Mystery Hunt Roundup 2022
Jan. 18th, 2022 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoySo! Mystery Hunt was this past weekend. Obviously couldn't go up to Boston for it this year, but myself, Daniel, Emma, and I gathered here at the Solarium for our little solving group.
Before the Omicron spike hit, I had been planning on trying to recruit more people, but, as things were, well... yeah, I decided not to. The other thing about recruting is -- well, I'm on Plant right now, right? And I remember hearing years ago that Plant wanted to avoid getting too big, so I don't know if they're OK with recruiting arbitrary people like that.
Like, I think this was when I was looking for a team to join, and I asked someone in the math department if I could join their team, and they were on Plant and were like, not really, Plant wants to avoid getting too big. However, given that the last time I was looking for a new team was, uh, back in 2014, that memory is probably pretty old; and Daniel doesn't think there's any such policy anymore, so, uh, maybe it's OK to recruit arbitrary new people for Plant? Well, this year I didn't. Oh well.
It's funny because, like, normally my experience of Mystery Hunt has been being in Ann Arbor and trying to get whoever's around to join me, right? But now I'm here in New York, and, well, my first Mystery Hunt here in New York, I actually went up to Boston for it; but if you do that, it's then much harder to recruit whoever's around! (Especially because then you'll want to get people to officially join the team. :P ) And then the year after that, i.e. last year, was under pandemic conditions so no going up to Boston, but also recruiting whoever's around was a bad idea. So this year was going to be the year of hitting that intermediate range again -- where I'm not going up to Boston and I can recruit whoever's around -- but then Omicron hit so that didn't happen.
As for the Hunt... well, the main thing that sticks out about this year was that our team got completely bottlenecked on the round 2 supermeta Friday night. Like, actually completely bottlenecked -- we had no other unsolved puzzles unlocked, our only possible way to advance was to solve that supermeta. We ended up asking for a hint on it as soon as hints became available... and, well, frankly, I feel like the solution to that puzzle was pretty out-of-nowhere; it doesn't seem like a particularly reasonable thing to try even in retrospect. Well -- I'll talk more about this puzzle below the cut, but, hoo boy, that was a nasty one.
(It was especially annoying because the FAQ said that you could unlock new rounds by solving feeder puzzles -- something that was true once you had made it to Pen Station, yes, but you couldn't get to Pen Station that way!)
Also, I suspect we underused our manuscrip. :P (Did we even use any?) This is of course famously an easy mistake to make...
One other interesting thing about this year was there were a fair number of backsolves, at least during round 2. I feel like most years backsolves are pretty rare, but the metas this year seemed to be pretty amenable to them. We definitely had at least two backsolves in round 2 that I know of, and I think it was more than that.
Anyway, on to discussion of specific puzzles!
The Hobbit -- I helped a fair bit on this one. Heh, when I saw that "ALTROP" in the third ring, I was like, wait, is the answer to "It may leave tanlines on your feet" "CALTROP"?? (It was not.)
Pippi Långstrump/Pippi Longstocking -- Just kind of a funny puzzle.
Go the F*** To Sleep -- Also just kind of a funny puzzle. I'm pretty sure we ultimately ended up backsolving this one.
Tikki Tikki Tembo -- I didn't actually work on this puzzle, but I saw those ladders and I was just like, this is going to involve amidakuji, isn't it. It did.
Watership Down -- I filled in one or two clues on this one but didn't do very much. I totally didn't get that when certain players' clues didn't appear, that's because they were colliding with each other.
The Adventures of Pinocchio -- I did a bunch of the image identification on this one. Google image search is quite helpful! Some of the time, anyway.
Kiki's Delivery Service -- Was it just us or does this puzzle contain a fair number of red herrings?
Just a Dream -- I did a fair bit of the movie identification on this one. I misidentified the Kirsten Dunst non-dream movie as Melancholia, which didn't seem right, but it was the only thing I could find. Upside Down just didn't come up in my searching, and unsurprisingly I'm no Kirsten Dunst expert. Well, nobody else on my team got that right either; we were still pretty able to complete the puzzle.
