There’s an awful lot going on in the world right now. With the headlines focused (as well they should be) on the protests for racial justice, it’s easy to place on the mental back burner the massive spike in unemployment this country recently suffered — 13.3% as I write this, up from a mere 4.4% a few months ago. People who are entitled to unemployment benefits can’t get them because the states’ ancient systems are overwhelmed with new applicants. Combine that with the fact that many people don’t have enough savings to see them through even a mild emergency, and you have a formula for lasting pain.
Oh, and by the way, the coronavirus pandemic is still very much with us.
With all these terrible things happening at the same time, this is a job for… well, probably not a professional puzzle constructor. But that’s what I am, and we all need to do what we can.
Later this week or early next week, I’ll present a new puzzle project: The Social Distancing Puzzles. These are 11 challenging puzzles designed to be solved with a partner — perhaps a spouse, roommate, or family member in the same room with you, or perhaps with a friend over a videochat.
To acquire the puzzles, I’ll first ask you to make a donation to Feeding America. There will be a place on my Web site to send me the proof of your donation. You’ll then receive the puzzles via e-mail. (You’ll receive TWO sets of puzzles — one for each solving partner. Plus a third packet with hints and answers.)
Feeding America is a four-star charity (according to Charity Navigator) with a nationwide network of food banks. A lot of people have had the rug pulled out from under them, thanks to the pandemic and the related unemployment — and many of those people are discovering they aren’t sure where their next meal will come from. There’s a weekly food bank a short walk away from where I live, and on Mondays the line of cars extends down the block. Such a sight made my charity of choice for this project easy to select.
My Web site for the Social Distancing Puzzles will be up soon. Keep an eye on Twitter or Facebook for the big release announcement, which I hope will happen by June 15 at the latest.
I saw an article the other day that there has been a mad run on jigsaw puzzles. Okay, that’s understandable. They’re good time-killers; they keep the hands busy. But allow me to put in a good word for pencil puzzles. They exercise the brain far better than jigsaws. They come in a million different varieties — your new favorite puzzle is out there, waiting to be discovered. And working together on a word puzzle with a friend or a relative, building on each other’s progress, sharing eureka moments, is a wonderful way to pass the time.
What’s more, you don’t need to rush out to the hobby shop or even leave your house at all: The Internet has hundreds upon hundreds of pencil puzzles, available for free and ready for downloading.
Let’s dive in.
Crosswords
The heavy hitter of the puzzle world. I couldn’t hope to list every possible source of crosswords — there’s just that many. I restricted myself to puzzles that are easily downloadable as pdfs.
Glutton for Pun: Erik Agard is the recently appointed editor of the USA Today crossword, a frequent contributor to the New York Times puzzle, and one of the few constructors in regular rotation the New Yorker. The man knows his puzzles, and his former blog has an archive of over 250 of them, mostly crosswords but a few variety puzzles as well.
Brendan Emmett Quigley: A few days ago, Brendan posted crossword #1247. He’s been doing this a while, is what I’m saying. You’ll find his puzzles in many newspapers and magazines, and he posts new puzzles to his Web site every Monday and Thursday. The archive will keep you busy for a long, long time.
The Bryant Park Crosswords: Mike Shenk is a hall-of-fame caliber constructor — he was an editor at Games magazine through its heyday, and is currently the editor of the Wall Street Journal crossword. He and his colleagues at Puzzability have presented a one-day tournament in NYC’s Bryant Park over these past few years, and now Mike’s puzzles for those tournaments are all available for free.
The Wall Street Journal: Those puzzles Mike edits daily for the Journal? They’re available for free, too. Don’t miss the weekly contest crosswords, and the Saturday variety puzzle is consistently one of my favorite solves of the week.
Tough as Nails: Stella Zawistowski recently came out of retirement as a constructor — you’re going to start seeing her name again here and there, and she has started a new blog that deserves your attention.
Arctan(x)words: Christopher Adams’s crossword blog has been cooking since 2017.
Rossword Puzzles: Ross Trudeau is another experienced constructor showing off his skills, with a new puzzle every week or so.
Indie 500 Tournament Puzzles: The Indie 500 is an annual tournament held in Washington, D.C., put together by a slew of great names from the crossword community. The puzzles are generally superb — and five full years of them are now available for free!
Variety Puzzles
I enjoy crosswords, certainly, but my favorite pencil puzzles are varieties. Forget “Across” and “Down.” Variety puzzles send words flying every which way — zipping around corners, going in circles, zigging and zagging unpredictably. This doesn’t mean they’re harder than regular crosswords, necessarily. It just means you’ll need to think a little more flexibly as you solve.
Puzzlesnacks: If you’re new to variety puzzles, here’s the place to start. A new, snack-sized puzzle is posted each Friday, all of them created by yours truly. (I’m allowed to have my own stuff in this list, right?)
A-Frame Games: There may well be no finer constructor of variety puzzles than Patrick Berry. He contributes dazzling grids to the Wall Street Journal (see the link above), and he has a small but priceless collection of free puzzles at his Web site.
Triple Play Puzzles: I could have just as easily put Trip Payne in the Crossword section above, but his site also has lots of varieties — including his magnificent “Something Different” puzzles, which have to be seen to be believed.
Nathan Curtis: Nathan has a Patreon that supplies challenging variety puzzles (and, oftentimes, logic puzzles) to his subscribers. But he also has a lot of free stuff — click the link and scroll down.
Cryptic Crosswords
Passionately adored by die-hard solvers, cryptic crosswords haven’t really caught on with the mainstream. At first glance, they can be intimidating, with clues that seem to have been imported straight from Bizarroland. They are well worth the effort — and if you’re stuck at home, what better time to start? This article by Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto explains the basics.
Kegler’s Kryptics: Lots and lots of cryptics posted over the years by Ron Sweet — including several made specifically for beginners.
Aries Puzzles: Andrew Ries does it all — crosswords, varieties, contest puzzles, and cryptics. I’m only putting him here because this section needs filling out.
Mark Halpin: If you are already an experienced cryptic solver but haven’t yet come across Mark’s “Sondheim” puzzles — boy, are you in for a treat. Each puzzle takes as its inspiration a different work or song by Sondheim. These are real brain burners, but very satisfying.
A-Frame Games: Let me point you back Patrick Berry’s site again. In addition to his free variety puzzles, he offers a bunch of cryptics, including “Middle of the Road” — one of the most astonishing puzzles I’ve ever solved. If you’ve got some cryptic crossword chops, and haven’t yet solved Patrick’s offerings, do not hesitate.
Logic Puzzles
I am forever grateful that sudoku became such a mania fifteen years ago, because that simple number-place puzzle ushered in a galaxy of intriguing logic puzzles. If you enjoy sudoku but have sometimes wondered “What’s next?”, get ready.
Grandmaster Logic Puzzles: Thomas Snyder started Grandmaster Puzzles back in 2013 or so, and while the blog is currently on hiatus, the extensive archive awaits you — hundreds of logic puzzles in dozens of different varieties. Go ahead, click randomly on the puzzle types in the left-hand menu — you’ll see all of the puzzles of that type, each one with a link to its specific rules. And the rules pages, in turn, each have a link to the easiest puzzles of that type. That should get you up and running.
The Griddle: A whopping fourteen-year archive of mostly logic puzzles by David Millar, with some word puzzles thrown in as well.
Anything Goes
Some constructors are never content with the standard array of puzzle formats — they are endlessly exploring new ways to challenge solvers. You never know what you’re going to find as you click on the links below.
Shinteki Puzzle of the Month: Shinteki has been making ingenious live puzzle adventures, mainly on the West Coast, since 1994, but for a few years they also featured a Puzzle of the Month on their Web site, with contributions by some of my very favorite constructors. Hint buttons will give less experienced solvers a boost.
Puzzled Pint: Puzzled Pint is a monthly puzzle event hosted at bars and taverns all over the world. It’s a great introduction into the world of puzzle hunts, where the answers to individual puzzles fit together into a concluding “metapuzzle” to provide a satisfying final answer. Some of the more extreme puzzle hunts have dozens of puzzles. Puzzled Pint is content to cap things off at just five or six puzzles per event — and what’s more, the puzzles are purposely designed to be accessible by a wide audience. Sound good? It gets better: An archive dating back to 2010 is sitting there waiting for you. (Psst: the February 2020 puzzles were created by me.)
BAPHL: It’s pronounced like “baffle” and stands for the Boston-Area Puzzle Hunt League. For a while there it was a twice-yearly event: Get a small team together and solve pencil puzzles while walking around Boston. Difficulty-wise, BAPHL puzzles are somewhere between Puzzled Pint (above) and the Mystery Hunt (below). Some of the puzzles might be location-specific, but most should be solvable at home.
