Mystery Hunt Roundup 2024!
Feb. 16th, 2024 02:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
So solutions are finally up so it's finally time to write about Mystery Hunt!
So because it's a month later, I don't remember things the best this year. I don't remember who else worked on various puzzles I'm going to write about, for instance.
Yeah Mystery Hunt had some real messiness this year. Early on the servers went down, so they unlocked the third round early and distributed the puzzles via Google doc. And then the hunt went long too; into Monday morning, oh boy. Second year in a row that's happened! We'll see how next year's goes.
Anyway, in addition to the usual OBNYC crew who are on Plant, I also brought along Laura and Maggie this year. They were also largely just there to see Boston, so they did less puzzling than some others on the team, but they did some. And I also went with them for some Boston exploration... went with them to Harvard Square after Hunt was over, although there wasn't as much interesting as I was expecting.
Hunter and Lee, who are not on Plant, were staying in the same hotel as me, but I only briefly encountered Hunter while up there... fortunately I got to see Hunter in New York after.
(New York is also how far we made it in the hunt... we were not close to winning.)
Anyway yeah I'm just gonna get on to talking about puzzles. Again, because it's a month later, I may not remember things as well this year.
Corporate Change -- A neat puzzle I worked on, not much to say about it. I remember the (7) gave us some trouble for a while.
Extreme Hiking -- Oogh, this one. Once we realized that it was giving us directions for navigating the course it was just like, ugh, I don't want to do that, and few others did, either. Fortunately we did eventually get it.
I kind of screwed this one up initially too, with the golf scores. I had no idea about the circling-for-birdie convention, so I (and others who looked at this) generally figured that the circled ones with the unknown birds were ones where we were supposed to figure out the bird. Meanwhile, I'd never heard of "buzzard" or "grouse", so I figured that buzzard was standing in for bogey, and grouse was standing in for birdie (since it's a bird that's not any of these other birds). Turns out no.
Family Tree -- Man, I got nowhere on this one. Someone else figured out it was Soundex, and I started trying to solve the Soundex, and... yeah, with nothing else to go on, that got nowhere by itself.
IV Guys -- I had no clue what was going on with this puzzle. It's pretty nifty though! I recall Laura worked on this puzzle a fair bit.
Poetic Justice -- People had most of this one but were kind of stuck on a few clues; I managed to get "prediction/predication", so yay.
Two Outs, Two Strikes, and... -- Oh boy, this one; I helped a bit on this one but I may also have hurt a bit on this one.
I initially assumed the title was supposed to be completed with "Three Balls". Later when it became clear it was about, y'know, balls, I was like, oh, it's "and two balls", how strange, but OK. Even after it we figured out it was about castration, I didn't figure out the title until reading the solution -- it's "and no balls". I'd never heard that phrase before!
Anyway, yeah, this one was amusing. I solved some clues, but I was also insistent for a while that the bucking animal is a bronco, even though, oops, that's not a bovine! Turns out the bucking bull is also a thing. Having two bulls was confusing though!
Fortunately Tera knew a lot about raising animals and was able to easily fill in the castrated animal terms. She also told us all about boar taint. So yeah.
Charon -- We managed to figure this one out with a few answers missing, but it was definitely a bit tricky.
Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges -- Oy, this one. We got the badges at the start of the hunt and figured out they were a puzzle, but it also became pretty clear we couldn't get anywhere without the missing Pluto badge. I don't think we got back to this one for a long time -- the key was that the staff were wearing the Pluto badge?? I had no idea!
Dating Stars -- I did most of the work on this one! I figured out what was going on with the Chads pretty quickly, but the virgins took a bit longer; fortunately something eventually reminded me of "Your Horoscope For Today".
Unfortunately the rest of this puzzle is dang tedious! Thankfully the rest I didn't have to do by myself.
Ari was disappointed to have missed this one. :P
Second Helpings -- I filled in some clues on this once other people had figured out the main idea, but I don't really have anything to say about it.
Transformations -- My only contribution to this one was going "Wait... transformations... Metamorphoses?" Daniel was like, oh, maybe! Well, uh, the solution doesn't even make mention of "Metamorphoses". Are all these tales in the Metamorphoses? Maybe, but I have no idea. (Looking things up, it seems that all are except Minthe, and it does mention Minthe's transformation even though it does not tell the story.)
