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Here's part 4 (the last) of my recap of the 2009 MIT Mystery Hunt, Escape From Zyzzlvaria.
Sometime on Saturday afternoon, someone finally figured out how to put the words in the grids for Dual Singularities and got the final answer. This gave us the fourth of the five answers for the Castor & Pollux round, which was enough for someone to figure out the answer to the meta. (I don't know who these someones were because I was asleep at the time.) This in turn gave us the final sheet of the sample game of Escape From Zyzzlvaria, and three hours later we were also given the "strategy guide", which was the final piece of the meta-meta puzzle for finding Zyzzlvaria Alpha and rescuing Captain Blastoid. When I arrived on Saturday evening, a few people were working their way through the sample game; two other groups had tried and failed to make it through the whole game, but the third time was a charm and they eventually finished successfully. But no one could figure out what to do with the strategy guide.
At some point early Sunday morning, Marc (the Central Services team captain) announced his opinion that solving the meta-meta should be our highest priority, and that everyone who hadn't looked at it already should take a look. So I sat down in front of the board and had Marc show me what we had. I looked at the strategy guide and said "why is each component name followed by its first letter in parentheses?" No one (who was nearby) knew; there didn't seem to be anywhere else that these letters were used. I then looked at the sample game and said "why are these capitalized two-word phrases in bold?" and again no one knew. Then I said "hey, looks like all of those words start with one of the component letters," and suddenly Marc said "Oh! Now I know exactly what to do," and proceeded to put these together with our sample game record and the answers to all of the puzzles we had solved in Inner Zyzzlvaria. He ended up with AL__A_AB__E_MEGA, which we guessed might be ALPHA'S ABOVE OMEGA (since we were looking for Zyzzlvaria Alpha on the game board). We didn't see any omega on the game board, though, so we started going back to solve more puzzles that we had put aside when we solved their round meta.
We started with And Now A Word From Our Intergalactic Corporate Overlords; others had long ago identified all but three of the logos, and someone had already noticed that all of the companies seemed to have parent companies, so it didn't take long to put the pieces together and get the answer. This confirmed the H in ALPHA, but we still weren't sure about the phrase so we started working on pluHarmony to see if it gave us the S, but no one was coming up with the final aha to finish solving it. We also called for a hint on Invasion of the Micronauts, because were all frustrated that no one had been able to even start the puzzle, but the hint didn't really help, other than confirming that we should ignore the invisible exclamation points in the PDF, and telling us to look for a set of six related words that were "really small". (In retrospect, that was a reasonable hint, but we were not in any mental shape to make the required aha at that point.) We were also staring at the game board trying to find an omega; I was pretty close to convinced that we needed to peel off the game board label to find an omega written underneath, but cooler heads prevented me from doing that. Finally Hugh noticed that the phrase "home game" contained "omega", and we all groaned in relief.
We called UPGAFS and told them we had found Zyzzlvaria Alpha; soon afterward,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lunchboy came to our HQ and told us where we needed to go, and that we should lead him there (because he didn't know the campus well enough to know where it was). This was around 8am Sunday morning, and we trudged out into the morning snow to the third floor of some nearby building (Hayden maybe? I forget). As we went up a few flights of stairs, we heard some moaning coming from behind a door. We opened it and out fell Captain Blastoid! (Who had apparently grown a beard in her long captivity—wesleyjenn was asleep and unavailable for this skit.)
Saving Captain Blastoid from Doug Orleans on Vimeo.
It was definitely satisfying to finish "phase 1", even though it was almost 24 hours after they had given every team the reward that was supposed to be tied to it. UPGAFS had designed this two-phase structure to give more teams the feeling of completing a "mini-hunt"; I respect their motivation, but I was still frustrated with how it played out for our team, being stuck with no new puzzles for about 8 hours on Friday night/Saturday morning. The ending was also a little anti-climactic; it would have been nice to have an actual runaround puzzle after finding Zyzzlvaria Alpha, rather than just a skit.
