The Washington Post Hunt: Not nearly as sweaty, but way more wet

I’ll always have a special place in my heart for the Miami Herald Hunt. An event that gets thousands of people running around solving puzzles? I’m a fan for life. I’ve long wished that other cities would pick up on the concept, and at long last one has. All hail the Washington Post Hunt! Thousands of people running around solving puzzles, and I don’t have to get on an airplane, and the humidity level is not the consistency of reheated gumbo. Okay, we had a little rain. Nothing in life is perfect. But this came pretty close.

In fact, this was the best Hunt by a mile, at least of the half dozen I’ve done. Huntmasters Dave Barry, Tom Shroder, and Gene Weingarten have done themselves proud. Not a weak puzzle in the bunch, and an endgame that was devious, clever, and elegantly constructed. And I say that despite the fact that I, personally, solved nothing—not one significant contribution to my team other than holding the map.

We were a dozen hardcore puzzlers from the National Puzzlers’ League, and we divided up into three teams of four. I was with my steady Miami Hunt teammate Todd McClary; crossword champion Jon Delfin; and my friend Andrew Kantor, who is not a member of the NPL and was worried he wasn’t going to pull his weight. He wound up solving the first puzzle we tackled pretty much by himself, and in about thirty seconds.

The structure of the DC Hunt was identical to the annual Miami event. Teams first had to solve five puzzles scattered around the neighborhood. The answer to each puzzle, as always, was a number. These numbers corresponded to clues found in the magazine section of that morning’s newspaper. My team solved these first five puzzles in just under an hour—which is to say, we totally kicked butt.

Here are the puzzles:

CARNEGIE LIBRARY

The library had three signs in front of it:

13 _
14 _
15 _

Not a lot to go on, until you realized that the library was also featured in the Sunday magazine, in one of those spot-the-differences picture puzzles that are so popular these days. The puzzle in the magazine stated that there were a dozen differences between the two pictures. The signs in front of the library told us that we had to find three more differences beyond that.

The library had three inscriptions at the top of the building. In each of these was a single V. (“WASHINGTON PVBLIC LIBRARY.”) In the magazine, each of these Vs had been turned into a U. So the three extra differences were V, V, and one more V. And the answer to the puzzle was 555.

CHINATOWN

The Hunt took place partly in Chinatown, the entrance to which was marked with a gigantic, ornate, Chinese arch. Volunteers handed out a sheet of Chinese characters and their supposed translations, although I’m pretty sure nothing in Chinese translates to “fierce kumquat” or “worm hysteria.”

There were three characters in the center of the arch, but according to the sheet, these translated to “too small / think / vastly bigger.” What you needed was the arch itself. One of the typographical characters looked just like it. This translated to “angry men,” which made the answer to this puzzle 12.

WASHINGTON COMICS

Three stand-up comics took turns going through their highly eclectic routines: One comic was obsessed with penguins, one spoke of nothing but elementary-school janitors, and one had much to say about crocodiles.

Nearby, volunteers were handing out copies of that morning’s edition of the Sunday comics. And hey, look at this: Opus is about a penguin. Frazz is about a janitor. Crocodiles are characters in Pearls Before Swine. Carefully analyzing these three strips revealed hidden numbers planted there by the artists. These three digits, taken in order, gave us the answer to the puzzle. (We probably would have solved this one a bit faster if we had seen the sign on stage that said, “LOOK FOR THE HIDDEN NUMBERS.” Oh. Good idea.)

FORTUNE COOKIE

Volunteers handed out fortune cookies. The double-sided fortune taught us how to say “movie theater” in Chinese, and also contained this aphorism: “He who has discerning taste will know success.”

Earlier, we’d spotted a fake ad in the Sunday magazine: Supposedly a nearby theater was showing a series of classic films—all of them, curiously, with food-related movie titles. We’d been waiting for this to become important. That moment had clearly arrived.

When we ate the fortune cookies, we discovered they were absolutely disgusting. They tasted of coconut. One of the movies in the ad was Coconuts. We had a winner. The movie was supposedly showing at 11:00, and the answer to the puzzle was 11.

RACING PRESIDENTS

Four volunteers were dressed in giant foam heads of various U.S. Presidents. A fifth volunteer, weirdly, was in costume as a deer. These five people ran race after race around a small circular track, and the result each time was the same: The deer came in first, George Washington second, and Abraham Lincoln third.