Mystery Hunt: You can’t very well have a list of puzzles in an “anything goes” section without including the MIT Mystery Hunt. These puzzles, make no mistake, are H-A-R-D. They’re also extraordinarily creative. You can lose yourself for hours wading through the archive without even solving anything — just click on a random puzzle and then immediately on the solution. Odds are you’ll stand in awe, first that anybody thought to do this, and then that anybody solved it.
New! Pilcrow Bar: An assortment of clever puzzles by Sandor Weisz, in alliance with the Chicago restaurant Alinea. Each puzzle represents a silly pop-up restaurant — Word Salad, Sandwich Castle. None have instructions, so you’re on your own to figure out exactly what you have to do. (Hints are available.) The whole project is heightened by dazzling production values.
New!Palace of Destiny: Explore the many rooms of this puzzle-filled palace, brought to you by the clever folks at the San Francisco escape room facility Palace Games. The puzzles are extremely varied, and are well-calibrated in terms of difficulty — the easy ones at the beginning suck you in, but before too long, you’re actually going to have to think. Click on each room’s Magic Mirror for useful hints.
Coming up on April 4th, I’ll be one of many authors (but almost certainly the only puzzlemaker) appearing at the Poughkeepsie Book Festival — I’ll be signing books and shouting puzzles at startled passers-by. If you have kids, you’ll get the chance to meet a wide variety of children’s book writers and illustrators, including headliner Marc Brown of the Arthur series. And the whole darn thing is free! If you’re in the area, drop on by.
UPDATE: Cancelled due to the coronavirus, of course. Oh well.
The five-puzzle mini-suite I created for Puzzled Pint, “Circular Reasoning,” is now available on the Puzzled Pint Web site. There’s a whole lot of free puzzles here, so you might want to dip into the archive while you’re at it.
For over a year now, I’ve been posting a daily puzzle on Twitter, inspired by whatever the Word of the Day is, as presented by Merriam-Webster. It’s a fun morning exercise, to get my puzzler’s brain warmed up. You can follow along at @puzzlereric.
Merriam-Webster’s word today, fittingly enough, is CUPID. Here’s the puzzle I came up with:
Cupid is getting a bit weird, shooting his arrows not just at people but at objects. He’s matched up one picture from the top row with one from the bottom row according to a certain rule. Can you figure out that rule and therefore which pictures he thinks make great matches?
(Click to enlarge the image.)
I’ll post the answer in the comments tomorrow. No spoilers, please!
On Tuesday, February 11, I’ll be the featured puzzlemaker at Puzzled Pint! Solve a few fun puzzles and have a drink or two while you’re doing it!
Click the link to see if the event is hosted in your city. If it is, here’s how to find out which bar to attend: This coming Friday, a “location puzzle” will go live on the Puzzled Pint Web site. Solve that (it won’t be hard, and there will be hints), type in your answer, and you’ll see a list of cities and bars.
Alas, Puzzled Pint isn’t hosted anywhere near me, so I won’t be able to watch my puzzles get solved. If you do attend, let me know how it goes!
A Really Absurdly Long Post About The MIT Mystery Hunt
When my Mystery Hunt team received the wedding invitation shown above, speculation immediately ran rampant as to who M & G might be. There had been a Hunt years ago that also began with a wedding, of the video-game characters Mario & Peach — maybe Mario was now leaving Peach for… uh, GLaDOS, from Portal?
And then somebody suggested that the wedding might be for our friends Mark Gottlieb and Gaby Weidling. They are both game and puzzle designers, and years ago Mark attended MIT in large part because of his fascination with the Mystery Hunt; he actually created one of them mostly (and maybe entirely) on his own, back in an era where this was possible. During my team’s discussions of whether or not Mark and Gaby would prove to be the weekend’s M & G, no one expressed the slightest objection to the idea that they would want to get married in an MIT lecture center in front of hundreds of puzzlers, some dressed in costume. Of course they would. But that didn’t mean that was the plan.
The MIT Mystery Hunt is a weekend-long event featuring some of the toughest, trickiest puzzles you could ever hope to see. Each Hunt is centered around a different theme, and that theme is usually a closely kept secret — although sometimes the organizing team allows a hint or two to spill out, as with the above wedding invitation. I figured we would still need to wait for the event itself for confirmation.
But then I ran into Mark while walking with a friend to a pre-Hunt escape room. (The local escape room companies were pretty happy that thousands of puzzle nuts had rolled into town.) Mark was with his sister-in-law and two nieces. After a brief conversation, he said with deadpan dryness, “Pay no attention to the fact that I’m here with my extended family.”
