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Deanna's 2019 MIT Mystery Hunt Saga
You know, I never actually wrote up my Mystery Hunt post last year (I just gave myself a long list of notes and failed to turn it into text) and then after hunt this year I met someone who helped run the 2016 hunt who asked which things I liked and I completely couldn't remember and was glad I had an entry about it, so.
Spoiler Warning: I talk about actual things that happened solving puzzles here so if you see me mention a puzzle name you want to work on sometime, skip the next paragraph, because I will likely spoil you on it. This is your overall entry spoiler warning.
Also as a note: I'd usually include more photos, but their solutions pages are relatively good about having them when relevant for puzzles, so I'm only going to include a few of things I don't think are included there.
This year was my third year hunting with Metaphysical Plant (is the joke about "marrying into Random" still funny?) and just like the past few years I flew into Boston on the Wednesday night redeye and spent Thursday working at the Google Cambridge office, where we had a Mystery Hunt lunch with 20 or so people from many different hunt teams. I also ducked out in the late afternoon for a little while to go to Trapology and do two escape rooms with friends from Seattle (Jennifer Geske invited me, but I was in a group with the Wallaces and Jay McCleery and Dave Miller), which was fun, and convenient because it's really easy to get around Boston by public transit. Then I went back to work for a bit, and in the evening I joined the Plant team dinner at Christopher's in Porter Square; Chris still wasn't there, but at this point I know enough people that it didn't feel too awkward to be there without him (if nothing else we had just seen Bryan in NZ a few weeks prior and we spent a week on the Joco Cruise with a bunch of others from the team last year too, so I mostly sat with those people).
Then I went back to the Kendall and crashed really hard because I barely slept on the redeye. I kind of remember Chris arriving but not really.
Friday morning we got up, got breakfast in the hotel, and went to building 46 to help set up, but we were running a little late and there wasn't much to set up, so it was mostly saying hi to people and then running off to Kresge for kickoff. There were people to say hi to, and then there was an opening skit, and then there was hunt.
(Kickoff video is now archived here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ4V_PDNEv0)
I know it's not nice to say things like this but I was actually pretty underwhelmed by the opening skit, probably because last year Death and Mayhem went overboard with production values for Inside Out and even two years ago when Setec last ran they did a really funny D&D skit thing that made you excited to see what was coming next. This year's theme turned out to be holidays, and the skit started out being about making a new holiday to remember the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, apparently a long-standing inside joke for the Setec team. Midway through the skit, the team is visited by Santa Claus, Jack Skellington, some Thanksgiving people, etc, and everyone is like, you can't just make a new Molasses Awareness Day without seeing how all of the other Holiday Towns react to this, it's going to cause problems between all of us. I mean, it was fine, it was clever, it's actually a pretty brilliant Hunt theme, it just didn't get me as excited about hunt as some previous openings have.
My original plan was to get free lunch from Google before heading back to Plant HQ but Chris wanted to just grab food in the student center, and I figured it was probably quicker to do that, and I wasn't hungry anyway, so a sandwich would be good because it could be eaten a few hours later. We tried to go to Laverde's, except that OMG THEIR KITCHEN WAS BROKEN and they had a sign up saying they'd be shut down until Jan 24th, which freaked me the hell out because I think I literally eat at least 2-3 meals there every Hunt since I get hungrier later than everyone else so I often stop by there for a sandwich while out on some other kind of runaround or whatever. (I genuinely like their deli sandwiches!) So we got sandwiches from Subway instead, running into a few other friends in the food court there, and then we got back to HQ a little while before puzzles came out.
As usual, there were too many people and not enough puzzles at the start, so people split into the 3ish groups for the 3ish open puzzles. I helped with a thing called Nobel Laureate, which we quickly realized were things all describing lyrics of Bob Dylan songs, and we just had to identify the songs and figure out how to index into them to get a message out of it (and of course there were some times that the song titles weren't straightforward (Quinn the Eskimo, I'm looking at you)).
