Mystery Hunt Roundup 2020
Jan. 26th, 2020 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoySo this was my first Mystery Hunt where I actually went up to Boston for it! Y'know, that being practical now that I'm in New York. Normally if I were going up to Boston I'd see if I could stay with a friend, but during Hunt... yeah, no, not going to subject my host to that. :P As I mentioned Daniel and Emma were also coming up to Boston for Hunt (and also on Plant) so I tried to coordinate with them somewhat; that didn't really work out but I did at least go stay in the same hotel as them?
So yeah I stuck with Plant this year rather than returning to Donner Party, because I didn't want to be one of a very few on-site people on a mostly remote team, because they I'd get stuck with all the on-site-only stuff. And hoo boy with the weather that especially turned out to be a good idea! I was not prepared for how cold Boston was going to be; I totally forgot to bring a sweater. Oh well...
So uh yeah most of the time was just spent at Plant HQ. So much of my food for that weekend came from the snacks they had lying around there! I tried to go to kickoff but got there a little late and they were full. Instead of watching the livestream, I just sat outside and read stuff on the internet. Meanwhile, with other people watching the livestream, I heard everything dimly twice... I also made it to wrap-up, but maybe I should say a bit more before I talk about that.
I also ran into Marc Sweetgall from high school there, woah. He's on Setec Astronomy apparently. At wrap-up I encountered Eric Frackleton (currently on one of the teams that split off from Palindrome) who I totally forgot I had seen a few months ago at the PROMYS thing. Missed seeing Li-Mei (of Death and Mayhem) there apparently... (Rhiannon, despite leading a team and living near Boston, solves remotely! So she wasn't there...)
Oh, I'm pretty sure this was also my first Hunt where I didn't stay up all night at any point. :P I was just way too tired. Friday I was tired both from waking up for wrap-up and from waking up early the previous day just to see Nintendo announce freaking Byleth for Smash @_@
(Not that I'm against Byleth in Smash, I'm always for more characters in Smash (as long as isn't Sora :P ), but there's no denying it's a bit of a disappointing choice)
So yeah I couldn't stay up all night Friday. In fact I was so tired I was planning on going to sleep at a normal person time like 11 PM, or maybe after the nominal HQ closure at 1 AM, but there were puzzles so in fact I stayed up till past 4 AM, i.e. normal time for me. :P I was really tired Saturday night as well for whatever reason...
Oh yeah, nominal HQ closure -- whoo, that was a mess. Fortunately, despite having no actual MIT students on the team, we were able to get special permission to stay open, so that wasn't a problem, yay!
(Also in firsts: Yay automated answer-checking!)
We were not close to winning; we didn't make it to the runaround or anything. When I went to sleep Saturday night we still had the two final lands still locked. We did have them unlocked when I woke up Sunday but I don't think we were very far in either.
Btw, on the way to the hotel when I was arriving I passed by a place with a Medieval Madness machine... I was like, oh man I have to go there before I leave... (I did not)
(Really though I gotta get myself to Sunshine Laundromat sometime)
Anyway so! On Sunday night after coming back to the hotel, intending to sleep, I went down to the lobby to get more tissues and there I encountered... Hunter and Lee! They called out to me and it took me a moment because I certainly didn't expect to see them here. I was like, what are you doing here, and they're like, we're here for Mystery Hunt, same as you. Lee apparently saw me at kickoff but I missed his attempt to get my attention. They're on... I forget what team, a team associated to some dorm that is mostly undergrads from that dorm.
(I had completely forgotten that Hunter does Mystery Hunt, I think largely because we never did it together in Ann Arbor.)
Anyway so I ask them if they're going to wrap-up and Hunter's like, no, wrap-up is terrible. Harry do you like wrap-up?? And I'm like, I've never been up to Boston for Mystery Hunt before, I have no idea! Anyway he explains, most of wrap-up is OK, but then there's always the part where they ask people to come up and tell solving stories from the year, and people just come up and talk about how oh there was this puzzle and we thought it was about crabs but actually it was about samurai and it's terrible. Well, uh, they didn't do that at wrap-up this year? So it was OK!
Oh, one other thing: Google search results really aren't what they used to be, huh? That may have made some things harder. I tried using DuckDuckGo but didn't notice a big improvement; maybe the things I was searching just never would've worked well. Still, wondering if I should start using Bing instead or something...
Anyway enough fluff, time to talk about the puzzles! Yes including some crab/samurai stories. :P
The Trebuchet -- we did not get the Sonic Bolt part of this one. (The presence of "TRAVOLTA" was noticed, but its significance was not realized.) Fortunately we were able to solve it without that...
The Castle -- we noticed that counties in the Texas panhandle were being clued, but what to do with them? For quite a while we were misled by the ones we had being geographically consecutive, and we thought it would have to do with that somehow. (Also, before we got the panhandle thing, we were misled by the flavor text into thinking state capitals would be relevant; I tried checking county seats, but that went nowhere.) Anyway once we got it we were able to backsolve both "Snow Job" and "Penny Park Guide" (those being the two in that round we were missing).
Goldilocks -- just a neat puzzle I wanted to point out.
