Mystery Hunt!
[This was originally a comment on this post by 530nm330hz, but it got too long for the comment box, so I decided I should make it an entry. So that's why it reads like a reply to that post.

Note also that most of this is about 1) the Reverse Dimension metapuzzle's first stage, because I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and 2) the difficulty of the metas in general. There was a LOT MORE to the hunt than that, but I will never get around to writing a "real" Mystery Hunt wrapup post, so this will have to sufice. ;-)]

First things first: Yaaay there was a Mystery Hunt! :-D These things will never get old. ^_^ They're always Damned Fun, no matter who's running them, and that's really impressive. :-)


On the obviousness of the fact that 8 answers <-> 8 planets in the Pluto meta: Never ever refrain from saying something during hunt just because it's obvious. ;-) It took the Sages a surprising number of hours to catch on to that one (which was the first meta we solved.)



I completely agree on the coolness of the Doctor round, in particular Buzzcut/9th doctor's puzzle. As someone who's never so much as solved a diagramless crossword before (they always looked hard! ;-), I was absolutely floored by the beauty of that puzzle. In retrospect we should have listed the answers out in gridded rows, just as you did, and if we'd done so we would probably have seen it sooner. The AHA of the overlapping answers, which you guys got _before_ the AHA of finding the grid, we didn't get until afterwards.

In addition to never refraining from saying obvious things, you should never refrain from saying dumb things during the hunt. I believe it took fully three different times of people saying things prefaced with "this is dumb, but" for us to solve this puzzle. :-) The first was "hey, this sounds dumb, but what if that wormhole picture is the grid?" Honestly I can't even remember who said it, I was so tired at the time. At that point we had already been analyzing anything else we could come up with to use as grids, so several people immediately noted that not only was it 15 across (suspiciously promising) it had just about the right number of squares for all the answers to fit, in which it differed from every other thing we had tried, including e.g. the board (_very_ suspiciously promising!) so despite skepticism we started throwing letters on it.

We had no idea what to do, so we decided "yeah, this is dumb, all these answers are completely unchecked, there's no way this could be the puzzle! But we'll just start listing answers in rows in the grid, because we have no better ideas." So we started with the first row, ran it to the right edge, then turned it 90 degrees and ran it down until we ran out of letters. We proceeded with about 7 rows before cooler heads decided this was never going anywhere.

I think we were actually on the verge of deciding to erase it and try something else when Alan [I hope I got his name right...], whose last name I don't even know, but he's brilliant and timid, came in and said "you know, this is dumb, it's probably nothing, but I see the word 'iceberg' in there..." and then several people called out words in the following couple of rows, and we all started applauding and told Alan to please talk more. :-D

It actually took 3 or 4 minutes before someone _else_ called out "hey, those aren't just words. They're answers!!" And that was the point at which we got _really_ excited. ;-)

Anyway, I went on at such length about this puzzle because it was my absolute favorite puzzle of the hunt, and it was a joy to help solve it. We had about a dozen people in the room, which was pretty much capacity, and the excitement was palpable. (Recall, in case you'd forgotten, we're a very large team.) I found it so much of a joy to help solve the puzzle, I barely had room for anger and disappointment when it told us something we already knew, after all those hours. :-P (We never did solve the actual meta. Checkers?! This was clued how? Oh well. At least it didn't involve a map of the Senate.)



I agree with you on the excessive number of AHA! moments per meta, and the partially-resultant degree of bottlenecking present in the Hunt. If you guys didn't like the bottlenecks, imagine being on a team of over 100 people with nothing left but two metas and about three other puzzles unlocked, at the end of the first round, for probably over an hour. :-\ Every single metapuzzle was a long hard-fought struggle, and it was just too many hard-fought struggles for one hunt. They all seemed to require nearly all the round answers, and in each half of the hunt you had to solve all metapuzzles to move forward; and every single meta had quite a few leaps, which to me felt more unchecked than not (although once they put the puzzle site back up, I think I'm going to take a more detailed look at "number of unchecked intuitive leaps per metapuzzle".)

It ultimately felt like for every meta, we kept Seeing How it Worked!!! and then we couldn't solve it, and we iterated that enough times to despair at getting to the end of any of them.


And despite all that, let me reiterate that the hunt was Damned Fun. :-D I am looking forward to many more of these, both Evil Midnight Bombers hunts -- despite length and difficulty, I have tremendously enjoyed both that I've been to, and find them to be masterful writers -- and hunts in general.

We are still hoping that some day the Manic Sages will win one... as several of us have gotten in the habit of saying, "hopefully next year". ;-)