It took us about an hour to do it, and I noticed we'd unlocked a thing called Theater Pieces, which said to go request an interaction with HQ, so I did that. I was told to go to building 13 and request "157 Easy Pieces", so I did that; actually, I forgot the adjective on the way so when I got to HQ I said something like "Hi, I'm here from Metaphysical Plant and I'm here to pick up ummm... 157 frickin' pieces or something". They had me knock on the door and who answers it but Brad Schaefer. But, I learned my lesson last year, so now I know to pretend I don't recognize him, and I politely thank him for the bag of jigsaw puzzle pieces he hands me, and back I go to the trenches.
Theater Pieces involved putting together a bunch of jigsaw puzzles, and they had various muppets on them. Eventually one of us realizes they're all scenes from Monsterpiece Theater, so after putting together 3-4 of them, I let other people work on the jigsawing and start looking up the Monsterpiece Theater movies and trying to figure out which is which. Some of them weren't too hard to guess what it was (ie, a thing with Prairie Dawn sitting on a Little House, or Grover rowing a boat as the Old Man and the Sea) but some of them were REALLY obscure or didn't have a lot of good things identifying them (like Chariots of Fur). You can look at the Solution page here to see what some of those images looked like and get an idea. Not to give away the entire ending, but once we had everything identified it wasn't hard to get a final answer. It was a cute puzzle and also took us about an hour total.
Right around when we finished that we'd unlocked something called Funkin', which also required going to Hunt HQ and telling them to FEED ME, so Brackett and I walked over and went to pick up our puzzle, which was... a Dunkin' Donuts box with 12 donuts and two donut holes in them, with some plastic things attached... amusingly, we walked by other puzzle hunt teams/friends on the way and fortunately they'd already gotten their donuts or that might have been awkward! Like we stopped by Rage since we were walking by their room and Glenn saw me through the window and waved.
Anyway, we get back with this box of donuts and figure out that the plastic things in the donuts are all little USB flash drives. I'm sitting at one end of a table with Brackett and Joel at that point and I'm like, well, this is my work laptop, so *I* don't think I should try to read them. Joel has no worries about this and so he starts looking through them.
Meanwhile I see Koi and (I think it was Daniel) cutting out You're Gonna Need a Bigger Gravy Boat at the other end of the table, and Daniel went off to do something else, so I finish cutting out pieces and Koi and I finish Gravy Boat while Joel goes through Funkin' files. I should have written them down at the time but all kinds of silly quotes came out of that, like "These donuts are filled with flash drives," and "Each donut has 19 mp3s in it", and so on.
"Yup, there's definitely something stuck in those donuts..."
Brackett carefully extracts the flash drives so that the donuts are still mostly edible afterwards.
Gravy Boat wasn't too horribly difficult, or at least, it was fairly straightforward what to do? Like you had to just assemble the pieces, and once you realize they're navy flags it gets a little easier, and then you read the clue saying the next part is semaphore, and of course we kind of sloppily assembled the last few pieces because we were just trying to get the entire picture, so when we realize that each dot has to become a semaphore we're like, oops, and then tried to assemble it a little better, and then I did the logic puzzle part to get semaphore letters, and I had most of it with a few little ambiguities that Koi helped work through, and we got the solution a bit later (again, the whole thing took about an hour).
I helped out a bit more with Funkin' (namely -- Joel and Allen had gotten a bunch of the setlists, and Terry noted that they had a lot of songs covered by Phish in them, and I googled some stuff and was like OMG YOU GUYS PHISH HAD A TOUR CALLED BAKERS' DOZEN WHERE THEY NAMED EACH NIGHT AFTER A DONUT, ALL OF WHICH WERE IN THAT BOX, but that was about it.
Mostly, because about that time Chris was working on We See Thee Rise with people and was like "oh, this needs to be pentominoed, my wife will do that for you very quickly" and I was like, pentominoes? where? And so I came over to work on that -- and sure enough, between knowing that there needed to be stripes of RED and whatnot, I was able to pentomino it out (and rearrange some words) pretty quickly. But then what? That was the problem -- we sat there basically trying to figure out how the hell to get a message out of what should have been the leaf of the Canadian flag for quite a while. I even was like "that J has an arrow, we need to read from it" and we got "JONES WIN ACTOR" but the rest was pretty garbled. Someone thought the rest was "SKIKDA PIU" which made very little sense, but eventually someone else realized it was SKIKDA PIC and that Skikda was infact a city and you could go north from it (the clues for each piece had involved switching things to be one thing north from the clue, like "this Maryland railroad" would be "this Pennsylvania railroad" and such.