So, wow. This was a genuine turn of events. Not only would the Mystery Hunt begin with the wedding of two great people, but we knew what the Hunt theme would be before the fact. Unprecedented!
How, we then wondered, would the matrimonial theme be tied to the many dozens of puzzles we would solve over the weekend? Here’s how:
At the Hunt’s kickoff, an officiant — himself a puzzler — assured us that we were in fact about to see an actual wedding. The groom was introduced. Mark came out to applause and said with deadpan dryness, “Thank you. I hope nothing goes wrong.”
The wedding procession began. The bride was beautiful. The whole thing was deeply moving. The officiant opened his mouth to begin the ceremony, and suddenly a young girl dressed as Cupid ran out on stage yelling “Stop the wedding!”
It seemed that evil ninjas had stolen all of the love in the world, had condensed it to a single dense core of love, and had hidden it somewhere on the MIT campus. For some reason, they had left behind a number of difficult puzzles that would lead to this hiding place. If only there were hundreds of puzzle solvers available to help crack these devious enigmas! Unfortunately, tragically, the wedding would need to be postponed until—
“Found it!” said Gaby, who had run off stage while all this was being explained. She was now back, waving a heart-shaped object that was, presumably, a dense core made up of all the love in the world. The Hunt was over! The wedding was back on!
And so Mark and Gaby were married, and an audience full of puzzlers applauded and wiped their eyes a whole lot.
The newlyweds then gave us an unexpected gift: They invited us along on their honeymoon.
Mark and Gaby planned to go that most magnificent of amusement parks, Penny Park. Unfortunately, the park had fallen on hard times; it just wasn’t the same as when Penny’s grandmother used to run the show. In order to return the park to its former glory, what it needed was buzz, lots of buzz. The kind of buzz generated (for reasons that remain a bit obscure) by solving puzzles! If only there were hundreds of puzzle solvers available to crack some devious enigmas!
And so the Hunt organizers had kept the theme under wraps after all — the wedding invitation was merely a spectacular fake-out. Hunters spent the weekend exploring the rides and attractions at Penny Park, with a puzzle for each and every one.
Part 2: Excelerating the Difficulty
My Mystery Hunt team, Palindrome, is one of the event’s larger teams — the organizers had suggested that teams cap themselves at 75 or so, but we wound up somewhere just north of 100, when you count both our on-campus solvers and our remote solvers working from the comfort of their living rooms.
If you are unfamiliar with the Hunt, you might be saying to yourself: 100 people solving puzzles together? Did you complete the event in fifteen minutes? Not hardly. In the end, only five teams out of 150 completed the Mystery Hunt in its entirety. My army of puzzlers was the second to do so. When I say that the Hunt is made up of the toughest, trickiest puzzles you’ve ever seen, I am not exaggerating for effect. And there were nearly 200 of them. We started solving on Friday afternoon and crossed the finish line about fifty hours later — and only because we worked around the clock, making sure we had solvers covering the “graveyard shift.” Without that, we would have had no chance at all of finishing.
How hard are these puzzles? Well, let’s take a look at one example, shall we? I present to you: The Excelerator.
A lot of Mystery Hunt puzzles present an initial obstacle, one I have a hard time surmounting even after twenty years. Call it the intimidation factor. There are a lot of puzzles over Hunt weekend that I cannot hope to solve, as I simply don’t have the necessary background — Hunters will find many puzzles about science, or deep math, or programming. It’s easy to glance at a puzzle and say: “Nope! This is clearly a puzzle for somebody who is not me.” That’s the intimidation factor, and Excelerator had it in spades.
Solvers who are used to puzzles looking a certain way — a grid of letters, perhaps some artful clues, and so forth — will be forgiven for reeling backwards when they open up Excelerator and come face to face with this (click to enlarge):
Yes, the puzzle exists entirely within a massive Excel spreadsheet — 700,000 cells, each containing either a random-seeming trio of letters or an equally random-seeming number. I looked at this puzzle for ten seconds and gingerly shut it back down again.
But in fact, getting started on this puzzle is not that difficult. You see those cells containing red letters? There are eleven of them, and those are your starting points. From each one you can trace out a clue. For example, starting at the MOU (in cell C6), you can move cell to cell and spell out MOUNTAIN FAMOUS FOR BEING INCREDIBLY HIGH. You might even notice that those cells, shaded in, form a letter A.