Most of the rest of the Hunt was spent trying to solve the metas for the two rounds we had the most answers to, Combat Simulator and Virtual Sectors. It turned out that these were probably the two most difficult metas, and in retrospect I'm not sure why we didn't put more effort into looking at the other metas. I think it's because we felt we were so close, especially for Combat Simulator where we had 11 of the 12 answers and a pretty clear idea of how it worked (with each answer assigned to a die). Also we were just frazzled by that point, and thinking that the Hunt would end at any moment, we just wanted to solve one darn Outer Zyzzlvaria meta. But even with that goal, we were just too disorganized—I think if someone had been a proper "fresh brain" for the Combat Simulator meta and started from scratch assigning letters to the die faces, they might have been able to fit together a few puzzles pieces to spell a word or two. As it was, when I returned at 1am on Monday, I wanted to take a crack at it, but I couldn't find a complete set of puzzle pieces that had already been printed out, and when Michael finally made a new printout for me, it turns out it had used the wrong die face assignment (numbering the letters for the 10-sided dice 0-9 instead of 1-10, since the 0 and 9 were on opposite faces instead of 1 and 10 like you would expect). Someone else had already figured this out and there was another version of the puzzle pieces floating around, but by this point the people who were still in the room didn't know enough of the history of the puzzle to tell me. If I had instead just started from scratch, I might have been able to solve it, although probably not before the COIN was found at 3am and UPGAFS shut the whole website down.
So, overall, I enjoyed the Hunt as usual, but it was neither my favorite Hunt—that would probably be SPIES in 2006, which was well-put-together and ran remarkably smoothly—nor my favorite Hunt experience—that would probably be last year, where despite feeling hopeless because we had an overwhelming number of puzzles with a smallish team, I felt like I was always making progress and solving tons of puzzles. I really liked this year's theme, both the 3009/space-opera part and the board game part, and the puzzles did a good job at fitting into both of those themes. And many of the puzzles were well-designed, fair, and satisfying. But it felt like there were too many "look up a bunch of things on Google" puzzles, and the Outer Zyzzlvaria metas especially were one or two layers more complicated than they should have been. There also seemed to be more errata than usual, though I don't think any of it directly affected our team. And I've already complained about the phase 1 bottleneck, which really almost ruined the Hunt for me. I hope Beginner's Luck learns the right lessons and doesn't make the same mistake next year.
As for my team experience, it felt a little too crowded on Friday evening and Saturday evening, and at several points we seemed to be out of chairs and/or table space. It would have been better if our secondary room had been full-sized, so that we could use it both as a sleeping room and a puzzle-overflow room, but really I would prefer if we could all fit comfortably into one room. We also still had the problem of progress grinding to a halt in the wee hours of the morning; on Saturday morning, that was mostly the fault of the Hunt structure bottleneck, but on Sunday morning, we could have used more people (or at least fresher people). I think instead of trying to encourage more people to stay up all night, it might be better to encourage people who are early risers to come in at 4am, say, instead of 8am.
I have some more post-mortem thoughts about how we can improve, but I think I'll save them for email to our team. I'll end this by giving a big thanks to UPGAFS (aka EMBWBAM) and to Central Services, and a hearty congratulations to Beginner's Luck. I'm already getting impatient about next year's Hunt! Here's a few more pictures:
Marc, our team captain, addressing the room (I think about paying for dinner).
Team Electric Mayhem left their name in the snow outside our window on Sunday morning. Thankfully it was not yellow snow.
At around 1am Monday, we requested that Scotchy come and show us his Dance of the Seven Ales. He explained that he didn't really remember how to do it sober—he usually only did it after drinking seven ales in seven minutes. But he gave it a shot, which was enough to help our morale. He didn't give us any hints, though—he didn't even frown when we showed him how we had fit the Combat Simulator pieces onto the Inner Zyzzlvaria game board (which was an unintentional red herring and a total dead end).
UPGAFS at the Warp-Up, explaining how things worked (or didn't work).