Crewel -- I helped a bit with this. I don't think any of us got the reweaving thing; we just treated it as anagramming, which was still good enough to solve the puzzle (I certainly identified a few capitals this way). Also, like, for the final part, you more or less have to just treat it as an anagram, right? Yes, it's a constrained anagram, but you don't have a specified reweaving order like you do for the earlier parts.
Herschel Hayden -- Heh, I was so wrong about how this puzzle worked.
Randy and Riley Rotch -- I did a fair bit of the first-step street identification on this one. We were thrown off for a bit because some of the initial streets we found led to people thinking that the address had to be at the very end of the street, that we were looking for the final cross-street. I eventually concluded that just wasn't the case and put down what I found anyway, which turned out to be the correct thing to do. We were missing one of the feeder puzzles (Go the F*** to Sleep) but that turned out not to be a problem and we were able to use this puzzle to backsolve it, IINM.
The Ministry -- This fucking puzzle. What a bottleneck this was for us. Several things went wrong here. First off, the correct approach -- to use the meta answers as criteria that can be applied to the feeder answers -- just seems terribly underclued; even in retrospect it seems like a leap. Yes, there is the word "bit" in the flavor text, but, um, that's kind of it...? Also, the mural -- one thing that bothered me about most of our ideas was that they seemed to underuse the mural. Well, guess what, turns out that the only thing the mural was used for was for getting an ordering on the criteria. That is at least better than not using it at all... we spent quite a bit of time fruitlessly trying to think of a literary work that could meet all five criteria, which, of course, was totally the wrong approach. (I suggested Worm, but I had to admit I had no idea how that fit the clue "colorful head".) So, yeah. Total fucking bottleneck. But at least once we finally beat it -- after requiring a hint -- we'd finally move on to the next round, right?
Fruit Around -- Nope, you need to do Fruit Around first! A second bottleneck after the first. Of course, this puzzle was a mini-round, so it wasn't actually everyone looking at the same thing, and also it didn't take that long. (I was the one who pointed out that the animals in "1, 2, 3, to the Zoo" were all OSX versions, which helped quite a bit in determining the ones we didn't yet have.) Still, it was pretty frustrating to break through the bottleneck only to encounter a second one.
SparksNotes -- Daniel, Emma, and I did a lot of work on this puzzle, and I in particular provided a lot of the insight on this one. :) Someone had already figuring out a fair number of the Ron/Russell clues before we got there, but we (OK, not just the three of us, other people on the team were working on this too, but I mean it happened once we restarted work on it) managed to fill in some more. (There was one pair we never got, which was the A Wrinkle In Time siblings; but, we didn't need that to solve the puzzle.) Also, whoever had worked on it before we got there had noticed that the album covers used visual elements from Sparks albums, but didn't get any further than that. I was the one who noticed, wait... there are exactly 26 Sparks albums! These are probably letters! And so they were. That left the problem of what to do with the letters; it wasn't until I plugged "IIIIORRSSSSS" into an anagram solver that I was like, wait, that's really close to "ISIS" and "OSIRIS", just with two extra letters; presumably that pattern holds generally, and so it did. When we went to spell out the hidden message, we did have to swap some of the digraphs we got, because (cued by whoever had started the puzzle before us) we split things up by Ron/Russell, rather than by first line/second line, but obviously that posed no real challenge. It took us a bit to come up with the correct interpretation; it was someone else who noticed that the clue lengths matched up with the sibling names (something we didn't notice until that final step), and then I think I was the one who put it together to figure out the final extraction. We did have some trouble reading and interpreting the final message (what with that "sta" abbrevation), but eventually someone produced the correct reading and we got it. :)
Strange Garnets -- It was a mistake to try to work on this one without actually looking up anything about The Genius. :P I did some work on Match 7 that was just... completely wrong. Also, on Match 4, after someone else had identified the hidden cards, I was like, oh, huh, player 1's cards are the numbers 1-10, should we sort by that? Turns out no. (I mean, that wasn't a bad thought, but it wasn't the way that puzzle worked.)