So what mountain is famous for being incredibly high? Everest? Sure, but there are other very tall mountains — like, for example, K2, which is the second-tallest mountain and also a cell in this spreadsheet. Sure enough, if we go to cell K2, we can trace out another clue (in the shape of another letter), the answer to which is that legendary cruise ship, the QE2. And if you go to cell QE2… okay, you’re getting it.
Ultimately, after locating and deciphering a LOT of clues, you wind up with a list of words like SUMAC — words that begin with Excel commands, followed by a column or cell in the spreadsheet. The word SUMAC, for example, instructs you to take the SUM of column AC. Do that and you get a total of 12. The 12th letter of the alphabet is L. Figure out what letter you get from each of these final “command” words, and you wind up with your answer: LINE NUMBERS.
I guess that’s still pretty intimidating.
But if you can imagine 200 puzzles at this level of extreme craftiness, maybe you can grasp why even a team of 100 die-hard solvers might struggle to reach the end of the Mystery Hunt.
Part 3: Puzzles To Keep You Up At Night
If I didn’t wade into the Excelerator spreadsheet up to my neck, what did I spend my time on? A whole lot. For example:
Storybook Pals: As a Mystery Hunt team solves puzzles, the answers they collect come together to form a “metapuzzle.” Solving a metapuzzle is a big deal — it’s a giant step toward the event’s finish line. We have a lot of superb solvers on my team — people who can crack a much-needed metapuzzle long before all of the necessary answers that feed into it have been collected. The moments where I have been the person to break into a meta have been among the headiest of my puzzling career.
On one metapuzzle last year or maybe two years ago, I had a strong notion of what the solution path might be. I chased my idea down that path a short way, didn’t see anything promising, and gave up… and then, hours later, learned that I had been correct, after somebody else found that same solution path and took it to the winner’s circle. If cracking a meta is the pinnacle of puzzling, then having the right idea on a meta but screwing it up has got to be one of the lows.
Storybook Pals was another low. I thought early on that the answers in the round should criss-cross together, but at that time I didn’t have enough answers to get anywhere — and by the time we did, somebody else had already solved the puzzle. Whee!
But in truth this was a good year for me and metapuzzles. I never had the explosive aha moment, the one that causes the room to burst into cheers and applause, but I made suggestions along the way that proved helpful and accurate, and that’s at least something. I’ll take it.
Tall Tales: The puzzle was presented as eighteen short videos, each depicting the same sedate white-haired man, the sort of man who seems to have been born a grandfather, sitting on a sofa, reading from a book entitled “Tall Tales.” A sample tale:
There I was, just minding my business, when I don’t know how many thousand caped superheroes—you know who I mean—showed up in town. I remember, because it was the same day I bequeathed my factory to Willy Wonka. I had already invented one thousand items like chocolate bars and gobstoppers and lollipops, and it was time to move on to new challenges.
Here was a rare example of me knowing what to do every step of the way: I recognized that each tall tale contained a reference to “thousands” of something (“thousands of caped superheroes”), and another reference to a specific quantity (“one thousand items like chocolate bars”). I understood that each of these was a clue to something, and soon after saw that these clues must lead to units of measurement both common and obscure. Sure enough, there is an ancient unit called the BATMAN and another unit called the CANDY; these were supposedly used in commerce in Persia. (I said they were obscure.) “There are twenty candys in a batman,” is a thing I actually said this weekend. Making that conversion gave you a number of thousands between 1 and 26. Taking the appropriate letter spelled out a phrase.
We solved this puzzle at 2:00 a.m., long after my brother Dan, one of my teammates on Palindrome, had gone home to get some sleep. The next morning when he came in I said to him, “While you were gone, there was a puzzle about measurements. What was the answer?”
He blinked at me. “What? How should I know?”
“Let me say put it a different way,” I said. “There was a puzzle about measurements at the MIT Mystery Hunt. What was the answer?”
“Oh.” Enlightenment dawned on Dan’s face. “Smoot.”
Of course it was. Oliver Smoot went from ordinary undergrad to MIT legend in the early 1960s, when as a fraternity pledge he was made to lay down repeatedly across the span of the Harvard Bridge, thus measuring it in “smoots,” a unit that has gained enough fame that it’s actually in the American Heritage Dictionary.
And this puzzle went from ordinary MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle to legend because the puzzlewriters actually got Oliver Smoot himself, now a sedate white-haired grandfather-type, to be the narrator of their book of tall tales.