Gallery of Tomorrow -- man, the actual solution here was so simple, but I spent so much time determining irrelevant information like when each painting is from, when the artist was born, where it's currently located, and what medium was used to make it...
Creatures from Outer Space -- just a neat little puzzle.
Stress Test -- There was a fair bit of discussion here as to what the correct indexing ones -- into the stressed syllable on the left, into the stressed syllable on the right, or taking the n'th syllable (of either side)? Of course, the answer turned out to be both of the first two and not the third. But the reason there was so much discussion of this rather than just trying it was because people got confused as to what was being suggested. :P Also, people were doing this and not entering it into the spreadsheet, so my contribution became entering it into the spreadsheet and also calling out answers that got entered into the spreadsheet so the team doing it on paper would hear them... (seriously people use the damn spreadsheet >_> )
Whack-A-Mole -- I just want to note that the people on our team working on this thought that the moles with glasses were owls.
Spaceopolis -- hoo boy. We had so much of this one for quite a while and yet we still couldn't get it. We had __GUCR__ER, if I recall. We figured it was likely "__GU CRATER", but what crater? (The next letters to be filled in just confirmed "CRATER", which didn't help.) People noticed there was an Angu Crater on Mars; could that be it? In the interest of completeness I went looking up other craters and pointed out that there's also a Degu Crater on Venus. Well, eventually we got that second letter and it was "E", not "N" -- so it's Degu Crater, right? But... what do we do with that?? We know that's not the answer; we need to figure out which part needs repair. But how does Degu Crater clue that?? (I suggested maybe instead of Venus, we should look for a crater on Earth near where degus live. :P That, unsurprisingly, went nowhere.) Of course ultimately it turned out it was not "Degu Crater", but rather "Hegu Crater", on the Moon. How did we miss that? Well, because it wasn't on Wikipedia's list of craters on the moon, that's how... :-/ (Edit: According to a teammate of mine, we never actually got that "H"; rather, Noah noticed the existence of Hegu Crater without us ever solving it. Wow, good on him...)
Pirate Ship -- Someone else got the initial part about Braille, and then I realized we had to add "R" for the second part, but the third part took a long time. We noticed the significance of "IRA", but just how does the "A" come in? It can't be a transform that has a consistent effect on the lengths of the words. I wasn't there when someone eventually solved it, but I can say it took a long time...
Checkerboard -- this is just an amusing puzzle...
Wizard Woods -- Daniel realized pretty quickly you could just view source and extract all the info that way, but solving the puzzle took a lot longer...
Sand Witches -- an amusing puzzle that was solved pretty quickly. There was an amusing moment where several people were like "wait, the answer is 'HORNY IN TISSUE'??" because they hadn't yet realized how to put the end together...
Magic 8-Ball -- another one where people ignored the spreadsheet and I tried to type it in; I ultimately found doing this too hard though. Anyway, as for the puzzle itself... we weren't sure we had a Chessex d20, but we did have a d20 and we checked it against pictures and it seemed right (apparently it was). People got quite stuck here on the clue "1st, 4th, 6th to end; insert a letter", because people read it as selecting certain letters from PSALMS, not moving them to the end. Like people thought 1st, 4th, 6th, which makes PLS, so they made PLUS (I think?), whose 4th studio album is HISNHERS (? I can't verify this), which went nowhere. Then someone was like, no, the 6th letters is counted from the end, so you get PLP, which, uh...? And I was like no they're all from the end, you get SAP. Which still went nowhere. Eventually I realized, based on one of the others, that it was about moving things to the end, so it was SAMPLS, which becomes SAMPLES, and then the rest was solvable.
Monty Minotaur's Magical Menagerie -- People actually read out the whole garbage message on this one... I started transcribing the monsters while other people were still transcribing the garbage message...
Fortune Cookies -- oh boy this one. So, we completely missed that we were supposed to add "in bed" to the fortunes, but we got the characters anyway. (Although people, me included, thought that Rachel Green felt a bit out of place among the others.) Then of course we extracted the indexed words. And then we took those as clues. And... then what? Well, Ricky, a remote solver noticed something... that a lot of these words could have "b" added to the beginning! "Blink", "bluster", "blather"... it didn't always quite work though. With "EMUS", for instance, you had to also add "e" at the end (but you were at least adding the "b" sound at the beginning)? Similarly with "LITTLE" you had to add "be" to the beginning (but at least you were adding the syllable "bee")? And then there was INN, where you had to delete an "n", but I guess that's similar to the EMUS case? Yes, somehow someone on the team noticed that pattern, yet it took a long time before anyone modified it into the real pattern...
Witches' Hut -- Originally we had "balls of steel" here rather than "nerves of steel". :P (I think I might have been the one who fixed that.) Of course they did end up using "balls" elsewhere with "balls of yarn"! At wrap-up they revealed a few other funny ones they had planned but which didn't make it in, but the only one I only remember is "buttcrack of dawn".
The Holy Cup of the Raven-God -- I didn't help out with the main solving with this one but did fill in a few of the genealogical relations. I then noticed that we probably had enough to solve it even though we didn't have the whole thing? I think we messed some of it up; IIRC, instead of "THE DOG STAR IS LOKIS BLANK", we got "THE DOG SIUP IS LOKIS BLANK" (or actually IIRC it was "THE DOG SIUP IS LIKAS BLANK" until someone fixed it). Fortunately someone got it anyway, yay!
