This was my seventh Mystery Hunt and my usual hunting friends decided to join up with TSBI again. This year, TSBI stayed pretty stable with about 70 people, ~15 on-site. Also we finally actually finished hunt (meaning we completed the runaround). This put us at third!

I decided to write a bit more about the non-puzzle stuff (mainly food) this year.

Like last year, I got to Boston Wednesday night as tickets were cheaper. Angel didn’t feel like coming this this year, so it was just me at Grant’s palce until Thursday, when Ryan would be showing up. That night, Grant and I went to Northeast Eating Club (Good!), where I ate a ton since I hadn’t yet eaten that day. Other than doing a small bit of work on Thursday, my only responsibility was to let Ryan into Grant’s apartment, since Grant had to go to attend a meeting. At around lunch time, I went to pick up a sandwich and a bag of chips at Cutty’s (Good!) and returned to Grant’s. When Ryan got there, Grant was already on his way back, so we took a walk to Trader Joe’s to pick up snacks for the team. I was curious about the hot honey popcorn so we got that, along with potato chips and three boxes of cereal. The cashier warned us that the popcorn was kind of spicy, but it really wasn’t at all. It was still good though. Drew was supposed to meet us for dinner at Noah’s Kitchen (Good!), but he got stuck in traffic getting out of the airport pickup, so dinner was just Ryan, Grant and me. We ended up order cumin lamb, garlic noodles, and chili chicken, which all ended up being pretty actually spicy.

Contributions

Roughly chronologically, these were all of my contributions I remember:

Friday

When we got back to the room, other teammates had already started looking at the nametags puzzle, so I just watched the intro video and waited for hunt to start. I spent a bit of time at the beginning of hunt campaigning for particular puzzles to be unlocked, leaving the MonQuest to the others on the team. Once we had a few puzzles unlocked I finally started solving some of the puzzles. Since puzzles were being solved relatively quickly, I took the initiative to get certain puzzles unlocked for remote solvers and people who were sitting near me.

A Wanderer’s Catalog: I think all I did here was help do the initial data organization of noting the colors and languages and creating a filter table in the sheet.

Gen Nu Brain ROT: I helped decode and unscramble some of the encoded words. I also wrote down the shifts and made a sortable table for this sheet as well.

Bird Nation: Around this time, I pre-made the sheet the Aviaria and a few other joined me in the sheet. We saw the flags right away, and I noticed they were specifically flags with birds on them. I also made the connection for the names of the birds and the Puzzmon species name being the same enumerations. We finally unlocked the capstone, and solved the puzzle pretty soon after.

Bringing Up Baby Shark: After finishing Bird Nation, I turned my attention to the PuzzMon in the next round. We hadn’t yet unlocked the capstone, but I made the sheet and was able to break-in to the items/sharks with MAGIC CARPET and FIDGET SPINNER. After the actual puzzle was unlocked, more solvers came to help and we finished the puzzle.

Maps: I didn’t make any a-has for this puzzle but I did do some of the geolocation and traced out the callout diagrams for around half of the maps.

Night Circus: Grant and I started work on this puzzle by identifying the symbols. We stared at the puzzle for a while, decoding the puzzle but eventually Grant and one remote solver figured out the rest of the puzzle.

Nine Lives: Someone else on the team started this puzzle by noticing the binary encoding on the PuzzMon. When Grant and I got to it, I figured out the main mechanic of identifying nine pop culture characters with the questions, and was confident when we got Sabrina to work. Then someone else noticed that she had a cat, and the rest of the puzzle was smooth after that. I ended up submitted errata for this puzzle regarding one of the questions about Taylor Swift, which did correct the puzzle.

Data Revisualization: Grant and I then turned our attention to this puzzle. I quickly got the second graph, and we eventually figured out the last one had to be a B or an M (depending on rotation). Grant ended up figuring out the first image, and we got the answer from that.

Convalarium: We then moved to Convalarium, and Ryan joined us. We got through most of this puzzle pretty quickly, but when trying to get the answer, we thought that we would have to redo the Greek translation when we saw the clue start with TRUE and thought it might end with AIR. That, plus we didn’t know how literal to interpret the symptons (i.e. was fainting the same as loss of consciousness) led to a bit of stumbling at the finish line.

Railway Terminal: I think Grant figured out what exactly to do in this puzzle, so he, Ryan and I filled out the rest of the information in the puzzle. We got from the cluephrase to the final answer pretty smoothly, too.

For Friday dinner, I group ordered Cava (Good!), which is a chain we don’t have in the Bay that I really like. It may end up being a personal hunt tradition for me.

Saturday

Let Her Cook(book)!: I woke up and decided to look at some of the metas. I spotted the connection to Salt Fat Acid Heat, but it took a while to fully figure out that we wanted two words for each component. We ended up only needing 4 answers to solve this meta, and I was able to guess the answer from ??RE?AZ?.

Adding and Abutting: When this puzzle unlocked, I pitched in by filling in some clues and creating a table, but I think I moved on to look at something else after enough people jumped in.

A Fake Artist Goes To Eland Islands: This puzzle got unlocked, so Grant and I stared at it for a while, coming up with wrong ideas, before someone else made the connection that the images represented other board games. We solved the puzzle pretty quickly after that.

Linework: I then pushed to get this puzzle unlocked. Grant and I opened it up and basically raced to see who could finish this first, and I won.

Common Scenes: Then we unlocked Fate’s Thread Casino, and Grant and I turned all of our focus to the gallery and quests for the Art banner. We took to the art history puzzle. As Grant identified the paintings, I figured out how to fill the diagram and started filling it out. With information from the diagram, we figured out the last few paintings and finished the puzzle.

Cryptozoologist: Throughout Saturday, I popped into the sheet and helped solidify the mechanic by finding the connection for Rhea Silvia. However, someone else had spotted the cryptic extraction after I moved on to a different puzzle.

Graphs: I spent the rest of Saturday focusing on Fate’s Thread Casino, which at this point had unlocked the Charts banner. I actually don’t think I contributed to Plots at all, and mostly solved the Graphs images. I figured out the heatmaps, the presidents-related charts and helped break into the bar charts, which was enough for someone to guess the answer of the puzzle.

Hear Me Out: We finally unlocked the Characters banner and I mostly helped other people fill out the data. By this time, it was pretty late so I didn’t contribute much more to the banner. By the time I woke up, the entire round was solved.

For dinner, we got Beantown Taqueria (Good!). We have plenty of Mexican food in the Bay, so I think I just picked it because it was nearby.

Sunday

Chart Your Course: Our remote solvers made tons of progress Saturday night, so when I woke up on Sunday, there were mostly metas and puzzles from the Glitch round left. I decided to look at Chart Your Course, which had some work started in it, but looked abandoned. Our team never noticed the titles of the puzzles being relevant, so I spent most of my morning trying to finesse the answers/buildings to clues that would plausibly work. I ended up getting the phrase to end with -FUL, as well as some other letters (even though it turns out I had the wrong building for the last clue). When more solvers came to look at the puzzle, we ended up getting some more letters and throwing in a couple guesses to finally solve the puzzle.

Point of View: At this point, the Glitch puzzles were the only normal puzzles left, so when Point of View was unlocked, I hopped into it. We ended up getting all of the ID and the two crossword grids pretty quickly. Grant came up with the extract mechanic idea, but we thought it was small picture-to-small grid and large-to-large. It took a bit to just try only using the large grid, but we eventually got it.

These Questions are Not Clever: The last regular puzzle I looked at, which already had numerous eyes on it. I managed to help identify some past hunts, but this puzzle was solved pretty quickly.

snalC ehT tcennoC and To the Edge: At this point, the hunt width was 1 so there wasn’t anything to do but look at the Glitch meta. I can’t say I contributed much to the actual solving, really. Once this was solved, we got to schedule the final runaround. During the first part of the runaround in the tunnels and conference room, I solved some of the minipuzzles, but once it got down to the final part, Ryan, Drew and I (and eventually Tom) let the most enthusiastic people on the team do most of the work. It was pretty hard to get everyone involved on the final puzzle without tons of cross-talk, so it was the right call to let Grant take the lead on it in my opinion. We ended up completing the runaround at 7:44, which was great, as we still had time to get dinner afterwards.

Grant, Ryan, Tom, Drew and I ended up at Area Four (Good!), a pizza place that happened to still be open.

Final Thoughts

Overall, it was a great year! We finished the runaround, which is a new personal best for my friends and I, so there’s really nothing else I could ask for. This year, I spent a lot more time on capstone puzzles and metas. For many of the capstone puzzles, I started looking at the MonArch entries before the capstone had even unlocked, which I think was helpful both organizationally (I pre-filled the sheets with MonArch information) and for solving. I never really felt like I had a slump period this year, and I even took quite a few breaks and paced myself. Given that I took care of our group’s dinner orders and picked them up for us, I’d say I still was pretty productive.

My favorite round that I worked on was definitely Fate’s Thread Casino, as it had the art history puzzle and I also liked solving the Charts. Unfortunately I basically did not touch the MonQuest at all, since it was mostly used for unlocking puzzles, so I wish there were puzzles (other than the Glitch meta) that made you interact with the MonQuest. Other than that, I really enjoyed my experience this year. All of the puzzles I did were very well-edited and clean, and the dimension rounds definitely had the wow-factor of MITMH. I’m pretty happy the unlock system returned, and I think it definitely improves hunt experience. It felt a little bad to have abandoned puzzles in rounds where we finished the capstone (not knowing about the meta-matching structure). I’m not sure how the abandoned puzzles affected capstone unlocks in different rounds so we felt a bit constrained on width at points, but I think it was okay in the end.

