Social Distancing Puzzles

[seekingferret]

A Mystery Hunt teammate wrote a set of Social Distancing Puzzles, available for a donation to Feeding America.

The gimmick is that the puzzles are designed to be solved with a partner, either remotely or in the same room (I solved them with a friend over Google Meet). Each partner gets a different version of the puzzles with only some of the information required to solve the puzzles, so you have to share information in order to solve them. There are ten puzzles, and then the answers to the ten puzzles form clues to a nice meta-puzzle with a satisfyingly thematic answer.


It was a really nice way to spend an evening with a friend and I highly recommend checking them out if you have a person you like solving word puzzles with.

Comments

[bironic]

Ooh, thanks for the tip. I've procured for my at-loose-ends mom and sister.

[primeideal]

Sounds like "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes," if you're familiar with that one?

[seekingferret]

Similar structure, yes, but no time limits, so it's not stressful like "Keep Talking". It took us a bit over 4 hours to solve the 10 puzzles plus metapuzzle, so... the puzzles took about half an hour each on average?

[sbrackett]

Does that mean you're on Palindrome? I'm on Metaphysical Plant.

Thanks for sharing! I have a friend who would love to do these with me I bet.

[seekingferret]

Yup, I've been Hunting with Palindrome for the past five years or so.

[sbrackett]

Cool! How did you discover Mystery Hunt?

[seekingferret]

I went to CTY (aka nerd camp), as a teen. Friends from CTY dragged me up to Hunt in '06 (the Metaphysical Plant SPIES hunt, actually) and I've been going ever since, first with Lake Effect Snow (which was a team with a lot of CTY people on it) and then that split up and I was with Just for the Halibut. That team fell apart and I was looking for a new team and ended up on Palindrome, just in time for a run of heartbreaking second place finishes.

[sbrackett]

Nice! I went to MITY, the Minnesota version of CTY, for many years and loved it. Definitely have recruited a friend from MITY into puzzling with me but I haven't yet gotten him to join Metaphysical Plant. I got into puzzles through someone who went to MIT and his sister. Those two introduced me to P and A magazine, then he mentioned Mystery Hunt and it sounded really cool so I uh, emailed everyone I knew in Boston and asked if they knew anyone on a team and was added to Metaphysical Plant by a friend of a friend. Not sure why that felt like the /best/ way to join at the time but now that I've started hunting not remotely I've gotten to know more of the team and I enjoy hunting with them!

[seekingferret]

Cool! Unfortunately I'm not sure if there's going to be much of a non-remote Hunt this year.

[sbrackett]

Alas! I hope there somehow is because I love going to the Boston area every year but, yeah. There may not be. I suppose if it is /all/ remote the remote experience might be more exciting but I'll definitely miss the in person stuff if it is.

[seekingferret]

Hunt is officially remote, I dunno if you saw.

[sbrackett]

I saw! I'm excited. I'll be bummed not to have my fun exploring Boston area times but if there is less Pandemic by, say, Readercon times maybe I'll actually get to go to Readercon because I won't think "But I just wnet to Boston for Hunt!"

I'm also very curious how they're going to do this and I'm looking forward to the experience of being remote when /everyone/ is remote. Being remote when a) you've not actually met anyone from your team in person and b) a ton of them are in Cambridge is a very lonely experience and I expect this to be not quite as bad. For one thing, I know my team now.