Bookspace: The 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt: The Puzzles
It remains to be seen whether I will write a more extensive post about what it’s like to help make a Mystery Hunt — I thought I would, but I’m finding the task a little overwhelming at the moment. But it’s easy enough to at least talk about the puzzles I contributed. Here they are, with commentary:
Algernon: A labyrinth variety crossword seemed the obvious approach for a puzzle about a lab rat. I make small Labyrinths all the time for Puzzlesnacks, but this was one of my few large-scale versions, and with an added twist to boot. The first attempts were on 13×13 grids with only two words per row, but six failed attempts later the light finally dawned that maybe I needed to stretch this out to 15x.
Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland: A variation on Fraternal Twins, a form I invented a couple of years back. I’m pleased with how this came out, all the more because there was an extra hidden constraint that wouldn’t be revealed until much later — after you fill in the grid, see if you can extract a second answer using this strange glyph. (Credit to Mark Halpin for coming up with the second-level idea.)
Battery Pack (with Mark Halpin, Dave Shukan, and Foggy Brume): A puzzle you can’t technically solve without first solving all of the other user-manual pages, like Narnia Beeswax below. But I include it here because, well, it was one of my puzzles, and that’s what this is a list of.
Communicating With The Aliens (with Justin Ladia): A meta-puzzle that only a handful of teams got to see — it was in the last region solvers explored before heading into the finale. If you’d like to try this without solving every other puzzle in the round, you’ll find the answers you need here.
Danni Dewey: A mini-meta, one of five needed for this part of the Hunt. Not exactly solvable without doing a lot of other stuff, but again, I’ve included it for the sake of completeness.
The Enchanted Garden: A variety type I’d never attempted before, and I’m pleased with how it came out. This is one of the few puzzles I actually got to watch a team solve over the weekend — thanks to Illegal, Immoral & Fattening for letting me peek in at their spreadsheet.
Hell’s Kitchen: We meant to have a number of “scrum” puzzles, technically whizzy video-game-like experiences that teams could play at the same time across multiple computers. The one scrum puzzle that reached the finish line died during our final run-throughs and had to be replaced with a back-up puzzle. Hell’s Kitchen was meant to be another such puzzle, but as fall headed into winter I could see that our tech team had far too much on their plates. I grabbed the answer and turned it into this.
Ice Cream Roll: I created this type a couple of years ago with the help of Mark Halpin — you might have seen it now and again in the New York Times. This puzzle is usually called Jelly Roll, and it usually has two layers instead of three, and it usually isn’t quite this hard, to construct or to solve.
Just a Dream (with Mike Nothnagel): A simple enough idea but a mondo pain to research, so my friend Mike’s jumping on as co-author was much appreciated.
Kid Start-Up (with Lea Berlin): One of my favorite things about working on the Hunt this year was the participation of my daughter, Lea, who played a major role on the art team, most notably with her cover to the Star Rats prologue. (Zappy forever!) She and I co-constructed this fairly straightforward puzzle for the Hunt’s second act.
The Mad Scientist’s Assistant: Another puzzle type I created for other purposes, here given massive doses of steroids so that it could serve as a Mystery Hunt puzzle. When I started this, it didn’t immediately dawn on me that, duh, all of the stacks of boxes would need to be the same size. That made it a pretty challenging construction, but the result was well-received by my team.
The Messy Room: Whoops, I skipped right past this one in my first version of this post. Maybe that’s psychologically revealing: In retrospect, while it fits the theme of its answer to a T, this was perhaps a bit too much puzzle to throw at people so early in the Hunt, when we wanted to start off with lighter fare. And the solving process involved a lot of brainless pattern searching as opposed to actual thinking. This puzzle earned its place on the “most requested free answers” list.
Narnia Beeswax: Completing a round of the Bookspace Hunt earned the team a “user manual page” for the Plot Device component they have just acquired — each one a puzzle, of course. Note that this puzzle has six separate answers.
Rack ’em Up: I won’t spoil the answer, but I’ll say that when I hit upon pairing this answer with this particular metaphor, this puzzle just about wrote itself.
Scream (with Gavin Edwards): Gavin and I first met in 1990, sharing a tiny office as the newest entry-level proofreaders for PC Magazine. He left before I did, moving on to take the next steps en route to his career as a successful celebrity journalist. (Buy his latest book!) And so we were out of touch until the age of Facebook. That’s where he read my annual write-ups of the Mystery Hunt, which ultimately led to a 30-years-later reunion when he joined Palindrome. With his encyclopedic music knowledge, it was a natural that I would turn to him for help on this puzzle. In the end, he did almost all of the legwork, including the pain-in-the-ass overdubbing of the Jaws theme, which we needed to add for reasons I won’t spoil here.
Spy Game (with Katie Hamill, Kevin Wald and Wil Zambole): It’s not for nothing that it took four of us to get this together: This is perhaps the meatiest and most Mystery Hunt-y of my contributions this year. This one took a lot of tweaking and adjustment to get it to its final state, and we were hashing over specific word choices for ages.
Swingin’ (with Gavin Edwards): One of the first puzzles created for the Hunt. My daughter did (most of) the art and I think you will agree that it is adorable.
You Took The Fifth (with Katie Hamill): “You should do an Ace Attorney puzzle,” Lea said one day. I explored the editor and agreed that the possibilities were endless. I roped in my friend Katie to help (she’s great at wordplay and she’s a lawyer, so who better?), and together we came up with this rather surreal series of dialogues.