a primary source.
I was curious so I went and dug through our slack records:
Times Friday afternoon:
3:36: 4 potential backsolves are identified
3:41: Incorrect backsolve (RITA HAYWORTH…) submitted
3:55: AD HOC called back in response to our incorrect backsolve
3:55: Correct backsolve (NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD) submitted
3:57: Correct backsolve verified by AD HOC
4:00: Incorrect backsolve (THE WOLFS HOUR) submitted
4:11: Correct forward-solve (IMPEACHMENT) submitted
4:13: Correct forward-solve verified by AD HOC
4:20: AD HOC called back in response to our incorrect backsolve
4:24: Correct backsolve (SKELETON KEY) submitted
4:27: Correct backsolve verified by AD HOC
Of course, I wasn’t at your headquarters, and you would know much better than I would, but myself and others at my table were discussing the timelines here and we were quite convinced that incorrect backsolves were being intentionally throttled while correct answers were being called back immediately.
Also I found the quote I mentioned in slack, which was “backsolving is not encouraged”. This was during the 4:20 call when it had taken a total for 40 minutes for 2 incorrect backsolve responses (and two 2-minute response times for correct solves), and I asked the AD HOC member something like ‘Is there anything you’d like to tell us about backsolving?’
I’m vaguely aware of Nightmare Before Christmas, though I haven’t seen the movie, no. Perhaps that would have helped.
LikeLike
That doesn’t sound like it was intentional, and we definitely wouldn’t have purposely waited 14 minutes the first time you called in a backsolved answer to the wrong puzzle. I don’t have a way to confirm the delay on the incorrect answers, because the data I can see only shows me submission times and solve times (i.e. when the answer was put into the system as correct) and not what time incorrect answers were confirmed as incorrect, so I have to take your word for those two times.
My best guess is that this early in the Hunt, a lot of our call staff were still getting used to the queue, and the people who took those two calls may have accidentally claimed them without calling right away? The pattern you describe doesn’t seem typical, and I apologize that it sent the message that it did.
As for the message you got about backsolving, team members who confirm answers aren’t necessarily the people in charge of policy decisions… if you ask the random person who’s calling a snarky question about backsolving, they’re probably just going to tell you what they think, since we didn’t have a “what do you do if someone asks you to comment on backsolving” script. Even then, I think “backsolving is not encouraged” is subtly different from “backsolving is discouraged.”
LikeLike
Pretty sure our team also had WOLF/SHAWSHANK answers throttled while forward solve answers proceeded unimpeded also. I watched one get claimed on the queue and held while a forward solve submitted later got confirmed.
LikeLike
Hmmm. At some point I passed the responsibility of contacting teams about this to someone else; it sounds like they may have handled things differently.
LikeLike
Regarding the reference to how April Fool’s used to be New Year’s, a good resource is the Encyclopedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/April-Fools-Day
LikeLike
I had a lot of fun at this year’s hunt. The puzzles were overall very high quality and I especially enjoyed working on the meta-puzzles, many of which had amazing solutions as well as funny thematic answers, while still managing to be fair.
One question: you mentioned two years ago that you came up with a theme that was outvoted in favor of the RPG theme. Is this that theme?
LikeLike
It was not. The alternative theme for 2017 was not one of our four 2019 theme finalists, for reasons that would be spoilers. (I won’t say anything about the four unused themes so that they’re still available for Setec to use in the 2039 Hunt when some of us are willing to write again.)
LikeLike
I hope Dan’s joking, but I have to say: “The Nightmare Before Christmas” was indeed a discarded theme from Setec’s TWO-THOUSAND FIVE planning.
For 2005, Setec was interested in maps and puzzle reuse, so the proposed structure back then was different from what you saw this year. But for 2019, I just kind of threw out a reminder of this idea, some notes about what people liked and didn’t like about the theme, and how it might lend itself to our 2019 structural goals. Dan did the lion’s share of work to turn that into a first draft for 2019, adding molasses and other stuff he’ll probably write about in Part One, and eventually it became the winning theme.
LikeLike
True story.
LikeLike
I really enjoyed everything I was able to be involved with this year. With the puzzles I worked on, I felt like things went pretty cleanly (and I felt like the answer extractions agreed with my way of thinking better this year). I was able to be onsite Saturday morning, and really enjoyed the experience of being involved. The scavenger hunt interaction in particular was fantastic. It certainly had our team captivated.