Hat Venn-dor -- We unlocked this one late at night when we didn't have enough people, so we had to have people go opening extra private browser windows so we'd have enough. :P The puzzle itself was pretty easy, although when we messed something up with the Venn diagrams it could take a while to correct as people hunted through their browser windows...
The Scrambler -- Someone on the team figured out what was going on pretty quickly, and then we mostly just had to solve the clues. That same person was also really fast at unscrambling the words afterward -- I don't know how, I can't invert a permutation just like that in my head! At the end people got a bit too hasty; people submitted SECTOR (no) and then CORSET (no! pay attention!) before we finally got CORTES (oh, heh, a Spanish gentleman). People actually got so hasty with their wrong answers that we got rate-limited on this one and had to wait a few minutes for the confirmation that CORTES was correct...
No Clue Crossword -- just a clever puzzle I wanted to point out.
The Balloon Merchant's Gambit -- I didn't really help out with this one so much as just watch other people solve it. We totally missed that the initials on Commencement, Blitz, etc, clued the word lengths btw. Anyway, neat puzzle. This one took a lot of iteration to get right...
A Boy and His Dog -- Oh man we got nowhere on this one. I mean, yeah, we got that it was about Blue's Clues, but beyond that...?
Carousel -- At wrap-up they mentioned that a few teams managed to just straight-up guess this one just from the theme and flavor text...
Food Court -- People asked me a fair bit afterward if I worked on this one ("the probability puzzle"). Well, I didn't; as I recall, I think we unlocked this one about as I was going to sleep. I did overhear two people who had it open asking "How do you find the stationary distribution for a Markov chain again?" and so briefly reminded them. :P
Coast to Coaster -- Just a neat puzzle, not one I really worked on. At the time I wondered if the solution had anything to do with transposing any of these to the other coast; turns out it does not.
Torsion Twirl -- The other one people asked me if I worked on ("the elliptic curves puzzle"). No, I didn't. :P
The Nauseator -- I didn't work on this one, but Emma spent a lot of time on it. Apparently there was a lot of duplication of effort on this one, with one group doing it on the spreadsheet and another group doing it on paper...
The Olden Age of Cinema -- I did a lot on this one. My initial thought was that each clue was cluing a combination of two movies, but once someone filled in "THE HIP REPLACEMENTS", I got what was going on. I filled in a bunch of these. In a few cases I identified the show but didn't see how to age it up, and in a few other cases I aged it up after someone else identified the original movie; I think I ultimately helped with every single clue except for "THREE MEN AND A BABY BOOMER". The hard one, though, was "EARLY BIRD DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS". I'd simply never heard of "Dinner for Schmucks" before, and it took a lot of searching to dig it up. And I already wrote above about the problems with searching... (I mostly had no idea who the actors were, however, and when I helped out with that I was often guessing based on who seemed likely based on the movies and then checking via pictures of them).
Film Clips -- We made what may have been the most elaborate trailer (they showed it at wrap-up!) (not that I helped in making it), but then got totally stuck on the puzzle itself. Making dice didn't work... but the actual answer is so simple...
Sightseeing -- ugggggh why didn't I think of this (I did notice it was the Snellen eye chart font)
Masked Images -- I came into this one late after most of it was solved and only extraction was necessary. I pointed out that the subject was Vitruvian Man, and tried one or two variations on that as answers, but (not having worked on the bulk of the puzzle) I didn't think of what was actually necessary...
Stunt Doubles -- Now this one I spent a lot of time on. This was a slow one, solved late at night over a number of hours. There were a few other people working on this slowly Saturday night; one was named Sydney, I don't know the others' names. It took us a while to be sure of how this one worked, but eventually we got it. I think a number of these we didn't get because we just weren't thinking oblique enough. Eventually we had enough of it that we figured we probably had enough to get it, and tried arranging what pieces we had; fortunately second attempt got us the house that was the answer.
I spent a lot of time on this one, so I want to make notes on specific clues:
The NFL draft picks: We spent a bunch of time looking at lists of these... how did we all totally fail to notice the overlapping name?? (Like I said, we solved the puzzle anyway, but...)
Someone who will rock you / someone with a wolfish appetite: I noticed that Queen and Duran Duran both had a drummer named Roger Taylor, but I entered it with a question mark at first because, well, it seemed a bit oblique to me. But that's just how this puzzle goes! We removed the question marks later.
Bay Area organ donor: Yeah we had no idea who this was.
A friend: Luckily someone already figured this one out before I got to it, or I would've gone looking up famous Quakers. :P
The Saturday Night Live clue: We went through a few wrong answers on this one, including Eddie Murphy. Took a while for someone to suggest it might be a musical guest...
Time-travelling do-gooder: Before we realized the theme, we had "The Doctor" as our answer here. :P
Suspicious renegades in the dark deadly night: Oh man this clue we did not get! "Dark, deadly night" seemed like such a specific phrase, I kept searching it and turning up nothing, and that's because it wasn't the key phrase at alll...