Spaghetti Western: A personal first: A Mystery Hunt puzzle that mentions me by name. Some years ago I invented a silly game where participants try to “solve” a puzzle that is in fact just a bunch of random words. I called it “Spaghetti,” because in an old magazine article about puzzles, I wrote that some of my friends were so smart, they could solve a plate of spaghetti. I usually run a round or two of the game in the days leading up Mystery Hunt — and this year I was specifically asked to do so by Larry Hosken, one of this puzzle’s co-authors. I promised that I would, and then I forgot. Sorry, Larry! Your puzzle was really fun, though!
Concierge Services: A delightful and relatively easy puzzle that brought great glee to my team as they watched me talk to the organizing team on the phone, and then watched my face when the organizing team hung up on me. Eventually we figured out that the questions we were being asked could all be punnily answered with the name of a Tony-winning musical. (What did Tiger Woods say after he missed the putt? “Bye, Bye Birdie.”)
Creative Pictures Studio: The early rounds of the Hunt were fairly standard affairs, as these things go: Great, solid puzzles, and interesting metapuzzles that required just the right amount of aha to crack. But then we ventured into the outer areas of the amusement park. (Remember how this hunt is themed to an amusement park?) The four outer areas cranked up the innovation, on a scale of 1 to 10, to about a 15. In the Creative Pictures Studio round, the answer to each puzzle was not a word or a phrase but an emoji — you literally had to paste a desert island emoji into the answer submission box, and not the words “desert island.” And then all of those emoji were used in a wild braintwister of a meta, in which the growing pool of symbols were used to spell out the plots of ten different movies. This was easily the puzzle that led to the most raucous debates in our HQ, as we tried on and discarded different movies, trying to find the ones that fit.
The Pennies: I actually had nothing to do with solving this, one of the final puzzles of the Hunt, but it was such a beautiful touch that I can’t let it go unmentioned. Each metapuzzle we solved in Penny Park earned us a new pressed penny. You know those machines they have at tourist spots around the world? Put in a penny (along with fifty cents to pay for your souvenir) and you’ll get a flattened oval upon which is etched the Lincoln Memorial or whatever? The Hunt organizers brought in ten such presses, and allowed us puzzlers to press our own pennies, and of course those pennies formed an elegant puzzle of their own. It was a lovely, nostalgic way to make a puzzle leap off the page or the computer screen.
Part 4: The End?
Looming over this brilliantly created event was the feeling that the Mystery Hunt might soon need to transform itself or fade away entirely. Every year, more people from outside the school are drawn to the Hunt, and the MIT administration has grown increasingly disgruntled at the idea of thousands of non-students running around campus, unregistered and untended. The Mystery Hunt may be one of the premier puzzle events in the country, with a long and storied history, but the administrators, it is clear, see it primarily as a potential liability nightmare. This year the ruling came down: If your team has no MIT students, you cannot stay in your campus headquarters overnight.
Since overnight solving is one of the great joys of the Hunt, this threw everyone into a tizzy. My team, which in fact has no students (despite years of trying), scrambled like mad trying to find an auxiliary HQ — ultimately we rented a house nearby through VRBO, an Airbnb competitor, and other teammates set up shop in various hotel lobbies. Irony #1: We wound up having our most productive overnight shifts in years. Irony #2: Because the school wanted all of the no-MIT-student teams in one place, our on-campus rooms were switched at the last moment… to by far the nicest HQ we’ve had in decades, including a room with a long conference table that facilitated group solving beautifully.
The new rules imposed this year will likely not be the end of the matter, and right now it feels like the day is looming — though I hope I am wrong — that I learn that because my team has no MIT representation (except for many alumni and one member of the faculty), we are no longer welcome to participate in the Hunt.
I don’t feel “entitled” to access to the school’s resources or goodwill, and I am deeply appreciative of the time I have gotten to spend on campus, solving puzzles with friends and reveling in the school’s bursting-at-the-seams braininess, creativity, and eccentricity. I realize this is a gift that can be taken away from me at any time, and if that happens, what can I do except thank the school for its generosity over the past 23 years.
I sure hope they can find a way to accommodate us, though.
Final note: Palindrome was gunning for a win this year, but despite solving at what I thought was a damn impressive speed, the {plane noise} Galactic Trendsetters {plane noise} outmatched us every step of the way. Those are some bright kids over there. Congratulations to them, and I am excited to see what they create for next year’s Hunt. Hey GT: As much as I enjoyed this year’s event, might I gently suggest a Mystery Hunt that more than five teams can finish?
Every month, Puzzled Pint presents a mini puzzle hunt at bars around the country. On February 11th, I’ll be your friendly puzzlemaster, presenting a mini hunt called Circular Reasoning.
