This weekend I participated in Puzzle Hunt 9: Doomsday on the MS campus. Captain Micropolis, in the midst of announcing his retirement, was seemingly dispatched by a new threat named The Puzzler and it was up to us to get to the bottom of things and foil The Puzzler's plot.
Rather than using the traditional "wave" structure for distributing puzzles, this hunt used a self-paced structure in which solving a puzzle unlocked access to one or more new puzzles in six different parallel storylines. For us and the other top teams, this structure worked very well. A steady flow of new puzzles to look at kept interest high. I've heard that less successful teams had quite a different experience. To get new puzzles you had to solve the ones you had. Teams unable to do that had to bang their heads against the same puzzles for hours, and didn't get the kind of help they wanted from the organizers to unblock them. That's a shame, and I'm surprised the organizers didn't implement a time-delay back-up system, where if a puzzle hadn't been unlocked by a certain time it would get unlocked automatically regardless of whether or not the team had "earned" it.
Aside from the unlocking system, the structure of this hunt bore a frightening similarity to Puzzle Hunt 8:
| Puzzle Hunt 8 | Puzzle Hunt 9 | Started with a travel brochure containing multiple puzzles, including one requiring the brochure to be folded so an answer could be read | Started with a newspaper containing multiple puzzles, including one required the newspaper to be folded so an answer could be read |
| Created a false map of the MS campus, turning it into a fictional Las Vegas | Created a fake map of the MS campus, turning it into a fictional city called Micropolis |
| Contained multiple metas, each utilizing puzzle answers that shared something in common | Contained multiple metas, each utilizing puzzle answers that shared something in common |
| Solving a meta led to a site puzzle somewhere on campus | Solving a meta led to a site puzzle somewhere on campus |
| When you solved the seemingly final meta, you discovered there was an additional endgame that required you to search through previous puzzles | When you solved the seemingly final meta, you discovered there was an additional endgame that required you to solve four additional puzzles scattered around the campus |
The puzzles were, by and large, solid efforts. I didn't think any were particularly innovative or surprising, but with perhaps one exception (a Googlefest involving many, many dates) none were real stinkers, either. I did especially enjoy a Scrabble puzzle in which each play was a bingo. Finding the bingos was usually trivial (thanks to anagram software), but searching for the right spots to place them was fun and provided the most satisfying moments of the hunt for me.
I arrived at the hunt after staying up all night at an event in Dallas. My flight left Dallas at 7 AM and arrived in Seattle at 9:30, just barely in time for me to get to the 10 AM kickoff. So with no sleep except for a few sporadic winks on the plane-- and anticipating no sleep on Saturday night either-- I expected to fall unconscious during the Hunt or else be so hopped up on caffeine that Robin Williams would look somnambulant. Somehow, however, I remained coherent and functional throughout. I suspect this is at least partially thanks to the unlocking Hunt structure, which provided a steady stream of new puzzles to look at and avoided the ennui that can set in when all that's left are the inscrutable, intractable beasts. We spent much of the hunt flip-flopping with Scrubbers for first place before defeating the Puzzler around 11 AM and claiming victory, marking the first time a team has won two hunts in a row. Of course, usually the team that wins a hunt runs the next one, so that's perhaps a dubious achievement at best.
Most importantly, our team had a lot of fun during this hunt. We made continual progress, experienced very few moments of homicidal rage at the organizers, and kept in good spirits throughout. Perhaps easy to do when you're in the lead, but significant nonetheless. Many thanks to Everyday Heroes for putting the event together. I know how much work it is, and how thankless it can seem-- especially when everything doesn't go perfectly. Good job, friends.
Posted by Peter at November 7, 2005 11:32 PM