Divine Intervention -- I did some of the saint identification on this one (as well as also fixing up some of the gods in the first part that weren't quite right). Some of them were pretty hidden!
Triangles -- Ugh, this one, we got very stuck on this one. I mostly didn't work on this one, but when it was late at night and people were stuck on it, I came over to see if I could help. David (I think) described to me what was going on, and, yeah, nothing I tried helped either.
The thing that nobody told me, because they hadn't noticed it, was that the frequencies were significant. Ugh! I obviously wasn't going to notice it without trying the button myself, but, frankly, even if I had, I rather doubt I would have noticed that... that's pretty difficult!
Medusa's Lair -- I didn't work on this one at all, just a nifty puzzle.
The Hell Round, for which I will not bother linking to individual puzzles -- I was actually the one on our team to put together what the structure of the round was, that each answer corresponded to a pair of puzzles and should be submitted to both those puzzles. People had obviously gotten bits and pieces of it but I was the one who was like, oh, this is what's going on, and made sure everybody knew.
This one was nasty. Some pairs were easy; others, not so much. A big problem for our team was Text Adventure. We had a hard time getting any solutions out of that one. Which meant we had a hard time getting complete solves for any of the puzzles, because a complete solve would include Text Adventure. Nasty! And you needed complete solves for the meta, so, that really made finishing this round quite difficult. (I never actually tried Text Adventure myself, FWIW.) One hard puzzle could keep you from getting answers on all the puzzles!
I did a bunch of the word search, and helped out with one of the Matchmaker extractions that led to us figuring out the gimmick. Also I was incorrectly convinced that the leftovers message in the word search was to be parsed as "midair boar; looping reaction three makes sodium" but, uh, no.
At the Late Night Picture Show -- For a while we were convinced that each clue here involved three movies, not two. I was like, I think it's only two, but then I saw one that convinced me that no it really is three. Oops.
Augmented Raility -- I am disappointed I missed this puzzle!
Befouled Spellings -- Oh. Spelling Bee. Duh.
Cedar Gardens -- I spent a lot of time on this puzzle; I did all the coaster identifications at start. (Except for Quicksilver Mine Express; we didn't get that one AFAIK. I didn't get it because it's the only one not on Wikipedia!) But then what? Well, uh, we had a lot of ideas that didn't work, is what. I wanted to match up tree heights to coaster heights, but that's way too imprecise to work. I was hoping some of the people who knew trees could identify the trees, but they all said there wasn't enough to work with.
It wasn't till much later that someone thought to look at state trees, and by that point, the people who knew trees weren't around, making things rather harder. Fortunately we eventually got it.
Maybe Not To Scale -- oh, man. This is one where you look at it, it's immediately apparent roughly what's going on, but actually doing the unscrambling? Yeah, I entered in some guesses but ultimately left it to other people. Not sure if we got this one. We did at least correctly guess what most of the sets were (I don't think we had any idea about the noble set).
Evildoers Wanted -- I eventually figured out what the images were, but then what? I had no idea. Fortunately someone else figured out it was related to Criminal Minds and got the rest. Laura, who's a big fan of the show, was disappointed to have missed this one.
Make a Winning Hand -- I didn't work on this one, but Emma and Daniel spent a lot of time on this one. They got pretty stuck because Daniel's solver reported that game 3 was impossible, so they thought they were supposed to extract without winning game 3. Turns out no. They ended up using a hint on this one, the response to which was, nope, game 3 is not in fact impossible...
Obelisks of Sorrel Mountain -- I identified this as having to do with Parks & Recreation and the Cones of Dunshire, but then didn't really touch this one again... until the end. People had figured out whatw as going on, solved the clues, and had put together the board, but weren't sure what to do with it. I was the one person around who knew trail markers, apparently! Kind of funny because I'm really not a hiker, but I remembered how trail markers work.
A More 6 ∪ 28 ∪ 496 ∪ ... -- I tried looking at this one but was just utterly baffled. David pointed out that the title clued "A More Perfect Union", but that didn't really help.
Game To Be Themed Later -- Ugh, I spent a bunch of time on this one with another person whose name I don't remember. We didn't solve this one, I'm pretty sure. I don't think we noticed the numbers theme -- did we even correctly identify Duotron? Did we accidentally identify it as something else?
Anyway, the basic idea of overlaying the sheets on top of one another and then looking for letters we obviously got, but without having figured out the order (sort chronologically??) we couldn't get anything useful. We tried doing it pairwise -- putting each sheet on top of each other sheet -- but that didn't yield anything useful. I eventually gave up on this one and moved on to other puzzles. Like I said, I don't think we ever got this one.
Intelligence Collection -- Haha, oh my, this one. I didn't get very far at the first part, but fortunately, others did. So I put this one down... until people were stuck on it and needing help. They'd gotten as far as "REDISGOL", but what the hell did that mean? Eventually I suggested, "Red is Game of Life?" Which was exactly it.
Of course, they'd marked their Codenames games with arbtirary colors, because up until this point it hadn't mattered which was red and which was blue; having to go back and change it was a pain. I'm also not sure if they'd figured out the grid layout by this point. But, uh, I figured out it was Game of Life, I let the others handle the rest. :P
Time for a Drink -- I saw this one and was like, hm, it sounds like New York, but maybe it's actually another city? Like maybe Chicago, they have a Pink Line. But as someone else pointed out, Chicago has a Brown Line, and this doesn't.
Looking at the solution now -- turns out it is just New York after all, there is no other city involved. It's just not the actual subway map. Huh.
😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠 -- For some reason we had trouble filling this one out. Well, it was easy to get mixed up between the many different productions there have been...
🤞📝🧩 -- I helped out a little with this one; I remember I identified "Dog Day Afternoon". The question of "what's the difference between the two cats" confused us. Turns out they're interchangeable!
Don't Feed the Trolls -- This puzzle really had an overabundance of things to try, and boy did we go down a lot of wrong paths. One thing that threw us off a little was a mistake of mine; my correction to the "mirror, mirror" quote was itself incorrect, oops!
Job Center -- I did some of the movie identification on this one, but I don't have much to say about it.
Proof It! -- People thought the solution to this one was lame. :P They were like, it's calculus? But that's so underdetermined! Not so much when you're thinking in a high school context, but people still thought it was lame. :P
Return to Sender -- Oy, we went up the wrong tree on this one. We spent a fair bit of time that it had to do with cities with the same name in multiple states. It does not.
Reverse -- Argh, I didn't manage to solve this one because I was thinking backwards! (Fortunately I think we eventually got it.)
Like, after we figured out the clues and noticed the black/white alternation, then what? I was right that we had to look at moves that flipped those particular words... but I was thinking of the given board as a final state, from which we had to undo the given moves. Which is impossible. I didn't think of going forward instead! Blargh.
Show of Hands -- I did most of the first part of this one, figuring out what was going on and how to complete most of the sequences; Joia (I think was her name?), solving remotely, got the ones I didn't. And I think it was me who figured out the "hand" thing, though I don't quite remember. But what then? Well, I had to go to sleep, but fortunately Joia got what I didn't and solved the puzzle. Take the letter next to it, man, that was not on my mind! Need to remember these things...
Streams of Numbers -- The first part is easy, but then we got stuck. On looking up the solution, I gotta say... I don't like this one!
Turning Æsop's Tables; a new translation -- Hey, one of these! Always a fan of these puzzles. Did a fair amount of this one. The final step of this puzzle confused me. You get the text "FABLE LESSON", and you're supposed to say, aha, it's called a "moral", and call in "MORAL". Fortunately someone else did that here, because to me that seemed like a *clue* rather than an answer. Like, to my mind, "FABLE LESSON" doesn't clue "call in MORAL"; it clues, go back and look at the morals. But we were already using those to get here! Hence why I was confused. A bit misleading there!
What Is the Moon Made Of? -- I totally missed that this related to the Cheese Shop sketch until someone pointed it out... (I didn't actually work on this one.)
OK! That's all I gotta say! I think! Probably I could say things about a few other puzzles too but oh well! I gotta sleep! Goodnight!
(Unrelatedly: 226 books remaining!)
So because it's a month later, I don't remember things the best this year. I don't remember who else worked on various puzzles I'm going to write about, for instance.