We See Thee Rise unlocked 7 Little Dropquotes when we solved it, so we printed that out and 7 people took one each, and since I cheat at dropquotes in general (shrug, not really, I just strategically use Nutrimatic to get an in, is that actually cheating?) I solved mine really quickly and figured out the words at the bottom with the word piece hook, and handed it off to everyone else; I would have worked on more dropquotes but it was getting near to 7pm, and the first event of the hunt was going to be Groundhog Day something at 7:30pm in the student center, so I went over to that with Brackett.
Groundhog Day was... frustrating, on purpose. You come in and they introduce the event with a clip from Groundhog Day the movie (ie, "I Got You Babe" playing and a thing saying how we'd see the groundhog, and then where'd he go, and can all of you go solve some puzzles to find the groundhog) and then they let us loose. They had 6 stations with things to solve at each; one was a word ladder where a new ladder item came in about every 15 seconds but old ones would disappear too, one was a thing that described fruit-related actors/movies, one was a pixel image that kept getting more enhanced, and one was Wheel of Fortune (same gimmick, letters would appear and disappear in the grid, so you had to watch for a while). Those four were on screens; the other two were on papers, one was an I Spy and one was a hex maze but you had to do it in your head without writing on it. The thing is, you had to not only get an answer to the station you were working on but you had to get in line and go talk to one of the Groundhog Day City Council people and get your answer stamped and get a transparency piece for it... AND you had to have your team's sheet (so the two of you had to be careful what lines you were in)... AND you had to do this within the 4-minute time loop or so that we had - if you were waiting in line for a stamp when I Got You Babe started playing, you were just screwed. Which happened to me like twice in a row, so actually, I just decided to not bother going up for the third round and just watched like all 4 of the computerized puzzles to gather data (figuring they were going to repeat anyway). On the fourth loop I was able to get the Word Ladder one and Brackett got Wheel of Fortune, since the crowds were thinning out, I got the fruit thing next while she found the I Spy, and then I did the hex maze while she identified the enhance image. Then we had to overlay the transparencies to make a cute picture of a groundhog and it was a polarizer, which revealed the overall event puzzle on a thingy in the other room. Fun. I was super frustrated by this at first but it wasn't so bad once the lines died down.
The mayor and the puzzle checking table, where people would eventually be scrambling.
Wheel of Fortune puzzle
Hex maze in your head
Do you know your cartoons?
After assembling all 6 transparencies
The groundhog's "shadow" was a polarizer that showed letters on a screen in the other room.
We bought some food/snacks/chocolate/whatever in Laverdes and went back to HQ, where outside our room I found that people had ordered Bertucci's pizza! Argh! But Josh assured me that there was undoubtedly some extra since he'd ordered a lot, and if I just waited like 10 minutes I could have some, so I ate some bread rolls and also my wrap that I got at Laverdes and went inside for a bit. I I found Koi and Chris and Austin (I think) and Cindy and I forget who else working on A Tearable Puzzle which looked awesome; the state I came into the puzzle, they had answers for maybe 9/12 of the clues and Austin and Koi were folding the edge thing into diagonal state abbreviations (which was clued in the main word find). I helped the remaining clues (notably the Sonic the Hedgehog one and the Rocky on the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum one; the White Stripes turned out to be slightly off too). Then I helped people find a bunch of the words in the grid (they were bent into corners, so Austin or Koi would read off letters to me and I'd tell them if they matched the current scheme (like Scrabble letters summing to 8?)), by which point Koi figured out to overlay the folded strip over the grid and start getting messages, so then I helped with the refolding, and things were relatively straightforward after that. I thought it was pretty impressive how they made all of that work out!
(And also, inbetween some of that, I went outside and ate pizza with Josh and some other people who I have forgotten now, one of whom was an actual undergrad hunting with us (whoa)).