The Case of the Missing Component -- People noticed pretty quickly that all the feeder answers seemed to contain "K"s... until, of course, they didn't. Figuring out the correct interpretation took quite a while.
The Colour Out of Space -- I didn't really work on this one, but when it was unlocked, I was like, hm, I wonder if some of these aren't decimal? Only after that did I notice the "B" confirming they aren't. Because I didn't actually work on this though I didn't pick up on the indications that it was all dozenal.
Trust Nobody -- Emma did a bunch of the initial parts of this, with her somewhat knowledge of German substituting for knowledge of Dutch. However I think it took people quite a while to figure out what to do with this after the test was passed...
A Number of Games -- Hoo boy, this one. David Speyer made the first attempt at this one, but wrote down the wrong sign on one of the Hackenbush games; as such, when he went to trace out the path, he hit the forbidden hex (the one hex that would require you to compare two games of equal value). So, I made the second attempt. I fixed David's sign error, and also "fixed" his evaluation of the Col that has value 1/2 (I said it was 1+* instead; fortunately this ended up not mattering). With the sign error fixed, I traced out the correct path... mostly. See, I made a transcription error that led to skipping the pen change inbetween the E and the first S (but which otherwise resulted in the correct path). So the result I got was unreadable... and also I realized I must have done something wrong as we never ended up using the final game on the shelf. (Which was kind of convenient, as neither David nor I had determined its value.) Fortunately, a third mathematician, whose name I forget but who knows the area better than either of us, came in, fixed 1+* back to 1/2, filled in the value of the final game on the shelf, and fixed my transcription error and traced out the path correctly. Well, not the whole thing -- he stopped once he realized it was presumably spelling out "RECESS". So yeah, on the third attempt we got it. :P (Also, I think it's pretty funny how this puzzle started with an introduction to combinatorial game theory... like anyone who doesn't already know some combinatorial game theory is really going to do this puzzle!) (Also, I don't know that any of us realized that many of these exact games appear in "Winning Ways" and that we could have just looked up their values in there... although to be fair David when he was doing it did look up values for a number of these games in other places.)
Something Command -- Oh boy, so our resident Magic player tried this and didn't manage to solve it. People were talking about using manuscrip on it, and I was like, wait, don't we have a number of Magic players on the team? Turns out no, I had misremembered someone on the team as being a competitive Magic player when they in fact are not. We did ultimately solve this, and I don't think we used manuscrip on it, but to do so might have been a better idea, because I'm pretty sure we just underused it.
Sorcery For Dummies -- Oh boy, this one. I did a lot of figuring out of the spell effects, often figuring out the details after other people had determined the rough idea. Worth noting: Many of the effect descriptions given in the solution have mistakes in them! Oy, that solution should be fixed. Oddly when I was confirming all the spell effects for myself I seem to have missed "P"; I say that because I don't remember anything involving postal codes! Anyway, with all the spells figured out, that left the problem of actually defeating the monsters, which we had a much harder time with... we ended up killing a few of the monsters but not solving this one.
Bad Beginnings -- I did some of the movie identification on this, but not much else... now when will there be a puzzle based on the Lyttle Lytton Contest? :)
The Mlystery Hunt, as Told By a Thief of the Bases -- I just saw the title of this one and was like, WTF is "Mlystery Hunt". Afterwards I looked at the solution and was like, oh. :P
How to Collide Particles -- Just a neat puzzle that we didn't get to.
How to Make a Loop -- Another neat puzzle we didn't get to.
Replicator Droid -- Other people figured out how to solve the initial part but then got stuck on what to do with the trigrams. I came in at this point and was like, hm, maybe they're airport codes? They were not.