A high-ranking confederate / Spider-Man's dad: We had Spider-Man's dad filled in as Richard Parker for so long, until I noticed the Confederate connection and pointed out that we're not looking for Peter Parker's dad, but Miles Morales's dad, Jefferson Davis... (it still really bugs me that they named him that!)
A professional wrestler / a character who was rebuilt: A looked up who was the main character in the Six Million Dollar Man, and, welp.
Adonis / Apollo: The answer for Adonis was the actor who played Adonis Creed, but the answer for Apollo was not the actor who played Apollo Creed...
Nobel Prize in physics / someone who spoke for a fish: This was the only one with the "no pseudonyms" condition. I spent a long time looking through the list of physics Nobel prize winners, but it was someone else who noticed that Albert Brooks's real name was Albert Einstein.
Sibling who's not one of the five primary siblings: Somehow we missed the existence of Randy Jackson? IDK.
Someone with double vision / someone who should either stay or go: We had the Clash entered for the latter, but it wasn't till I went through the list of members and found that there was another Mick Jones in a band called Foreigner (which I'd never heard of!) that someone else put this one together.
All the ones about survivors and idols: Man, these were confusing. We were pretty sure Richard Hatch was going to be involved somehow, but had trouble pinning it all down...
Someone who is us: I thought this might have to do with the recent movie "Us". It did not.
Someone who made much ado about nothing: We had this one filled in as Jason Alexander at one point -- we were sure he'd be involved because of the "toxic spouse" clue -- but for some reason at some point we became convinced this one was wrong and erased it? IDK. Well, ultimately we solved the puzzle regardless.
"Three of six to eight" -- Thanks to reading about Masquerade I knew how to interpret this one!
"A character played by Keanu Reeves" -- I didn't finalize this one, but I did enter Matt Ryan as a possibility after noticing that there were multiple famous people by that name.
Whew OK next puzzle!
Star Maps -- I did a little with this one. I helped assemble the initial jigsaw puzzle but didn't come back till the end. Someone the others figured out where all the big red dots went without determining how to fill any of them in! I provided a few names of graph families (they already had a lot), which while a number were still missing were enough to get the message. In extraction we miscounted the degree of one vertex (thinking it was odd-degree when it had degree 8) which confused things a little, but we submitted the package emoji anyway, and it worked; we found the mistake afterward.
Marching Band -- I helped a little with the initial phase of this one. Although, I kind of messed it up! For "Robot Master that toots at you", I said Shade Man, because he has a sonic attack (and the weapon you get from him is a sonic attack). But this didn't quite work out; we ended up with an empty space, and with "DAVESTONE" instead of "GRAVESTONE". Actually it was Charge Man, because he's a train.
Lil' Tykes Play Structure -- Oh boy, this one. I came into this one a big late, but helped fill in a few nursery rhymes. Once they were all filled in it was time to put it all together! And when we did we got... a picture crocodile with its tail up? Thing is, this was still early in the Creative Pictures round, so we hadn't yet figured out that the answers were all emoji. So, we submitted CROCODILE; no dice. ALLIGATOR? Nope. I pointed out, hey, this looks like the logo of that clothing company. They were like, yeah, we already submitted LACOSTE, that wasn't it. I was like, Lacoste? No, I meant Izod. (I'd never heard of Lacoste; apparently they have very similar logos and are often confused.) So we submitted IZOD, and that wasn't it either. We submitted a lot of things for this one and eventually got rate-limited. Like: Look at the title. Well, Lil' Tykes makes a crocodile teeter-totter. Could the answer be TEETER TOTTER? (Nope.) Then we had my suggestion -- which we didn't try, as it was deemed too unlikely to be worth the 20-minute delay we'd get -- where I said, well if you take "TEETER TOTTER", and write it in a 6x2 grid as per this puzzle, and then the letters in the distinct boxes anagram to "OTTER", so we should submit "OTTER"! (Thankfully, we didn't.) Of course once we learned about this round's gimmick, we immediately got it...
First You Visit -- I didn't work on this at all, I just find this puzzle hilarious.
Backlot -- oh geez this one. After Stunt Doubles was finished, Sydney and I tried to tackle this one. But, we were both too tired to get very far. Sydney suggested, hey, there are six possible entrance/exit pairs; let's just try solving each one. I was like, yeah, I thought of that too, but the problem is that there's the recursive rooms; those complicate things, you can't just solve the 6 cases because you don't know which way you'll exit the recursive rooms, so really even if you black-box those there's way more than six-cases and this approach is impractical. And so we tried to do it the straightforward way, but quickly gave up when we realized we were way too tired and should go to sleep. Except, apparently that totally is the way to solve it! What the two of us failed to notice is that actually you can basically just treat the recursive rooms like any other square, just with some additional restrictions on them. You don't need to know in advance how you're entering and exiting them -- you can just see if that matches up later! Oy. Oh well...
Director's Cut -- Disappointed I basically missed this puzzle. I forget whether we actually solved it; I may have missed it in the sense that when I woke up Sunday and saw it for the first time the Hunt was already basically over.
Dog -- People got the first two answers here, but not the third. (Our system is not well set-up to handle this sort of thing...) Thing is, the part of the puzzle that yields the third answer is really quite separate from the rest, isn't it?
Horse -- another one I'm disappointed to have missed.