Solving Tearable unlocked Cross Campus, which I jumped on because campus puzzle (yeah I know. Our team is about 50% MIT alumni and yet I am always jumping on campus puzzles because, I dunno, maybe it doesn't give me PTSD. Kidding. Maybe.) I went through and identified about 65% of the places in the video on a first runthrough, then I got Bryan to watch it again with me and he identified another 25% (we were both like "omg building 12!"), so we had almost everything, and we also identified a whole bunch of the items being held up, and so on, and then it was like, okay, now what?
Well, actually, "now what" turned out to be unlocking an ACTUAL runaround puzzle called Running for Office. Tim and Alya and Molly were going to go on that, but I was like runaround! I wanna runaround! And so did other people, and Tim was like "well we're not trying to win hunt, so who cares if we have 7 people on this?" and so the away team ended up being Tim, Alya, Molly, Joel, Terry, Bryan, and myself.
Sorry, gonna just tell stories here. So, spoilers. We started off at 26-100 and found the picture needed for the first part, which said to go to Morss, which is the ballroom thingy inside Walker. (Side note: We actually walked through the first floor of Building 12 for a bit as we passed by, since people wanted to see it, and the Rage away team walked by us as we were coming out, and we ran into them a few more times and apparently they were super confused what route we'd taken since we shouldn't have been in 12 so early.) We got to Walker and had to overlay some stuff on the Walker Memorial Mural and take some letters out; also not too hard. Next thing was the "friends" list in the Stata Center, and it was just a matter of doing annoying arithmetic (like it'd say "friend for 82 years" so you had to realize that meant 1937 and find the person, etc). We split up the list and got the phrase about "attics of pavilions" and figured we were headed to Killian Court for the next one. (We also ran into Rage again at this point in Stata, and recognizing most of them, I called out "It's the Carnegie Mellon runaround team!")
Being as it was almost midnight at this point, people had to go actually gather the names of all the people around the court since we couldn't just see them all from the center (and we ended up with too much information; apparently you really only needed the 8 names, not their subgroups, oops). We adjourned to a nearby classroom in Building 4 to actually solve the puzzle (because like, it was cold and snowy outside) and then somehow this tripped us up for half an hour. (I have to admit -- I spent about 5 minutes frantically opening Pokemon Go gifts before midnight and *then* started focusing on the puzzle) I wrote a pigpen cipher chart up on the board, and listened to people talk about which combination of names made which combination of the arts, and then I tried to use quipquip to just flat out cipher it, which didn't work, so then I asked Terry where people were thinking they had letters, and he showed me where the O's were, and since they had two towards the end I said "well that's gonna be either "DOOR" or "ROOM" right? Let's see what happens if we assume one of those words?" and so Terry and I put together some letters and next thing you knew we had "O_DMEDI____DOOR" and was like "uhh... could this be "old media lab door"?" and everyone was like "sure, but how did you get there?" and I was like "shrug, cryptogramming with some smart guesses?"
We lost Alya at this point and went into the tunnels to get over to the media lab, going past all the paintings down there and various other things (which I both thought were new and old; looking at my photos of the same tunnel from 1 and 2 years ago, many of them were there then too).
The media lab thing tripped us up too -- well -- more like, the problem I had was, I had the bad printout with the poor coloring, so I couldn't even really see the actual colors on the puzzle. We looked at the part of the building where the old entrance was, couldn't figure out what to do immediately, found a way into the building, and... and I started working on seeing if I could break the dropquote in puzzle 9, since I couldn't do the colors anyway. Everyone else eventually solved it anyway and off we went to the Rotch library in building 7.
3 members of the running team were outside Rotch when we got there, and we couldn't all fit into the doorway anyway, so half of us did the puzzle and the other half talked to the Setec folks about Common Flavors, this puzzle involving identifying a whole ton of tea, which I totally did not work on but which Molly had been buried in. Again, I didn't have an ideal printout with colors, but the shapes of the corners in the library design were unique enough that it wasn't too hard to do without having exact colors.