And one last story: we (Ryan, Grant and I) typically want to take home some souvenir from hunt, but the only thing that particularly spoke to us this time was Puzzmon: the Card Game. I even told Ryan that I might have even paid $50 for it. Since another team member ended up claiming the team copy, we planned to ask at the merch table if they were for sale during wrap-up, since Ryan had seen plenty of copies when he went to the tournament. Unfortunately, they weren’t at the time so after wrap-up+lunch, we went back to Grant’s place somewhat unfulfilled. My flight was scheduled to leave at 6, so I packed my stuff and waited around when Cardinality suddenlty sent out the email that extra copies of Puzzmon TCG were going on sale back at campus, first come first served. Grant called an Uber and the three of us all rushed back to campus (I brought my suitcase because I would probably leave from campus at that point). We reached out to Drew, who was staying at Kendall, to see if he could secure us some copies, but unbeknownst to us, Drew and Matt had already headed to campus planning to pick up copies for all of us. When we got there Drew handed them off to us, and we were evean able to pick up a copy for Sam. So it turns out that Cardinality had one last surprise for us, but nonetheless I’m glad I got my copy of the card game. Anyways, my flight ended up being delayed 4 hours so at least I didn’t also have to rush to the airport, too.

This was my sixth Mystery Hunt and my usual hunting friends tagged along with TSBI again. This year, TSBI re-merged so we had about 70 people, 17 on-site, and we finally finished hunt (technically). It doesn’t really feel that way to me since we didn’t do the runaround and finish the story, though.

Contributions

Roughly chronologically, these were all of my contributions I remember:

Friday

Missing Connections: Helped data collect, noticed the cable-length numberlink connection.

Battle Factory: This puzzle went pretty fast, since it was a Pokemon puzzle. I helped match the transformations and organized the sheet.

Check-a-deez Words Out: Also went fast; I spotted the flamingo shape and noted that we were finding full names in the grid.

MITropolitan House of Fashion: I hopped on this puzzle right away, since fashion is something up my alley. I pulled Angel and Grant into this puzzle and we were able to find most of the dresses and celebrities without much issue.

📑🍝: Traded a few copypasta with Matt, who was solving with Setec Astronomy this year.

Mastering the Art of Conch Frocking: Helped with some clues.

The Art Gallery: I don’t think we ever got the order from the first letters of the titles, so it took us a while to get the answer even though all our other steps were correct. At some point I bashed out that it was plausibly going to say BOX… and the rest of the team solved it from there.

Paw Print Detective: Luckily for us, Grant was very familiar with the BLAST database from writing his own puzzle back in UMD Puzzlehunt. While he did the querying, I identified the dogs and organized the sheet. Looking at the solution now, we entirely skipped the Paw Print Genetics database, as Grant just matched the diseases listed at the bottom with his own intuition. We breezed through this one pretty quickly.

And Now, a Puzzling Word From Our Sponsors: From our activity log, it looks like there were 3 hours were I didn’t solve a puzzle. I must have also bounced around a lot. I did some of the cryptics in this puzzle, and I remember now that we stared at this one for a while before Drew realized that the scrabble words could be found inside each subpuzzle.

Formula Won: This was one of the puzzles I bounced around to. I was the first person on our team to try to draw the last circuit out. I showed the G to the others working on the puzzle and then left it to them.

Reuse and Recyclability: This was one puzzle I wanted to unlock based on its description; I like looking at dresses I guess. Right away, Sam, Grant and I made the Jane Austen connection and worked slowly filling out the diagrams. I put together the small jigsaw at the end and remembered that I had heard about the costume reuse in film making, and even knew of a database for it. This might have been my favorite puzzle; it spoke my sensibilities the most, at least.

The Eras Puzzle: This was the other puzzle I vouched for unlocking, since I was pretty sure it’d be a puzzle about Taylor Swift. When we unlocked it, Angel spotted the mechanic fairly quickly. Angel and I, along with another person in the sheet, did all the data collecting, and we figured out that each was cluing surprise songs. I was working on this puzzle as we moved from campus HQ to Grant’s house. After getting back, I filled the blanks at the bottom, and did the final extraction.

Saturday

I slept from 2-8 am on Saturday, so we ended up getting back to campus HQ around 10. Smoke ’Em If You’ve Got ’Em: I’m pretty sure a lot of my dead time on Saturday was spent working on this puzzle, which we never finished. I’ve expressed to my friends before that I hate mini-meta puzzles because there’s often so many parts in the puzzle, and “mini/easy” is not something puzzle writers often succeed at. You get stuck on one or more minipuzzles that prevent you from finishing the puzzle, and it ends up feeling bad regardless of making progress on all the other minipuzzles. So that’s exactly what happened on this puzzle. After the hunt, I kept telling my friends that I couldn’t believe I got roped into doing a mini-meta despite my dislike for them.

Given Up: Other than Smoke ’Em, much of my Saturday was spent working on this puzzle. I think Grant, Sam and I were outside of HQ for three or four consecutive hours. We ended up going to each location twice, and I assume we weren’t the only team to do so. Luckily, Grant had a friend who went to MIT who knew where many of the locations were. The first time around, we just went to each location to find the letters. It wasn’t until the last location where I was trying to figure out the order that I had the idea to listen to the end of the song to see if there was more information. We ended up doing another run at all the locations to finally solve the puzzle.

Half Baked: I helped do a significant amount of data-collecting and figured out the missing ingredient mechanic for this puzzle. Grant and I went to the Gala to present a peanut butter whole wheat toast with M&Ms and Bugles.

A Dash of Color: Someone found the exact nail-polish brand and I helped gather the data for extraction from the painting. After we got back the physical component, I transcribed the information to the sheet and did the final extraction.

Inspectre: We didn’t solve this puzzle until after I went to bed, but most of my contribution to this puzzle happened before we left HQ. Our other teammates solved the jigsaw so Grant and I started figuring out if there was a smart way to obtain the symbolic lengths of each line (reading the solution, I don’t think there is). We gave up and decided to do the tedious approach of listing unit vectors to compose. We got through about half the lengths before I started falling asleep so we left it for others to pick up.

Papa’s Stash: Most of the work was already done on this puzzle when I looked at it right before bed, but I extracted the letters in the right order and figured out the final answer.

Sunday

Sounds Like a Dodo to Me: We didn’t end up actually solving this puzzle because it was low-priority, but I did spend some time in the morning trying to do some data-collecting.

Given Up (Under Blacklight): Of course, it was our responsibility to run around with the radio again, with the twist that one location had changed due to another event on campus. We did this one pretty quickly, with only going to about half the locations.

Papa’s Bookcase (Under Blacklight): My teammates got the ahas on this puzzle, but I helped data-collect the audible narrators.

He Shouldn’t Have Eaten The Apple: I think my contribution here was making a column in the sheet converting episode number to letter.

We Can Do This All Day: Our teammates organized the logistics, so Angel and I were told to go to 4-3, where we were assigned the task of “Pretending to be Mens et Menus.”

Kindred Spirits: Thankfully my teammates tasted all of the cocktails for me, but I ended up fixing some misidentified ingredients for first three. I extracted the puzzle with Grant after that.

The Oversight: We took a hint for this set of metas to figure out we had to use the backgrounds on the puzzles. Then, Sam and I figured out how to construct the grids and hypothesized the correct extraction, while another teammate actually figured out the correct thing to do with each puzzle.

The Grand Illusion: We figured out the Czech Republic connection, and I helped extract.

Alias: We took a few hints to error-correct, which we needed because we didn’t have the correct grid for the redo of The Oversight. I helped solve the redo of The Grand Illusion, and we were able to guess the answer with SHIRLEY and an M and a Y.

The Killer: I basically just watched them solve this puzzle, because it was too deep to jump in at this point, and it was electrifying when we finished 13 seconds under the HQ close time of 10 pm.

Final Thoughts

It looks like I did contribute to a lot of puzzles this year, except it seems like I was in a slump on Saturday. Also, I realize I didn’t do any of the puzzles from the Stakeout (the fish/smaller-sized puzzle round), and I guess I remember saying to Grant that I’d leave those to the remote solvers. I definitely knew that I spent tons of time outside of HQ on one puzzle, but that’s fine. It was really memorable. My puzzling highlights were Reuse and Recyclability, MITropolitan House of Fashion, The Eras Puzzle, and Given Up. I’m not as much of a Taylor Swift fan nowadays, but I really like how well-integrated that puzzle was. I liked Reuse and Recyclability and MITropolitan House of Fashion for their subject matter, mostly. For puzzling lessons, I think I should be less afraid of re-doing others’ work, since you really shouldn’t trust anyone’s prior work. A little redundancy could have gone a long way on The Killer, for example, as I probably could have spreadsheeted their information which would have made it easier for remote solvers to help with.

I think this was my favorite hunt experience since I started. The fact that my friends and I were on-site, we finished, and the overall quality of the hunt made this experience nearly perfect. To touch upon a few key aspects of this hunt, I thought the key system was done pretty well, especially the puzzle descriptions. As a team, I think we could handle their usage in a more streamlined way. While I loved how on-site focused this hunt was, the on-site contingent of TSBI is still a bit thin, which we felt during this hunt with the numerous pickups and running around. In my blog post last year, I talked about how I wish there were more events that mattered (and didn’t just give a free answer). While technically there were still only four events, all of them rewarding a free answer, there were a lot of actual puzzles that required in-person interaction with the hunt team. I didn’t do any events this year as we let the on-site first-timers have priority, which I was fine with. I actually didn’t do many interactions for puzzles either, just when I delivered the baked good for Half Baked. Still, I really do like that these puzzles existed, so I hope future hunts continue having a lot of in-person elements.

I’m excited for Cardinality’s hunt next year.

Besides my personal website, the only project where I was heavily involved in the web design was UMD Puzzlehunt. I enjoyed playing around with CSS there and thought it was a useful skill, so I had been meaning to learn more. I wanted to share a bit of the process in creating the theme, which is modified from Jekyll’s default theme, Minima (v2.5 specifically).

Inspiration

Before working on this theme, I had already changed a few things from default Minima—removing the footer, changing the header—but nothing substantial. I had ideas for the new theme for a while, but finally found the time and energy recently.

So one of my favorite TV shows of all time was a Chinese reality series, Youth With You Season 2 (YWY)¹. I really liked the graphic design used throughout the show, and figured it’d be a fun project to adapt it to a website theme. I had previously tracked down the design firm’s YWY Behance page for a different project (see images below), and the page was, again, an invaluable reference.

I originally found the Behance page when I was building the YWY logo in Terraria. (Built in Master Mode btw)

The logo serves as a backdrop for my boss arena.