So what on earth was this? A big hint was provided by another helpful sign, which read in part: “A Time For Change.” Ah. Change in this case meant money, and that wasn’t a deer, it was a buck. Add in a quarter to represent Washington, and a penny for Abe, and you had $1.26. That wasn’t in the clue list, but 126 was, and that was the answer.

So, boom. Five up, five down, and soon we were chowing on hamburgers at a nearby brewery, confident that when we heard the final clue at 3:00, we’d be in the running for the grand prize.

What happened instead was a mighty impressive belly flop.

THE FINAL PUZZLE

The five clues, in numerical order, were:

- (All you need to do is remove eds from the middle, and the solution is right in front of you!) [Parentheses and boldfacing in the original.]

- The answer for you begins for me.

- The first letter is the 14th letter and the third letter is the 13th letter!

- Seek letters that end with a PS.

- If second comes after first, what comes after third?

The final clue was simply this: A large pair of crossed swords, assembled on the stage for our contemplation. We didn’t contemplate for long. Every die-hard puzzler knows that “cross swords” can become “crosswords” when you drop an S. We instantly turned to the crossword puzzle in the Sunday magazine, by Merl Reagle, and began trying to apply the clues. There were plenty of EDs in the center of the grid—CARPEDIEM, for instance, and MED, and PEDDLERS. We removed all of these and got… absolutely nowhere.

And here we have a classic example of brainiac puzzle experts outsmarting themselves in grand fashion. That first clue was supposed to be applied to the swords themselves. CROSSED SWORDS minus EDS equals CROSSWORDS. We skipped right over that, however, because we are so very very smart, and wound up tying ourselves in knots.

Eventually we got back on track, but far too late for it to matter. We discovered that each of the other four clues referred to a word in the crossword grid—not in the current puzzle, but in the solution from the previous week. Once we figured out what were doing, we wound up with the words FORMER / NAME / CAPS / HOME.

Uh-oh. This smelled like sports trivia. What was the former name of the home of the Washington Capitals? Wait, take a step back: What sport did the Washington Capitals play?

I called my wife, who hit the computer. She informed me that the Capitals (a hockey team; no wonder I didn’t know) currently played in the Verizon Center, which had previously been called the MCI Center.

Some embarrassing length of time later, we realized that MCI might indicate the number 1,101 to thinking persons. We looked on the official Hunt map, found a building with that number, and ran like crazy.

At the building was a sign: Valuable Opportunities Available in Your Area! Call Today! We called the phone number on the sign, only to be told by an answering machine, “No! I said to call today!” At that point a volunteer told us that the game was over and to head back to the mainstage to hear the rest of the answers.

What we never got a chance to figure out was that we needed to literally call today: We had to convert the date into a phone number (202-518-2008) and call it. Had we done so, we would have been told to meet a man in a Red Sox cap at the intersection of Maple and Elm.

There was no such intersection on the map… but a look back at the crossword puzzle revealed those two words, crossing at the letter L. On the map, a small letter L was in approximately the same place as it appeared in the crossword grid—in the lower left corner. That’s where the winning teams went to meet their destiny.

ALL of the National Puzzlers’ League teams had made the same blinkered mistake, trying to remove EDs from the current puzzle instead of using that clue to simply confirm the crossword’s importance. My friend Trip Payne and his team nonetheless caught up enough to finish the entire Hunt, placing fifth overall. One of these days an NPL team is going to win this damn thing.

But wait a minute… what was with all those EDs in the middle of the crossword puzzle? What kind of nasty trick was that? Had they been planted to throw people off the trail? Only one person could answer that question, so we called Merl Reagle. (We’re crossword professionals; we can do stuff like that.) Merl had no idea what I was talking about. The EDs that we had been so excited to discover weren’t a cruel red herring—they were simply a coincidence. And, yeah, come to think of it, that is a letter pair that shows up in crosswords fairly often.

Merl gave us some further insight into how the Hunt was supposed to work. Apparently some teams were supposed to stumble their way into thinking 2-Down was important. Alas, the answer in that space was TRY AGAIN. That’s one trap we missed. Did anybody reading this fall into it? Has anybody even read this far?

So there’s another Hunt down, and now that it’s wrapped up, I assume Dave and Tom are in a bar somewhere, even as I write this, planning the first steps of next Miami Hunt, scheduled for October 26. They’ll have to work pretty hard to top this one. Not that I want to put any pressure on them or anything.