Bpuzzled Recap Part 1: 2019-2020
What’s Bpuzzled?
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.