What I liked most about the YWY design was that it is sleek-yet-retro and the animations gave it a lot of kinetic energy. One of my goals for this redesign was to make my site not look like a Web 2.0 “professional website” template—I wanted it to actually look custom made—and these features keep the design from looking too formal. The specific features that I wanted to incorporate into my site were the desktop-window borders and the expanding windows. Of course, I also liked the color scheme.

Implementation

Most of the elements are pretty straightforward. I was able to implement the 3D-perspective desktop-window border using a few online references (see below) and made the navbar links resemble desktop-window buttons. I interleaved the horizontal bars motif featured in the site header throughout the site by adding the motif to the section headers inside the page content. This feature was inspired by those used in Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2020, which I particularly liked because they automatically filled the horizontal space.

The horizontal bars in the page header themselves were probably the most challenging element to implement. It’s probably not the best way to do it, but I utilized a similar technique to the section headers. I used a :before pseudo element attached to the navbar, which has variable width depending on the window size and navbar size. This was tricky because at narrow window sizes, the navbar turns into a drop-down menu. I also had to account for the site title (“DAWS”), and attach another pseudo element to continue the bars all the way to the edge.

I couldn’t really come up with a practical way to integrate the expanding windows into my page directly, so I incorporated the idea into the hovering effect for the hyperlinks. On my website, I previously used the hyperlink style that I created for UMD Puzzlehunt, which I liked because it makes reference to physical media (underlining and highlighters). A few months after UMD Puzzlehunt, Hunt 20 used a similar style which I liked because it added an animated transition. Lastly, the little element denoting a hyperlink was something I picked up from Practical Typography. I merged all of these ideas together to create the expand-on-hover highlighted hyperlinks for my website.

Naturally, I’ll continue to update the site theme (and this post) when I see something that inspires me. For example, some things I want to add are some image motifs and possibly update the font. Ideally, the design will evolve and get more unique over time, and it will all be documented here!

References

Here are websites with elements I adapted:

• Gradient + Polygonal borders: CSS-tricks, Stack Overflow
• Horizontal space-filling header bars: Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2020
• Link hover boxes: Hunt 20, Practical Typography
• Misc. CSS tricks: A Single Div

Last month, during MLK day long weekend, I participated in MIT Mystery Hunt for the fifth year in a row. My usual hunting team assimilated into the TSBI Swarm again and we made up half of the on-site presence. We all flew in Thursday and met up for dinner. Even though half my hunting group also live in the Bay, I still only regularly see them in person all the way up in Cambridge. Hopefully with DASH coming back, that will change.

This year, our team ended up doing similarly well. Across Saturday, we had the second-most puzzles solved. I think during Sunday when the width of the hunt was extremely large, we slowed down as the collective focus of our team was weaker. We were farther away from finishing as well, but I still felt pretty accomplished by the end.

I think this will have to be a shorter blog post than last year’s because of how busy I’ve become, but hopefully I may get around to adding more thoughts when I remember to.

Contributions

Roughly chronologically, these were all of my contributions I remember:

Friday Afternoon

Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges: I worked on my own badge, decoding the dancing man cipher. Then when we got a visit from HQ, we continued with the puzzle. We split up, where Angel and I went to three of the locations.

Dating Stars: I started looking at this, got the Chinese Zodiac ones, then pulled some of my friends in and we finished it up before the round unlocked.

Deep Conspiracy: I saw at the corner of my eye in discord that there was a TS puzzle, so I called Angel to come look at it with me. Most of the sub puzzles were done, but we filled out the Secret Pseudonyms.

The Laboratory: After Grant tried the correct extraction, I helped finish it off by piecing the cluephrase together and interpreting it.

Nightclubbing Event: Grant and I went, which was the same time when our team unlocked the Escape from the Underworld runaround. This was the first time this MH I had to do a musical performance.

Transcendental Algebra: Helped translate a few clues, but ultimately the puzzle was solved by a linguistic olympiad-head on our team. Unfortunately, TTBNL didn’t respond to the puzzle’s answer request for a few hours (it was sleeping hours), so we had to backsolve it.

Hell, MI: Solved most of the Word Search-related puzzles. Just before I slept, I saw Matt got the torus aha. When I woke up, the round was solved.

Saturday morning

Product Placement: Right after waking up and before going to HQ, I took a look at some of the easier puzzles in the Hole in the Ceiling round. I ended up mostly solo-ing this, with some backup from teammates on Discord.

The Best IT: Helped fill data-collect for this one.

Luxor: I think at this point we were back on campus. I helped Grant data-collect as he had the ahas for this one.

Circus Circus: Matt got the aha for this. I think I mostly watched as a lot of people hopped into this one after it was identified to be a past-MITMH related puzzle.

Wynn: TTBNL came to our room, and I was part of the volunteers who sang All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey.

How to Quadruple Your Money: Angel was looking at this puzzle, which was abandoned after the initial movies step. She came up with the quarters idea and pulled me in to help. We figured out the rest from there.

Isle of Misfit Puzzles: Helped do the Kitchen Island sub-puzzle.

Maybe Not To Scale: Solved this with Matt and then Ryan. I really liked this puzzle.

Julia and Friends: At some point I helped do a few of the clues.

Sumantle: I really don’t understand why each semantle was so hard compared to regular semantle. The solution doesn’t explain why. This puzzle took so much effort from Grant, Ryan, Matt, me and especially Angel. It took the span of hours of setting it down and coming back to throw in dozens of words to finish it. We also took a hint to get two of the first-round words. Ultimately, Angel was the most persistent and got many of the words.

Mosaic: I figured out the albums aha and finished it quickly from there.

Sorry Not Sorry: Picked this up from an abandoned state and figured out the Sorry! board and grid. Ended up writing a hint to fix one of our entries.

Augmented Raility: Was pulled into this to help ID Plaza Mayor in Madrid. Ended up jumping somewhere else soon after that, though.

Sunday Morning

Persephone META: I woke up and looked at this meta. I made the aha about the substrings and someone else figured out the puzzle titles. I placed the answers in the grid and extracted/wheel-of-fortuned the answer.

Until They Come Home: Grant was working on this and pulled me in to help extract.

Hera META: Helped by theorizing the solution path using the Juno puzzles, but mostly by pulling Grant in to the puzzle, as he figured out many of the actual ordering and letter extractions.

Oil Paintings: I was the one who finally recognized the Boston Celtics logo.

Split the Difference: Was called in to look at this so I pulled in Grant. We finished up the last few clues needed to read the answer out.

Toy Chest: Angel was looking at this and so I hopped in. I got some sets to come out by googling, and pulled Grant in. We ended up using a hint to find the Smurfs set. We solved it soon after all the sets were identified.

Final Thoughts

As with last year, I find it helpful to reflect on how I solved. I think one notable thing was that on more than one occasion, I made the right call to pull my friends in to what I was looking at, which helped unstick several puzzles. I also directed Matt towards A Radical Fishing Trip, which was exactly up his alley. In the past, I think hopping around different puzzles wasn’t very productive, but I think approaching it more managerially, seeing who might fit with which puzzles, was. Last year I said I stared at metas too much. In contrast, this year I didn’t work on metas during the first two days, which did make me feel more productive and I think I had more fun.

Overall this years hunt was fun, like always, even if it ran long, again. I’d much prefer a shorter and more distilled hunt experience, as this one felt a little bloated, structurally and narratively. Still, I thought many of the individual puzzles were very well-tuned, so I always had fun.

On another note, I wish there were more events, events mattered more, and each took less time. I’d love to spend lots of my weekend doing events, but with all the hunts I’ve been to, they’re more like side events and they’ve only ever contributed free answers. As someone on a team who doesn’t really want/need those, the events don’t feel like they add to the hunt structure. I go because I just want to do events, but it feels a little unproductive. I appreciated the complimentary soda at the nightclub this year though.

Well, I’m excited for what Death and Mayhem will bring us next year.

Pointless Quiz Rules:

Pointless is a quiz show where the core gameplay involves trying to answer questions correctly with the most obscure answer possible. In the quiz I ran, all participants were asked to give up to 50 answers for each prompt, and select three answers they think are the most obscure. Each answer is given an obscurity score equal to the number of times that same answer was also on someone else’s submission. The three selected answers are used to score each question, while the rest are only used to penalize other answers. This means that if you are the only person to submit an answer, then it is pointless. If you chose that answer as one of your three to be scored, you are awarded zero points. The goal is to accrue as few points as possible. I’ll reproduce exact rules as worded in the quiz below, for posterity:

• NO LOOKING STUFF UP — Please do not consult any outside sources. Your answers should come entirely from your own knowledge base. Try your best!
• The goal is to have the fewest possible points. (Hence “Pointless”.)
• For each question, you may enter up to 50 answers. The score of an answer is equal to the number of people who said that answer minus one.
• Your first 3 answers will be scored. With your second and third answer incurring a +1 and +2 point penalty respectively. Your final score for that question will be the best (i.e. lowest) score out of those 3 answers.
• If an answer is wrong, it will score MAX + 3, where MAX is the number of people who said the most common correct answer.
• After your first 3 answers, all of your other answers will count towards other people’s scores until you enter 3 wrong answers. All further answers after the third wrong answer will be ignored.
• Separate multiple answers with commas, newlines, or any other sensible delimiter.
• There are no passes. Your highest-scoring question is automatically dropped. Good luck.

Adapting the format to K-pop

Lovemathboy’s Pokémon quiz delves into various corners of the franchise, covering the main series games, competitive play, anime, card game, and side games. Within the main series games, it explores music, human characters, moves, and fishing. Pokémon, as an intellectual property, boasts an abundance of content. Despite not acing that quiz, my ballot was solid and I felt I knew a similar amount about K-pop. This prompted me to consider whether K-pop, with its vast culture, could also serve as quiz material and if I was capable of reproducing a similar quiz for my friends.

My K-pop quiz consists of six questions, down from the original ten. I planned to have fewer questions mainly because I wanted to avoid intimidating potential participants. I also planned for the questions to be easier than lovemathboy’s, since I was writing for people who would probably be seeing this game format for the first time. Truthfully, I struggled to think of many more compelling questions or topics to include anyways. Regarding ubiquity, in the realm of K-pop, you do pick up bits of information beyond your immediate interests, primarily revolving around songs, idols, albums, and a handful of viral moments and memes. However, there are many more aspects that diehard fans are well-versed in regarding their favorite groups, but that aren’t as widely known in general pop culture, such as lyrics, idol personalities, physical albums, and B-sides.