Sometime on Saturday afternoon, someone finally figured out how to put the words in the grids for Dual Singularities and got the final answer. This gave us the fourth of the five answers for the Castor & Pollux round, which was enough for someone to figure out the answer to the meta. (I don't know who these someones were because I was asleep at the time.) This in turn gave us the final sheet of the sample game of Escape From Zyzzlvaria, and three hours later we were also given the "strategy guide", which was the final piece of the meta-meta puzzle for finding Zyzzlvaria Alpha and rescuing Captain Blastoid. When I arrived on Saturday evening, a few people were working their way through the sample game; two other groups had tried and failed to make it through the whole game, but the third time was a charm and they eventually finished successfully. But no one could figure out what to do with the strategy guide.
At some point early Sunday morning, Marc (the Central Services team captain) announced his opinion that solving the meta-meta should be our highest priority, and that everyone who hadn't looked at it already should take a look. So I sat down in front of the board and had Marc show me what we had. I looked at the strategy guide and said "why is each component name followed by its first letter in parentheses?" No one (who was nearby) knew; there didn't seem to be anywhere else that these letters were used. I then looked at the sample game and said "why are these capitalized two-word phrases in bold?" and again no one knew. Then I said "hey, looks like all of those words start with one of the component letters," and suddenly Marc said "Oh! Now I know exactly what to do," and proceeded to put these together with our sample game record and the answers to all of the puzzles we had solved in Inner Zyzzlvaria. He ended up with AL__A_AB__E_MEGA, which we guessed might be ALPHA'S ABOVE OMEGA (since we were looking for Zyzzlvaria Alpha on the game board). We didn't see any omega on the game board, though, so we started going back to solve more puzzles that we had put aside when we solved their round meta.
We started with And Now A Word From Our Intergalactic Corporate Overlords; others had long ago identified all but three of the logos, and someone had already noticed that all of the companies seemed to have parent companies, so it didn't take long to put the pieces together and get the answer. This confirmed the H in ALPHA, but we still weren't sure about the phrase so we started working on pluHarmony to see if it gave us the S, but no one was coming up with the final aha to finish solving it. We also called for a hint on Invasion of the Micronauts, because were all frustrated that no one had been able to even start the puzzle, but the hint didn't really help, other than confirming that we should ignore the invisible exclamation points in the PDF, and telling us to look for a set of six related words that were "really small". (In retrospect, that was a reasonable hint, but we were not in any mental shape to make the required aha at that point.) We were also staring at the game board trying to find an omega; I was pretty close to convinced that we needed to peel off the game board label to find an omega written underneath, but cooler heads prevented me from doing that. Finally Hugh noticed that the phrase "home game" contained "omega", and we all groaned in relief.
We called UPGAFS and told them we had found Zyzzlvaria Alpha; soon afterward,
lunchboy came to our HQ and told us where we needed to go, and that we should lead him there (because he didn't know the campus well enough to know where it was). This was around 8am Sunday morning, and we trudged out into the morning snow to the third floor of some nearby building (Hayden maybe? I forget). As we went up a few flights of stairs, we heard some moaning coming from behind a door. We opened it and out fell Captain Blastoid! (Who had apparently grown a beard in her long captivity—wesleyjenn was asleep and unavailable for this skit.)Saving Captain Blastoid from Doug Orleans on Vimeo.
It was definitely satisfying to finish "phase 1", even though it was almost 24 hours after they had given every team the reward that was supposed to be tied to it. UPGAFS had designed this two-phase structure to give more teams the feeling of completing a "mini-hunt"; I respect their motivation, but I was still frustrated with how it played out for our team, being stuck with no new puzzles for about 8 hours on Friday night/Saturday morning. The ending was also a little anti-climactic; it would have been nice to have an actual runaround puzzle after finding Zyzzlvaria Alpha, rather than just a skit.
