2019 Mystery Hunt Wrap-Up

I’ve written about this before (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018). As usual, I’ll start with “Here, there be spoilers”. I’ll be talking about puzzles and solutions, so if you want to work on them on your own, stop here!

This was my eighth year competing with Team Palindrome. We always choose a palindrome for our team name and we went with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, pronounced “?Huh?”.

Credit to Joe Cabrera for the image above for our nametags!

(What follows is verbatim from a previous post).

Anyway, I’ve spoken about the basic format of the Mystery Hunt before, but for the sake of completeness, it’s a collection of about 150 puzzles that have no instructions. If there’s no instructions, then how do you solve them? Well, you typically look at the information you’re given. Sometimes it’s pictures of people or places, other times it’s crossword clues. There’s usually some “aha” moment (although from past experience with my time, I would call these “ooooohhhhhhh” moments) and you end up piecing things together and eventually get an answer, which is a word or phrase.

There are also rounds that have a handful of puzzles in them, and you put them all together for a metapuzzle. These are a huge deal to solve and we try our best to solve them with as few answers as possible. In a Mystery Hunt sized extravaganza, there are also meta-meta puzzles and typically the “meta-meta-meta-puzzle” is the runaround, where the goal is to find a coin hidden somewhere on campus.

The theme for Hunt this year was “The Holidays”. As it happens, this year Hunt fell almost exactly a century away from the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, a unique event in Boston history. I heard from a friend on the writing team, Setec Astronomy, that one of their team members has been absolutely obsessed with this theme if they happened to run the Hunt this year. Here’s the kickoff video:

Very roughly, each of the rounds was based off a holiday. This was centered around Molasses Awareness Day. The rounds were: Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Valentines Day, President’s Day, New Years, Patriot’s Day, Holi, Pi Day, Arbor Day and Bloomsday, along with a few others.

It bears mentioning that Setec Astronomy ran the Hunt this year, two years after their last time running it (when they said they never wanted to run it again). That hunt went really short, so we expected there to be some effort to avoid the pratfalls of that year. More-or-less, I feel they did that, although it was pretty clear they expected it to be finished earlier than it did.

Amid the mad rush to work on puzzles at the start, I jumped on Tough Enough. Each answer is a six-letter word and for each, you can replace the first two letters with a single letter, to create a mapping from bigrams to letters. Decrypting the phrases at the bottom gives three more clues and the answers to them give you the answer to the puzzle. This was the only puzzle in the Christmas Round that I was able to look at. Interestingly, the metapuzzle structure of this round used combinations of answers from two holidays. Christmas paired with Halloween using the old dumb math joke that Dec 25 = Oct 31 (25 in decimal is 31 in octal).

For Halloween, somehow I didn’t work on the Weird Al puzzle. I’m checking it out on my own post-Hunt. I worked on three other puzzles. Tales From the Crypt was a cryptic that I did some work on, but eventually moved on (our team is full of people who like them, so it can be hard to make progress). Uncommon Bonds was a fun puzzle about interesting ways to clue Bond movies. Finally Unpleasant Characters, a puzzle about a series I’d never heard of called Skulduggery Unpleasant.

Thanksgiving had a truly amazing prop puzzle. We were given a box of donuts with thumb drives in them.

Each had a playlist of songs on it. Turns out there was a tour that Phish did in 2017 called “The Baker’s Dozen” that did a mixture of originals and covers that were on these. Incidentally, I’ll mention that Shazam wasn’t possible because they put bubble noises over the top of all the songs. There was also Stuffing, a fun crossword using emojis. I did a tremendously fun puzzle called We See Thee Rise. Here, there were trivia clues that all had a mistake in them and the corrected version basically moved a geographical location northward. We filled them into the pieces, then someone had the observation that we had a lot of things in our pieces that looked like the word “RED”. The title of the puzzle is a reference to O Canada, so you could arrange the pieces in the grid to make a Canadian Flag with the final message reading around the Maple Leaf.

In Valentine’s Day, I worked on A Mysterious Event, an interesting puzzle combining Scrabble and Sue Grafton novels. Also 7 Little Dropquotes, a fairly straightforward puzzle.

In President’s Day Town, I only looked at Running for Office. We quickly identified it as a run around campus and by that point, I could use the exercise and excuse to move around. Some things to mention from this. First, we crossed paths with multiple teams. Second, we got to Walker Memorial after they had turned the lights out so it really hard to make out the answer to puzzle 2. Step 9 was far and away the worst of this. It required us to visually scan a plaque of donors to the university with probably 1000 names on it. We ran into two other teams while here. Eventually we got the message “INTRO TEXTS NTH WORDS N ORDER N IS MIT PREZ NUMBER.” It seemed clear what to do, but the problem is that there are several lists of MIT presidents. The flavortext did clue which one to use, but it was still tricky. Eventually we got the message “In newest building floor list word above the cave” which is CLEANROOM. Of note is the fact that Building 12 has the appearance of the place where we are incubating either Super Soldiers or Indominus Rex.

That mostly finished off the first day for me.

In New Year’s Town, I worked on Binary Search, a fun puzzle with answers that overlap in a lot of letters. Far Out was a mixture of a Something Different and a Something Extra, two of my favorite crossword variations. There was also Taskmaster, the annual Scavanger Hunt-y type puzzle. We always have a ton of fun with this. I was disappointed to not get to use one of my favorite jokes for the task to “Draw the largest circle you can”. You draw a small circle, then declare the inside to be the outside. Finally, I definitely didn’t work on First You Visit Burkina Faso. This puzzle was an extremely intricate one involving very precise instructions on a globe. We have a geographer on our team and she gave up. This puzzle would prove to be our undoing, leaving open our last metapuzzle. I don’t know if any team forward solved this.