I tend to be not as much of a backsolver during the mystery hunt (I often find myself trying to go back through our team’s stuck puzzles trying to work on those). I do agree that the particular meta-mechanism used this year did encourage backsolving attempts to prevent working on puzzles for previously solved metas. That being said, I enjoyed the mechanism of having to figure out which puzzles went with which meta. I’m not completely sure how to reconcile those two. Perhaps just more solvent?
And the donuts puzzle was inspired.
LikeLike
I’m in the weird position of having done virtually all my solving during the second half of hunt, and I’m still trying to sort out exactly how much of my reaction to this hunt is unduly affected by this, so I’ll only make one brief and general remark while I continue trying to sort things out.
It feels like there were several design philosophy decisions which were strongly affected by the desire to significantly curb the effectiveness of backsolving. I suspect that the one’s perspective of the hunt may in large part be a function of whether, how, and in what ways these particular design decisions mesh with your own particular style, approach, and enjoyment of hunt.
LikeLike
I hunted with teammate again, and we were surprised and pleased to discover that we finished 5th-ish. I thought this hunt had several marked improvements from 2017 that really improved my experience. To echo what DanielS said above, the unlocking felt pretty perfect to me—soon after we started slowing down and getting bottlenecked by the hard puzzles, Santa came by and unlocked a bunch more puzzles and prevented us from getting frustrated. This is probably the first mystery hunt I’ve ever done where my team was making steady progress on puzzles for the entire weekend, and it felt really good. [It felt less good at 6pm on Sunday when we got the email saying hunt was over while we were still making good progress on puzzles… I feel like this could have been avoided had HQ stayed open until 10am like last year, but I totally understand that something like this was only feasible for a large running team like D&M.]
I also liked the metas a lot more than 2017. The flavortext felt less hand-holding, and many of the later ones did require you to do something significantly challenging even after you made the key insight. Personally nothing really matched “building a soccerball out of a Catan board” or “computing effective currents across a 3D network of puzzles”, but it was nice to spend less time staring at lists of puzzle answers and more time stuck in the weeds of trying to figure out how the Chaocipher worked.
I don’t want to wade too deep into the backsolving controversy, but I will say that the sentiment “backsolving is discouraged” was communicated from our call-in person back to our whole team (or perhaps slightly more accurately, “*aggressive* backsolving is discouraged’). As a result of this pushback and the difficulty of backsolving with the novel meta / round structure, our team definitely ended up backsolving a lot less than in prior years. As someone said above, it does seem to have been a design goal for this hunt, which I think is fine.
Finally let me close with a short list of my favorite puzzles for anyone who wants to dig through the website for ones they might have missed: Send yourself Swanlumps, Cross Campus, I AM GROOT, Bloom Filter, Far Out, You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Gravy Boat, Delightful, We See Thee Rise.
LikeLike
2018 was the first year when the Hunt was open until Monday morning regardless of when the coin was found; previously it’s been closer to what we did in 2017 and again this year. When D&M committed to this, I admired them for it, but it also felt like it might set unreasonable expectations for the future; running a 52-hour Hunt (which is how long it still would have gone if the coin had been found early) is exhausting, and bumping this up to 68 hours is a big ask. Large teams have already caused a “puzzle creep” that makes the job of the constructors much bigger… I think we should be even more wary of “time creep.”
Pulling the plug Sunday also makes the wrap-up a bit more pleasant… I want solvers to be able to come to wrap-up without deciding whether to do that or sleep, and I want organizers to have time to sleep, clean up their HQ, make sure teams have cleaned up their HQ, and prepare wrap-up content.
LikeLike
It’s also worth noting that extending the hunt into Monday requires a significant increase in the budget. The Institute needs janitorial services to clean up all the mess we make, and if hunt extends into the holiday then the writing team has to pay for that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Did you catch that you could still check answers after HQ closed (via a simple client-side script, no further updates to your team log / state)? This was fantastic. My team (Hunches in Bunches) had a great time puzzling together until after midnight because of that feature. I definitely recommend it for teams making future hunts!
I was a little disappointed that this was a long hunt, just for the personal reason that this was my first time making it to Cambridge in 6 years and I was hoping to get the fun of experiencing an endgame for the first time. But that’s nobody’s problem but mine. Overall I had a fabulous time, and I loved the theme and structure. It was definitely on the overwhelmingly long side — finishing hunt with dozens of unsolved puzzles that I’d never even glanced at is a novel experience for me, and I wonder if I would have enjoyed hunt more if it had a couple fewer towns. But overall, well done once again Setec folks!
