(no subject)
Mar. 25th, 2019 05:51 pmThis past week was the third annual Galactic Puzzle Hunt, a weeklong online puzzle competition run by a team that competes in the MIT Mystery Hunt. I put together a local team of friends and we competed as best we could, which was almost exactly middle of the pack. 242nd out of about 500 teams competing.
When we could all gather together and work on puzzles, we were reasonably successful at solving. But scheduling proved a major weakness. Of the seven people on the team, I managed to get as many as five together in one place twice- last Saturday night and Sunday night. The rest of the week, when I managed group solving at all, it was just two people. We also lost a couple days to Purim.
It was interesting being the best puzzler on the team, as the people I recruited were local Jewish geeky people but not puzzle-obsessed people. When I solve with Palindrome at Mystery Hunt, a team chock full of better solvers than me, it's a really good Mystery Hunt if I solo solve a single puzzle. Here I had a hand in essentially every single puzzle we solved, whether it be solving from start to finish or being the person who jumps onto a stuck puzzle and identifying how to unstuck it.
It was fun to be in that position for a change, to be the person that people looked to for help when they were stuck. But it also had me evaluating how to best use myself to support the team goals, which given our ability were much more about having fun than about solving as many puzzles as possible. I had to figure out how to switch between Individual Solver mode and Team Captain mode. I'm not a natural Team Captain type, really. I struggled with a lot of the communication and planning and and scheduling and organization stuff, and how to communicate progress I'd made on puzzles to others and more significantly, how to get others to communicate the progress they'd made on puzzles.
Yesterday afternoon I set a focus and said to everyone "Okay, we are solving the first metapuzzle before the Hunt ends no matter what it takes" and I stared and stared and finally I had the key aha that broke it open, and man is that a satisfying feeling.
When we could all gather together and work on puzzles, we were reasonably successful at solving. But scheduling proved a major weakness. Of the seven people on the team, I managed to get as many as five together in one place twice- last Saturday night and Sunday night. The rest of the week, when I managed group solving at all, it was just two people. We also lost a couple days to Purim.
It was interesting being the best puzzler on the team, as the people I recruited were local Jewish geeky people but not puzzle-obsessed people. When I solve with Palindrome at Mystery Hunt, a team chock full of better solvers than me, it's a really good Mystery Hunt if I solo solve a single puzzle. Here I had a hand in essentially every single puzzle we solved, whether it be solving from start to finish or being the person who jumps onto a stuck puzzle and identifying how to unstuck it.
It was fun to be in that position for a change, to be the person that people looked to for help when they were stuck. But it also had me evaluating how to best use myself to support the team goals, which given our ability were much more about having fun than about solving as many puzzles as possible. I had to figure out how to switch between Individual Solver mode and Team Captain mode. I'm not a natural Team Captain type, really. I struggled with a lot of the communication and planning and and scheduling and organization stuff, and how to communicate progress I'd made on puzzles to others and more significantly, how to get others to communicate the progress they'd made on puzzles.
Yesterday afternoon I set a focus and said to everyone "Okay, we are solving the first metapuzzle before the Hunt ends no matter what it takes" and I stared and stared and finally I had the key aha that broke it open, and man is that a satisfying feeling.