Demonically Tough Puzzles
Puzzles are not normally thought of as a hobby requiring much by way of endurance. If you like to run, perhaps you will decide to train for a marathon — building up your stamina bit by bit until you can do the whole 26 miles. While you’re doing that, we puzzlers are stretched out on the sofa, clipboards in hand, content to leave the strenuous pastimes to other folks.
But even as sedentary a hobby as puzzling has its hardcore adherents. Look around a little and maybe you’ll find a “puzzle hunt” in your town, one that will take you from place to place, solving crafty puzzles with a team of friends for two or three hours. If you enjoy that, you might decide to step up and participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt, a weekend-long event requiring the brainpower of a team of dozens of dedicated solvers.
The Mystery Hunt has gotten its share of media coverage over the years, and you might believe, after reading one article or another about the annual event, that this is the top of the mountain — that puzzlers can’t possibly get more fanatical than this.
Well. Let me introduce you to “The Game.”
Since its origins on the West Coast in the 1970s, the Game has specialized in over-the-top puzzles that leap dramatically off the page — and that participating teams solve while driving around in a van for 24 to 36 sleepless hours. Early versions of the Game may have gone a little too over the top: Wikipedia describes a puzzle, if that’s the word for it, in which a team member was left at a strip club “stripped of all clothes and spectacles, dressed in nothing but a hospital gown.”
More recent iterations of the Game have been less likely to embarrass or threaten its participants, but the endurance component remains a core feature of the event. The latest version of the Game, Miskatonic University, was held in the Boston area this past weekend. After a fun Friday night introductory event, things really got going Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m…. and ended the following day at 4:00 in the afternoon. Somewhere in there I took a couple of fifteen or twenty-minute naps.
Miskatonic was a H.P. Lovecraft-themed puzzle event created by an army of kick-ass volunteers headed up by Sarah Leadbeater, with puzzles by constructors Nathan Curtis and Nathan Fung. Did the puzzles, as advertised, leap dramatically off the page? To some extent, yes. Sometimes, and especially in the first half of the event, they were variations on familiar puzzle types, set in offbeat locations. We were excited for what might await us at a miniature golf course, but what awaited us was a small maze puzzle that we solved sitting at a picnic table. Similarly, we were delighted when we went to a “children’s center” and were handed a school-cafeteria milk carton — but inside the carton was a fairly standard diagramless crossword.
Other puzzles more successfully used their environments. Some of the puzzles at the Friday night event, for example, could have been solved in your own living room with only minor modifications — but it was a thrill to solve them instead at Hammond Castle, the gorgeous medieval castle that was plonked down in Gloucester, MA in the 1920s.
Solvers who found the puzzles fun but were expecting a little more zing were rewarded by their patience: Saturday night, teams were sent to a community center and were met with a suite of puzzles bursting with innovation: A “beer pong” puzzle put a bunch of classic red Solo cups to creative use; another puzzle was locked in a gorgeous puzzle box that could only be opened with the crafty use of an assortment of gears; and most brilliant of all was a simple guess-the-word puzzle enlivened to the max by a Ouija board whose planchette moved all by itself (with the help of magnets and some ingenious programming).
I had the good fortune to be on one of the event’s stronger teams, anchored by Dan Katz, who routinely grasps in a matter of moments puzzles that are meant to take much longer. (Glancing briefly at a bunch of stacked-up specimen jars, each containing a sad little stuffed animal: “A lot of them are missing at least one eye. Have you tried counting up the eyes and seeing if they form Braille?”) We and a handful of other teams pretty much had the run of the community center for the first hour, solving puzzles alone in a room that would become much more crowded later on. By the time all 34 teams had arrived, the center was a scene of bustling chaos, held together admirably by Sarah Leadbeater, who seemed to be everywhere simultaneously — helping stuck teams, fixing broken puzzle elements, redirecting teams from too-crowded rooms to slightly less crowded ones. The puzzles were the main event, but her awesome powers of organization were a dazzling sideshow.
After the night at the community center, teams hit the road again, and by sunrise were at an Irish lodge for breakfast and my favorite puzzle of the weekend. The walls of the lodge were decorated with children’s drawings. We were instructed to make a drawing of our own, and were given crayons for the task. But, aha: This was still a Lovecraft-themed event, and the drawings were all charming depictions of multi-eyed tentacle monsters. And we couldn’t simply create any old multi-eyed tentacle monster — we had to create one that perfectly matched its name (“Thaathlog”). What did this mean? It meant analyzing the drawings on the wall and the names of the various monsters to determine the rules for monster creation. For example, it turned out that the color of each monster was determined by looking at which ROYGBIV letter was contained the most times by the monster’s name, and if a second ROYGBIV letter appeared, well, now you knew what color to make the monster’s spots. There were seven or eight such rules to suss out, some quite tricky — it was a just-right balance of puzzle challenge and theatricality. Also, our monster, drawn by teammate Jennifer Braun, came out great.
We left the lodge a couple of hours shy of the event’s 24-hour mark, and my whole team was feeling pretty weary. Nonetheless, there were more puzzles to solve, including a reconstruction of the Greenway Labyrinth with letter-strewn magnetic strips, and a Jenga tower constructed by following a set of clues.
The event’s finale took place in a field on the edge of Boston’s Public Garden. I took one look at what they were setting up and said “No, sorry, this is where I draw the line.” At nearly the 30-hour mark, in the bright August sunshine, they were clearly preparing some kind of athletic event. This turned out to be a funny variation on Simon Says — or rather, Cthulhu Says. It had something to do with racing to be the first team to complete a mosaic made of Rubik’s Cubes — I didn’t entirely follow it, except to see that most people found it great silly fun.
Our graduation from Miskatonic U ended on a bit of a sour note: the event’s organizers — exemplary in every other way — had neglected to print enough of the final puzzle, the one that would tie all of the previous answers together. My team was one of the unlucky ones that didn’t get a final puzzle, and it was a bit like binging a long, magnificent television series and then the last five minutes of the final episode cuts out. And then when we did finally get the missing puzzle, important instructions had been torn away, leaving us stuck and frustrated for longer than was necessary. A bit of a downer that might not even be worth mentioning except that it was literally the final moments of the whole wild event.
Despite this, the event was a joy, and I was thrilled to be a part of it. And I’m glad that I was on a team that was strong enough to see all of the puzzles — many teams were skipped past various puzzles, depending on their pace, so that everyone could meet at the grand finale at the same time. A reasonable idea — indeed, probably the only way to go about an event like this — but a bummer for the teams who missed out on, for example, the self-operating Ouija board.
All in all, I have enormous admiration for the event’s organizers — the staff of Miskatonic University. These behind-the-scenes photographs barely hint at the mind-boggling amount of work that went into this, all done for the love of the puzzles and the puzzle community. Heartfelt thanks to all of them, and best wishes for many, many hours of catch-up sleep.