To Dan specifically: The Konundrum was amazing as usual. We solved it in three groups of three, which meant a fair amount of downtime… which honestly was some of the most relaxing parts of hunt, just chatting with my sister and a new friend not feeling a need to focus on anything. (And I’m slapping myself at the explanation for the Duck-level character names — I had figured it was just a monster, a mobster, and a minister?)
LikeLike
I saw that and definitely used and enjoyed it when picking off a few puzzles at the airport the next day, but I think it would have been hard to motivate our team to keep puzzling when the prospect of any sort of payoff (i.e. a runaround) disappeared.
FWIW, the 2017 and 2018 hunts also have a static answer checker on their archive sites, although I don’t think either had it immediately after hunt ended like 2019 did.
LikeLike
The static answer checker couldn’t deal with puzzles whose answer was an interaction request (thus it was impossible to use it on those puzzles to get final answers to use in the metas), nor could it apply solvent, so meta solving became significantly more difficult after HQ closed.
LikeLike
I really loved this year. After 2017 I was pretty worried, but this Hunt lasted pretty much an ideal amount of time (Sunday afternoon/evening), and on our mid-size, mid-level team we never ran out of puzzles and interesting things to look at. The Nightmare Before Christmas (and molasses *cough*) theme was wonderful and used well for both plot and meta design (how did you manage to find so many clever links between holidays?). Thanks for a great Hunt!
Tuning the unlock rate is always a challenge, and I feel like you got it mostly right this year. It was perhaps a bit too narrow; I think the branching factor was basically 1, meaning time unlocks were the only way to increase puzzle breadth, right? But the time unlocks shifted suddenly from “not fast enough” to “oh my god SO MANY PUZZLES” sometime late Saturday. Before then, some people felt like there was nothing they could usefully contribute to, as so much of our breadth was taken up with puzzles stuck at extraction. And afterwards, I almost feel like I missed the last half of the Hunt by sleeping during Sunday, while a huge number of open puzzles piled up.
I don’t want to suggest major changes to the unlock rate, as it seemed well tuned (especially for the top teams?), but perhaps for us it could have accelerated a little more smoothly from Friday to Sunday. Or, say, it might be ok to have the branching factor be slightly larger than 1 (1.1?) instead of 1. You said at wrap-up that you wanted time unlocking to be the primary unlock mechanism of the Hunt, but that makes puzzles feel like something you’re graciously granting us rather than something we earn as a reward for solving.
I can understand why you didn’t want to keep running until Monday, but from looking at your solved-puzzle graphs it seems there were some other teams close behind Left Out. Why didn’t you stay open long enough for a couple more runarounds? Exhaustion?
I won’t comment (positively or negatively) on puzzle difficulty in the hope of avoiding personal attacks.
Some puzzles I enjoyed (from the tiny slice of Hunt that I saw): “Herbert West, Animator” for the hilarious writing (and apropos answer). “Moral Ambiguity” for the cute logic variant I’m surprised I haven’t seen before. “Broken Concentration” because trying to figure out how an interactive widget works is always enjoyable. “Deep Blue” for using a very, very amusing wordlist.
LikeLike
> “Tuning the unlock rate is always a challenge, and I feel like you got it mostly right this year. It was perhaps a bit too narrow; I think the branching factor was basically 1, meaning time unlocks were the only way to increase puzzle breadth, right? But the time unlocks shifted suddenly from “not fast enough” to “oh my god SO MANY PUZZLES” sometime late Saturday.”
Puzzle breadth (we called it width internally) increased every time you opened a new town (whether via Santa or Jack), because when you first revealed a town, we gave you two puzzles instead of just one. So if you stayed ahead of the time-release curve, by the time you reached Bloomsday Town you’d have 16 puzzles open.
Santa delivered puzzles every 30 minutes for a while, then every 25 minutes, then 20 minutes, 18 minutes, and finally 15 minutes. This was tuned to ensure al puzzles were delivered by noon Sunday (so that if Hunt ended on time, teams would have enough time to work on anything that looked fun), but that as many teams as possible would stay ahead of Santa as long as possible. The consequence of wanting slowish releases early and everything out in a finite time is that the latter share of puzzles has to come out much more quickly.
> “I can understand why you didn’t want to keep running until Monday, but from looking at your solved-puzzle graphs it seems there were some other teams close behind Left Out. Why didn’t you stay open long enough for a couple more runarounds? Exhaustion?”
The puzzles-solved graph can be deceiving; having lots of puzzles solved doesn’t mean a team had a lot of metas solved, and you finish Hunt by solving metas. When the coin was found, I believe the third place team was still missing FOUR metas, so it’s not like there were a few more teams on the verge of reaching endgame. We stayed open as long as we said we were going to: until 5pm Sunday or until the coin was found, whichever comes later.
LikeLike
I’m probably missing something, but I don’t see the advantage of “slowish releases” after a team has finished the town square. That is, slowish releases are really nice in making the “town square” feel like its own hunt and a good goal for teams to shoot for. But once you’re through that it seems to me to be optimal to jump immediately to a faster speed rather than slowly ramping it up.
LikeLike
I was thinking more about puzzle breadth. It’s probably hard to get good data on this, but a key input to this calculation is how many puzzles a typical team gets completely stuck on per round. That is there’s another variable which you might call “effective breadth” which is breadth minus extremely stuck plus backsolves. I’d guess extremely stuck minus backsolves is around one per round, so effective breadth is probably roughly constant in this structure. I’ve no particular point to make with this…
LikeLike
I had a really great time solving the puzzles. I spent a lot of the hunt finishing off old puzzles that people had gotten stuck on. In many hunts this can be a very frustrating experience because that filters for the fiddly broken-ish puzzles, but in this hunt even the puzzles people had abandoned often worked out very nicely (and were probably abandoned due to sleep needs). I thought the theme was delightful, and thoroughly enjoyed the opening skit. I really liked the structure and metas for the town square. Since Plant got stuck on the first two metas in the second half and didn’t get far enough to have a chance to solve the others I don’t think it’s fair for me to express an opinion on the rest of the structure/metas. I’d be interested to know how many teams solved more than one or two metas in the second half, maybe we were an outlier this year in terms of our performance relative to other years. I thought the solvent mechanic was really nice and important (they were hard metas and without any solvent getting stuck on a couple metas just totally dooms you).
One question about metas. I’d be curious to hear about what considerations lead to “more obscure” topics (e.g. football squares) being fair game for metas than what I think of as following the Setec style guide.
Contrary to some of the comments above, I was somewhat frustrated with the release speed for this hunt. We spent the first 36 hours of hunt kinda starved for puzzles, and then so many opened up while the team was sleeping on Sunday morning that we were overwhelmed with puzzles on Sunday. Shifting the schedule up by about 6 hours (i.e. everything time releases by 6am Sunday) would have made a huge difference to our hunt experience. I think the way this hunt was set up, you had to be a giant strong team to have any hope of solving puzzles fast enough on Sunday to finish the hunt. To me it feels like a waste to have all these beautiful metas and puzzles and only have a few teams see them, especially when it’s due to release speed and not puzzle difficulty. That said, I understand why you all would have made this decision as a counterbalance to your last hunt (which I really loved!). I also think I’m somewhat of an outlier among hunters in being comfortable with shorter finishes, and this experience is somewhat special to teams in our tier who usually finish but had no hope of finishing this year. I also think its good for hunt to have some variety in timing, since different hunters have different preferences, so I don’t expect the timing to be my preference every year.
LikeLike
> “I’d be interested to know how many teams solved more than one or two metas in the second half, maybe we were an outlier this year in terms of our performance relative to other years.”
3 teams solved 6 metas
4 teams solved 7 metas
4 teams solved 8 metas
2 teams solved 9 metas
1 team solved 10 metas
1 team solved 11 metas
1 team solved 14 metas
1 team solved 15 metas (and found the coin)
LikeLike
Thanks! That definitely puts us well behind our usual relative pace. So teams that typically have finished hunts near closing time in this hunt typically solved 8-10 metas (while we solved 6), or said otherwise those teams finished between a third and half of the second part of hunt.
LikeLike
Hi! I’m a teammate from the 3rd place team. In your count, is the 15th meta April Fools Day town or the events meta?
LikeLiked by 1 person
The 16 things that you needed to complete to unlock Molasses Awareness Day Town were the 14 problems between normal holiday towns, plus April Fool’s Day Town and Your Birthday Town. Dan’s count above excludes Your Birthday Town (since it’s not a metapuzzle). Including the events problem would increase the count to 17 – but you didn’t actually need to solve the events problem to complete the Hunt, it just turned on your solvent drip.
LikeLike
Thanks, Dan and all. The labour, and the love, spent on hunt is/was obvious.