Wanted: Gangs of Six -- this one isn't one I missed in that we'd already solved it, but rather in that by the time I woke up Sunday and saw it the Hunt was basically already over. Really disappointed I didn't have time to work on this one!
Whew OK I think that's all I have to say about that! And hopefully I can go up to Boston again next year!
So yeah I stuck with Plant this year rather than returning to Donner Party, because I didn't want to be one of a very few on-site people on a mostly remote team, because they I'd get stuck with all the on-site-only stuff. And hoo boy with the weather that especially turned out to be a good idea! I was not prepared for how cold Boston was going to be; I totally forgot to bring a sweater. Oh well...
So uh yeah most of the time was just spent at Plant HQ. So much of my food for that weekend came from the snacks they had lying around there! I tried to go to kickoff but got there a little late and they were full. Instead of watching the livestream, I just sat outside and read stuff on the internet. Meanwhile, with other people watching the livestream, I heard everything dimly twice... I also made it to wrap-up, but maybe I should say a bit more before I talk about that.
I also ran into Marc Sweetgall from high school there, woah. He's on Setec Astronomy apparently. At wrap-up I encountered Eric Frackleton (currently on one of the teams that split off from Palindrome) who I totally forgot I had seen a few months ago at the PROMYS thing. Missed seeing Li-Mei (of Death and Mayhem) there apparently... (Rhiannon, despite leading a team and living near Boston, solves remotely! So she wasn't there...)
Oh, I'm pretty sure this was also my first Hunt where I didn't stay up all night at any point. :P I was just way too tired. Friday I was tired both from waking up for wrap-up and from waking up early the previous day just to see Nintendo announce freaking Byleth for Smash @_@
(Not that I'm against Byleth in Smash, I'm always for more characters in Smash (as long as isn't Sora :P ), but there's no denying it's a bit of a disappointing choice)
So yeah I couldn't stay up all night Friday. In fact I was so tired I was planning on going to sleep at a normal person time like 11 PM, or maybe after the nominal HQ closure at 1 AM, but there were puzzles so in fact I stayed up till past 4 AM, i.e. normal time for me. :P I was really tired Saturday night as well for whatever reason...
Oh yeah, nominal HQ closure -- whoo, that was a mess. Fortunately, despite having no actual MIT students on the team, we were able to get special permission to stay open, so that wasn't a problem, yay!
(Also in firsts: Yay automated answer-checking!)
We were not close to winning; we didn't make it to the runaround or anything. When I went to sleep Saturday night we still had the two final lands still locked. We did have them unlocked when I woke up Sunday but I don't think we were very far in either.
Btw, on the way to the hotel when I was arriving I passed by a place with a Medieval Madness machine... I was like, oh man I have to go there before I leave... (I did not)
(Really though I gotta get myself to Sunshine Laundromat sometime)
Anyway so! On Sunday night after coming back to the hotel, intending to sleep, I went down to the lobby to get more tissues and there I encountered... Hunter and Lee! They called out to me and it took me a moment because I certainly didn't expect to see them here. I was like, what are you doing here, and they're like, we're here for Mystery Hunt, same as you. Lee apparently saw me at kickoff but I missed his attempt to get my attention. They're on... I forget what team, a team associated to some dorm that is mostly undergrads from that dorm.
(I had completely forgotten that Hunter does Mystery Hunt, I think largely because we never did it together in Ann Arbor.)
Anyway so I ask them if they're going to wrap-up and Hunter's like, no, wrap-up is terrible. Harry do you like wrap-up?? And I'm like, I've never been up to Boston for Mystery Hunt before, I have no idea! Anyway he explains, most of wrap-up is OK, but then there's always the part where they ask people to come up and tell solving stories from the year, and people just come up and talk about how oh there was this puzzle and we thought it was about crabs but actually it was about samurai and it's terrible. Well, uh, they didn't do that at wrap-up this year? So it was OK!
Oh, one other thing: Google search results really aren't what they used to be, huh? That may have made some things harder. I tried using DuckDuckGo but didn't notice a big improvement; maybe the things I was searching just never would've worked well. Still, wondering if I should start using Bing instead or something...
Anyway enough fluff, time to talk about the puzzles! Yes including some crab/samurai stories. :P
The Trebuchet -- we did not get the Sonic Bolt part of this one. (The presence of "TRAVOLTA" was noticed, but its significance was not realized.) Fortunately we were able to solve it without that...
The Castle -- we noticed that counties in the Texas panhandle were being clued, but what to do with them? For quite a while we were misled by the ones we had being geographically consecutive, and we thought it would have to do with that somehow. (Also, before we got the panhandle thing, we were misled by the flavor text into thinking state capitals would be relevant; I tried checking county seats, but that went nowhere.) Anyway once we got it we were able to backsolve both "Snow Job" and "Penny Park Guide" (those being the two in that round we were missing).
Goldilocks -- just a neat puzzle I wanted to point out.
Gallery of Tomorrow -- man, the actual solution here was so simple, but I spent so much time determining irrelevant information like when each painting is from, when the artist was born, where it's currently located, and what medium was used to make it...
Creatures from Outer Space -- just a neat little puzzle.