This told us to go to the ice arena, which you can't get into at 1am, conveniently, but we figured that the puzzle was actually referring to the three sports figures hanging off the ceiling in the sports center, which we could see from the outside. We took a picture of them and went into the student center to finish solving it...
...and got accosted by a guy from Special Events, who was basically like "What are you people doing here? There is not supposed to be anyone camping in this building after hours," and we were like, WTF? And he said, are you MIT students? and we were like, alumni? (not me, but everyone else in the group was, and had alumni IDs) And he insisted that people weren't supposed to be in the student center, and we're like, we're not camping -- we're solving a puzzle -- and infact, we had just solved the part that said the next thing would be to go downstairs (ie, it was "W20 basement") so the puzzle even explicitly told us we needed to come into the student center, so how on earth was there a miscommunication that led this guy to think nobody would be in the student center overnight? Since it's not like they could control what time of day the puzzle would hit teams, and the instructions even explicitly said "Bring your MIT ID and watch the weather."
Anyway he was all like, well, I'm gonna go talk to the liaison I have for this hunt thing and tell him that you guys were here overnight, and we're like, uh, okay, you do that. Nevermind that literally any day of the year, any alum with an MIT ID could get into the student center, of course. Later on we heard that they started locking the student center to people without IDs after 9pm because homeless people had been coming in and sleeping in there, which I guess maybe was what he was referring to as "camping out", but did a bunch of us with clipboards and pencils and puzzles, during a puzzle event on campus, actually look like a group of homeless people? WTF?
We went downstairs, and the dropquote in the basement was much easier when you had the actual painting with the quote it was on :)
Dropquote told us to go over to the thingy outside 10-250 and oh my god there was this gigantic thing listing all of the MIT Sustaining Fellows and even though we knew exactly what we had to do -- find pairs of these first names with the same last name -- it was still pretty tedious and took a while -- about 40 minutes by my timestamps on photos. Also, since it was past 2am, at this point the only people left were myself and Bryan and Terry; we basically lost everyone else after either the gym or the student center. So, I started at the right side, and Bryan and Terry started at the left, and we eventually found enough of them to get enough of the final phrase for how to extract an overall answer. Spoiler: it had to do with identifying the MIT presidents associated with each building we'd been in (since it was called Running For Office after all, but even for the MIT alums it was hard to remember things like, the area of the Stata Center we were in is technically the Vest Student Street, stuff like that) and putting them in the proper order to extract overall from our puzzles. We went over to 26-100 to do it, actually, because we weren't even sure which president that was (turns out it's Compton; 26-110 across the way is the Karl Taylor Compton Reading Room or something). We did this, and amusingly, the final answer did involve going back through Building 12, which is no wonder why everyone was confused to see us there earlier on.
They don't actually have a picture of Tearable in action so here is one.
Walker memorial mural
Stata center cranes and names
One of these things is not like the others
Old Media Lab Door
Rotch library patterns
Dropquotey painting thing
Possibly the most tedious part, finding names in the MIT Sustaining Fellows
Finishing up the final steps, back where we started in 26-100
So we got back victorious around 3:30am (though Bryan gave up for the night at that point) and the next thing that happened is I came back to the Cross Campus puzzle; I mentioned that we'd identified almost all the locations and many of the objects in them beforehand, and I'd even split it up by timestamps in our spreadsheet, and I could then confirm the ones that were "maybe building 12?" at that point. Reid had been looking at it, noticing that the camera panned in each video clip, so I went and added the videoclip pan directions and the postit notes directions. He figured out that it had to be a big crossword over main campus, and I figured out that: the postit notes only showed up in even buildings, and that each of those buildings had exactly one clip pan left to right and one clip pan up to down, so they must be across and down clues, and next thing I knew Reid had filled out almost all of the grid. The only clue that took us absolutely forever to figure out was the satin pods (seriously WTF) and it didn't really matter since he just spotted the extraction anyway.