With K-pop trivia, you could write thousands of questions like “what is the fandom name of ‘X,’” “the real name of ‘Y,’” or “name this single with precisely ten letters and starts with Z,” but those have little play—you either know it or you don’t. People who could answer those questions already know the topic because they follow those groups, so nobody is really gaining anything when playing. Writing my quiz was an exercise for exploring how permeable various aspects of K-pop are, even among dedicated fans. It was about identifying what aspects are widespread or viral enough that they’re known by more than the diehard followers of those specific acts. Instead of exploring an iceberg, it’s an exploration of the common language shared by the “collective fandom.” Much of K-pop culture is depth-related, where you accumulate extensive knowledge about your favorite groups and pick up bits here and there otherwise. I aimed to tap into the latter when composing the quiz. I also wanted to write questions that could be gettable from some provided context that could jog your memory. That way, you don’t immediately give up on a question if you don’t know it immediately.

Quiz

When writing the quiz, I set a few rules and goals as I brainstormed questions. I wanted to span as much of K-pop culture as possible with minimal overlap. I didn’t want to over-represent questions about songs, so I also wrote questions about the idols themselves, as well as albums. I also wanted to make sure that no answer would be correct for more than one question, and furthermore, minimize the amount of times a specific artist was repeated throughout the whole quiz. This would reduce the bias toward fans of a particular group. I’ll note that for my intended audience, I kept the more specific questions mostly about girl groups.

My general writing process was essentially to come up with the questions and then do research to explore how many possible answers there were to see if the question had potential. As I alluded to before, I ended up with six questions mainly because I couldn’t think of that many more interesting ones. I cut two questions from the quiz (a question about identifying lightsticks and one about survival show rankings), because I didn’t think they were that interesting compared to the others.

It was surprisingly challenging to come up with the first three open-ended questions, because you need to find a well-defined set. The sets also needed to be large enough that it would be hard to ace the question, but not too large as I didn’t want it to be overwhelming. I felt that 20-40 possible answers was a good ballpark (completely arbitrary). Initial ideas I considered, but dismissed after thinking about it for more than a moment, included topics like “groups with N members” or songs “with M characteristic” because such questions emphasize depth over breadth. I’m sure anyone could unearth an incredibly niche pointless answer, but that would undermine the value of those answers collectively (if everyone gets pointless, then the question has no impact on the game at all). Imposing constraints on the answer-space of the questions makes for a better game. There’s still depth, but it’s intentionally limited, keeping it fair.

Q1: SM idols

Name any debuted idol from SM Entertainment (former or current) whose stage name starts with the letter ‘S’ or ‘M’. Specifically SM Entertainment, and not its subsidiaries.

List of all correct answers¹

“SM idols” is a surprisingly ill-defined set, as reflected in my need to bloat the question with specifics. While there’s a general understanding of who qualifies, crafting a question without loopholes proves challenging! I’m not entirely certain if members of The Grace count as idols, but considering nobody guessed them anyway, it didn’t impact the results. The process involved digging through Wikipedia for SM groups, fact-checking numerous non-idol groups, and so forth. The question is relatively unbiased toward SM diehards (as opposed to if the question focused on other groups), given that SM groups consistently rank among the most popular, frequently spilling over to general K-pop-related media through commercials, hosting gigs, gossip, and whatnot.

The question went about as I expected; the most obscure idols were either among the oldest (members of Super Junior and The Grace) or the youngest (members of Riize). There were 20 possible correct answers, by my count, and the lowest scoring ballot also had the most correct answers, 13. The most answered idols were the members of SNSD, SM’s most famous girl group.

Q2: TWICE

Name any Korean-language single by TWICE.

List of all correct answers²

Twice’s singles provide a nicely defined and unambiguous set. The primary reason I stuck to Korean-language singles is to exclude the Japanese ones, as incorporating them would introduce unfairness. The added benefit of excluding English singles prevents double-indexing on their two English releases, which would be featured on the Billboard Hot 100, the subject of question 3. It’s pretty perfect, since their Korean discography holds a significant presence within general K-pop audiences without any crossover to the Billboard charts. Their discography’s ubiquity makes this question fairly unbiased when confined to Korean-language releases. While SNSD is another group with a prolific and widespread output, considering I already have a question about SM groups, indexing on Twice’s discography makes more sense. Additionally, Twice has greater public awareness when I wrote the quiz, making it a more engaging question in my opinion.

There were 20 possible correct answers here too, but unlike the previous question, I wasn’t as sure how each song other than the most and least obscure would rank. The most correct answers on a ballot was 18. Every correct answer was answered at least once, with “The Best Thing I Ever Did”, Twice’s forgotten Holiday-core single, achieving pointless. I wasn’t sure if anyone was going to answer it at all. Unsurprisingly, “TT,” the song that launched the group’s popularity, was the most common answer. A funny outcome was that several people had “Knock Knock” on their ballot, and each thought it would be among the most obscure. In reality, it wasn’t in the top 10 most obscure. I probably would have done the same, it’s the follow-up to “TT” and completely overshadowed by it. I guess it’s memorable for being unmemorable.

Q3: Billboard Hot 100

Name any song by a K-pop act that has made it onto the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Specifically, I will accept any song where the primary artist is a K-pop act.

List of all correct answers³

Question 3 is an exercise in identifying groups that have made a significant impact on mainstream US radio and naming their most popular songs. Additionally, anyone who has spent time on K-pop Twitter has likely come across chart updates. There is some trivia involved, such as remembering that Wonder Girls and Psy once charted. The question tends to lean towards bias for BTS fans, given that many of the songs are either by BTS or their members. However, for the specific audience I was writing for, this bias was welcomed, considering that everyone had a similar level of unfamiliarity with BTS’s discography.

By my count, there were 65 total possible correct answers. I was fortunate that there’s a Wikipedia page for “List of K-pop songs on the Billboard charts,” but I still sifted out songs where the K-pop artist was a featured artist. The nature of the pop charts ranking system in recent years meant that a lot of these 65 songs didn’t really chart for very long or at high positions. Stans front load their mass streaming efforts to get songs to chart, and the songs drop in rankings the next week. So as I mentioned before, guessing recent releases from big groups would be a pretty good strategy. The most correct answers on a ballot was 21 and that was their strategy.

The least obscure answers were a tie between BTS singles “Butter” and “Dynamite,” and viral TikTok hit “Cupid” by Fifty Fifty. All of these songs are among the top 5 for weeks on the chart. The most obscure correct guesses were previously alluded-to brief, unmemorable chart appearances by BTS, Lisa, Twice, Blackpink, and NewJeans. Surprisingly, PSY’s “Gentleman,” his follow-up to “Gangnam Style,” was pointless (“Gentleman” charted for 15 weeks and “Gangnam Style” for 31). As a result a few participants got pointless and overall, the scores were low for most participants, so it wasn’t too impactful a question. Regardless, I like this question because there is some strategy to it if you know how charts work.

Of the 65 possible answers, only 33 of them were guessed. I’m not surprised by this; 27 of the remaining 32 songs were single-week, low-position chart appearances mostly by BTS or their members’ solo songs. The notable misses were also BTS songs, but “Make it Right”, “Fake Love,” “IDOL ft. Nicki Minaj,” and “Like Crazy” by Jimin all charted for two to six weeks. The only other notable unguessed song was Pinkfong’s “Baby Shark,” charting for 20 weeks. Looking back, I don’t really think counting them a K-pop act was correct, but it didn’t matter since nobody had them on their ballot anyways. Plus it was fun trivia to include when sharing the quiz results.

Assessing the difficulty of the first three questions while writing was challenging, but I’m happy with the results. Each question yielded a few pointless answers, and there was a range of scores for each. There is no overlap between the first three questions, which is surprisingly elegant. I’m very happy with that. No SM artist has a Billboard Hot 100 entry (as of writing), and Twice’s only entries are English, despite their popularity among K-pop fans.

Q4: Debut songs

Each audio clip is from a debut song. Identify the song. Link to audio files (volume warning)

List of all correct answers⁴

For this question, I went with the theme of identifying the artist based on the initial moments of their career—your first impression of them. These snippets are all the first few seconds of their debut songs. I thought the theming was clever and it helped constrain the question from both the writing and solving side. Going through a playlist of debuts, it was interesting to hear how distinctive, or not distinctive some songs can be. The hardest part was finding songs I wanted to serve as more difficult questions, but without choosing no-name groups. I ended up using older songs, “AH” by After School (2009) and “FIRE” by 2NE1 (2009) for these. Truthfully, there were plenty of songs I could have chosen overall, and my primary consideration in selection were minimizing references to a specific group throughout the quiz and varying the release years to mitigate bias. This question provided much-needed flexibility for the subsequent ones. However, I violated my double-index rule by including an SM group with a member that was the correct answer to question 1, but I felt “Jopping” was too good to replace (its distinctively SuperM), especially since the quiz lacked representation of boy groups.

What surprised me the most was that “POP!” by Nayeon was the least obscure song; it wasn’t a song I personally heard very much of. I was also surprised that “Glass Bead” by GFriend was tied for most obscure—for exactly the opposite reason as “POP!” Other than that, the distribution of obscurity was as I had designed. If anything, I initially thought this question was too easy, because one of the first submitted ballots aced this question. This question turned out quite fair—no pointless answers, but everyone got different subsets of songs.

Q5: Album portmanteau

Each image is the left half and right half of two different albums that form a portmanteau with each other. (i.e. The end of the first answer is identical to the start of the second answer). Portmanteaux must overlap at least 2 letters. The first and last letters, as well as the enumeration, have been given to you.

List of all correct answers⁵

The album portmanteaus involve image identification, and they are challenging since you need to identify two albums per question—no partial credit. However, this difficulty is counteracted by the potential to guess one if you know the other, using wheel-of-fortune tactics. There are surprisingly few pairs that make for good questions, especially with the constraints I set for myself. There aren’t that many well-known album covers and album names with common starting and ending bigrams. I also avoided using any bigram more than once. And of course, I didn’t use the same group twice in one question.

