ZyzzlCon 3009, part 3

[dougo]

Here's part 3 of my recap of the 2009 MIT Mystery Hunt, Escape From Zyzzlvaria. But first, a footnote for part 2: thedan posted an enlightening essay about writing duck konundra to mystery_hunt.

I returned to Central Services HQ ("We do the work, you do the pleasure!") on Saturday evening, a bit too late to participate in the scavenger hunt event (Collector's Showcase). I had been told about this event before I left home on Friday so I could bring rare/obscure items, because we would only get credit for each category if our item for that category was unique among our group of teams at the event. I wasn't clear on the fact that we could only use one item per category—the rules said "You may not alter answers once you arrive at the event", but I thought maybe there would be multiple rounds for teams that didn't get 10 unique items—so I had brought multiple items for some of the categories. For "a piece or piece of equipment from a game that ends in a double letter", I brought Frank's Zoo, Last Days of Pompeii, Bluff, EcoFluxx, Zombie Fluxx, and Monty Python Fluxx, but we ended up using ext_100875's copy of Take Off, an obscure Adlung card game; only the game had to be unique, not the letter, or Pompeii would have been a better choice. For "a CD or record by a musical group with a number in their name which is not the number of members of the group", I brought CDs by (in ascending order): Thirteenth Floor Elevators, 18th Dye, Swoon 23, Front 242, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, 360's, 808 State, and 1000 Homo DJs; the number had to be unique, not just the band, so we used TFUL282. In the end, we got credit for 21 of the 24 categories, and we only needed 10, so we definitely overdid it. We had two non-unique items—a 2009 car manual and a paperback book in Dutch—and for "a photo of N people standing in Building N" they didn't accept our photo of 3 people standing in Building 11 (three in binary).

My memory of the order of events on Saturday night and Sunday morning is a bit fuzzy now, so I'll just mention the Outer Zyzzlvaria puzzles I worked on in the order that they appear on the website. Aliotherapy was nice and simple and straightforward, and I did almost all of it on my own. It took a while to identify the comic book character, but I eventually found XS on a list of black superheroes in Wikipedia. I then had to ask the room "what's in between a Stephen Colbert WristStrong bracelet and chicken nuggets?" which stumped us for a while until I realized they were chicken fingers.

Mos Eisley Spaceport was also straightforward and fun, basically a kriss-kross where the words (in this case 50 Star Wars spacecraft names) were not straight lines. I spread the printouts on a table and started picking out colored pencils, and soon Maggie and Cally had sat down with me to help and we worked through the puzzle together in less than an hour. I liked how once we had gotten enough of the numbered squares to read out the clue phrase, we still had to keep filling in the grid before we could get the final answer.

Some other team members had spent a while on Robots in Disguise trying to associate each picture with the name of a Transformer, e.g. Hawkeye, but a lot of the links were tenuous, and they had no idea how to associate the Transformer names with the wordplay clues. They had, however, guessed the answers to three of the wordplay transformation clues, so I ignored the pictures and tried to guess some more answers. Eventually I guessed that "Replace a well-known heavy metal band with a single letter, and I transform into another, lesser-known heavy metal band." was cluing KISSINGER -> WINGER; I noticed that two others could be cluing NESSEN and BAKER, and some of the others previously guessed seemed to be politician's names too. Then luckylefty had a flash of insight and mentioned Secret Service code names, and we quickly matched them to the pictures. Hugh and I then matched up the codenamed people's real names with the wordplay clues, then followed the Ultimate Transformer instructions to get the final answer pretty easily. I'm not sure if the puzzle was intended to be cracked that way (by guessing the transformation clues backwards), but it was pretty satisfying anyway.

Space Ghosts Coast to Coast was another fun straightforward puzzle, with the instructions spelled out pretty clearly for once. I did most of the work filling in the grids, and then Dick and hanechak did most of the work solving the logic puzzle.

Nesting Instinct was a late-night group solve, with pretty much everyone who was still around at that point calling out answers as we thought of them. It was very odd how you could suggest an answer that seemed shaky until you spoke it out loud, when it suddenly became obviously correct.

Kevin did about half of His Worshipful Handmaiden before I came over to help him finish it. Eventually we got the clue phrase D_LE_ETHEM_EA_ERSONTH_TI_____RATESHBODY, at which point I did the magic trick of writing it on the board and waiting for someone else to solve it. Somehow that always seems to work, and it worked in about a minute here too, even thought we had two letters wrong.

hanechak and I each filled in one of the grids for His Alien Barbarian Girl and Her Robot Dog, putting the colored pencils to good use once again. Once we read out the answer and emailed to confirm it, we sat wondering why we had all these extra one- and two-digit colored numbers, including 00. People speculated that they might be sports jersey numbers, but nothing seemed to come of that idea. Then I noticed that the colors in the scarf in the puzzle The Energetic Man Sporting a Very Long Scarf were in the same order as the colors of the numbers, and I suddenly knew (mostly) how this round worked: each Doctor Who puzzle needed information from the corresponding puzzle of that Doctor's companion before it could be fully solved. Craig then figured out that the clues in the scarf seemed to be referring to sports teams, at which point two other people who had much more sports trivia knowledge (Dave H. and Andy Lynn) took over the puzzle. And the numbers did in fact turn out to be jersey numbers, which eventually led to what seemed like a clearly clued answer, MICHAEL JORDAN. We called that in, but it was wrong; a few minutes later, we called in JORDAN, which we were even more confident was the right answer (the clue phrase had only used last names), but that was wrong too. At this point we were demoralized, thinking maybe we had picked the wrong number to call in, but not wanting to call it in for the other seven numbers, but fortunately it wasn't that long before someone (Andy Lynn?) had the brilliant idea to combine it with the answer to the companion puzzle, SUBCONTINENT, to get MIDDLE EAST, and we all breathed a sigh of relief when that was confirmed.

At some point I copied the answers for the Dr. Who round from one blackboard to another, and unfortunately I didn't see at the bottom where someone had written that they had solved His Shopgirl. So Hugh and I solved it again, but fortunately it was both straightforward and fun. And even more fortunately, the people who had solved it before hadn't known the structure of this round yet, so had only extracted one answer, so I extracted the other answer which told us what grid to use for the corresponding Doctor puzzle, The Buzz-Cut Man In A Leather Jacket. Unfortunately I never got around to trying to solve that puzzle, because several people said it was their favorite from the whole hunt, and now I've been spoiled about how it works. I may still try it at some point anyway, just to see what everyone was marveling at.

I think that's all of the Outer Zyzzlvaria puzzles I worked on, so I'll stop here. Tune in soon for the thrilling conclusion of my Hunt recap, where I talk about the metas, the meta-meta, and reveal the long-promised video of Saving Captain Blastoid. Oh, and here's one more picture of our spaceship, the NCC 27B/6, which I had forgotten I had taken with my gPhone: