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Jan. 22nd, 2020 09:55 amAt the Mystery Hunt's kickoff this year, I dug out a photo of myself in 2006 dressed up for my first Mystery Hunt Kickoff, in a white dress shirt and black and red cape.
It was a kick to see how time has passed, and I'm delighted that fifteen years later, on my tenth Mystery Hunt, I'm still seeing some of the same awesome people at Hunt. Just as in '06, the '20 Hunt asked Hunters to show up to Kickoff in semi-formal dress, this time because Kickoff was going to include an ACTUAL WEDDING. Two members of the writing team had met through puzzles and forged their relationship around puzzles and they wanted to get married at Mystery Hunt in front of the many friends they had on a number of teams. It was lovely. Here's a picture of the members of my team who decided to dress up for kickoff
After the ceremony, the bride and groom announced that they'd bought everyone at kickoff tickets to join them on their honeymoon at Penny Park, a theme park they had loved as children. It had since fallen into disrepair... the sense of the slightly seedy amusement park gone far from its glory days was a key part of the Hunt's visual aesthetic. By solving puzzles we generated Buzz which would help restore Penny Park to its glory days.
Palindrome (WTF FTW) was the first team in the Hunt to solve a puzzle, about 13 minutes after the first puzzles were released. And the race was on. I'm incredibly proud of the people I worked with, who stayed in good spirits for the whole Hunt and constantly amazed me with their creativity and ingenuity.
We did have some new organizational challenges. MIT's new policy, announced literally days before the Hunt, restricts teams without MIT students on them from working on campus between the hours of 1AM and 7AM, so we hastily booked an off-campus after-hours headquarters via VRBO, though it offered limited solving space. We're evaluating options for next year.
I helped construct a Bender the Robot costume out of duct tape and cardboard for the Disney parade style Robot Parade event. I don't mind bragging that our costume is awesome:
I solved puzzles (many of my favorites seemed to be about language this year; I really enjoyed Foreign Box Office and Old West Revue), I helped with various logistical and organizational challenges we faced, I had so much fun, and at about noon on Sunday, as I was working on a puzzle about Sesame Street, we solved our final meta. This unlocked the Penny meta-meta, a puzzle involving flattened souvenir pennies we'd acquired throughout the Hunt.
After we solved this, about an hour later, we were sent 10 campus runaround puzzles to solve in parallel, with the clear expectation on our part that if we solved all of those, we would find the coin and win the Hunt. The one I got sent on was a Hansel and Gretel runaround where we were given the directions they'd used to plant breadcrumbs. We therefore had to follow the directions backwards to follow the breadcrumb trail. Each runaround had its own hook- there was one brutal one where the instructions were written all in emojis. When we'd solved eight of the ten runarounds, we got word that another team had beaten us to the coin. Twenty minutes later we finished the runarounds, and we completed the endgame about forty minutes later, just over an hour behind the winning team. SECOND PLACE AGAIN!
In looking at the results later, it wasn't entirely as close as that seemed. The winning team, ✈️✈️✈️ Galactic Trendsetters ✈️✈️✈️ had solved the final meta six hours ahead of us... they then got stuck on the penny meta-meta for hours, allowing us to catch up most of the way. I know how frustrating that is, to be stuck on one puzzle in a Hunt of nearly two hundred, with the coin on the line. But with the pressure on, they finally solved the penny puzzle and found the coin.
It'd be amazing to win, it'd be amazing to get the opportunity to help run a Hunt, but the Mystery Hunt is so much fun as it is and I'm so grateful to Left Out for running an amazing Hunt and so grateful that I get to work on it with Palindrome every year. And looking forward to a Galactic Mystery Hunt.
It was a kick to see how time has passed, and I'm delighted that fifteen years later, on my tenth Mystery Hunt, I'm still seeing some of the same awesome people at Hunt. Just as in '06, the '20 Hunt asked Hunters to show up to Kickoff in semi-formal dress, this time because Kickoff was going to include an ACTUAL WEDDING. Two members of the writing team had met through puzzles and forged their relationship around puzzles and they wanted to get married at Mystery Hunt in front of the many friends they had on a number of teams. It was lovely. Here's a picture of the members of my team who decided to dress up for kickoff
After the ceremony, the bride and groom announced that they'd bought everyone at kickoff tickets to join them on their honeymoon at Penny Park, a theme park they had loved as children. It had since fallen into disrepair... the sense of the slightly seedy amusement park gone far from its glory days was a key part of the Hunt's visual aesthetic. By solving puzzles we generated Buzz which would help restore Penny Park to its glory days.
Palindrome (WTF FTW) was the first team in the Hunt to solve a puzzle, about 13 minutes after the first puzzles were released. And the race was on. I'm incredibly proud of the people I worked with, who stayed in good spirits for the whole Hunt and constantly amazed me with their creativity and ingenuity.
We did have some new organizational challenges. MIT's new policy, announced literally days before the Hunt, restricts teams without MIT students on them from working on campus between the hours of 1AM and 7AM, so we hastily booked an off-campus after-hours headquarters via VRBO, though it offered limited solving space. We're evaluating options for next year.
I helped construct a Bender the Robot costume out of duct tape and cardboard for the Disney parade style Robot Parade event. I don't mind bragging that our costume is awesome:
I solved puzzles (many of my favorites seemed to be about language this year; I really enjoyed Foreign Box Office and Old West Revue), I helped with various logistical and organizational challenges we faced, I had so much fun, and at about noon on Sunday, as I was working on a puzzle about Sesame Street, we solved our final meta. This unlocked the Penny meta-meta, a puzzle involving flattened souvenir pennies we'd acquired throughout the Hunt.
After we solved this, about an hour later, we were sent 10 campus runaround puzzles to solve in parallel, with the clear expectation on our part that if we solved all of those, we would find the coin and win the Hunt. The one I got sent on was a Hansel and Gretel runaround where we were given the directions they'd used to plant breadcrumbs. We therefore had to follow the directions backwards to follow the breadcrumb trail. Each runaround had its own hook- there was one brutal one where the instructions were written all in emojis. When we'd solved eight of the ten runarounds, we got word that another team had beaten us to the coin. Twenty minutes later we finished the runarounds, and we completed the endgame about forty minutes later, just over an hour behind the winning team. SECOND PLACE AGAIN!
In looking at the results later, it wasn't entirely as close as that seemed. The winning team, ✈️✈️✈️ Galactic Trendsetters ✈️✈️✈️ had solved the final meta six hours ahead of us... they then got stuck on the penny meta-meta for hours, allowing us to catch up most of the way. I know how frustrating that is, to be stuck on one puzzle in a Hunt of nearly two hundred, with the coin on the line. But with the pressure on, they finally solved the penny puzzle and found the coin.
It'd be amazing to win, it'd be amazing to get the opportunity to help run a Hunt, but the Mystery Hunt is so much fun as it is and I'm so grateful to Left Out for running an amazing Hunt and so grateful that I get to work on it with Palindrome every year. And looking forward to a Galactic Mystery Hunt.