Yeah Mystery Hunt had some real messiness this year. Early on the servers went down, so they unlocked the third round early and distributed the puzzles via Google doc. And then the hunt went long too; into Monday morning, oh boy. Second year in a row that's happened! We'll see how next year's goes.
Anyway, in addition to the usual OBNYC crew who are on Plant, I also brought along Laura and Maggie this year. They were also largely just there to see Boston, so they did less puzzling than some others on the team, but they did some. And I also went with them for some Boston exploration... went with them to Harvard Square after Hunt was over, although there wasn't as much interesting as I was expecting.
Hunter and Lee, who are not on Plant, were staying in the same hotel as me, but I only briefly encountered Hunter while up there... fortunately I got to see Hunter in New York after.
(New York is also how far we made it in the hunt... we were not close to winning.)
Anyway yeah I'm just gonna get on to talking about puzzles. Again, because it's a month later, I may not remember things as well this year.
Corporate Change -- A neat puzzle I worked on, not much to say about it. I remember the (7) gave us some trouble for a while.
Extreme Hiking -- Oogh, this one. Once we realized that it was giving us directions for navigating the course it was just like, ugh, I don't want to do that, and few others did, either. Fortunately we did eventually get it.
I kind of screwed this one up initially too, with the golf scores. I had no idea about the circling-for-birdie convention, so I (and others who looked at this) generally figured that the circled ones with the unknown birds were ones where we were supposed to figure out the bird. Meanwhile, I'd never heard of "buzzard" or "grouse", so I figured that buzzard was standing in for bogey, and grouse was standing in for birdie (since it's a bird that's not any of these other birds). Turns out no.
Family Tree -- Man, I got nowhere on this one. Someone else figured out it was Soundex, and I started trying to solve the Soundex, and... yeah, with nothing else to go on, that got nowhere by itself.
IV Guys -- I had no clue what was going on with this puzzle. It's pretty nifty though! I recall Laura worked on this puzzle a fair bit.
Poetic Justice -- People had most of this one but were kind of stuck on a few clues; I managed to get "prediction/predication", so yay.
Two Outs, Two Strikes, and... -- Oh boy, this one; I helped a bit on this one but I may also have hurt a bit on this one.
I initially assumed the title was supposed to be completed with "Three Balls". Later when it became clear it was about, y'know, balls, I was like, oh, it's "and two balls", how strange, but OK. Even after it we figured out it was about castration, I didn't figure out the title until reading the solution -- it's "and no balls". I'd never heard that phrase before!
Anyway, yeah, this one was amusing. I solved some clues, but I was also insistent for a while that the bucking animal is a bronco, even though, oops, that's not a bovine! Turns out the bucking bull is also a thing. Having two bulls was confusing though!
Fortunately Tera knew a lot about raising animals and was able to easily fill in the castrated animal terms. She also told us all about boar taint. So yeah.
Charon -- We managed to figure this one out with a few answers missing, but it was definitely a bit tricky.
Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges -- Oy, this one. We got the badges at the start of the hunt and figured out they were a puzzle, but it also became pretty clear we couldn't get anywhere without the missing Pluto badge. I don't think we got back to this one for a long time -- the key was that the staff were wearing the Pluto badge?? I had no idea!
Dating Stars -- I did most of the work on this one! I figured out what was going on with the Chads pretty quickly, but the virgins took a bit longer; fortunately something eventually reminded me of "Your Horoscope For Today".
Unfortunately the rest of this puzzle is dang tedious! Thankfully the rest I didn't have to do by myself.
Ari was disappointed to have missed this one. :P
Second Helpings -- I filled in some clues on this once other people had figured out the main idea, but I don't really have anything to say about it.
Transformations -- My only contribution to this one was going "Wait... transformations... Metamorphoses?" Daniel was like, oh, maybe! Well, uh, the solution doesn't even make mention of "Metamorphoses". Are all these tales in the Metamorphoses? Maybe, but I have no idea. (Looking things up, it seems that all are except Minthe, and it does mention Minthe's transformation even though it does not tell the story.)
Divine Intervention -- I did some of the saint identification on this one (as well as also fixing up some of the gods in the first part that weren't quite right). Some of them were pretty hidden!
Triangles -- Ugh, this one, we got very stuck on this one. I mostly didn't work on this one, but when it was late at night and people were stuck on it, I came over to see if I could help. David (I think) described to me what was going on, and, yeah, nothing I tried helped either.
The thing that nobody told me, because they hadn't noticed it, was that the frequencies were significant. Ugh! I obviously wasn't going to notice it without trying the button myself, but, frankly, even if I had, I rather doubt I would have noticed that... that's pretty difficult!
Medusa's Lair -- I didn't work on this one at all, just a nifty puzzle.
The Hell Round, for which I will not bother linking to individual puzzles -- I was actually the one on our team to put together what the structure of the round was, that each answer corresponded to a pair of puzzles and should be submitted to both those puzzles. People had obviously gotten bits and pieces of it but I was the one who was like, oh, this is what's going on, and made sure everybody knew.
This one was nasty. Some pairs were easy; others, not so much. A big problem for our team was Text Adventure. We had a hard time getting any solutions out of that one. Which meant we had a hard time getting complete solves for any of the puzzles, because a complete solve would include Text Adventure. Nasty! And you needed complete solves for the meta, so, that really made finishing this round quite difficult. (I never actually tried Text Adventure myself, FWIW.) One hard puzzle could keep you from getting answers on all the puzzles!
I did a bunch of the word search, and helped out with one of the Matchmaker extractions that led to us figuring out the gimmick. Also I was incorrectly convinced that the leftovers message in the word search was to be parsed as "midair boar; looping reaction three makes sodium" but, uh, no.
At the Late Night Picture Show -- For a while we were convinced that each clue here involved three movies, not two. I was like, I think it's only two, but then I saw one that convinced me that no it really is three. Oops.
Augmented Raility -- I am disappointed I missed this puzzle!
Befouled Spellings -- Oh. Spelling Bee. Duh.
Cedar Gardens -- I spent a lot of time on this puzzle; I did all the coaster identifications at start. (Except for Quicksilver Mine Express; we didn't get that one AFAIK. I didn't get it because it's the only one not on Wikipedia!) But then what? Well, uh, we had a lot of ideas that didn't work, is what. I wanted to match up tree heights to coaster heights, but that's way too imprecise to work. I was hoping some of the people who knew trees could identify the trees, but they all said there wasn't enough to work with.
It wasn't till much later that someone thought to look at state trees, and by that point, the people who knew trees weren't around, making things rather harder. Fortunately we eventually got it.
Maybe Not To Scale -- oh, man. This is one where you look at it, it's immediately apparent roughly what's going on, but actually doing the unscrambling? Yeah, I entered in some guesses but ultimately left it to other people. Not sure if we got this one. We did at least correctly guess what most of the sets were (I don't think we had any idea about the noble set).
Evildoers Wanted -- I eventually figured out what the images were, but then what? I had no idea. Fortunately someone else figured out it was related to Criminal Minds and got the rest. Laura, who's a big fan of the show, was disappointed to have missed this one.
Make a Winning Hand -- I didn't work on this one, but Emma and Daniel spent a lot of time on this one. They got pretty stuck because Daniel's solver reported that game 3 was impossible, so they thought they were supposed to extract without winning game 3. Turns out no. They ended up using a hint on this one, the response to which was, nope, game 3 is not in fact impossible...
Obelisks of Sorrel Mountain -- I identified this as having to do with Parks & Recreation and the Cones of Dunshire, but then didn't really touch this one again... until the end. People had figured out whatw as going on, solved the clues, and had put together the board, but weren't sure what to do with it. I was the one person around who knew trail markers, apparently! Kind of funny because I'm really not a hiker, but I remembered how trail markers work.
A More 6 ∪ 28 ∪ 496 ∪ ... -- I tried looking at this one but was just utterly baffled. David pointed out that the title clued "A More Perfect Union", but that didn't really help.
Game To Be Themed Later -- Ugh, I spent a bunch of time on this one with another person whose name I don't remember. We didn't solve this one, I'm pretty sure. I don't think we noticed the numbers theme -- did we even correctly identify Duotron? Did we accidentally identify it as something else?