Most of the rest of the Hunt was spent trying to solve the metas for the two rounds we had the most answers to, Combat Simulator and Virtual Sectors. It turned out that these were probably the two most difficult metas, and in retrospect I'm not sure why we didn't put more effort into looking at the other metas. I think it's because we felt we were so close, especially for Combat Simulator where we had 11 of the 12 answers and a pretty clear idea of how it worked (with each answer assigned to a die). Also we were just frazzled by that point, and thinking that the Hunt would end at any moment, we just wanted to solve one darn Outer Zyzzlvaria meta. But even with that goal, we were just too disorganized—I think if someone had been a proper "fresh brain" for the Combat Simulator meta and started from scratch assigning letters to the die faces, they might have been able to fit together a few puzzles pieces to spell a word or two. As it was, when I returned at 1am on Monday, I wanted to take a crack at it, but I couldn't find a complete set of puzzle pieces that had already been printed out, and when Michael finally made a new printout for me, it turns out it had used the wrong die face assignment (numbering the letters for the 10-sided dice 0-9 instead of 1-10, since the 0 and 9 were on opposite faces instead of 1 and 10 like you would expect). Someone else had already figured this out and there was another version of the puzzle pieces floating around, but by this point the people who were still in the room didn't know enough of the history of the puzzle to tell me. If I had instead just started from scratch, I might have been able to solve it, although probably not before the COIN was found at 3am and UPGAFS shut the whole website down.
So, overall, I enjoyed the Hunt as usual, but it was neither my favorite Hunt—that would probably be SPIES in 2006, which was well-put-together and ran remarkably smoothly—nor my favorite Hunt experience—that would probably be last year, where despite feeling hopeless because we had an overwhelming number of puzzles with a smallish team, I felt like I was always making progress and solving tons of puzzles. I really liked this year's theme, both the 3009/space-opera part and the board game part, and the puzzles did a good job at fitting into both of those themes. And many of the puzzles were well-designed, fair, and satisfying. But it felt like there were too many "look up a bunch of things on Google" puzzles, and the Outer Zyzzlvaria metas especially were one or two layers more complicated than they should have been. There also seemed to be more errata than usual, though I don't think any of it directly affected our team. And I've already complained about the phase 1 bottleneck, which really almost ruined the Hunt for me. I hope Beginner's Luck learns the right lessons and doesn't make the same mistake next year.
As for my team experience, it felt a little too crowded on Friday evening and Saturday evening, and at several points we seemed to be out of chairs and/or table space. It would have been better if our secondary room had been full-sized, so that we could use it both as a sleeping room and a puzzle-overflow room, but really I would prefer if we could all fit comfortably into one room. We also still had the problem of progress grinding to a halt in the wee hours of the morning; on Saturday morning, that was mostly the fault of the Hunt structure bottleneck, but on Sunday morning, we could have used more people (or at least fresher people). I think instead of trying to encourage more people to stay up all night, it might be better to encourage people who are early risers to come in at 4am, say, instead of 8am.
I have some more post-mortem thoughts about how we can improve, but I think I'll save them for email to our team. I'll end this by giving a big thanks to UPGAFS (aka EMBWBAM) and to Central Services, and a hearty congratulations to Beginner's Luck. I'm already getting impatient about next year's Hunt! Here's a few more pictures:
Marc, our team captain, addressing the room (I think about paying for dinner).
Team Electric Mayhem left their name in the snow outside our window on Sunday morning. Thankfully it was not yellow snow.
At around 1am Monday, we requested that Scotchy come and show us his Dance of the Seven Ales. He explained that he didn't really remember how to do it sober—he usually only did it after drinking seven ales in seven minutes. But he gave it a shot, which was enough to help our morale. He didn't give us any hints, though—he didn't even frown when we showed him how we had fit the Combat Simulator pieces onto the Inner Zyzzlvaria game board (which was an unintentional red herring and a total dead end).
UPGAFS at the Warp-Up, explaining how things worked (or didn't work).
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I'm on Beginner's Luck, and I was on Palindrome before this Hunt. I'm glad that last year was your favorite Hunt experience--that year was understandably frustrating for a lot of people, and while a lot of that was beyond our control, it's good to hear that people still had fun.
I agree with you about Google-slog puzzles. Although they can be really difficult to avoid, rest assured that we will do what we can. :)
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