Additionally, because of the first two questions, I didn’t use albums from SM groups (except for BoA, where I made an exception because being reminded of her didn’t significantly help with the other question) or Twice. This restriction was pretty huge. Fortunately, this question didn’t clash much with the Billboard question, as later Blackpink EPs/albums and NewJeans albums didn’t have portmanteau-friendly names. I didn’t end up with many other pairs on the cutting room floor, actually. Given the difficulty of finding pairs without repeating groups, I essentially went with the first ten that worked.

Due to the lack of flexibility in choosing the pairs, I was limited in how much of a difficulty curve I could bake into the question. I started by fixing what I figured was easiest (“KimLipStick”) and trickiest (“JohnTravoltaWannaBetter”). For the remaining ones, I aimed for a difficulty between those two and just hoped that they were gettable. I believe this question ended up well-calibrated, if slightly challenging. My predictions were correct, and I was relieved when nearly all of the pairs were gotten by more than one person. None of the participants got “JohnTravoltaWannaBetter,” but there were a few close guesses, and I think that’s okay. I knew it was difficult, but I really wanted to include it because that T-ARA album title is so iconic.

Q6: Idols from screenshots

Each picture is a screenshot with a particular idol removed. Name the missing idol.

List of all correct answers⁶

This question was the most challenging for participants and also the one that took the longest to write. The primary difficulty here lies in my criteria for “ubiquity.” The questions must be reasonable enough for a non-stan to answer, leading me to focus on memes, popular music videos, and very little else. Again, I faced constraints by deciding not to include SM idols, Twice, or music videos of the most popular songs featured on Billboard. This question would have been much easier to write without those constraints.

There are a lot of popular music videos, but during my research, it became evident that popularity alone wasn’t sufficient. These videos were viral or iconic, but the visuals rely heavily on the idol the shots focus on. Removing the idol from the image makes the rest of the shot unidentifiable. The budget of the music video has a lot to do with this. Many videos end up placing members on the same sets, with solo shots against the same background. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use these solo shots, even if iconic, as they weren’t unambiguously tied to a single idol.

Interestingly, although some detractors criticize Blackpink’s music videos for filming the members in separate rooms, and as a result they don’t feel like a “group,” I needed more groups to film their videos this way. In their music videos, solo scenes are unique; they’re filmed on different elaborate sets. When the idol is edited out, it’s still an identifiable image which works for this question. However, I couldn’t use recent Blackpink music videos due to their Billboard Hot 100 appearances. Ironically, although I initially considered using an iconic moment from Blackpink’s “As If It’s Your Last,” it turned out to be unambiguous for the same reasons mentioned earlier. This scene with Lisa against a yellow background is really recognizable but it’s unusable since the other members also have their own shot in front of it.

You’d assume that JYP groups or Le Sserafim music videos have usable scenes given their budget, but many don’t. Either the backgrounds are re-used for different members or the backgrounds are unmemorable and plain by themselves. One of the few exceptions, Ryujin of Itzy in the “ICY” MV, did make it into my quiz. In the case of the NMIXX music video, despite “O.O” featuring numerous memorable sets, they aren’t member-specific. The intended solve path for the one I ended up using was recognizing the viral moment or meme and connecting the lyric to the idol who sings it, rather than recalling the music video set and associating that scene with a member. This also applies to the Wonyoung skydiving scene, which is more of a meme than an easily identifiable solo scene in the MV.

One that made the cut was 2NE1’s “Lonely” MV, an old-school video with a clear storyline, where CL is the main character. I wanted the image to ask “Does this screenshot remind you of an MV?” which you would connect to 2NE1’s “Lonely” and get to CL, who is essentially the main focal point of the entire MV. The scene in question isn’t exactly unique but it’s meant to give clues to the MV’s story. It also looked old. I also ended up using a scene from a Blackpink MV which fit the criteria and is recognizable as the same scene used for the video thumbnail, and then a Sunmi MV. I didn’t necessarily think the Sunmi MV was iconic, but it includes a full moon in the frame, so the intention was to connect it to her through context clues.

A few other groups’ MVs were also usable, such as (G)I-dle’s. However, I had already planned to use Miyeon in the context of a presenter. I really wanted to include music shows in the question as they are culturally relevant to K-pop, resulting in Miyeon’s inclusion being fixed. I couldn’t use another emcee because it would have been unambiguous. I wanted to use a current hostess, since using a past one seemed too challenging. That left me with Miyeon, Tsuki, Moon Sua, Nana, or Sullyoon. Honestly, I didn’t use Tsuki, Moon Sua, or Nana because I didn’t perceive their show, Show Champion, as a major music show or as culturally relevant as M Countdown or Show! Music Core, so the choice was between Miyeon and Sullyoon, both well-known idols.

The context clues for this question would be the co-hosts who weren’t edited out, allowing viewers to pinpoint the timeframe and particular music show. It turns out I couldn’t use Sullyoon because the two other presenters at the time had previously hosted the show with Minju, right before Sullyoon’s tenure. Minju herself had a lengthy and memorable tenure as an MC, so it would have been ambiguous. Therefore, Miyeon was locked and I couldn’t use any (G)I-DLE MVs, even though they would have worked for the question.

For the other non-MV questions, I highlighted other culturally relevant aspects of K-pop: survival shows, fancams, and social media—using my own K-pop profile pic was more of an in-joke than anything though. The iconic Hani fancam is self-explanatory, and I liked how the way I present the screenshot in this format effectively conveys the hint that it’s a vertical video.

As for survival shows, the trick lies in using the graph to identify the idol, either by recalling their final placement or tracing their rankings throughout the show. Sejeong was known for consistently staying within the top two. Considering I had already incorporated references to Iz*One and post-Iz*One groups, I opted for a screenshot from Produce 101 instead of Produce 48. While determining the specific season is tricky, those screenshots are nonetheless unambiguous.

As I had mentioned, this question was the hardest. Two screenshots remained unidentified (Jennie and CL) and there were two pointless (Ryujin and Haewon). I’m a little surprised about Jennie, though, since her scene is the thumbnail. The others I’m not surprised about. They were all music video scenes that I suspected might be tricky, but hoped I was being paranoid. After all, these videos have tons of views. During the writing process, these four shots were the ones I spent the most time deliberating and convincing myself that someone could get them. It’s when I learned that, other than some exceptions, the cinematography of K-pop music videos just didn’t work well for this question, but I was close to finishing the quiz so I just called it good enough.

The most guessed image was a tie between Wonyoung’s scene where she’s jumping out of the airplane and Hani’s fancam. Sunmi was the third most guessed, so it seems that my clueing worked there.

Final Thoughts

A recurring theme in the writing process for the last three questions is that I intentionally made it more challenging for myself by imposing additional restrictions after creating the first three. My unassuming “no double-indexing” rule led to omitting the most popular groups or their most popular songs, all for a quiz meant to reflect popular culture. It was surprisingly difficult, but evidently still possible. There is still quite a lot of common ground outside of the most popular groups. For many fans, K-pop is more than just the songs, so I knew it wouldn’t be a comprehensive quiz without also touching on the non-music side, such as idols, memes, and tv shows. It was a challenge to distill all of these parts into a short quiz, but I had fun giving it a shot. I got a lot out of having to research the discographies of groups outside of the most well-known ones. In a time where I personally wasn’t keeping up with K-pop all that much, writing the quiz was a little nostalgic and helped me catch up on recent releases. I rewatched videos I hadn’t seen in a while. I watched a lot of music videos for the first time. I watched a lot of music videos 10+ times when picking out frames. And I watched the Jopping music video over 50 times, according to my Youtube Rewind (I have no shame).

Thanks to Ryan for proofreading/editing.

Last weekend I participated in the annual MIT Mystery Hunt, a puzzle-solving competition traditionally held on MIT’s campus during the MLK day long weekend. I had a great time this year between the puzzles I worked on, seeing with long-time friends, making new friends, and of course making it far into Mystery Hunt for the first time. It was the first time a team I was on received the Phonecall, warning us about our leading position during late Sunday night. We ended up finishing just 40 minutes after the tracking period, placing us about 9th, but I’m nonetheless very happy with how everything turned out.

This year was my fourth Mystery Hunt and the first time back on campus since my first Mystery Hunt in 2020. For the last two years, the event was online-only, so I was really excited to attend in person again with more experience in the puzzlehunt hobby. I had clearer expectations about the hunt, was more confident about my puzzle-solving, and eager to contribute to the team.

Expectations

First, the expectations. Every year, the group that hosts the MIT Mystery Hunt changes—as tradition, it is the responsibility of the winning team to write and organize the next event. Last year, the team “Palindrome” hosted a book-themed event, which was won by “teammate.” Palindrome’s last writing effort was way before my time, with the team changing significantly since then, so I essentially had no idea what to expect for their Mystery Hunt. Conversely, I was extremely excited for teammate’s Mystery Hunt because unlike Palindrome, teammate had recently organized two independent puzzlehunts, Teammate Hunts 2020 and 2021, both of which I adored for their memorable puzzles, unique features (including a virtual game system), and incredible art production value.

To get this out of the way, anybody who was involved in this year’s Mystery Hunt, solver or writer, knows that teammate’s event did not go as planned. Not in the ways that I mentioned above, but because of the combination of ambitious puzzles—many of which were very time-consuming because of their size and difficulty—and the sheer number of these puzzles, the event ran much longer than it should have. Logistically, the winner should have been crowned before 5 pm Sunday, 52 hours after the start, which was the original time teammate said they would shut down HQ (actively organizing the hunt by answering hints and whatnot). Instead, the first team finished at around 4 am Monday, after dozens of free answers letting you skip puzzles and hints on the final metapuzzles which were bottlenecking close-to-the-finish-line teams. By this point, there are numerous writings about this, both from solvers and writers perspectives, so there isn’t much I want to add to the discourse.