Solving Cross Campus unlocked a puzzle called Twelve! Eleven! and so for whatever reason, rather than going to sleep, Laurel and I started working on it (with someone else too but I forgot who since they were mostly in the spreadsheet). We weren't sure how to partition things at first but like, we quickly made the group of the Twelve Days of Christmas things, and we noticed that you could read a message vertically in the 5-letter things if you ignored one of them, so it seemed that we were going to make groups of 10. And some weren't so bad... we found 10 sports teams, we found 10 moons, we found 10 cities on islands, and 10 winter olympians, but then after that it was very... well... we thought we had a group of comedians (but how to sort? top ten emmy getters?) and we definitely had a group of songs from musicals (but also how to sort??)
Also gotta admit something funny: I don't think we ever actually sorted the Olympians, for example, I just found the word "backwards" in the 5th column and noticed the rest made a message; same for the sports teams, since they were 2 from each major sport here I just started playing with the order and got the things like "what" and "going going" and such and managed to piece it out. And infact with musicals I even had the word "explode" in the 5th column but couldn't seem to get everything else to fit together ("junmuta" doesn't really look like anything compared to "cajun mutant"...) We also, for the longest longest time, had no frickin' clue where Green Pants was supposed to go. Laurel was positive it was a musical song, but like, what damn musical? Neither of us had heard of it.
Anyway, I got the David Letterman one by Googling a set of the comedians names and was just like OMG WHY DIDN'T I DO THAT EARLIER and then figured out the 2003 recall election one a bit later -- a lot of those names were deceptive (like "Carey" seemed like it could be Drew Carey, the comedian, but it was actually Mary Carey, and Coleman we thought might be Gary Goleman, and so on) and so once we had those, it wasn't hard to figure out where Green Pants was and to figure out that the last category was frickin' characters in top 10 movies (I had, infact, immediately thought of Don Lockwood when I saw "Lockwood" in there, but I figured that was just bias because Singin' in the Rain is actually one of my favorite movies, has been since I was around 8 years old, and I have the entire thing memorized), and to finish the rest of the puzzle.
By that point it was around 8:30am and definitely felt like time to leave and go sleep. Around 7:30am Reid's mom had shown up with an assortment of bagels and spreads and juices for breakfast, which apparently was a Hunt tradition for this team, but I'd never been awake and in the room at the right time for it before (I think in past years I came back later and was like, oh look, bagels, that's cool) and infact a bunch of us went downstairs to get them, which is when I realized it was really morning and light outside and all. Yay, bagels.
This also meant that I got *back* to the Kendall during breakfast, but didn't really feel like having any, so I didn't, and just went upstairs to go sleep, falling asleep around 9am I suppose. I set my phone to wake me up at 3pm.
zzzzzz...
I did infact wake up at 3pm, and showered and changed and walked out of the hotel towards the Chipotle next to the T station to grab lunch, when who do I see coming down the street but Terry -- he left around the same time I did in the morning, maybe later -- he asked where I was going and I said Chipotle, so he came with me and also got something to eat there and we walked back to Building 46 together, and ran into a bunch of people from Central Services in the lobby since they were also hunting in 46.
I should have taken a photo of the mostly-empty team room at 4:30am; this is a photo of the room at 4:30pm when I got back.
However, being as it was like 4:30 when I got back and there was an event going on at 5:30, I didn't really want to get involved in too much -- instead I ate my burrito and got involved in recruiting someone else to come with me to Talk Like a Pirate Day (that links to the solution, which also has the sheets that teams got). I thought we might need to dress like pirates so I tried to make a hat or eyepatch out of paper but eventually just gave up, and I recruited Joel to come with me.
Talk Like A Pirate Day was pretty awesome IMO! (I am not sure if Joel had a great time, but I did!) What happened there was, you were paired with 2 people from another mystery hunt team (we got paired with Illegal Immoral and Fattening), and in your group you were told we were "pirating" songs, which turned out to mean that you'd rewrite a few lyrics into Talk Like a Pirate speak and perform part of a song, with a responsive chant from the entire audience.
We were in Group A, so we got a sheet that had an example song of:
Jeremiah did a bullfrog be!
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
Aye, and 'twas he a fine matey!
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
Ne'er did he arr-ticulate!
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
Twas a scurvy drunken mate!
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
bein' a pirated version of Joy to the World by Three Dog Night (you know, the song that starts "Jeremiah was a bullfrog, was a good friend of mine")
Group B got the response chant of
Line A
(Wey, hey, blow the man down!)