Stress Test -- There was a fair bit of discussion here as to what the correct indexing ones -- into the stressed syllable on the left, into the stressed syllable on the right, or taking the n'th syllable (of either side)? Of course, the answer turned out to be both of the first two and not the third. But the reason there was so much discussion of this rather than just trying it was because people got confused as to what was being suggested. :P Also, people were doing this and not entering it into the spreadsheet, so my contribution became entering it into the spreadsheet and also calling out answers that got entered into the spreadsheet so the team doing it on paper would hear them... (seriously people use the damn spreadsheet >_> )
Whack-A-Mole -- I just want to note that the people on our team working on this thought that the moles with glasses were owls.
Spaceopolis -- hoo boy. We had so much of this one for quite a while and yet we still couldn't get it. We had __GUCR__ER, if I recall. We figured it was likely "__GU CRATER", but what crater? (The next letters to be filled in just confirmed "CRATER", which didn't help.) People noticed there was an Angu Crater on Mars; could that be it? In the interest of completeness I went looking up other craters and pointed out that there's also a Degu Crater on Venus. Well, eventually we got that second letter and it was "E", not "N" -- so it's Degu Crater, right? But... what do we do with that?? We know that's not the answer; we need to figure out which part needs repair. But how does Degu Crater clue that?? (I suggested maybe instead of Venus, we should look for a crater on Earth near where degus live. :P That, unsurprisingly, went nowhere.) Of course ultimately it turned out it was not "Degu Crater", but rather "Hegu Crater", on the Moon. How did we miss that? Well, because it wasn't on Wikipedia's list of craters on the moon, that's how... :-/ (Edit: According to a teammate of mine, we never actually got that "H"; rather, Noah noticed the existence of Hegu Crater without us ever solving it. Wow, good on him...)
Pirate Ship -- Someone else got the initial part about Braille, and then I realized we had to add "R" for the second part, but the third part took a long time. We noticed the significance of "IRA", but just how does the "A" come in? It can't be a transform that has a consistent effect on the lengths of the words. I wasn't there when someone eventually solved it, but I can say it took a long time...
Checkerboard -- this is just an amusing puzzle...
Wizard Woods -- Daniel realized pretty quickly you could just view source and extract all the info that way, but solving the puzzle took a lot longer...
Sand Witches -- an amusing puzzle that was solved pretty quickly. There was an amusing moment where several people were like "wait, the answer is 'HORNY IN TISSUE'??" because they hadn't yet realized how to put the end together...
Magic 8-Ball -- another one where people ignored the spreadsheet and I tried to type it in; I ultimately found doing this too hard though. Anyway, as for the puzzle itself... we weren't sure we had a Chessex d20, but we did have a d20 and we checked it against pictures and it seemed right (apparently it was). People got quite stuck here on the clue "1st, 4th, 6th to end; insert a letter", because people read it as selecting certain letters from PSALMS, not moving them to the end. Like people thought 1st, 4th, 6th, which makes PLS, so they made PLUS (I think?), whose 4th studio album is HISNHERS (? I can't verify this), which went nowhere. Then someone was like, no, the 6th letters is counted from the end, so you get PLP, which, uh...? And I was like no they're all from the end, you get SAP. Which still went nowhere. Eventually I realized, based on one of the others, that it was about moving things to the end, so it was SAMPLS, which becomes SAMPLES, and then the rest was solvable.
Monty Minotaur's Magical Menagerie -- People actually read out the whole garbage message on this one... I started transcribing the monsters while other people were still transcribing the garbage message...
Fortune Cookies -- oh boy this one. So, we completely missed that we were supposed to add "in bed" to the fortunes, but we got the characters anyway. (Although people, me included, thought that Rachel Green felt a bit out of place among the others.) Then of course we extracted the indexed words. And then we took those as clues. And... then what? Well, Ricky, a remote solver noticed something... that a lot of these words could have "b" added to the beginning! "Blink", "bluster", "blather"... it didn't always quite work though. With "EMUS", for instance, you had to also add "e" at the end (but you were at least adding the "b" sound at the beginning)? Similarly with "LITTLE" you had to add "be" to the beginning (but at least you were adding the syllable "bee")? And then there was INN, where you had to delete an "n", but I guess that's similar to the EMUS case? Yes, somehow someone on the team noticed that pattern, yet it took a long time before anyone modified it into the real pattern...
Witches' Hut -- Originally we had "balls of steel" here rather than "nerves of steel". :P (I think I might have been the one who fixed that.) Of course they did end up using "balls" elsewhere with "balls of yarn"! At wrap-up they revealed a few other funny ones they had planned but which didn't make it in, but the only one I only remember is "buttcrack of dawn".
The Holy Cup of the Raven-God -- I didn't help out with the main solving with this one but did fill in a few of the genealogical relations. I then noticed that we probably had enough to solve it even though we didn't have the whole thing? I think we messed some of it up; IIRC, instead of "THE DOG STAR IS LOKIS BLANK", we got "THE DOG SIUP IS LOKIS BLANK" (or actually IIRC it was "THE DOG SIUP IS LIKAS BLANK" until someone fixed it). Fortunately someone got it anyway, yay!
Hat Venn-dor -- We unlocked this one late at night when we didn't have enough people, so we had to have people go opening extra private browser windows so we'd have enough. :P The puzzle itself was pretty easy, although when we messed something up with the Venn diagrams it could take a while to correct as people hunted through their browser windows...
