Mystery Hunt roundup 2015
Jan. 22nd, 2015 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoySo! This past weekend was MIT Mystery Hunt, which means it's time for my annual Mystery Hunt roundup. Unfortunately the puzzles aren't up yet on the archive, or full stats, but limited stats are up in the form of the slideshow, and the solutions are at least up for those of us who participated. Hopefully everything's up before too long, but I'm just going to go ahead and do this anyway. EDIT: I've now put the links in. (Also, I had accidentally mislabeled "Dory" as "Nemo".)
I was once again on the Donner Party team this year. Not a very large team. We did OK, I guess? Solved a decent fraction of the puzzles. Ended up right about the middle of the pack. We didn't solve any of the metametas (certainly didn't make it to the runaround -- I don't know how possible the runaround would have been anyway, seeing as we're a mostly-remote team), and I don't think we even solved any of the metas until after the coin was found (and we only got two of those). So, not great. Apparently we solve a record number of puzzles for our team, but that was probably helped by the existence of the School of Fish round, which consisted of a large number of lower-difficulty puzzles (apparently designed to be about "something like one-third the difficulty of typical ocean puzzles").
Nobody else here really joined in, although Seth and Noelle each did very briefly, and so did Angus, who was here for the weekend, and actually Angus and Seth both ended up contributing substantially during that brief time! But oh well. Anyway, on to discussing particular puzzles.
Beth: Helped out with this one. By the time I got to it, the maze part had already been solved, as had the hidden-letters bit, and we'd realized each room referred to some work of fiction and that the hidden letters were a clue for something about it. I was the one who suggested the extraction method -- that the number of letters should match the number of doors, and that the sequence of doors you took might spell out the answer (or a clue to it). We didn't realize however that each room was referring to a fictional work. I mean, we certainly got some of the answers by looking at the fictional works that the books contained, but I don't think we ever put it together and realized that it was always about a fictional work. (For #8, instead of the Necronomicon, we just had "something Lovecraftian"; I figured out they wanted AZIF anyway.) Also, for a while some people were convinced the clickbait part was relevant to the solution to the puzzle. Still we were able to get the answer from what we had.
Nope!: I was the one who realized the Roman-lettered clues were values of errno, but I had no idea what to do with the Greek-lettered clues. (Also, I didn't realize that that was Conan O'Brien in D; I tentatively put EDEADLOCK, figuring it was showing a dead person, good chance they're named Locke. It was Seth who pointed out that it was Conan O'Brien, making it EHOSTDOWN.) Beta was obviously cluing "generic", but what about the rest? Some people thought they had to do with programming languages, because delta showed a C and the Eiffel tower (and epsilon showed more C's). Someone eventually figured it out though. (Also, I still don't get why there's that tower in the picture that clues EDOTDOT.)
Machine Room Meta: One of the two metas we solved -- though, again, I'm pretty sure not till after the coin was found. I didn't really work on it.
This Puzzle Has No Errata: We solved the crossword puzzle pretty early (though I noticed quite late that we had "Forum Magnus" instead of "Forum Magnum"). I don't think we solved the rest until after the coin was found though.
Time Is Out of Joint: This is a clever puzzle, I gotta say. Someone on our team solved it, I don't know who. I, in addition to the obvious sort by time, also tried "sort by time within the year" and "sort by time within the day"; naturally neither produced anything. At that point I gave up. Kind of disappointed I didn't think of it.
Montages: Helped out with this one, first identifying songs and then later putting the "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" events in order (I seem to have been the first one to realize we should do this). Actually this was the first one I worked on; I sent out an email to the house saying "I'm starting Mystery Hunt now if you want to join, also I'm working on a puzzle about Disney movies if anybody knows those". Jackson or Justine might have been able to help a lot, but neither was around. Noelle came down and helped identify songs a little though. At that point we didn't really need it so much though. We also got stuck at the end here -- we submitted "YES YOU DO", "WHEN DONE", and "YES YOU DO CALL WHEN DONE" before realizing we were actually supposed to build a snowman. Since the bulk of the team was in Chicago rather than on-site, they built it in Chicago and sent in a picture, which counted.
Optics Lab Meta: The other meta we eventually solved. Didn't work on it either.
People and Places: Helped answer a few clues on this one, but we ultimately didn't get anywhere.
Eh?: This is the one Seth helped out with. I was just like, "What the hell is this, I'm not going to do this"; I just thought it would be amusing to show Seth. But then he realized it was Pig Latin -- remembering the illustration on the Magic card Atinlay Igpay -- and then we identified the picture as Ray Charles, and then I got the rest. So, yay Seth!
Feeling Bluefin: Helped fill in a few clues, as well as the final answer.
Tournament: Someone on our team got this, I have no idea who. I had no idea what to do with this. It's pretty neat though.
This Story is Canon: This puzzle was kind of amusing. Really easy though. I basically soloed this (not too surprising for a fish puzzle, I guess). Like with many fish puzzles, I was a little hesitant to call the answer in, because there had to be more to it than that, right?
Starfish: Helped out with this one. Realized all answers are 5 letters and they're all alphabetical; this managed to bring people back to it after it had been abandoned earlier. Some difficult clues in this one, but the puzzle makes what to do with them pretty obvious.
FJF, S: This is the one Angus helped out with. I got the first part, and translated the grid to Dvorak (as well as the inverse translation, for good measure), but wasn't sure what to do there. Angus was the one who suggested walking through based on the directions, so yay! Another one where I was a little hesitant to call in the answer due to how short it was.
Striptease: People managed to identify most of the comic strips, but then we got stuck. Also I don't think people realized that it was supposed to be "The Amazing Spider-Man" (it being the newspaper comic).
The Resistance: An amusing puzzle. I had no idea what the subscripts meant so I got nowhere. I think someone else later mostly solved it, but we didn't ultimately get it.
Fill in the Blanks: Most of the blanks had already been filled in one way; we already had MONEY and TESLA. I was the one who realized there were two possibilities, and we got the full two messages. However we initially submitted DINAR, and got a little stuck (even asking the Oracle for help) before submitting SERBIA.
Spittle Loon: Now this obviously seems like one for me and Angus! (Note the similarity to 2013's Funny Story, which Angus and I did quite a bit on. Thankfully this one didn't have that one's awful extraction, though.) Angus was going to sleep at the time, though. I got all of them except for the one about the bear; I was convinced the answer would contain "cub" and not "bear", since all the others had conspicuously avoided using the answer words in the story itself. (I also thought the bush or the cuts would be involved somehow, but apparently those were just red herrings.) I called for help there, but nobody was able to get it. With FAR_ED, we tried submitting FARMED (wrong) based on just trying to complete the word, and later FARCED (on the theory that the third word of the answer would be CUB, and moving the C to the front would make FARCED). We didn't ever try submitting FARTED. Of course, the real answer was BARFED, which without getting the B was pretty hard to see, so we didn't get this one.
Funny Shapes: Obviously these are mangled states, but that's as far as I got, and nobody else seems to have made any serious attempt.
School of Fish Meta: I was the one who noticed the answers were anagrams of the fish with an additional letter. People working on it before me had noticed the relevance of the fish types, but instead of anagram+1, they were looking at the letters in common (and not in common) between the fish and answer for the same puzzle. But with anagram+1, we had letters and we had a permutation. But we never solved enough of the puzzles to really get anywhere, and I don't think any of us took a serious look at the permutation, or noticed that answers were associated with fish of the same general type. (Also, I think instead of RED, we had DEVIL; some of the fish clues were kind of opaque without the corresponding answer, and some even with.) So we didn't get it.
Representative Characters: Representation theory puzzle! I mean, OK, all you need is a character table for A10, which you can look up, but still. This was solved before I ever looked at it. Pretty sure the solution page will be close to incomprehensible for anyone not already familiar with the subject.
Something Looks Fishy: At least someone on the team thought this had to do with the "fish" family of ciphers (Blowfish, etc).
Choose Your Language: We got the English part, but almost none of the rest. Without a good knowledge of Pokémon names in other languages, it's hard to get anywhere. (We also thought they were all first generation, instead of French being second generation, etc.)
Jack and Jill or Janet: Worked quite a bit on this one. Once we had the modified words ("SALIENCE", etc) I was the one who noticed the synonyms in the original poems ("conspicuousness", etc). (I was also the one who noticed the original answers rhymed.) However, after that, we took quite a while putting different things in different orders before we found the one that yielded the answer. (I also thought for a while there would be an "and" part to the puzzle, since "and" was in the title along with "or".)
Pipe: Oh boy. I did most of the work on this one while other people were mostly asleep; later people didn't make much progress beyond what I did. (Another disadvantage to being on a small team -- if you stay up all night solving, you're going to be working largely solo.) I figured out what the first two stages do, and that stage 3 only accepts numbers up to 117 (or 118), and thus determined (by trying everything that 33 was the only input that yielded success) but beyond that I got stuck. (I didn't bother trying to call in 33 or THIRTY THREE.) I mean, we figured out the final part of stage 7, and, really, if you can figure out stage 3, the rest doesn't seem that hard. (Although it's somewhat confusing how the puzzle sometimes works on sequences of characters, sometimes on numbers, and sometimes on sequences of numbers.) But nobody on the team was able to figure out how stage 3 was converting numbers into strings; it was a total mystery. (Why were the only final unpaired letters appearing in the error messages c, e, m, n, and y? And why were m and n so much more common, with c and y each only appearing once?) Nobody made the 118 elements connection. Honestly, that part still strikes me as a bit shaky. 1 through 118 is just how far we normally draw the periodic table, or how far elements have been unofficially made and announced. But it's not the set of elements that have been officially (according to IUPAC) discovered, and it's certainly not the set of elements that have permanent official names. (Of course, doing it that way might make for a worse puzzle. It'd no longer be a range of numbers, causing people to waste their time with higher and higher numbers because they couldn't be sure there wasn't something up high. Meanwhile, the fact that 115 was skipped just might make that part too easy for anyone who noticed that. (You wouldn't see that 113 was skipped, because 113 is prime, while 115=5*23.)) So you've included elements with placeholder names, but those can go arbitrarily high. (The periodic table might eventually end, but that's an unresolved question.) So, whole thing is a little iffy. That said, I can't say it's wrong; it was a sensible decision to do it that way, and we didn't get it.
Polyglot: I started on this one, getting the easy ones. I didn't realize it was about unique solutions rather than solutions, but that didn't come up till later.
Coral Reef Meta: The "make all answers blue" thing (and how each answer is "made blue", each in a different way) is pretty clever.
Let's Get Submersible: I wasn't familiar with Battleship puzzles before. I mean, I kind of guessed at how they worked, but... how could there be an 11 on a 10x10 grid? I probably would have realized had I thought about it some more. Oh well. Other people on our team got this one.
Graveyard Meta: Looking at the solution, I bet Angus would have liked this...
Spongebob: Someone on the team realized this had to do with PADI dive tables, but we didn't end up solving it.
Dory: Nothing particular to say about this, but it's a neat puzzle.
Cthulhu: Like the clickbait as mentioned under Beth, when people first saw the "Translate text" things they thought they were relevant to the solution of the puzzle, rather than being for a later meta. And unlike the clickbait, they're not directly used in the solution to the meta; they're just there to give you some more examples of plaintext/ciphertext pairs that you can use to figure out how it works. It's a little easy to miss that the translated text replaces the flavor text (as opposed to just popping up and not replacing anything), since it's often easy to miss flavortext.
Beyond this point are the Atlantis puzzles, which we got to really late and as a result hardly anyone seriously worked on them. Only two of them got solved.
Blue Bomber: Obviously the Blue Bomber is Mega Man, and a number of the clues are pretty easy, and I knew those boxes with blue or red dots were something from Mega Man, but I couldn't remember what; I didn't think of passwords. I don't think anyone seriously worked on this one.
A Push in the Right Direction: Hey, it's Twitch Plays Sokoban! I didn't really work on this one, I just noticed that and thought it was funny.
Suns of China: Angus might have been helpful on this, but I think he was asleep at the time...
Colorful Tower Meta: Somehow I didn't make the connection to Hangman. Then again, it's not like I seriously looked at it very long. The conversion to the "dead" version of the answers seems pretty hard.
Foamy: Didn't get this one at all. Tried plugging the first one into a nonogram solver -- holy hell, that took a long time -- only for it to tell me the column and row sums didn't match. Instead of taking that as a clue, I just tried it again. This time I used a different solver that didn't check that beforehand; I guess it wasn't programmed very well, because it appeared to tell me not that the puzzle was impossible, but rather that it was underconstrained. At that point I gave up.
Spotted Tower Meta: This one's pretty clever, but wow it seems hard. I guess this is true in general of the tower metas.
Floating Crossword: One of the two Atlantis puzzles the team solved. I didn't work on it.
UKACD: The other one. I didn't work on it either.
Spiky Tower Meta: See comment about Spotted Tower Meta. Perhaps not to the same extent though.