Context: relatively low-level solver; mid-upper level team (Central Services).*. We found the Coin for the first time in my experience two years ago. I think many of us hoped to do so again, and through maybe mid-afternoon, even mid-evening Saturday that felt achieveable. And then… it got harder, we slowed down, the number of puzzles available sped up, and all of a sudden by Sunday morning the room’s mood shifted to “holy cow, no way, we are doomed.” In hindsight, the puzzles kept being clean and fair and often delightful; there were just a lot :). [Solving Chain of Commands and watching the delightful readout was my final solve and hugely rewarding; I had spent several hours flailing on Quaternary Structure as the only team biochemist available – my research is on brain metabolism, anything with a clue involving glycolysis makes me happy! – but looking at the solution now I just feel stupid; I am confident that if I had encountered it on Friday I would have had the brain freshness to see the key.]
So this is purely a datapoint, nothing to complain about: we had fun, the team is a delight (kudos to Marc Tanner for effectively enforcing the ‘fun first’ team ethos, and to everyone on the team for being people with whom 53 hours in a room is a pleasure!). The emotional slope was markedly down during Sunday, I think, and ending that way makes it tricky to focus on the earlier joys: the unlock choices played a significant role in that slope, I suspect, by creating the puzzle glut at the same time as mental resources diminished: whereas earlier easier puzzles could have a team working on them, the late stages meant either working in isolation or working in teams on only a fraction of the puzzles. (The wrapup graph also shows that we’re an outlier in terms of very few incorrect answers submitted, so I suppose we could relax that a little if we wanted to be more competitive). Which surprised me given the comments about team size prior to Hunt: we could definitely have benefitted, if we were so inclined, from 40 or 50 or more additional solvers on Sunday. Theme was weird: I brought my family to kickoff for the first time and as noted above, it didn’t feel as cohesive as past years; O well, no big deal. The mayoral interaction *was* great, and definitely a mini-win feeling. I suppose the tl;dr is “Hey, please write a Hunt optimised for mid-size, mid-competency teams :-P” and I truly don’t want to come across as that entitled :).
Things I especially enjoyed/recommend, all likely on the easy end of things: Chain of Commands and Quaternary Structure noted above, Be Mine, Chowing Down (short but very clean), Gravy Boat. And Running for Office, because I enjoy runarounds and it came at a really nice time (midnight Sat) to get us outside.
[*Also, I brought my 16 year-old son to Hunt for the first time this year and he had a blast; as the youngest member of the team by at least ten years and probably at least 20, maybe 30 below mean, there were lots of things where he had specialist knowledge and several others where he contributed. Watching him throw himself at Cubic on Sunday and eventually succeed made me very proud. Thanks, folks, for facilitating this personal joy.]
LikeLike
I solved with the Lexingtons, a team of ~25, and this was my second hunt. Our goals coming in were to finish more puzzles than last year (achieved!) and to finish the first metameta again (not close).
I had a lot of fun at this hunt! Swanlumps was beautiful, A Tear-able Puzzle was cool, figuring out the Hexed 2 boss battle was memorable, and we all laughed at “Do not eat the puzzle” as Funkin’ walked in the door. We always had plenty of puzzles to work on, and it was nice to have everything available early Sunday afternoon as we gave up on targeting the first metameta and just did whatever looked fun.
My one regret from this hunt to me was that, because we never solved the first meta meta, we never had any interaction with the plot or the characters from kickoff. Some of my favorite memories from the Inside Out hunt were interacting with characters after finishing the early metas, and I really missed that. This hunt had fewer, more interactive visits with teams (and according to youtube, so did the previous Setec hunt) but we didn’t get to see them. I realize that last year’s hunt was a bit of an outlier in this sense (interaction heavy).
The recap slides have some interesting data – there’s a big gap between a cluster of teams with ~55 solves and teams with ~90+ solves, and the count of teams that saw the birthday party is very close to the number of teams with 90+ solves. I don’t know what would explain that gap but it certainly seems interesting. Birthday Town unlocked after completing 1/3 of the metas, but because of the structure that shares metas between towns it looks like every team that saw it probably solved over half the puzzles in the hunt.
There’s nothing wrong with that, maybe it’s exactly what Setec intended. In a world perfect for my team, maybe one fewer metas would’ve been required and a cluster of ~10 more teams would’ve hit Birthday Town late Sunday afternoon as a conclusion to their hunt. In reality, I know I’m on a team smaller than the hunt is really built for, and that’s not the hunt’s problem. We look forward to doing better next year (and finally remembering to bring a printer!).
LikeLike
For the purposes of my record keeping, does this hunt have a canonical name like “Monsters et Manus” or “Head Hunters”?
LikeLike
I feel like that mostly gets decided by the community. (I still think it’s weird that Normalville is called Normalville… we thought of it as “superheroes” when writing and only actually named the town a week before Hunt.)
If I had to place a bet, I’d say Holiday Forest?
