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Mystery Hunt 2010. My favorite hunt so far.
2010: I was the first person to see the answer phrase for Banner Headline, but that's about all the credit I deserve for it. I found almost none of the words in the word search, and I wasn't the person who saw how the puzzle worked in the first place. I loved how we started off the hunt with such a zippy solve from a large group -- on a word search, too, where group solving is fairly difficult.
2009: I really loved The Zyzzlvarian Holovid Institute, because it was basically a mini-round in a puzzle. At one point, almost everyone in our room was working on a section of it, and it felt really satisfying, like a round that we just zipped through and solved. We had a couple of false starts but it was overall really satisfying. The only thing I would have done differently is treat it as a round in our webapp, because it would have been slightly easier to manage who was working on which sections. But we didn't really have time, because we went through it so quickly, and it was fairly easy to share information about what we were finding just by shouting across the room in organized fashions.
2000: Watching![[livejournal.com profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aspartaimee knit Quick Paws all afternoon was a thing of beauty. Otherwise I didn't work much on many of these. I came in late-- after tons of amazing work by gemini6ice-- on Side by Side by Side (after taking a nap, I think), and about 15 minutes after I had the epiphany that this wasn't a context-free logic puzzle (cued by sylvanstargazer?) and started searching for the appropriate trivia, my team solved the meta and I stopped looking. I fought with Bits and Pieces for a really long time; I'm looking forward to the answer for that one getting posted.
1983: I came in very late on Psychic Bonds, came up with a theory, wrote some Perl to test my answer, and proved instead that I was wrong. It's not very exciting, except in the usual "looked over somebody's shoulder and had some bad ideas" sense, but it is the first time I ever wrote code to solve a puzzle, so I feel good about that. Even though it didn't solve the puzzle. That is all I looked at in 1983. My only other comment about this round is that, as the IIF archivist, I'm still not sure how I am going to store Building a Mystery.
1952: I spent a lot of time filling out the wiki for For Whom the Bella Tolls, listing all the things it wasn't. Whentahnan mentioned to me how it worked a week later when he figured it out, I was very facepalm. On the other hand, Temptations was one of my favorite puzzles, just because it was so well constructed. lapak, B, and I worked on that one in a mixed local/remote group, and we just zipped right through it, epiphany falling after tidy epiphany, each of us contributing seamlessly to a quick and graceful solution.
1926: Need to Take Someone out really kicked my ass. Oncelorelei_sakai recognized in one of our trivia answers the name of how he and I had arrived at the hunt on Friday morning, the theme fell quickly into place. What we never did with this one was Solve the Damn Puzzle, mostly because we were just so tired and exasperated that we weren't willing to do what we were pretty sure was the final step.
1903: Other people did all the work for Sorry, I Love These Big Wrong Musical Numbers, and then they came up with an excellent -- but mistaken -- theory about how the Solve the Damn Puzzle step worked.marginaliana, N, and I brute forced for several hours in a lovely mixed local/remote chat, thereby proving the theory was incorrect. At which point N asked a question about the number formatting in chat, lorelei_sakai responded by picking out some letters as he read the chat window over my shoulder, and I shouted the answer phrase at the top of my lungs and ran into the main solving room to call it in. I was so tired and punchy that I just giggled for about 15 solid minutes. It was awesome. Woofers and Tweeters, on the other hand, is a puzzle for which I was almost no help at all, but was one of the many puzzles for which it was totally awesome to work with aspartaimee and marginaliana.
1710, 1804, and 1871: I don't think I worked on any of these puzzles for more than five minutes. Although one of them did make me very happy that, as Minister of Creature Comforts, I was the person responsible for deciding to bring in several small Euro games with our team supplies.
1752: The Prodigious Riddle of Juno: So. Much. Love.greenlily, N, and I worked on this cracktastically awesome logic puzzle. I am not a puzzler outside of Mystery Hunt contexts, and I have never before bothered to solve a Mystery Hunt puzzle once the coin was found. But it was only about 20 minutes before the coin that we figured out the mechanic for solving this, so the next day, when I was awake, I hammered on it until it was done. I needed to go through the process about nine times (with help from both temvald and cnoocy) because I kept getting something inverted, and it was something different each time. But I finally got the right answer. (lorelei_sakai and s Teal Sashed this one for us.) This is definitely the puzzle I would recommend reading even if you don't intend to solve it. It's snort-soda-through-your-nose funny.
There were lots of people I've established I love solving with but never got the chance:classicaljunkie and brief_life come to mind. I guess we will just have to have another team solving event. :D? :D?
IIF is the best team in all of explored space, you guys. Everybody on the team is an asset -- from a puzzling perspective, but more importantly everyone is a pleasure to be around. And I can't even begin to explain how much it rocks my world thataspartaimee joined us (and as far as I can tell, seemed to have a good time, and that was BESIDES the fact that she was kickass at the puzzles).
2010: I was the first person to see the answer phrase for Banner Headline, but that's about all the credit I deserve for it. I found almost none of the words in the word search, and I wasn't the person who saw how the puzzle worked in the first place. I loved how we started off the hunt with such a zippy solve from a large group -- on a word search, too, where group solving is fairly difficult.