Golden Tower Meta: The only tower meta that doesn't require you to realize you have to perform certain appropriately-themed transformation on the answers.
So, that's that. We'll see what next year brings. (Maybe I should join a different team -- I miss having a shot at actually winning...)
-Harry
I was once again on the Donner Party team this year. Not a very large team. We did OK, I guess? Solved a decent fraction of the puzzles. Ended up right about the middle of the pack. We didn't solve any of the metametas (certainly didn't make it to the runaround -- I don't know how possible the runaround would have been anyway, seeing as we're a mostly-remote team), and I don't think we even solved any of the metas until after the coin was found (and we only got two of those). So, not great. Apparently we solve a record number of puzzles for our team, but that was probably helped by the existence of the School of Fish round, which consisted of a large number of lower-difficulty puzzles (apparently designed to be about "something like one-third the difficulty of typical ocean puzzles").
Nobody else here really joined in, although Seth and Noelle each did very briefly, and so did Angus, who was here for the weekend, and actually Angus and Seth both ended up contributing substantially during that brief time! But oh well. Anyway, on to discussing particular puzzles.
Beth: Helped out with this one. By the time I got to it, the maze part had already been solved, as had the hidden-letters bit, and we'd realized each room referred to some work of fiction and that the hidden letters were a clue for something about it. I was the one who suggested the extraction method -- that the number of letters should match the number of doors, and that the sequence of doors you took might spell out the answer (or a clue to it). We didn't realize however that each room was referring to a fictional work. I mean, we certainly got some of the answers by looking at the fictional works that the books contained, but I don't think we ever put it together and realized that it was always about a fictional work. (For #8, instead of the Necronomicon, we just had "something Lovecraftian"; I figured out they wanted AZIF anyway.) Also, for a while some people were convinced the clickbait part was relevant to the solution to the puzzle. Still we were able to get the answer from what we had.
Nope!: I was the one who realized the Roman-lettered clues were values of errno, but I had no idea what to do with the Greek-lettered clues. (Also, I didn't realize that that was Conan O'Brien in D; I tentatively put EDEADLOCK, figuring it was showing a dead person, good chance they're named Locke. It was Seth who pointed out that it was Conan O'Brien, making it EHOSTDOWN.) Beta was obviously cluing "generic", but what about the rest? Some people thought they had to do with programming languages, because delta showed a C and the Eiffel tower (and epsilon showed more C's). Someone eventually figured it out though. (Also, I still don't get why there's that tower in the picture that clues EDOTDOT.)
Machine Room Meta: One of the two metas we solved -- though, again, I'm pretty sure not till after the coin was found. I didn't really work on it.
This Puzzle Has No Errata: We solved the crossword puzzle pretty early (though I noticed quite late that we had "Forum Magnus" instead of "Forum Magnum"). I don't think we solved the rest until after the coin was found though.
Time Is Out of Joint: This is a clever puzzle, I gotta say. Someone on our team solved it, I don't know who. I, in addition to the obvious sort by time, also tried "sort by time within the year" and "sort by time within the day"; naturally neither produced anything. At that point I gave up. Kind of disappointed I didn't think of it.
Montages: Helped out with this one, first identifying songs and then later putting the "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" events in order (I seem to have been the first one to realize we should do this). Actually this was the first one I worked on; I sent out an email to the house saying "I'm starting Mystery Hunt now if you want to join, also I'm working on a puzzle about Disney movies if anybody knows those". Jackson or Justine might have been able to help a lot, but neither was around. Noelle came down and helped identify songs a little though. At that point we didn't really need it so much though. We also got stuck at the end here -- we submitted "YES YOU DO", "WHEN DONE", and "YES YOU DO CALL WHEN DONE" before realizing we were actually supposed to build a snowman. Since the bulk of the team was in Chicago rather than on-site, they built it in Chicago and sent in a picture, which counted.
Optics Lab Meta: The other meta we eventually solved. Didn't work on it either.
People and Places: Helped answer a few clues on this one, but we ultimately didn't get anywhere.
Eh?: This is the one Seth helped out with. I was just like, "What the hell is this, I'm not going to do this"; I just thought it would be amusing to show Seth. But then he realized it was Pig Latin -- remembering the illustration on the Magic card Atinlay Igpay -- and then we identified the picture as Ray Charles, and then I got the rest. So, yay Seth!
Feeling Bluefin: Helped fill in a few clues, as well as the final answer.