Anyway, that's all I have to say about this year. Next year in Boston!
-Harry
Before the Omicron spike hit, I had been planning on trying to recruit more people, but, as things were, well... yeah, I decided not to. The other thing about recruting is -- well, I'm on Plant right now, right? And I remember hearing years ago that Plant wanted to avoid getting too big, so I don't know if they're OK with recruiting arbitrary people like that.
Like, I think this was when I was looking for a team to join, and I asked someone in the math department if I could join their team, and they were on Plant and were like, not really, Plant wants to avoid getting too big. However, given that the last time I was looking for a new team was, uh, back in 2014, that memory is probably pretty old; and Daniel doesn't think there's any such policy anymore, so, uh, maybe it's OK to recruit arbitrary new people for Plant? Well, this year I didn't. Oh well.
It's funny because, like, normally my experience of Mystery Hunt has been being in Ann Arbor and trying to get whoever's around to join me, right? But now I'm here in New York, and, well, my first Mystery Hunt here in New York, I actually went up to Boston for it; but if you do that, it's then much harder to recruit whoever's around! (Especially because then you'll want to get people to officially join the team. :P ) And then the year after that, i.e. last year, was under pandemic conditions so no going up to Boston, but also recruiting whoever's around was a bad idea. So this year was going to be the year of hitting that intermediate range again -- where I'm not going up to Boston and I can recruit whoever's around -- but then Omicron hit so that didn't happen.
As for the Hunt... well, the main thing that sticks out about this year was that our team got completely bottlenecked on the round 2 supermeta Friday night. Like, actually completely bottlenecked -- we had no other unsolved puzzles unlocked, our only possible way to advance was to solve that supermeta. We ended up asking for a hint on it as soon as hints became available... and, well, frankly, I feel like the solution to that puzzle was pretty out-of-nowhere; it doesn't seem like a particularly reasonable thing to try even in retrospect. Well -- I'll talk more about this puzzle below the cut, but, hoo boy, that was a nasty one.
(It was especially annoying because the FAQ said that you could unlock new rounds by solving feeder puzzles -- something that was true once you had made it to Pen Station, yes, but you couldn't get to Pen Station that way!)
Also, I suspect we underused our manuscrip. :P (Did we even use any?) This is of course famously an easy mistake to make...
One other interesting thing about this year was there were a fair number of backsolves, at least during round 2. I feel like most years backsolves are pretty rare, but the metas this year seemed to be pretty amenable to them. We definitely had at least two backsolves in round 2 that I know of, and I think it was more than that.
Anyway, on to discussion of specific puzzles!
The Hobbit -- I helped a fair bit on this one. Heh, when I saw that "ALTROP" in the third ring, I was like, wait, is the answer to "It may leave tanlines on your feet" "CALTROP"?? (It was not.)
Pippi Långstrump/Pippi Longstocking -- Just kind of a funny puzzle.
Go the F*** To Sleep -- Also just kind of a funny puzzle. I'm pretty sure we ultimately ended up backsolving this one.
Tikki Tikki Tembo -- I didn't actually work on this puzzle, but I saw those ladders and I was just like, this is going to involve amidakuji, isn't it. It did.
Watership Down -- I filled in one or two clues on this one but didn't do very much. I totally didn't get that when certain players' clues didn't appear, that's because they were colliding with each other.
The Adventures of Pinocchio -- I did a bunch of the image identification on this one. Google image search is quite helpful! Some of the time, anyway.
Kiki's Delivery Service -- Was it just us or does this puzzle contain a fair number of red herrings?
Just a Dream -- I did a fair bit of the movie identification on this one. I misidentified the Kirsten Dunst non-dream movie as Melancholia, which didn't seem right, but it was the only thing I could find. Upside Down just didn't come up in my searching, and unsurprisingly I'm no Kirsten Dunst expert. Well, nobody else on my team got that right either; we were still pretty able to complete the puzzle.