Patriot’s Day had two puzzles I’ll mention. The first is Mathematical. This is one of those puzzles that immediately results in data overload. We knew the hook, but weren’t able to get an answer until very far in. The second is Small Steps. This wound up being a puzzle about locations on the moon, but with a runaround element. I ended up leaving after a few hours of wandering as it was clear it would last for quite a long time. The first image had us quite flummoxed. We could tell the grandfather clock probably meant a very nice office, but no one on the team could remember where it was. After an hour of aimless wandering, I eventually found a faculty search form that allowed wildcards. That got us started. But the rest of the walking and the fact that it was partially outside and also starting to snow made things awful.

I worked on quite a lot in Holi Town. Connect Four, a fun mixture of Mastermind and Fillomino puzzles. Climate Change was another cryptic. Chris Chros was a puzzle about all the “Chris” actors in movies. Battle of the Network Stars was super fun and a mixture of pop culture and a star battle puzzle.

I also did a lot in Pi Day Town. Clued Connections was a fun Only Connect puzzle. Compass and Straightedge seemed like another “Go to this place on campus puzzle”, but we ended up having a lot of trouble with it. I worked on it some the previous night, just as the snow was starting, but ended up moving onto something else. The next day, I was helping with the puzzle again once we realized we had to find things on the radii of the circles when they solved the meta and no longer needed the puzzle. Marching Band was a fun variant on the standard Marching Band puzzle. I also did Sage Advice, a fun variant of a Seven Sages puzzle. This took a really long time to fill in. There turned out to be an erratum in this puzzle and I wound up going home before that was released, so I didn’t see the end of it.

I didn’t do that much in Arbor Day. Bloomsday Town was the last one to unlock. Bloomsday is the day on which Ulysses takes place (which is why I’ve never heard of it). Most of the puzzles here were very hard, but there was a delightfully easy one called itishuntyes. This is a reference to the website isithuntyet.info which maintains a countdown to the next Mystery Hunt. Setec created a website similar to it such that every time you refreshed you got a different anagram of Setec Astronomy with one extra letter. They spelled out “DEPICT AN ANAGRAM OF YOUR TEAM”. As it turns out, our team name this year contained no actual letters. While we debated taking a photo of one of us doing a shrug and rearranging it in Photoshop, we went with RANDOM PILE, and anagram of Palindrome. We literally went to our room which has a box full of random crap from previous years and each grabbed a handful, dumping then in front of the Setec rep, who found it hilarious. I worked for a very long time on two puzzles the first was Standardized Mess. There are a number of trivia questions and scantrons at the bottom, but the scores don’t match up. After hours of trying to figure out what happened, we finally realized that all of the questions clued something upside-down! It turns out that some of the tests had been run through the scantron upside-down! This yielded an answer. I also worked quite a lot on Turn on a Dime. This was yet another puzzle where we had tons of info and no idea what to do with it.

That discusses most of the regular puzzles that I want to talk about. I largely stayed out of the metapuzzles, but I played a big role near the end of the Bloomsday/Arbor Day meta. We had all of the answers for the left wheel and four of the six for the right wheel. A few of us were hard at work trying to fill them into the grid when I decided to try to do a little backsolving. We didn’t actually have the answer at that point, so it’s more like side-solving, though. The puzzle revolves around a Chaocipher which needs pangrams on both rings. We were missing six letters from the union of our answers in that round and we thought they were seven letters, so I managed to find a list of all pairs of seven-letter words that would fill out what we had left. There weren’t all that many of them. However, just then, a group that had been working fruitlessly on a Harry Potter puzzle came over and said “Is there any chance PAJAMAS is an answer?” Well, that was on my list and it paired with EXACTLY, which was a decent answer for Turn on a Dime. We confirmed both of them then answered the metapuzzle and were on our way to figuring out the final metapuzzle for New Years/Patriot’s Day. This was where the Burkina Faso puzzle went, so we were at a real loss for what to do, as you really need that answer. I have a few theories of how we could’ve gotten through it which I’m going to test out now that I have time.

This all turned out to be a moot point as a few minutes after we solved the next-to-last meta, a member of Setec came and informed us that another team was on the runaround and had passed the point where we could catch up. Since the Hunt had also gone long, there was no way they could run it for us as well. We’ve been second so many years, so it was a little disappointing, but the team really took it in good stride. Seeing the final stats at the wrap-up, we could see exactly where we lost the hunt. We had a very large lead over Left Out (the team that won) until sometime late Saturday night when we hit a HUGE plateau. I think what happened was a lot of our better solvers crashed from sleep deprivation and while we had an amazing push on Sunday, it wasn’t enough.

Oddly enough, there were some memorable things that happened after the end of the hunt as well. First off, somehow Setec Astronomy timed a lunar eclipse for this weekend. I braved the bitter cold and got this photo:

Speaking of cold, we got some snow on Saturday night, then it froze solid Sunday and Monday, which wreaked havoc with all flights out of Boston. Some of my friends are still stuck! I ended up taking a train back, arriving at 7 AM on Tuesday.

I absolutely love the team I solve with and can’t wait to solve with them again next year.