Tournament: Someone on our team got this, I have no idea who. I had no idea what to do with this. It's pretty neat though.
This Story is Canon: This puzzle was kind of amusing. Really easy though. I basically soloed this (not too surprising for a fish puzzle, I guess). Like with many fish puzzles, I was a little hesitant to call the answer in, because there had to be more to it than that, right?
Starfish: Helped out with this one. Realized all answers are 5 letters and they're all alphabetical; this managed to bring people back to it after it had been abandoned earlier. Some difficult clues in this one, but the puzzle makes what to do with them pretty obvious.
FJF, S: This is the one Angus helped out with. I got the first part, and translated the grid to Dvorak (as well as the inverse translation, for good measure), but wasn't sure what to do there. Angus was the one who suggested walking through based on the directions, so yay! Another one where I was a little hesitant to call in the answer due to how short it was.
Striptease: People managed to identify most of the comic strips, but then we got stuck. Also I don't think people realized that it was supposed to be "The Amazing Spider-Man" (it being the newspaper comic).
The Resistance: An amusing puzzle. I had no idea what the subscripts meant so I got nowhere. I think someone else later mostly solved it, but we didn't ultimately get it.
Fill in the Blanks: Most of the blanks had already been filled in one way; we already had MONEY and TESLA. I was the one who realized there were two possibilities, and we got the full two messages. However we initially submitted DINAR, and got a little stuck (even asking the Oracle for help) before submitting SERBIA.
Spittle Loon: Now this obviously seems like one for me and Angus! (Note the similarity to 2013's Funny Story, which Angus and I did quite a bit on. Thankfully this one didn't have that one's awful extraction, though.) Angus was going to sleep at the time, though. I got all of them except for the one about the bear; I was convinced the answer would contain "cub" and not "bear", since all the others had conspicuously avoided using the answer words in the story itself. (I also thought the bush or the cuts would be involved somehow, but apparently those were just red herrings.) I called for help there, but nobody was able to get it. With FAR_ED, we tried submitting FARMED (wrong) based on just trying to complete the word, and later FARCED (on the theory that the third word of the answer would be CUB, and moving the C to the front would make FARCED). We didn't ever try submitting FARTED. Of course, the real answer was BARFED, which without getting the B was pretty hard to see, so we didn't get this one.
Funny Shapes: Obviously these are mangled states, but that's as far as I got, and nobody else seems to have made any serious attempt.
School of Fish Meta: I was the one who noticed the answers were anagrams of the fish with an additional letter. People working on it before me had noticed the relevance of the fish types, but instead of anagram+1, they were looking at the letters in common (and not in common) between the fish and answer for the same puzzle. But with anagram+1, we had letters and we had a permutation. But we never solved enough of the puzzles to really get anywhere, and I don't think any of us took a serious look at the permutation, or noticed that answers were associated with fish of the same general type. (Also, I think instead of RED, we had DEVIL; some of the fish clues were kind of opaque without the corresponding answer, and some even with.) So we didn't get it.
Representative Characters: Representation theory puzzle! I mean, OK, all you need is a character table for A10, which you can look up, but still. This was solved before I ever looked at it. Pretty sure the solution page will be close to incomprehensible for anyone not already familiar with the subject.
Something Looks Fishy: At least someone on the team thought this had to do with the "fish" family of ciphers (Blowfish, etc).
Choose Your Language: We got the English part, but almost none of the rest. Without a good knowledge of Pokémon names in other languages, it's hard to get anywhere. (We also thought they were all first generation, instead of French being second generation, etc.)
Jack and Jill or Janet: Worked quite a bit on this one. Once we had the modified words ("SALIENCE", etc) I was the one who noticed the synonyms in the original poems ("conspicuousness", etc). (I was also the one who noticed the original answers rhymed.) However, after that, we took quite a while putting different things in different orders before we found the one that yielded the answer. (I also thought for a while there would be an "and" part to the puzzle, since "and" was in the title along with "or".)