2009: I really loved The Zyzzlvarian Holovid Institute, because it was basically a mini-round in a puzzle. At one point, almost everyone in our room was working on a section of it, and it felt really satisfying, like a round that we just zipped through and solved. We had a couple of false starts but it was overall really satisfying. The only thing I would have done differently is treat it as a round in our webapp, because it would have been slightly easier to manage who was working on which sections. But we didn't really have time, because we went through it so quickly, and it was fairly easy to share information about what we were finding just by shouting across the room in organized fashions.
2000: Watching
aspartaimee knit Quick Paws all afternoon was a thing of beauty. Otherwise I didn't work much on many of these. I came in late-- after tons of amazing work by gemini6ice-- on Side by Side by Side (after taking a nap, I think), and about 15 minutes after I had the epiphany that this wasn't a context-free logic puzzle (cued by sylvanstargazer?) and started searching for the appropriate trivia, my team solved the meta and I stopped looking. I fought with Bits and Pieces for a really long time; I'm looking forward to the answer for that one getting posted.1983: I came in very late on Psychic Bonds, came up with a theory, wrote some Perl to test my answer, and proved instead that I was wrong. It's not very exciting, except in the usual "looked over somebody's shoulder and had some bad ideas" sense, but it is the first time I ever wrote code to solve a puzzle, so I feel good about that. Even though it didn't solve the puzzle. That is all I looked at in 1983. My only other comment about this round is that, as the IIF archivist, I'm still not sure how I am going to store Building a Mystery.
1952: I spent a lot of time filling out the wiki for For Whom the Bella Tolls, listing all the things it wasn't. When
tahnan mentioned to me how it worked a week later when he figured it out, I was very facepalm. On the other hand, Temptations was one of my favorite puzzles, just because it was so well constructed. lapak, B, and I worked on that one in a mixed local/remote group, and we just zipped right through it, epiphany falling after tidy epiphany, each of us contributing seamlessly to a quick and graceful solution.1926: Need to Take Someone out really kicked my ass. Once
lorelei_sakai recognized in one of our trivia answers the name of how he and I had arrived at the hunt on Friday morning, the theme fell quickly into place. What we never did with this one was Solve the Damn Puzzle, mostly because we were just so tired and exasperated that we weren't willing to do what we were pretty sure was the final step.1903: Other people did all the work for Sorry, I Love These Big Wrong Musical Numbers, and then they came up with an excellent -- but mistaken -- theory about how the Solve the Damn Puzzle step worked.
marginaliana, N, and I brute forced for several hours in a lovely mixed local/remote chat, thereby proving the theory was incorrect. At which point N asked a question about the number formatting in chat, lorelei_sakai responded by picking out some letters as he read the chat window over my shoulder, and I shouted the answer phrase at the top of my lungs and ran into the main solving room to call it in. I was so tired and punchy that I just giggled for about 15 solid minutes. It was awesome. Woofers and Tweeters, on the other hand, is a puzzle for which I was almost no help at all, but was one of the many puzzles for which it was totally awesome to work with aspartaimee and marginaliana.1710, 1804, and 1871: I don't think I worked on any of these puzzles for more than five minutes. Although one of them did make me very happy that, as Minister of Creature Comforts, I was the person responsible for deciding to bring in several small Euro games with our team supplies.
1752: The Prodigious Riddle of Juno: So. Much. Love.
greenlily, N, and I worked on this cracktastically awesome logic puzzle. I am not a puzzler outside of Mystery Hunt contexts, and I have never before bothered to solve a Mystery Hunt puzzle once the coin was found. But it was only about 20 minutes before the coin that we figured out the mechanic for solving this, so the next day, when I was awake, I hammered on it until it was done. I needed to go through the process about nine times (with help from both temvald and cnoocy) because I kept getting something inverted, and it was something different each time. But I finally got the right answer. (lorelei_sakai and s Teal Sashed this one for us.) This is definitely the puzzle I would recommend reading even if you don't intend to solve it. It's snort-soda-through-your-nose funny.There were lots of people I've established I love solving with but never got the chance:
classicaljunkie and brief_life come to mind. I guess we will just have to have another team solving event. :D? :D?IIF is the best team in all of explored space, you guys. Everybody on the team is an asset -- from a puzzling perspective, but more importantly everyone is a pleasure to be around. And I can't even begin to explain how much it rocks my world that
aspartaimee joined us (and as far as I can tell, seemed to have a good time, and that was BESIDES the fact that she was kickass at the puzzles).
ION: HI! *GLOMP*
The night before Hunt, I found myself with a friend stranded in the cold after a show outside a Zipcar that apparently was apparently not the one she reserved. (How we got into it in the garage in the first place is beyond me.) We spent some time on the phone with Zipcar, and were told quite clearly that Ibbitson was not actually the car we were supposed to be in. We were kinda pissed, cold, and frustrated.
And then a day later, what shows up in a puzzle... perhaps it's fate :)
Zipcar puzzles ftw!