I have been on the organizing side of much lower stakes time-estimate mispredictions while running several UMD Puzzlehunts, including UMD Puzzle Hunt 2021, so I know how stressful it can be on the running side. In some early UMD Puzzle Hunts, no teams would finish, or few would with generous hints. We were lucky with UMD Puzzle Hunt 2021, since running longer/being harder than advertised ended up being a good thing, landing in a sweet spot for substantive puzzles, with basically no downside (we did have to answer hints for much longer than expected). In the end, I think teammate handled their situation as best as they could have and I appreciate all of their effort during the weekend. I’ll share some overarching things I liked during the hunt (puzzle-specific comments later).

• The art was great, as usual. I especially liked the puzzle factory and all of the AI rounds.
• The interactions with MATE were a really smart way of being fed the story. I was always engaged with reading and answering the polls.
• I think the unlocked-puzzle width during the middle and later parts of the hunt was well-balanced.
• Logistics were all handled perfectly. The events all started without delay, I never had issues with puzzle-pickups, hints had a quick turnaround time, and we had several checkups which I really appreciated.

Even though Mystery Hunt was more exhausting than I planned for (I had to attend the TRB Annual Meeting earlier that week, flying to Boston straight from it) and I didn’t even get to dive into some of the interesting-but-time-consuming-looking puzzles, want to reiterate I still had a great time. This is partly to do with the puzzles, which I’ll talk about later, and partly due to solving with an entirely new team this year, TSBI Swarm. TSBI Swarm, totaling around 55 solvers, much smaller than its previous iterations, much larger than Halibut that Bass, the team I solved with for the previous three years, adopted me, Angel, and five other friends from “Team Copypasta.” There were numerous other puzzlehunt-regular yet TSBI first-timers, too. Knowing this, I had higher expectations than previous years for how much of the event we would be able to see and finish. Even with a larger overall team, we only had about a dozen solvers who were on-site, the rest remote, so I could tell it would still be an intimate solving experience on campus. And other than my own friends, I didn’t know anyone else on the team so it was nice to meet some new people. MIT guest wifi blocking Discord VC aside, I felt that the team synergy was pretty good despite being split remote and onsite. We had a livestream of HQ and I heard plenty of different voices over VC over the weekend.

For next year, like Palindrome, I don’t know what to expect out of the winning team, TTBNL. As always, I hope their event presents some interesting round structures and novel ideas.

Contributions

At the very start of the hunt, I was mostly aimlessly hopping in and out of sheets since there weren’t many puzzles to look at. Thus, I mostly contributed to researching and data collection. It wasn’t until Sunday until I felt like I contributed a lot myself. On top of puzzles, I went to the Art, Café, and Dance event. I really enjoyed Art and Dance, with Dance being really hilarious and clever.

I also found myself in the position of looking for puzzles to use our free answers on. This was a pretty stressful task, since we didn’t know when HQ would close and wanted to see as much as possible, hopefully getting to the final runaround. At first we were good about announcing which puzzles were in consideration for free answers, but eventually it broke down when the rate of identifying/agreeing on using scrip was basically slower than the rate of accruing scrip. I don’t necessarily regret using as many free answers as we did or on the puzzles we used them on in particular, since it was evident we needed all the help we could get, but unfortunately a lot of free answer-usage ended up being poorly communicated.

Now we can talk about some of the more memorable contributions. I’ll do this roughly chronologically, but it’s honestly all a blur.

Scicabulary: Instantly, I recognized LEAKFAST and FOON as reverse portmanteaus since we once did a puzzle that used this at UMD Puzzle Club.

Art Event: Angel and I were excited for the Art Event as we both do/did a lot of it. We were joined by two other TSBI members. In the first task, we were in charge of giving origami instructions with a list of banned words. This was probably the most challenging of the three tasks for us, since we had trouble figuring out the diagrams in hte first place. The second and third tasks went more smoothly and I was pretty happy with what we ended up making in the end.

Formula Deluxe: I got the staff ghosts aha, and started to help extract, but left the tedium of measuring the racetracks to my more patient team members.

Café Event: I went to do Café with Matt. For me, it was the first thing I did after waking up, while for Matt, this was near the end of his night shift. At first it wasn’t clear what was going on in the event; that it was supposed to be an escape room. It took a few hints from the organizers to get us (and it seems a lot of other teams) on the right track. Since the room itself filled up, we were sitting at a table doing the puzzles outside—making it harder for us to realize what we were meant to use as puzzle data. The puzzles and concept of an escape room was neat, but it ran much longer than the other events I went to. However, it felt like I was just doing more puzzles. I did appreciate the coffee and hot chocolate provided, though.

Exhibit of Colors: From the three subpuzzles, I got the aha for how to solve the rest of the puzzle, which was a fun throwback. I’m always especially happy to solve a physical puzzle, so they no longer taunt us sitting in the room.

Noise Apparatus: I broke into the puzzle by getting matching words to the fourth equation, and stayed to help finish this puzzle. I think this puzzle was a nice difficulty level with a good theme.

Tissues: After Angel spent the better part of the whole day identifying the tissue samples, I helped figure out how to read the message from tissues. We ended up needing a hint to figure out how to construct the logic puzzle. Nonetheless, this was another physical puzzle that we conquered.

Subterranean Secrets: Me, Angel, Matt, and Andrew went down into the tunnels which was a neat break from sitting all day. We didn’t end up finishing the puzzle, but I did like the riddles.

Dance Event: I was the only volunteer from TSBI Swarm for this event. This was actually more fun than I thought—I had no idea how to dance or what to expect. I ended up roleplaying as one of several Hooded Grebes, using my neck muscles to copy their mating dance. At the end of a tiring Saturday, this event reenergized me. I also met some solvers on a different team who recognized me by my t-shirt, which had the name of our high school.

Second-Rate Tiles: I did very little work on this one, but I spent some time before going to bed helping fill out the data and reading out the cluephrase.

Reactivation: In this puzzle, I helped solve the redactle and spotted an error in our EYE recreation. We solved this Sunday morning, with the lights still off in our room. teammate later told us that because of this, they didn’t have the opportunity to turn off the lights as they left at the end of the interaction.

Laugh: A team mate asked for help after they did basically all of the work and so I spotted the final extract :)

Lost at Sea: I got the break-in by interpreting the years and flags, matching them to the ships. I was totally lost on how to pair the ships or order them, but I spotted the answer from what we extracted.

Space Modules: I contributed to the solve by finding the rebuses, spotting the missing letters, and then spotting the rebuses from the unused letters. I think this was a really cool way of using answer formatting.

Period of Wyrm: After helping pair the answers, I also helped by verifying the pairs and getting the extract.

Fountain: I worked on this after-the-fact, as I was told it was something I should have looked at. I really liked the core idea and the extraction aha was neat. The research step took a lot of time for me since it seemed unconstrained—speaking as someone very familiar with the subject matter.

Reflecting on my solves this year is pretty helpful, because I can see that I did make some meaningful contributions, but can improve in a lot of areas. I noticed that during Mystery Hunt, more so than the smaller scale hunts, I have a shorter attention span on puzzles, often hopping around seeing if I can make near-immediate ahas. This is probably because I spend a lot of time staring at metas instead of feeders during Mystery Hunt. In at least one case this year, I called for a free answer when if I had just taken the time to read what was in the sheet for more than five minutes, I probably could have made some headway. One thing I can try to do in the future is put in more effort to help unstuck a puzzle by understanding the work done up until the current point. Writing this post only made me more excited for upcoming events and TTBNL’s Mystery Hunt.

Once again, thanks to teammate for making this really cool and high-effort event. The story was really neat, I liked the OC’s for once, and all the new tech/interactive portions were amazing. I’d have to say it is one of my favorite puzzle hunts I have done.

Nov 13: Bpuzzled UMD

The 2020 COVID pandemic happened, so I wasn’t hopeful that I would win another trip to New York City, but was nonetheless surprised when I learned Bpuzzled would return. After doing many puzzlehunts from that spring until fall, I felt way more confident than before. Duck Gizzards, an essentially all-UMD student team, began finishing in the top 20 of popular hunts, so I expected to have a shot at taking first at Bpuzzled. It was also my final year at UMD, so I wouldn’t have another chance.

For this year, Josh and Steven returned as team members, while Grant (another UMD Puzzlehunt writer and regular Duck Gizzards teammate) took Ryan’s spot, since he graduated. Bpuzzled kept the same format: you initially start with 3 puzzles and unlock 1 more for every solve. The answer checker confirms partials (and more), and you are given canned hints every 10 minutes after the puzzle is unlocked. There would be 8 puzzles and 1 metapuzzle that you would have to solve in the 3-hour time limit.

Puzzles

Steven and I got to work on Step by Steppe, which was a simple criss-cross puzzle where each entry was a pair of homophones. On this puzzle I used the answer checker a lot to confirm my entries. Josh completed Dance Like an Egyptian, a puzzle visually cluing famous dances (e.g. YMCA and the Moonwalk), while Grant got started on Rogue Gallery, where he jotted down some mashed up the names of paintings and Batman villains. I joined him, helping ID the villains, but got stuck on the extraction, so we moved on to another puzzle, waiting for its canned hints to come along.

I started to work on Spill the Tea with Grant while Josh and Steven worked on Textris. Spill the Tea clued the names of Drag Queens using some descriptions written like they were for tea. At some point, I returned to Rogue Gallery (after receiving several canned hints) to finish off the extraction, which unlocked Mirror Mishap. After completing Spill the Tea and Textris, we unlocked Grinding Your Teeth and Plant One. Grant already started working on Mirror Mishap, so I started working on Grinding Your Teeth, a word puzzle with letters placed on the teeth of various gears.

Some time while I was working on Grinding Your Teeth, my teammates solved Mirror Mishap and we unlocked the metapuzzle. I dropped my puzzle—I could already tell it’d take too long—and went to look at the meta. The puzzle gave you a grid which was a key for a pigpen-like cipher (clearly inspired by pigpen, but it was their own custom code). Each answer was seven letters long, and the presentation suggested that the letters at each index were assigned a color from ROYGBIV. Then you needed to color in the given grid of letters and decode the shapes using their cipher. We didn’t take too long to figure out the meta, but with two missing answers, it took us some time fiddling around to get the answer to fall out. With the solve in about 2 hours, we punched our ticket to the virtual Bpuzzled finals.