Anyway, the basic idea of overlaying the sheets on top of one another and then looking for letters we obviously got, but without having figured out the order (sort chronologically??) we couldn't get anything useful. We tried doing it pairwise -- putting each sheet on top of each other sheet -- but that didn't yield anything useful. I eventually gave up on this one and moved on to other puzzles. Like I said, I don't think we ever got this one.
Intelligence Collection -- Haha, oh my, this one. I didn't get very far at the first part, but fortunately, others did. So I put this one down... until people were stuck on it and needing help. They'd gotten as far as "REDISGOL", but what the hell did that mean? Eventually I suggested, "Red is Game of Life?" Which was exactly it.
Of course, they'd marked their Codenames games with arbtirary colors, because up until this point it hadn't mattered which was red and which was blue; having to go back and change it was a pain. I'm also not sure if they'd figured out the grid layout by this point. But, uh, I figured out it was Game of Life, I let the others handle the rest. :P
Time for a Drink -- I saw this one and was like, hm, it sounds like New York, but maybe it's actually another city? Like maybe Chicago, they have a Pink Line. But as someone else pointed out, Chicago has a Brown Line, and this doesn't.
Looking at the solution now -- turns out it is just New York after all, there is no other city involved. It's just not the actual subway map. Huh.
😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠 -- For some reason we had trouble filling this one out. Well, it was easy to get mixed up between the many different productions there have been...
🤞📝🧩 -- I helped out a little with this one; I remember I identified "Dog Day Afternoon". The question of "what's the difference between the two cats" confused us. Turns out they're interchangeable!
Don't Feed the Trolls -- This puzzle really had an overabundance of things to try, and boy did we go down a lot of wrong paths. One thing that threw us off a little was a mistake of mine; my correction to the "mirror, mirror" quote was itself incorrect, oops!
Job Center -- I did some of the movie identification on this one, but I don't have much to say about it.
Proof It! -- People thought the solution to this one was lame. :P They were like, it's calculus? But that's so underdetermined! Not so much when you're thinking in a high school context, but people still thought it was lame. :P
Return to Sender -- Oy, we went up the wrong tree on this one. We spent a fair bit of time that it had to do with cities with the same name in multiple states. It does not.
Reverse -- Argh, I didn't manage to solve this one because I was thinking backwards! (Fortunately I think we eventually got it.)
Like, after we figured out the clues and noticed the black/white alternation, then what? I was right that we had to look at moves that flipped those particular words... but I was thinking of the given board as a final state, from which we had to undo the given moves. Which is impossible. I didn't think of going forward instead! Blargh.
Show of Hands -- I did most of the first part of this one, figuring out what was going on and how to complete most of the sequences; Joia (I think was her name?), solving remotely, got the ones I didn't. And I think it was me who figured out the "hand" thing, though I don't quite remember. But what then? Well, I had to go to sleep, but fortunately Joia got what I didn't and solved the puzzle. Take the letter next to it, man, that was not on my mind! Need to remember these things...
Streams of Numbers -- The first part is easy, but then we got stuck. On looking up the solution, I gotta say... I don't like this one!
Turning Æsop's Tables; a new translation -- Hey, one of these! Always a fan of these puzzles. Did a fair amount of this one. The final step of this puzzle confused me. You get the text "FABLE LESSON", and you're supposed to say, aha, it's called a "moral", and call in "MORAL". Fortunately someone else did that here, because to me that seemed like a *clue* rather than an answer. Like, to my mind, "FABLE LESSON" doesn't clue "call in MORAL"; it clues, go back and look at the morals. But we were already using those to get here! Hence why I was confused. A bit misleading there!
What Is the Moon Made Of? -- I totally missed that this related to the Cheese Shop sketch until someone pointed it out... (I didn't actually work on this one.)
OK! That's all I gotta say! I think! Probably I could say things about a few other puzzles too but oh well! I gotta sleep! Goodnight!
(Unrelatedly: 226 books remaining!)
no subject
Date: 2024-02-16 10:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-16 06:32 pm (UTC)Edit: Also wow I only just noticed that you're responding to a mostly-redundant paragraph I left in accidentally, now I have to go edit the entry to go remove that paragraph while still mentioning the trip to Harvard Square :P
no subject
Date: 2024-02-25 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-25 09:05 pm (UTC)...of course eventually they'll take these copies down and move them to a permanent URL, but, that hasn't happened yet.