Crewel -- I helped a bit with this. I don't think any of us got the reweaving thing; we just treated it as anagramming, which was still good enough to solve the puzzle (I certainly identified a few capitals this way). Also, like, for the final part, you more or less have to just treat it as an anagram, right? Yes, it's a constrained anagram, but you don't have a specified reweaving order like you do for the earlier parts.
Herschel Hayden -- Heh, I was so wrong about how this puzzle worked.
Randy and Riley Rotch -- I did a fair bit of the first-step street identification on this one. We were thrown off for a bit because some of the initial streets we found led to people thinking that the address had to be at the very end of the street, that we were looking for the final cross-street. I eventually concluded that just wasn't the case and put down what I found anyway, which turned out to be the correct thing to do. We were missing one of the feeder puzzles (Go the F*** to Sleep) but that turned out not to be a problem and we were able to use this puzzle to backsolve it, IINM.
The Ministry -- This fucking puzzle. What a bottleneck this was for us. Several things went wrong here. First off, the correct approach -- to use the meta answers as criteria that can be applied to the feeder answers -- just seems terribly underclued; even in retrospect it seems like a leap. Yes, there is the word "bit" in the flavor text, but, um, that's kind of it...? Also, the mural -- one thing that bothered me about most of our ideas was that they seemed to underuse the mural. Well, guess what, turns out that the only thing the mural was used for was for getting an ordering on the criteria. That is at least better than not using it at all... we spent quite a bit of time fruitlessly trying to think of a literary work that could meet all five criteria, which, of course, was totally the wrong approach. (I suggested Worm, but I had to admit I had no idea how that fit the clue "colorful head".) So, yeah. Total fucking bottleneck. But at least once we finally beat it -- after requiring a hint -- we'd finally move on to the next round, right?
Fruit Around -- Nope, you need to do Fruit Around first! A second bottleneck after the first. Of course, this puzzle was a mini-round, so it wasn't actually everyone looking at the same thing, and also it didn't take that long. (I was the one who pointed out that the animals in "1, 2, 3, to the Zoo" were all OSX versions, which helped quite a bit in determining the ones we didn't yet have.) Still, it was pretty frustrating to break through the bottleneck only to encounter a second one.
SparksNotes -- Daniel, Emma, and I did a lot of work on this puzzle, and I in particular provided a lot of the insight on this one. :) Someone had already figuring out a fair number of the Ron/Russell clues before we got there, but we (OK, not just the three of us, other people on the team were working on this too, but I mean it happened once we restarted work on it) managed to fill in some more. (There was one pair we never got, which was the A Wrinkle In Time siblings; but, we didn't need that to solve the puzzle.) Also, whoever had worked on it before we got there had noticed that the album covers used visual elements from Sparks albums, but didn't get any further than that. I was the one who noticed, wait... there are exactly 26 Sparks albums! These are probably letters! And so they were. That left the problem of what to do with the letters; it wasn't until I plugged "IIIIORRSSSSS" into an anagram solver that I was like, wait, that's really close to "ISIS" and "OSIRIS", just with two extra letters; presumably that pattern holds generally, and so it did. When we went to spell out the hidden message, we did have to swap some of the digraphs we got, because (cued by whoever had started the puzzle before us) we split things up by Ron/Russell, rather than by first line/second line, but obviously that posed no real challenge. It took us a bit to come up with the correct interpretation; it was someone else who noticed that the clue lengths matched up with the sibling names (something we didn't notice until that final step), and then I think I was the one who put it together to figure out the final extraction. We did have some trouble reading and interpreting the final message (what with that "sta" abbrevation), but eventually someone produced the correct reading and we got it. :)
Strange Garnets -- It was a mistake to try to work on this one without actually looking up anything about The Genius. :P I did some work on Match 7 that was just... completely wrong. Also, on Match 4, after someone else had identified the hidden cards, I was like, oh, huh, player 1's cards are the numbers 1-10, should we sort by that? Turns out no. (I mean, that wasn't a bad thought, but it wasn't the way that puzzle worked.)
