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[seekingferret]

At 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.

Comments

[bironic]

Congrats on having a good time and being an awesome team, even if being awesome involved coming "only" *thisclose* to winning.

Question for you, since some friends have been debating the kickoff situation: So, everyone knew ahead of time that a real wedding would be involved? Or did only some people / did that only become clear once on site?

[seekingferret]

Thanks!

I've heard some mixed feelings from people about the wedding thing. Everyone definitely did not know that a real wedding would be involved, but my team was able to figure it out from the clues ahead of time and so did some other teams.

A week before Hunt, an invitation was sent out to the wedding of M&G. https://www.ericberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/invitation.png. This was very clearly a callback to the 2011 Hunt, which invited Hunters to the wedding of M&P. http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/2011/invite.png M&P, it turned out, were Mario and Peach, leading into a video game themed Hunt where GLaDOS was the ultimate boss.

We debated various options for M&G (Mario and GLaDOS? Morticia and Gomez?) but our team pretty quickly came to the guess that M&G were Mark and Gaby, two members of Left Out, the team writing the Hunt, who had been dating for several years. The people who do Mystery Hunt are very much an uncommunity in the way I describe in my essay on "Silent Fandoms", in the sense that there definitely isn't a single Mystery Hunt community, but there is enough overlap and interweave between people on the various long-time teams and people at other big puzzle events that you can speak of 'the puzzle community' and not be speaking entirely nonsense. So a number of people on Palindrome know Mark and Gaby, from various other puzzle events where they see each other, and guessed that there might be something up. And in the days leading up to the Hunt there were various clue confirmations... some puzzle community people who haven't gone to Hunt that often in recent years were coming, people on our team ran into Mark in the days before Hunt in company of out-of-town family members, etc... So we were pretty certain that M&G were Mark and Gaby and it was a real wedding, and so were some of the other top teams, but I'm sure most Mystery Hunters did not know.

dr_whom, who is on the team Metaphysical Plant who wrote the aforementioned 2011 video games Hunt, wrote in his Hunt wrapup: honestly I felt a little weird about it? The invitation they sent out a week before the Hunt was just an alteration of the invitation we had sent around for Mario and Peach's wedding in the 2011 Mario Hunt; it both seems a little inappropriate of them to literally just copy our team's design, and certainly didn't make it clear that this wedding (unlike the one in 2011) was going to be real. And so there I am unexpectedly a guest at an intimate moment in the lives of two people I don't know; I'm glad they got to have their wedding in a venue that was meaningful for them, but it felt inappropriate for them to be imposing their important personal moment on everyone who was just there to solve puzzles.

So clearly everyone didn't love the imposition of the wedding. But I thought it was a lovely moment of shared uncommunity. Mark Gottlieb literally wrote the book on Mystery Hunt, it felt nice and fitting to let him celebrate his and Gaby's love amongst the people who love Hunt as much as they do. And if it was an imposition, it was not a huge one. The ceremony lasted at most fifteen minutes, followed immediately by a pivot to puzzle content. Any other wedding celebration with family and closer friends happened in venues that did not impose on the rest of the Hunt.

[bironic]

Fascinating! Thanks for writing all that out. I don't know enough about the culture(s) of Mystery Hunt to gauge what did or did not go well here, so it's interesting to hear perspectives from attendees I do know. The context about the main players (as it were) is helpful, too.

[seekingferret]

There's also a particular joy for me, which is that over the past decade I have missed three Mystery Hunts for weddings (for a former roommate, a cousin, and a close friend) so it was kind of delightful to me that I got to go this one and still attend a wedding.

[bironic]

Ha! Yes. And perhaps the pleasure of having solved a puzzle before the Hunt even began, and which not everyone realized was a puzzle? Wedding-imposition ethics aside.