LikeLike
I feel like the URL sums it up: “Molasses Holiday”.
LikeLike
I second Glasser — unlike the other suggestions, “Molasses Holiday” includes Scott Purdy’s lifelong dream finally coming true and I feel like the hunt community should honor.
Also, not sure if you (Dan) knew this story, but when I was hanging out with Tanis last May she said, “You know the theme is the Molasses Flood for Scott, right?” and I said “Right, sure, whatever,” assuming Tanis was pulling my leg, because she would know better than to tell me the theme. So I promptly told my entire team this… and told them that it was therefore definitely not the theme. You might think this means that we were spoiled on the hunt theme, but actually, it worked really well as a double fakeout.
I don’t think I personally, or our team collectively, has ever been so surprised by a theme reveal before.
LikeLike
Erin, at the NPL convention in July, when you were casually telling me about how you played an April Fools’ Day joke on your team, telling them that you were spoiled on the (molasses) theme and would therefore have to write with us… I tried to keep a straight face but on the inside I was freaking out. I’m glad to hear you had no idea how close you were to the actual theme, but at the time I was thinking, “She clearly knows everything, I think she does have to write with us.”
LikeLike
I think of it as Nightmare Before Christmas hunt, because Holiday Mashup hunt isn’t quite as appealing.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The #1 thing I liked about the hunt was the unlock structure. I really appreciate the idea of moving to time unlock as the default unlock and faster unlocks as an outlier.
I was also really enjoying the idea of all the metas being mixed metas between the rounds.
My favorite individual puzzle was Crosscut. Great job on that one, I got a kick out of it.
Mostly, it was just *really* nice to be able to solve again. I can’t imagine having to write twice in three years. Thanks for making an awesome hunt, even though I’m sure motivation was sometimes hard to come by.
LikeLike
I hunted with SuperTeamAwesome, I believe we had 8 metas solved at the end of the hunt (depending on how you’re counting – does events meta count, but birthday town doesn’t)? (and solved another one very shortly after, according to our internal tracking system)
First, I want to commend you and all of Setec for a wonderful hunt. As with other commenters, I felt like the unlock rate was extremely well tuned, up until we got overwhelmed Sunday morning or so. Our team is definitely not good about spreading ourselves out through the night and morning shifts, so the effect was definitely exacerbated by 90+% of the team not being productive from ~4am-10am on Sunday. One thing I also noticed was just how incredibly clean the puzzles were this year – it’s relatively easy to write a clean puzzle, but nearly impossible to write a hunt as free from unsatisfying, stretchy, not-clean puzzles.
The structure of the metas was definitely interesting, but I didn’t find it to be a huge leap in the mystery hunt meta (pun intended). Even before we discovered the mechanism for the metas, most of the solved puzzles we generally were able to guess which meta they would belong to based on the length or some other feature of the answer. We probably had about an 80% success rate on guessing which meta things would belong to based on that or other factors (eg, we figured out Halloween/Thanksgiving’s blood types and were able to classify answers well before actually figuring out the rest of the meta). It definitely threw a wrench into our puzzle-tracking system, which our team has been building up for the past 3 years, so there are a number of new feature requests we’ll have to implement to get ahead of the game next year…
With regards to backsolving, we have 7 puzzles in our internal system marked as backsolved, and I remember one particular instance in Arbor/Bloomsday where we were able to backsolve Furious Fellows before even completing the meta. I can understand the desire for puzzle-writers to have their puzzles solved and enjoyed, but I agree with other commenters that the metas and meta structure this year made backsolving both easier and more useful, for determining which puzzles went with which metas. I know 7 is the highest number of backsolves we’ve had in the past few years, the previous max being probably only 3 or 4. I know we also inundated your queue with a decent number of backsolve attempts (we did try pretty hard to cut that down, but team-wide coordination can be difficult, so we apologize for that), and I know we also inundated your queue with an egregiously large number of double submissions where two members would both get really excited and submit at the same time, without first communicating who should call in the answer. There was one puzzle where we submitted the same solution 4 times in a span of 13 seconds, for which I am truly sorry. We’re terrible people and we apologize.
In terms of the puzzle style, as mentioned previously, I thought this hunt was probably the cleanest hunt I’ve done (been hunting since 2014). All of the classics were there, of course, including the Obligatory G&S Puzzle, scavenger hunt, knitting puzzle, and the instant-classic FISH Puzzle(s). I agree with the other commenter about the particularly excellent scavenger hunt this year – our team is large enough that we typically find the scavenger hunts to be a somewhat unreasonably high effort for a single puzzle, but we actually did it this year and the interaction was amazing. I would actually confidently state that the scavenger hunt interaction was significantly superior to the Birthday Town interaction, which was no slouch. I would strongly support the trend of shorter but more whole-team engaging, interaction-based scavenger hunts becoming the norm. I personally worked on and enjoyed Hexed Adventure II: Hexed Again! after some initial software bugs with sockets getting closed (I also worked on Hexed Adventure in the hunt that it appeared) – I always enjoy the text adventure puzzles.
In terms of super clean puzzles that I worked on, there was FISH Puzzles, GIF of the Magi, Lantern Festival, Twelve! Eleven!, Movie Marathon, Tree Ring Circus, True and False^2, Jukebox Hero, and Playing Bootsie. I particularly enjoyed Twelve! Eleven! because it wound up working exactly the way I thought it would, Tree Ring Circus, because we started with a slightly inaccurate ring size chart, which made things incredibly difficult, and then things instantly fell into place when one of our teammates found a ring size chart that matched exactly. I also enjoyed Lantern Festival and True and False^2 as some really solid logic puzzles – I was a huge fan of USPC in last year’s Galactic Hunt, for example.
I also had an unfortunate tendency this year to work on puzzles that wound up going unsolved, or took a very long time for our team to complete, which included IN SYNdiCation, Turn On a Dime, Standardized Mess, First You Visit Burkina Faso, iPod Submarine, and Shah Raids. Of those, IN SYNdiCation and Turn On a Dime were ones where we guessed the final extraction only after a fair amount of time and effort (and late at night), and the proposed extraction method seemed like more work than anyone was willing to put in at the time when we figured it out, so they were left for others to finish up in the morning. iPod Submarine and Shah Raids were both ones where we never quite put together the actual extraction. We keyed in on figuring out the guessing rules for iPod Submarine, without paying close attention to the questions being asked (I think we submitted over 300 answers for the first question, and fewer than 10 for the third question, and probably never even saw the full phrase). Shah Raids we just never quite pieced together moving the words around – we had some *very* stretchy charades, like “ellie bow” -> “elbow”, and probably the worst “trees hoe” -> “chorizo”. Definitely missed the mark there. Turn On a Dime I don’t have much to say about except that 52 pictures of coins to identify was a bit too much for our beleaguered team at the time we unlocked that puzzle. And finally there was Burkina Faso. I helped with this puzzle up until it told us to use a rhumb line, at which point I decided to move on and return to sanity. Amazingly, some additional members of my team stuck through and forward-solved it, and we were one of just 5 teams to solve Burkina Faso.
Overall, this year’s hunt gave almost no room for valid complaints – the puzzles were clean, the difficulty and unlock width were very well-tuned, the art was gorgeous, and things generally went very smoothly. I’m sure Left Out isn’t looking forward to matching the bar Setec has set this year :D.
LikeLike
Let me start with the things I liked! I loved kickoff. The night before hunt, someone on my team (Metaphysical Plant) pointed out that the great molasses flood would be a wonderful element in a mystery hunt, so I was really hoping for a molasses theme. And I got it! Then it got even better when the actual theme was revealed, since I’m a total Nightmare Before Christmas nut. The writing and the cast were great, especially the valentine’s day town representative. And I like the basic structural idea for how puzzles feed into metas themed around two holidays, even though I didn’t work on too many metas myself.
Some individual puzzles that I worked on and liked: Send Yourself Swanlumps was completely awesome in every way. Rules of Order might just be a perfect mystery hunt puzzle — the right combination of pop culture, nerdyness, a clever pun, and an easy to guess answer extraction. I also enjoyed Tough Enough, Ornaments, and Lantern Festival.
I’m always surprised after hunt at how small a fraction of the hunt I actually see. It didn’t help that this year I had a work meeting that lasted for most of the afternoon on Friday. In retrospect this was terrible for my experience of the hunt, since most of the puzzles that I probably would have liked were solved by my team on Friday. This obviously was not Setec’s fault.
As always, it’s an amazing thing that so many people work so hard to put on this incredible event for free. I’ve helped run two mystery hunts, and the idea that a team would be running its fifth, or that Dan is running his fifty millionth or whatever, I find to be astonishing and spectacular. I am ever grateful that people continue to put their time and passion into keeping it alive even while I do not want to run a hunt again. Setec wrote my favorite hunt, and their hunts from the 2000s are a lot of the reason I fell in love with this thing. And this thing is how I met my fiancé.