The Case of the Missing Component -- People noticed pretty quickly that all the feeder answers seemed to contain "K"s... until, of course, they didn't. Figuring out the correct interpretation took quite a while.
The Colour Out of Space -- I didn't really work on this one, but when it was unlocked, I was like, hm, I wonder if some of these aren't decimal? Only after that did I notice the "B" confirming they aren't. Because I didn't actually work on this though I didn't pick up on the indications that it was all dozenal.
Trust Nobody -- Emma did a bunch of the initial parts of this, with her somewhat knowledge of German substituting for knowledge of Dutch. However I think it took people quite a while to figure out what to do with this after the test was passed...
A Number of Games -- Hoo boy, this one. David Speyer made the first attempt at this one, but wrote down the wrong sign on one of the Hackenbush games; as such, when he went to trace out the path, he hit the forbidden hex (the one hex that would require you to compare two games of equal value). So, I made the second attempt. I fixed David's sign error, and also "fixed" his evaluation of the Col that has value 1/2 (I said it was 1+* instead; fortunately this ended up not mattering). With the sign error fixed, I traced out the correct path... mostly. See, I made a transcription error that led to skipping the pen change inbetween the E and the first S (but which otherwise resulted in the correct path). So the result I got was unreadable... and also I realized I must have done something wrong as we never ended up using the final game on the shelf. (Which was kind of convenient, as neither David nor I had determined its value.) Fortunately, a third mathematician, whose name I forget but who knows the area better than either of us, came in, fixed 1+* back to 1/2, filled in the value of the final game on the shelf, and fixed my transcription error and traced out the path correctly. Well, not the whole thing -- he stopped once he realized it was presumably spelling out "RECESS". So yeah, on the third attempt we got it. :P (Also, I think it's pretty funny how this puzzle started with an introduction to combinatorial game theory... like anyone who doesn't already know some combinatorial game theory is really going to do this puzzle!) (Also, I don't know that any of us realized that many of these exact games appear in "Winning Ways" and that we could have just looked up their values in there... although to be fair David when he was doing it did look up values for a number of these games in other places.)
Something Command -- Oh boy, so our resident Magic player tried this and didn't manage to solve it. People were talking about using manuscrip on it, and I was like, wait, don't we have a number of Magic players on the team? Turns out no, I had misremembered someone on the team as being a competitive Magic player when they in fact are not. We did ultimately solve this, and I don't think we used manuscrip on it, but to do so might have been a better idea, because I'm pretty sure we just underused it.
Sorcery For Dummies -- Oh boy, this one. I did a lot of figuring out of the spell effects, often figuring out the details after other people had determined the rough idea. Worth noting: Many of the effect descriptions given in the solution have mistakes in them! Oy, that solution should be fixed. Oddly when I was confirming all the spell effects for myself I seem to have missed "P"; I say that because I don't remember anything involving postal codes! Anyway, with all the spells figured out, that left the problem of actually defeating the monsters, which we had a much harder time with... we ended up killing a few of the monsters but not solving this one.
Bad Beginnings -- I did some of the movie identification on this, but not much else... now when will there be a puzzle based on the Lyttle Lytton Contest? :)
The Mlystery Hunt, as Told By a Thief of the Bases -- I just saw the title of this one and was like, WTF is "Mlystery Hunt". Afterwards I looked at the solution and was like, oh. :P
How to Collide Particles -- Just a neat puzzle that we didn't get to.
How to Make a Loop -- Another neat puzzle we didn't get to.
Replicator Droid -- Other people figured out how to solve the initial part but then got stuck on what to do with the trigrams. I came in at this point and was like, hm, maybe they're airport codes? They were not.
Anyway, that's all I have to say about this year. Next year in Boston!
-Harry