Feb 26: Bpuzzled Finals

The hosts started by sending everyone a Zoom meeting link, and during the competition they would split every team into a breakout room (although my team ended up hopping into a Discord call). All I could see were some people’s names, so I couldn’t really get a sense of which schools were present or how many teams there were. The writing team introduced themselves for a little bit, showed us the instruction video that outlined the format, and sent us off to our breakout rooms.

Recalling my experience from last year, I reminded my team that we could take advantage of the answer checker. Even though it rate-limits guesses at 1 per 2 second, there was no penalty and there is a lot to gain from confirming even the smallest parts of a puzzle. We could also use the hint system to our advantage, by moving on to the next puzzle the moment you get stuck, since the pre-written hints will eventually unlock. And lastly, that we should all try to think about our answers as we solve and prioritize the metapuzzle when we unlock it.

I felt pretty confident, knowing that our team had experience with Bpuzzled’s format and having competed in over a dozen more puzzlehunts than last year.

Puzzles

The first three puzzles were Bonds of the Heart, Coaster Connection, and Headlines. I started to work on Headlines with Grant, solving clues that gave words that either had the substring HEAD or LINE. After an indexing step, we finished and were off to start Bonds of the Heart. My teammates working on Coaster Connection started filling out the crossword clues but ended up getting stuck on the extraction. I told them to move on to the new puzzle, Color Filter Tester, while waiting for the canned hints to come up. Coaster Connection ended up wanting us to write letters rotated (as if they were aligned to a rollercoaster track), which we completely missed even though it was heavily clued by the presentation. We were still leading, so I wasn’t really concerned.

Bonds of the Heart gave a word search grid with rows that you had to reorganize. The given left-most column gave a cluephrase, and implied the right-most column would do the same. From here I threw the left-most letters into an anagram solver and was able to mostly reconstruct the grid. In the word search, you found words (which were clued) that were parts of sets of things that included hearts—SPADE, DIAMOND, and CLUB for example. Then you would find the names of each set in the grid (SUITS), pointing you to the answer.

Grant started helping with Color Filter Tester as we unlocked Shooting Hoops. Steven and I jumped right on Shooting Hoops, as it was a puzzle about some NBA games and we are both basketball fans. The puzzle gave the scores of some games and robots whose initials were the same as one player on each team during those games. Drawing lines connecting the box scores and robots, we obtained semaphore giving the letters AFGTT, which didn’t anagram to anything nice. We sorted by various things, then finally game dates, which gave us FGATT. It didn’t look good, but I threw it into the answer checker and it told us that we needed to interpret that as “Field Goal Attempts.” Neither of us had ever seen it abbreviated that way but solved the puzzle and moved on. Glancing at the leaderboard, I noticed we gained a decent lead in solve counts over the other teams, so I knew we had good pace as long as we didn’t get stuck.

Meanwhile, my teammates solved Color Filter Tester, a puzzle about removing letters from words using certain sets of letters (e.g. Roman Numerals). They also started working on Homemade Caesar Salad right after, which was a criss-cross. I helped my teammates figure out the extraction, which involved Caesar shifting some letters by resistor colors, which could be related to cutting board colors. Some teammates started working on the last two puzzles, Prank Bit Shank Fit Fishtank and Double Vision, a wordplay puzzle and a Pokémon puzzle respectively, but when we solved Homemade Caesar Salad, we all jumped to the metapuzzle.

The metapuzzle was mostly pure, the shell provided an order but there was no other given info. I didn’t figure anything about the feeders before we unlocked the meta, so I tried to scan the flavortext for any possible clues. My teammates also stared for a while and I started googling words in the flavortext. I wasn’t desperate yet, but since there wasn’t a penalty, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to start guessing related terms. Best case scenario: the answer checker could confirm something, bailing us out. And it did. I was shocked that typing in something as conspicuous as KEYHOLE (in a puzzle themed after unlocking padlocks) would actually come up with anything. It confirmed a subanswer that I was meant to extract out of a feeder, giving me all the context I needed to piece the mechanic together. For each answer, you could replace a letter with KEY, to form a word. We extracted a letter from each feeder, giving us a hyperlink to a final clue. Solving this gave us the final answer and secured a first place finish in about 1 hour and 45 minutes. I was happy that we won, but more than that, I was relieved we didn’t get walled on any puzzles.

Retrospective

After finishing Bpuzzled, we sat in our Discord call, waiting for the competition to end. Solving the meta locked us out of the puzzle page, so we couldn’t see the leaderboard anymore to watch other teams progress. A member of the writing team hopped into our breakout room to congratulate us and give us a choice among a selection of prizes (we all took the Nintendo Switches we missed out on last year). When the competition ended, they had a short ceremony announcing the prize winners, followed by an author Q&A session.

Similar to the previous year’s Bpuzzled events, I thought the puzzles were well-made with a couple neat ideas. The meta for the finals was clean, and there weren’t any puzzles I was unhappy about. During the finals they started to rely on the answer checker a bit too much to clarify some unclear steps (many weren’t your typical sparse “Keep Going!”, but more descriptive). However, within the context of a hunt aimed at beginners, it worked for Bpuzzled.

On a separate note, many of these puzzles from both years incorporate significant amounts of art, which I really like because it prevents all the puzzles from looking plain or uniform. Personally, I think there could be an overall style guide to make the hunt more cohesive—the font choices are different from puzzle to puzzle, even if it doesn’t add to the theme, for example—but every author puts in some effort to stylize their puzzle, so it gives the impression that there’s a lot of variety and texture to the hunt overall.

Recruiting event puzzlehunts are naturally limited in their scope, since their audience is mostly people unfamiliar with puzzlehunts. Thus, the puzzles end up at best tropey, relying on codes and ciphers, or at worst unfair and frustrating, if written by an equally inexperienced team. However, they do serve as an introduction to puzzlehunts for many students, occupying a specific niche, despite being unavailable to the general public. I’ve been pretty invested in the topic of writing “beginner” puzzles ever since writing for UMD Puzzlehunt, so it’s interesting to study how the runners of recruiting events approach writing a puzzlehunt for beginners, even if they mostly end up using overdone mechanics. I hope these events continue to get support from the companies that sponsor them, since they can really benefit the hobby.

Writing these posts made me realize how different my approach to and experience doing puzzlehunts is nowadays. In general, my team (Duck Gizzards folks plus a few new members) is very conservative about guesses—and I don’t really like to backsolve unless we have a pretty confident guess and made a serious attempt at a forward solve. (However, if the Bpuzzled-style answer checker system made its way into an online hunt, I’m sure we’d spam it.) I’m also pretty apathetic to my team’s ranking in online hunts—I never visit the leaderboard page until after we finish. I still care about improving my own solving ability and finishing as fast as possible, but the latter mostly so that I don’t get distracted after the first weekend that hunts start on.

Thanks for reading this two-part post about some hunts you didn’t do. Thanks to Ryan for providing feedback on these posts. Here’s a bonus write-up:

Bonus: APT/Mastercard Puzzle Tournament

I’m not sure when the first one was, but Applied Predictive Technologies (APT) also held puzzlehunts for college students. In 2019, this became the Mastercard Puzzle Tournament (after APT was acquired). These were competitions only between teams within a school, and I never kept the earlier puzzles, so there isn’t much I remember about them other than doing really poorly my first two years. They didn’t hold a competition in 2020, but in 2021 they held a virtual event where it was a competition with other schools. I did keep these puzzles, since it was a PDF.

I don’t think this event was well-advertised to other schools, since the pool of colleges and teams was pretty small. I ended up teaming with Josh and Jesse (a friend who had done puzzles before, but doesn’t do them as frequently).

Since this hunt was just given as a PDF, I started by staring at the meta puzzle page for the first few minutes. There were 12 feeder puzzles, each marked with a difficulty level, so we all started working independently. I looked for the easy pickings, first working on Time to Escape, a standard semaphore puzzle and Pizza Pi, a puzzle that had you manipulate tangram pieces. I printed out Puzzle Pi and spent most of my time trying to recall that they were called “tangrams,” so I could google the shape formations. Jesse started working on Five Fillings, which had a bank of words minus their vowels. I hopped in to help figure out that the extraction involved binary and went back to looking at the untouched puzzles. Josh worked on Chopped, a puzzle cluing fruit and vegetable puns. Then we worked on Hot Cross Puns, another pun puzzle that had us enter the words in a criss-cross and solve for the extract positions using minesweeper clues.

Jesse moved on to do Note-o-gram, a nonogram, and Josh started on Labyrinth, a puzzle where given some images of the interior, you had to spatially orient a 3D sketch of a house. I thought this one was pretty unique, since it was essentially a visual logic puzzle. I went to look at the metapuzzle with 5/12 answers and was able to make headway, placing our answers on the given grid. Josh solved Labyrinth and gave me just enough letters I needed to pull out the answer.

We ended up getting first, and backsolved all but one remaining puzzle, a duck conundrum style puzzle. Josh volunteered to work on it and earned us a 100% completion before the time ran out. Another UMD team with Grant, who teamed with Sam (Duck Gizzards member and UMD Puzzlehunt author) and one of his friends, got second place. The first place prize was a $100 prepaid Mastercard.

The puzzles we solved were nothing special yet solid, but the meta included some literal red herrings in the form of symbols of fish along with numbers that you actually used to extract. The symbols weren’t meant for anything except being red herrings. Although it didn’t impede us, I’m not a fan of that choice. At some point afterwards, we also solved Hexorflow, which required reading hex codes as words (using the numbers as letters in various ways). The parsing on this step was a bit tough without hints confirming the step, especially because you needed to concatenate codes together to get some instructions. On the other hand, I think Labyrinth was really memorable, since the main solving didn’t rely on typical beginner puzzlehunt tropes. Even though it was rated as the most difficult puzzle, I feel like its barrier to entry was low, which could make it a good puzzle to introduce to people.

Thanks to Ryan for proofreading/editing.

In 2019, I was still pretty new to puzzlehunts and wouldn’t really call myself competitive—the only online competitions I had done were Puzzle Potluck 2 and MUMS 2019¹. However, I did do some localized in-person hunts like DASH, DCPHR, and Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge (CPC) in 2018. CPC was the highlight of my freshman year; and after coming in fourth within UMD, I became obsessed with puzzles. I couldn’t wait until next year’s CPC to challenge the spot for first at UMD and see how I stacked up against other college teams. The prospect of competing against other college students was more exciting to me than other events, since I felt the pool of teams was more relatable, experience-wise. I also have friends who were more casual, so they preferred in-person events to online competitions.

Unfortunately, in 2019, Microsoft CPC was canceled, leaving this niche completely empty. I would just have to accept that there wouldn’t be any restricted competitions. Luckily, Bloomberg decided to get into running puzzlehunts aimed for college students the next school year, calling their events Bpuzzled. Unlike CPC, Bpuzzled consists of two events. The first Bpuzzled is local, held at different institutions throughout the year. The first place team at each university wins an expenses-paid trip to New York City and gets to compete at the Bpuzzled Finals held at Bloomberg’s Midtown Manhattan office².

Since Bpuzzled is exclusive to certain college students and the finals is limited to each college’s winners, many members of the puzzlehunt community will never experience these events, meant for about 100 students each. Here, I’ll recount my experience for anyone who wants to live through these events vicariously. Unfortunately, most of these puzzles were not made public³, so there’s no link to them, and I won’t reproduce them here. I did keep an archive of them, so ask me if you want to see a particular one.

Oct 27: Bpuzzled UMD

Having hosted several on-campus UMD Puzzlehunts, I was pretty familiar with anyone who was into puzzles. So even without too much solving experience, I was pretty confident that I could win against other UMD students. I was on a team with Josh and Ryan, UMD Puzzlehunt writers and two regular members of Duck Gizzards, my team for online hunts. We also had Steven, a close friend who frequently attended UMD Puzzle Club meetings.

Bpuzzled was only live for three hours, so a lot of it was a blur (I’m also writing this three years late), but I’ll try to recap my solving experience and the puzzles.

On the day of the event, teams gathered in the Charles Carroll Room at Stamp, UMD’s student union building. Bpuzzled got started right away, without any introduction about Bloomberg as a company at all. Several stacks of pizza boxes, ordered for the 80-or-so participants, stood at the front of the room while we all watched a short instruction video about how to register our team, submit answers, etc. The video also mentioned that the answer checker would confirm partials and even answers to individual things like crossword clues—a feature I have never seen used anywhere else. Additionally, prewritten (a.k.a. canned) hints are automatically given out every 10 minutes after a puzzle is unlocked. They also gave out cardstock sheets that had all the common encodings on it (e.g. Braille, Binary), so we figured the puzzles would make heavy use of them. Other than that, we had no idea what to expect or how many puzzles there would be.

Puzzles

The puzzles were all provided through their website, which had some cute art that made up their puzzle selection “map.” You initially started with three puzzles, Pasta Cheese, Please!; Green Energy; and Silence. Each puzzle also comes with a food (some text near where you would select the puzzle) and a destination. I split off from Ryan and Steven to do some puzzles with Josh.

Pasta Cheese, Please! was a puzzle about filling in the blanks to puns that used names of pasta.

Did you know caterpillars are genetically nearly identical to their parents? You might say an apple doesn’t _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ from the tree

I remember getting the above pun pretty quickly, and eventually getting 7 out of the 10 puns before using the given indices to get a cluephrase. Overall I thought it was pretty cute and holds up decently. I remember abusing the answer checker on this one, throwing pasta shapes at the wall and seeing if any would stick.

We moved on to Silence, a puzzle about silent letters in words. It took us a bit to break into this puzzle since the words were clued with images and we weren’t confident enough in the ones we did get. Meanwhile, Ryan and Steven solved Green Energy, a puzzle that encoded braille using the letters of 6 8-letter words.

After every solve, you would unlock one more puzzle. Our next puzzles were Boat Tour, Separated, and Ocean Operation. I ended up working on Separated after finishing up Silence. Ryan and Steven had done some work on it, then Ryan went to start Boat Tour. Separated was presented as a pair-matching puzzle between rebus-style clues about collective names of animals. Josh and Ryan then solved Boat Tour, a puzzle that crossword clued USS ships which provided peg locations on a grid from the Battleship board game.

Ocean Operation provided some colored grids (presented as flags on a boat) that you had to transform using some given mathematical equations. I figured that the colors were all resistor color codes, so Josh and I spent quite some time trying to match equations with each grid, trying to form valid naval flags to read out the answer. We didn’t notice until pretty late that each equation only used one type of operation, providing PEMDAS as the order.

After solving Boat Tour and Separated, we unlocked Brazilian Bricklayers and Pathfinder, which Ryan and Steven started looking at. However, we unlocked the meta right after solving Ocean Operation, so we all jumped to that instead. The meta turned out to use the foods that came with every puzzle as an order. It was a pretty simple meta, consisting of placing the answers in a grid across and reading some ingredient names down. Reading the first letter of the ingredients in order of their length gave the final answer. However, for some reason one of the ingredients they wanted us to use was a feeder answer. We were extremely lucky that Ryan guessed the final answer while still missing the final ingredient, or else we might have been stuck long while.

With the meta solve, we got first place in about 1 hour and 45 minutes. We had some now-cold pizza and waited for the event to finish. If you weren’t keeping track, the total puzzle count was 8 feeders and 1 meta.

Feb 21: Bpuzzled Finals

Bloomberg provided the four of us with Amtrak tickets to New York City and individual hotel rooms for two nights. The day of the competition, we walked to the Bloomberg office, getting lost while trying to find the front entrance of the building. They held all of the students in a large room, each team given their own table and each student given their own notepad, pen, and code sheet. Between the UMD event and finals, I participated in my first Mystery Hunt and MLP: Puzzles are Magic. I certainly felt it was possible to win, but not totally confident after seeing students from other schools that I thought would be competitive, such as CMU and MIT, who had their own established puzzlehunt culture. In the front of the room there was a table with several Nintendo Switches, the first prize. There was also a big safe, which we presumed we would have to open during the finale.

Puzzles

The format was similar to the first event. The hunt started with 3 unlocked puzzles: Student Exchange, A Nutritious Meal, and One Koi Two Koi. I ended up jumping into One Koi Two Koi, while the rest of my team did parts of A Nutritious Meal, a virtual jigsaw puzzle. I ended up staring at my puzzle for way too long without progress, resorting to help from the canned hints that appeared every 10 minutes. In between waiting for the hints, I helped my team finish off their puzzle. One Koi Two Koi consisted of three of fish-themed subpuzzles presented as a simplistically drawn 6-page storybook. Eventually with enough canned hints I solved One Koi Two Koi, while Josh completed Student Exchange.

After solving a puzzle, an image cluing something would appear next to the solved puzzle. We didn’t know what to think of them yet, so we moved onto our next puzzles, A Vibrant Collection, Robot Labs, and Worm Search. I started working on Worm Search, which was a word search, but the grid was all numbers. I was also pretty lost on this one and needed hints to push my way through. At some point, Robot Labs, an interactive puzzle, was solved, and we unlocked News That Strikes a Chord. At this point, we were still in first, but I kept fumbling my way around Worm Search until Ryan and Steven solved A Vibrant Collection which unlocked Alphabet Soup Kitchen. I quickly hopped onto the new puzzle, leaving Ryan and Steven to finish off Worm Search for us.

I worked with Josh on Alphabet Soup Kitchen, which was easily the largest puzzle of the set. Even though we just needed one more solve to unlock the metapuzzle, we figured we might as well start on Alphabet Soup Kitchen. It was a wordplay puzzle, but consisted of 90 clues, taking us quite a bit of time to solve. When I checked the leaderboard, we were no longer in first, but while working on Alphabet Soup Kitchen, Ryan and Steven solved Worm Search, unlocking the meta. However, I let them focus on the meta as Josh and I were making good progress on our puzzle, thinking that an extra answer couldn’t hurt. After finishing Alphabet Soup Kitchen, Josh and I moved onto the meta, where we ended up getting walled, not sure what to make of the extra images that were given after each solve. While still stuck, I saw that UC Berkeley had finished and taken the first prize. I didn’t even get the chance to feel demoralized or dejected; all that I could think about was that I had to solve this puzzle and at least finish. Eventually, we were able to figure out the connection between the images and our answers—they shared the same length and we needed to use the fact that all the images clued something with a common substring. We even backsolved our only missing puzzle, making us the only team to solve every puzzle.

We finally finished the meta, prompting a writing team member to hand us a code for the safe. Ryan ran ahead and started cracking the safe as we all followed behind. After what seemed like an eternity, we finally opened the safe revealing some congratulatory second-place certificates. The prize for second place was a $50 Chipotle gift card.

Retrospective

At the time, I was pretty salty that we placed second, and not just because the prize for first place was a Nintendo Switch. Even though I didn’t go in thinking we’d get first, being so close to first made it somewhat painful. Given that my own solving pace was only slightly faster than the hint-unlock pace, I ended up a little disappointed in myself, too. It was pretty regrettable that we didn’t all focus on the meta right as we unlocked it (if not before): a hard lesson learned.

I know first hand that running any puzzlehunt takes a ton of passion and effort, probably much more than a typical recruiting event, so Bpuzzled really exceeded my expectations—especially because the puzzles were written fairly. While you could always expect to see the common encodings and pretty simple mechanics, I think the puzzles are good for getting beginners into puzzles. Out of these two events, Ocean Operation and Alphabet Soup Kitchen were the most memorable puzzles for me. Ocean Operation had some neat math while Alphabet Soup Kitchen was well-constructed. I think the writing team does a good job accounting for the target audience. Both the generous answer checker and flood of hints ensures that teams actually finish within the relatively short 3-hour time limit and aren’t stuck forever on the 3 puzzles they have open at any given point.

Overall, the hunt was really fun. They fed us a lot of dinner (more pizza plus a buffet), provided us with drinks (alcoholic for those of age), and gave us a tour of the office building. After the event, my team visited the MOMA, caught our train back to Maryland the next day, and anticipated next year’s Bpuzzled events.

Thanks to Ryan for proofreading/editing.