Pipe: Oh boy. I did most of the work on this one while other people were mostly asleep; later people didn't make much progress beyond what I did. (Another disadvantage to being on a small team -- if you stay up all night solving, you're going to be working largely solo.) I figured out what the first two stages do, and that stage 3 only accepts numbers up to 117 (or 118), and thus determined (by trying everything that 33 was the only input that yielded success) but beyond that I got stuck. (I didn't bother trying to call in 33 or THIRTY THREE.) I mean, we figured out the final part of stage 7, and, really, if you can figure out stage 3, the rest doesn't seem that hard. (Although it's somewhat confusing how the puzzle sometimes works on sequences of characters, sometimes on numbers, and sometimes on sequences of numbers.) But nobody on the team was able to figure out how stage 3 was converting numbers into strings; it was a total mystery. (Why were the only final unpaired letters appearing in the error messages c, e, m, n, and y? And why were m and n so much more common, with c and y each only appearing once?) Nobody made the 118 elements connection. Honestly, that part still strikes me as a bit shaky. 1 through 118 is just how far we normally draw the periodic table, or how far elements have been unofficially made and announced. But it's not the set of elements that have been officially (according to IUPAC) discovered, and it's certainly not the set of elements that have permanent official names. (Of course, doing it that way might make for a worse puzzle. It'd no longer be a range of numbers, causing people to waste their time with higher and higher numbers because they couldn't be sure there wasn't something up high. Meanwhile, the fact that 115 was skipped just might make that part too easy for anyone who noticed that. (You wouldn't see that 113 was skipped, because 113 is prime, while 115=5*23.)) So you've included elements with placeholder names, but those can go arbitrarily high. (The periodic table might eventually end, but that's an unresolved question.) So, whole thing is a little iffy. That said, I can't say it's wrong; it was a sensible decision to do it that way, and we didn't get it.
Polyglot: I started on this one, getting the easy ones. I didn't realize it was about unique solutions rather than solutions, but that didn't come up till later.
Coral Reef Meta: The "make all answers blue" thing (and how each answer is "made blue", each in a different way) is pretty clever.
Let's Get Submersible: I wasn't familiar with Battleship puzzles before. I mean, I kind of guessed at how they worked, but... how could there be an 11 on a 10x10 grid? I probably would have realized had I thought about it some more. Oh well. Other people on our team got this one.
Graveyard Meta: Looking at the solution, I bet Angus would have liked this...
Spongebob: Someone on the team realized this had to do with PADI dive tables, but we didn't end up solving it.
Dory: Nothing particular to say about this, but it's a neat puzzle.
Cthulhu: Like the clickbait as mentioned under Beth, when people first saw the "Translate text" things they thought they were relevant to the solution of the puzzle, rather than being for a later meta. And unlike the clickbait, they're not directly used in the solution to the meta; they're just there to give you some more examples of plaintext/ciphertext pairs that you can use to figure out how it works. It's a little easy to miss that the translated text replaces the flavor text (as opposed to just popping up and not replacing anything), since it's often easy to miss flavortext.
Beyond this point are the Atlantis puzzles, which we got to really late and as a result hardly anyone seriously worked on them. Only two of them got solved.
Blue Bomber: Obviously the Blue Bomber is Mega Man, and a number of the clues are pretty easy, and I knew those boxes with blue or red dots were something from Mega Man, but I couldn't remember what; I didn't think of passwords. I don't think anyone seriously worked on this one.
A Push in the Right Direction: Hey, it's Twitch Plays Sokoban! I didn't really work on this one, I just noticed that and thought it was funny.
Suns of China: Angus might have been helpful on this, but I think he was asleep at the time...
Colorful Tower Meta: Somehow I didn't make the connection to Hangman. Then again, it's not like I seriously looked at it very long. The conversion to the "dead" version of the answers seems pretty hard.
Foamy: Didn't get this one at all. Tried plugging the first one into a nonogram solver -- holy hell, that took a long time -- only for it to tell me the column and row sums didn't match. Instead of taking that as a clue, I just tried it again. This time I used a different solver that didn't check that beforehand; I guess it wasn't programmed very well, because it appeared to tell me not that the puzzle was impossible, but rather that it was underconstrained. At that point I gave up.
Spotted Tower Meta: This one's pretty clever, but wow it seems hard. I guess this is true in general of the tower metas.
Floating Crossword: One of the two Atlantis puzzles the team solved. I didn't work on it.
UKACD: The other one. I didn't work on it either.
Spiky Tower Meta: See comment about Spotted Tower Meta. Perhaps not to the same extent though.
Golden Tower Meta: The only tower meta that doesn't require you to realize you have to perform certain appropriately-themed transformation on the answers.
So, that's that. We'll see what next year brings. (Maybe I should join a different team -- I miss having a shot at actually winning...)
-Harry
