cananian

I really enjoyed this year's Mystery Hunt. Kudos to the Mad Bombers for a nicely-paced, well-constructed hunt. ACME was smallish, and slept often, so we weren't competitive in the race for the coin, but everyone I've talked to seemed to really enjoy the solving atmosphere this year. I really appreciated that Bomber HQ stayed open until 3pm Sunday, giving us a chance to finally solve those last pesky puzzles plaguing us, and to experience and enjoy some of the puzzles in the later rounds. Of course, some people went home to go to sleep late Saturday evening — and they missed all the fun. =)

I was asked about my favorite puzzles from this year. This was my response:

I really enjoyed "Logical Digits", a electronics & circuits puzzle in the very last round that emerged late. "Blather" is another programming puzzle with a clever construction. "Embezzler's Quest" is a lot of fun if you're familiar with the conventions of old text-adventure games. "Unscrambled Cable Porn" is fun to show other people, especially if you know the aha. "IAP Mystery Hunt" is a good example of a "classic" one-page mystery hunt. See for example:

• http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/80/MH1980-1.gif
• http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/80/MH1980-2.gif

from the first hunt in 1980.

The "Hell Runaround" might be fun if you've got a bit of time to kill and want to explore some of the more obscure corners of MIT — it takes you on a large loop around main campus, but doesn't require any MIT-specific knowledge. I still prefer ACME's runaround from 2003, though:

http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/03/www.acme-corp.com/solutions/endgame.html

which can be run in both the "real" MIT and the "virtual" puzzle-matrix of that hunt. The monopoly hunt had a good run-around, too; I'll have to check to see if it can still be followed as written.

Puzzles we didn't try to solve, but which look fun: "Choose Your Own Misadventure", "War Dances" (for PC gaming addicts), "Manual Transmission", and the Hell puzzles in general (since we never put our two parts of these together).

"Squad Car" was reputed to be very enjoyable "for those who enjoy that sort of thing" (cryptograms). "Negative Ad Campaign" was reputed to be hilarious. "Hang 'Em High" has a number of interesting bits to it, despite being fairly straightforward. "The Central Science" isn't too hard, and is nice and science-geeky. "Friends You Can Count On" might be nice for those with small children.

Other puzzles I helped work on/solve: "The Continental DiViDe", "Team Dynamics", "Clash of the Titans", "Encore! Encore!", "Scoring Points" (didn't work on, just witnessed the first aha), "Choose Your Weapon" (same deal; teaching Anna about gang guns was a hoot), "Episodic Disorder", "D4: Ducks Playing Poker" (wouldn't it be fun to combine a duck puzzle, a "locate-places-at-MIT" puzzle, and a runaround? but instead we got a slightly tedious vanilla duck puzzle), "Celebrity Scrabble" (there is, perhaps, still a bug in my scrabble-solving program—which I wrote for Rack Your Brain in the 2000 hunt—as I'm told that the puzzle itself is blameless), "Now That's High Finance", "Flip Flop Ya Don't Stop" [I just stopped by and read the answer after others had done the real work =)], and the round 1, 2, 3, and 6 metas. If you want to tackle one of these, I might be able to give reasonable hints.

Notably, I personally worked on many many more puzzles this year than last. And this despite being the team leader! Not exactly sure of the reason for this. Perhaps because most people went home late at night to sleep, allowing me and the die-hard puzzlers to get some quality early-morning solving time. Maybe because the hunt really was much more self-organizing this year, and so I wasn't responsible for "doing stuff" for people as much. Lots of people took their turns updating the bot/wiki (Nick, especially!), there was a dedicated printing machine so I didn't have to pull print duty, Richard took care of the namebadges, and people fixed their own food (with the exception of Friday/Saturday dinner). I certainly enjoyed myself!