The Scrambler -- Someone on the team figured out what was going on pretty quickly, and then we mostly just had to solve the clues. That same person was also really fast at unscrambling the words afterward -- I don't know how, I can't invert a permutation just like that in my head! At the end people got a bit too hasty; people submitted SECTOR (no) and then CORSET (no! pay attention!) before we finally got CORTES (oh, heh, a Spanish gentleman). People actually got so hasty with their wrong answers that we got rate-limited on this one and had to wait a few minutes for the confirmation that CORTES was correct...
No Clue Crossword -- just a clever puzzle I wanted to point out.
The Balloon Merchant's Gambit -- I didn't really help out with this one so much as just watch other people solve it. We totally missed that the initials on Commencement, Blitz, etc, clued the word lengths btw. Anyway, neat puzzle. This one took a lot of iteration to get right...
A Boy and His Dog -- Oh man we got nowhere on this one. I mean, yeah, we got that it was about Blue's Clues, but beyond that...?
Carousel -- At wrap-up they mentioned that a few teams managed to just straight-up guess this one just from the theme and flavor text...
Food Court -- People asked me a fair bit afterward if I worked on this one ("the probability puzzle"). Well, I didn't; as I recall, I think we unlocked this one about as I was going to sleep. I did overhear two people who had it open asking "How do you find the stationary distribution for a Markov chain again?" and so briefly reminded them. :P
Coast to Coaster -- Just a neat puzzle, not one I really worked on. At the time I wondered if the solution had anything to do with transposing any of these to the other coast; turns out it does not.
Torsion Twirl -- The other one people asked me if I worked on ("the elliptic curves puzzle"). No, I didn't. :P
The Nauseator -- I didn't work on this one, but Emma spent a lot of time on it. Apparently there was a lot of duplication of effort on this one, with one group doing it on the spreadsheet and another group doing it on paper...
The Olden Age of Cinema -- I did a lot on this one. My initial thought was that each clue was cluing a combination of two movies, but once someone filled in "THE HIP REPLACEMENTS", I got what was going on. I filled in a bunch of these. In a few cases I identified the show but didn't see how to age it up, and in a few other cases I aged it up after someone else identified the original movie; I think I ultimately helped with every single clue except for "THREE MEN AND A BABY BOOMER". The hard one, though, was "EARLY BIRD DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS". I'd simply never heard of "Dinner for Schmucks" before, and it took a lot of searching to dig it up. And I already wrote above about the problems with searching... (I mostly had no idea who the actors were, however, and when I helped out with that I was often guessing based on who seemed likely based on the movies and then checking via pictures of them).
Film Clips -- We made what may have been the most elaborate trailer (they showed it at wrap-up!) (not that I helped in making it), but then got totally stuck on the puzzle itself. Making dice didn't work... but the actual answer is so simple...
Sightseeing -- ugggggh why didn't I think of this (I did notice it was the Snellen eye chart font)
Masked Images -- I came into this one late after most of it was solved and only extraction was necessary. I pointed out that the subject was Vitruvian Man, and tried one or two variations on that as answers, but (not having worked on the bulk of the puzzle) I didn't think of what was actually necessary...
Stunt Doubles -- Now this one I spent a lot of time on. This was a slow one, solved late at night over a number of hours. There were a few other people working on this slowly Saturday night; one was named Sydney, I don't know the others' names. It took us a while to be sure of how this one worked, but eventually we got it. I think a number of these we didn't get because we just weren't thinking oblique enough. Eventually we had enough of it that we figured we probably had enough to get it, and tried arranging what pieces we had; fortunately second attempt got us the house that was the answer.
I spent a lot of time on this one, so I want to make notes on specific clues:
The NFL draft picks: We spent a bunch of time looking at lists of these... how did we all totally fail to notice the overlapping name?? (Like I said, we solved the puzzle anyway, but...)
Someone who will rock you / someone with a wolfish appetite: I noticed that Queen and Duran Duran both had a drummer named Roger Taylor, but I entered it with a question mark at first because, well, it seemed a bit oblique to me. But that's just how this puzzle goes! We removed the question marks later.
Bay Area organ donor: Yeah we had no idea who this was.
A friend: Luckily someone already figured this one out before I got to it, or I would've gone looking up famous Quakers. :P
The Saturday Night Live clue: We went through a few wrong answers on this one, including Eddie Murphy. Took a while for someone to suggest it might be a musical guest...
Time-travelling do-gooder: Before we realized the theme, we had "The Doctor" as our answer here. :P
Suspicious renegades in the dark deadly night: Oh man this clue we did not get! "Dark, deadly night" seemed like such a specific phrase, I kept searching it and turning up nothing, and that's because it wasn't the key phrase at alll...
A high-ranking confederate / Spider-Man's dad: We had Spider-Man's dad filled in as Richard Parker for so long, until I noticed the Confederate connection and pointed out that we're not looking for Peter Parker's dad, but Miles Morales's dad, Jefferson Davis... (it still really bugs me that they named him that!)
A professional wrestler / a character who was rebuilt: A looked up who was the main character in the Six Million Dollar Man, and, welp.