So believe me, I don’t like criticizing this hunt. But I’m going to. (I should mention that other members of my team don’t seem to feel the same as I. It’s quite possible that I just got unlucky in the puzzles I saw.) Basically, I thought too many puzzles were unnecessarily long, or had steps that were unmotivated. (This criticism is of course hypocritical, as I am the author of Long Division from 2006, undoubtedly the most unnecessarily long puzzle that my team ever put into a mystery hunt.) I’m generally a hunt-is-almost-never-too-short kind of person (2017 might be the only hunt in the last 20 years that I would consider too short, and even then it was well within range), so I always like the short, elegant, straightforward puzzle over the long, complicated, brilliant puzzle. This hunt seemed to have way too many of the latter.
I spent the entirety of Saturday working on exactly two puzzles (Caressing and Connect Four), neither of which we solved. My team tends to talk about “answer extraction” as being a somewhat separate task from the puzzle itself, which probably isn’t a useful way to think about puzzles most of the time, because often the step that we think is answer extraction is just whatever the next step of the puzzle is. But in the case of both Caressing and Connect Four, we had correctly collected essentially all the data that was needed to solve the puzzle, but none of the ideas we had on how to assemble this data into an answer happened to be the same as the puzzle designer’s.
In the case of Caressing, we had identified each track image and found its location on the real racetrack. We thought we were going to get one letter for each car, since the cars had unique numbers, which suggested an ordering (and so a 54 letter clue phrase). As it turned out, the clued corners themselves were not used (except to identify the specific racetracks), nor the exact numbers aside from their order on each racetrack. I guess “as long as they know where they are” in the flavor text is supposed to clue to look at the absolute locations, but to me it doesn’t clue strongly enough to do something like connect-the-dots, especially since, in connect-the-dots, one does not connect non-adjacent numbers. A better option I think would have been to repeat car numbers, so that there are 1-n in each track — that would make identifying tracks easier, but by no means trivial. I think this would have made it easier to guess connect-the dots easier as an extraction mechanism.
With Connect Four, we solved the mastermind puzzles, found and solved the cipher fillominos on gmpuzzles, noticed that CODE lined up with the letters in that position on the grid, and then were stuck on what to do. We couldn’t come up with a good way to fit together the data we had left. Similar to Caressing, I think the problem may be that there was a lot of unused data in the puzzle: most of the letters in the grid provided in the puzzle turn out to be meaningless.
Another one was Turn on a Dime, a puzzle that I actually rather enjoyed. We got all the way to the clue to bring HQ a Canadian coin, but only after HQ closed on Sunday, so we didn’t see the very end of the puzzle. But even the part we saw felt to me that it had a completely unnecessary step. You do all this work to match up fronts and backs of the coins, and to notice that the flipped images correspond to letters, and to put this data together correctly to get a phrase, which, rather than giving you an answer, sends you off to perform a brainless data collection step, which finally gets you a useful instruction. Was looking up mintages really that important for the puzzle to be fun? Why not put the instruction about the Canadian coin into the first phrase? I actually just now looked at the solution and discovered that even after we bring in a Canadian coin, there’s a whole other puzzle step before we could get an answer.
Then there’s Common Flavors. I didn’t actually work on this puzzle, but I overheard a lot of my teammates working on it. Obviously the change to the Celestial Seasonings website (apparently just days before hunt) was unpredictable and not Setec’s fault, but I think this is a problematic puzzle even without that. The question for me is, what is this puzzle about? It can be about trying to identify teas by tasting them, or it can be about a logic puzzle involving teas sharing ingredients, but I don’t think it works for it to be both. The task of identifying the teas is just never going to be perfect, and it seems like the rest of the puzzle just falls apart if your data is noisy. This is exactly what happened to us. The people working on the puzzle had exactly the right idea about how the puzzle would work, but their slightly incorrect data made it seem that this idea was wrong. Eventually they corrected the data and solved it, but only after a lot of frustration. I think, with this kind of identify-subtle-differences-in-these-physical-objects puzzle, the best approach is to have each identification yield one letter, via a very simple and obvious rule, and those letters spell a clue phrase. That way, even if you only get 80% of the identifications, and a few errors among them, you can still play wheel of fortune and get the full clue phrase. The point is that the fun part of the puzzle is identifying the teas, and the rest of it should be totally straightforward. OR, if you like this thing about all these teas sharing some ingredients, you should have some way to get the teas that’s less error prone.
Anyway, thanks Dan and the rest of Setec for all your work on this hunt! Your dedication to this thing comes through even in the stuff I didn’t like.
LikeLike