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Jan. 27th, 2016 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI almost forgot one of my favorite Hunt stories. Mid-day Sunday, we were a little bit in the weeds. We were four metas from the end, and we'd solved at least three puzzles in each of those rounds, and in some cases four or five or six. In all four rounds, we'd made at least some discovery about how the meta worked. In some rounds, we knew exactly how the meta worked, and needed more puzzle solutions to make further progress. In other rounds, we figured we had enough answers, but needed a new insight into how the meta worked that likely wouldn't come with any new answers. So we went through the open puzzles with an eye to triage- which puzzles would help us the most to solve metas, and which puzzles seemed the most likely to crack with new eyes on them.
One of the rounds that needed the most help was the Lovecraft-themed Randolph Carter round, where we only had three of the eight solutions but we had some fairly strong ideas about how the meta worked (some of which turned out to be right, while others turned out to be wrong). One of the puzzles in this round was a scavenger hunt. There is usually a small scavenger hunt as part of Mystery Hunt... it is not really the kind of puzzle that Mystery Hunt excels at or that most of the people who come to Hunt come for, but scavenger hunts are fun and some of the people who come to Hunt do like to do them. I'm often one of them, though it depends on the nature of the scavenger hunt. On the other hand, Palindrome as a team tends not to like Mystery Hunt scavenger hunts, because we are a large, mostly carpetbagging team and both of those things present challenges for Mystery Hunt scavenger hunts 1) Mystery Hunt scavenger hunts are usually handicapped by team size, so that larger teams need to provide more items to satisfy the judges. and 2)Many items in a scavenger hunt are ultimately household items, or household items with minor adjustments, but if home is hundreds of miles away for most of the team, they are not available to be used in the scavenger hunt.
The scavenger hunt this year was particularly poorly suited for us because it prohibited creating new items and purchasing items specifically for the hunt. All items had to be pre-existing property of team members, and again, most of us were living the weekend out of a hotel room. So we looked at the hunt and most of us wrote it off as not worth devoting team resources to. At this team meeting where we were triaging puzzles, we reiterated this: it would be great to have the answer associated with the scavenger hunt, since it would greatly help us in solving a crucial meta, but there are probably better uses of our time given how difficult it would be for us to amass such items. If someone really wanted to do the scavenger hunt, we never tell anyone on the team not to do a puzzle they really want to, but it was not encouraged.
But we do have some team members who live locally and go home to sleep. And right after this noon meeting we got a call from one of them saying that they would be there in an hour and they had the whole scavenger hunt completed! We were shocked. All of a sudden an essential puzzle we had written off had fallen into our laps.
And then she showed up at HQ with a few dozen utterly ridiculous objects that she happened to own, ready to be judged. Jewelry with the specific combination of metals and glass required. Dog chew toys in the exact right shapes. Puzzles made of wood and plastic. It of course wasn't that simple. The judges disallowed a couple of the items she'd brought, so a few of us rallied to quickly improvise replacements. But just like that, we had a vital answer, and an hour later we solved the Randolph Carter meta, in large part because of this unexpected act of Hunt heroism.
One of the rounds that needed the most help was the Lovecraft-themed Randolph Carter round, where we only had three of the eight solutions but we had some fairly strong ideas about how the meta worked (some of which turned out to be right, while others turned out to be wrong). One of the puzzles in this round was a scavenger hunt. There is usually a small scavenger hunt as part of Mystery Hunt... it is not really the kind of puzzle that Mystery Hunt excels at or that most of the people who come to Hunt come for, but scavenger hunts are fun and some of the people who come to Hunt do like to do them. I'm often one of them, though it depends on the nature of the scavenger hunt. On the other hand, Palindrome as a team tends not to like Mystery Hunt scavenger hunts, because we are a large, mostly carpetbagging team and both of those things present challenges for Mystery Hunt scavenger hunts 1) Mystery Hunt scavenger hunts are usually handicapped by team size, so that larger teams need to provide more items to satisfy the judges. and 2)Many items in a scavenger hunt are ultimately household items, or household items with minor adjustments, but if home is hundreds of miles away for most of the team, they are not available to be used in the scavenger hunt.
The scavenger hunt this year was particularly poorly suited for us because it prohibited creating new items and purchasing items specifically for the hunt. All items had to be pre-existing property of team members, and again, most of us were living the weekend out of a hotel room. So we looked at the hunt and most of us wrote it off as not worth devoting team resources to. At this team meeting where we were triaging puzzles, we reiterated this: it would be great to have the answer associated with the scavenger hunt, since it would greatly help us in solving a crucial meta, but there are probably better uses of our time given how difficult it would be for us to amass such items. If someone really wanted to do the scavenger hunt, we never tell anyone on the team not to do a puzzle they really want to, but it was not encouraged.
But we do have some team members who live locally and go home to sleep. And right after this noon meeting we got a call from one of them saying that they would be there in an hour and they had the whole scavenger hunt completed! We were shocked. All of a sudden an essential puzzle we had written off had fallen into our laps.
And then she showed up at HQ with a few dozen utterly ridiculous objects that she happened to own, ready to be judged. Jewelry with the specific combination of metals and glass required. Dog chew toys in the exact right shapes. Puzzles made of wood and plastic. It of course wasn't that simple. The judges disallowed a couple of the items she'd brought, so a few of us rallied to quickly improvise replacements. But just like that, we had a vital answer, and an hour later we solved the Randolph Carter meta, in large part because of this unexpected act of Hunt heroism.