Adonis / Apollo: The answer for Adonis was the actor who played Adonis Creed, but the answer for Apollo was not the actor who played Apollo Creed...
Nobel Prize in physics / someone who spoke for a fish: This was the only one with the "no pseudonyms" condition. I spent a long time looking through the list of physics Nobel prize winners, but it was someone else who noticed that Albert Brooks's real name was Albert Einstein.
Sibling who's not one of the five primary siblings: Somehow we missed the existence of Randy Jackson? IDK.
Someone with double vision / someone who should either stay or go: We had the Clash entered for the latter, but it wasn't till I went through the list of members and found that there was another Mick Jones in a band called Foreigner (which I'd never heard of!) that someone else put this one together.
All the ones about survivors and idols: Man, these were confusing. We were pretty sure Richard Hatch was going to be involved somehow, but had trouble pinning it all down...
Someone who is us: I thought this might have to do with the recent movie "Us". It did not.
Someone who made much ado about nothing: We had this one filled in as Jason Alexander at one point -- we were sure he'd be involved because of the "toxic spouse" clue -- but for some reason at some point we became convinced this one was wrong and erased it? IDK. Well, ultimately we solved the puzzle regardless.
"Three of six to eight" -- Thanks to reading about Masquerade I knew how to interpret this one!
"A character played by Keanu Reeves" -- I didn't finalize this one, but I did enter Matt Ryan as a possibility after noticing that there were multiple famous people by that name.
Whew OK next puzzle!
Star Maps -- I did a little with this one. I helped assemble the initial jigsaw puzzle but didn't come back till the end. Someone the others figured out where all the big red dots went without determining how to fill any of them in! I provided a few names of graph families (they already had a lot), which while a number were still missing were enough to get the message. In extraction we miscounted the degree of one vertex (thinking it was odd-degree when it had degree 8) which confused things a little, but we submitted the package emoji anyway, and it worked; we found the mistake afterward.
Marching Band -- I helped a little with the initial phase of this one. Although, I kind of messed it up! For "Robot Master that toots at you", I said Shade Man, because he has a sonic attack (and the weapon you get from him is a sonic attack). But this didn't quite work out; we ended up with an empty space, and with "DAVESTONE" instead of "GRAVESTONE". Actually it was Charge Man, because he's a train.
Lil' Tykes Play Structure -- Oh boy, this one. I came into this one a big late, but helped fill in a few nursery rhymes. Once they were all filled in it was time to put it all together! And when we did we got... a picture crocodile with its tail up? Thing is, this was still early in the Creative Pictures round, so we hadn't yet figured out that the answers were all emoji. So, we submitted CROCODILE; no dice. ALLIGATOR? Nope. I pointed out, hey, this looks like the logo of that clothing company. They were like, yeah, we already submitted LACOSTE, that wasn't it. I was like, Lacoste? No, I meant Izod. (I'd never heard of Lacoste; apparently they have very similar logos and are often confused.) So we submitted IZOD, and that wasn't it either. We submitted a lot of things for this one and eventually got rate-limited. Like: Look at the title. Well, Lil' Tykes makes a crocodile teeter-totter. Could the answer be TEETER TOTTER? (Nope.) Then we had my suggestion -- which we didn't try, as it was deemed too unlikely to be worth the 20-minute delay we'd get -- where I said, well if you take "TEETER TOTTER", and write it in a 6x2 grid as per this puzzle, and then the letters in the distinct boxes anagram to "OTTER", so we should submit "OTTER"! (Thankfully, we didn't.) Of course once we learned about this round's gimmick, we immediately got it...
First You Visit -- I didn't work on this at all, I just find this puzzle hilarious.
Backlot -- oh geez this one. After Stunt Doubles was finished, Sydney and I tried to tackle this one. But, we were both too tired to get very far. Sydney suggested, hey, there are six possible entrance/exit pairs; let's just try solving each one. I was like, yeah, I thought of that too, but the problem is that there's the recursive rooms; those complicate things, you can't just solve the 6 cases because you don't know which way you'll exit the recursive rooms, so really even if you black-box those there's way more than six-cases and this approach is impractical. And so we tried to do it the straightforward way, but quickly gave up when we realized we were way too tired and should go to sleep. Except, apparently that totally is the way to solve it! What the two of us failed to notice is that actually you can basically just treat the recursive rooms like any other square, just with some additional restrictions on them. You don't need to know in advance how you're entering and exiting them -- you can just see if that matches up later! Oy. Oh well...
Director's Cut -- Disappointed I basically missed this puzzle. I forget whether we actually solved it; I may have missed it in the sense that when I woke up Sunday and saw it for the first time the Hunt was already basically over.
Dog -- People got the first two answers here, but not the third. (Our system is not well set-up to handle this sort of thing...) Thing is, the part of the puzzle that yields the third answer is really quite separate from the rest, isn't it?
Horse -- another one I'm disappointed to have missed.
Wanted: Gangs of Six -- this one isn't one I missed in that we'd already solved it, but rather in that by the time I woke up Sunday and saw it the Hunt was basically already over. Really disappointed I didn't have time to work on this one!
Whew OK I think that's all I have to say about that! And hopefully I can go up to Boston again next year!