Line B
(Give me some time to blow the man down)
Repeat, with Line C and D the same way.
And Group C got the even harder one of
(Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!)
Line A
(Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!)
Line B
(Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!)
(Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!)
Line C
(Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!)
Line D
(Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!)
(Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!)
The twist here was that you would get points for this event in two ways:
1) guessing other people's songs
2) having other people guess your songs... up to 2/3 of the room, after which you would lose points for people guessing your songs.
So you wanted to come up with something guessable but that would fool some number of teams, or maybe they just didn't know the songs anyway. They said using cellphones to find lyrics while writing your song was fine, but you couldn't use them while guessing songs (like standard pub trivia).
Trying to think of a song that I thought would both be thematic and not guessable by everyone, I suggested "My Heart Will Go On", because 1) it is associated with a boat and 2) it is from 1997 therefore current undergrads weren't alive then lol and 3) I went to see Come From Away last week again and one of the characters, there's a running gag where she keeps getting up and singing "NEEEEEAAAR, FAAAARR, WHEREVER YOU ARE..." so it was probably on my mind as an annoying karaoke song.
Everyone else went along with my idea though so it worked out :) Our lyrics were:
Though ye be near or farrrrr away
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
Me heart still beats fer another day
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
Throw back the latch, re-open the hatch
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
You're safe in me heart, where forever ye'll stay
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
And I think it went well, since I was watching the room when Kath was performing it and I could see about half the people with this look of "WTF is this" and the other half of the room laughing like "oh haha I get it", which seemed about as optimal as it could be.
So there were some pretty funny songs that got performed. I only took pictures of the second and third round guessing sheets for us so I've forgotten some, but the first round also had a group do Barbie Girl (right before us, even) and a Bohemian Rhapsody and two teams did Sounds of Silence (including Todd Etter, and I was pretty sure that's what he was doing but our team guessed Enter Sandman for it), and there were a whole bunch of Beatles (like Let it Be and Hey Jude).
The second round included things like David Reiley performing Money For Nothing, and another Bohemian Rhapsody, and a team doing YMCA ("Arr, laddie, there be a port ye can stay"), and my two personal favorites of the entire event, Tubthumping, and Re: Your Brains ("Harr, Tom, it be Bob from the other ship"), which I thought was particularly brilliant not just because it was really funny but also because several people might not recognize it AND even if people do recognize it they might not know the title, since I think a lot of people understandably think it's called All We Want To Do Is Eat Your Brains.
The third round was surprisingly much harder than the other two rounds to decipher, maybe due to the way the songs were formulated? Or maybe people were just better at obscuring things. The first one was Smooth Criminal, which I was proud to get off of a repetition of something like "Annabel, lass, be ye doin' fine?" and the second was Call Me Maybe and I cannot even remember how the hell I figured that out. Joel figured out the 5th one was Harder Better Stronger Faster, which wasn't even really pirated lyrics, the people just got up like "the first word be ____, the second word be ____" and so on. There was also Wannabe by the Spice Girls and Toxic by Britney Spears, and then there were a whole bunch of others we just had no idea (and in some cases, there were incomprehensible singers anyway). But overall it was pretty entertaining and our team did get bonus points for scoring well so that was good.
Our rule sheet and our lyrics sheet
The rest of Group A ("Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum")
Group C ("Drink up, me hearties, yo ho")
Anyway, that was basically the high point for me and Hunt was completely downhill from then on.
(yeah, I know that's a big thing to say, but bear with me.)
We got back and I was like, okay, what now? And Chris said, well we're working on this fucked-up wordfind, and you're good at those, wanna stare at this a little? It was a puzzle called Have You Seen Me and basically, the first part of it had involved finding characters in James and the Giant Peach, and then filling in a playfair cipher grid in the middle of the word find. Ciphering the grid gave us a second grid where we found Frodo and Boromir but nothing else, and another way of ciphering it gave us Aragorn somewhere, but never all at once, and I really did stare at this forever looking for names and just plain didn't really find much.
So when we unlocked a puzzle called Connect Four which appeared to start with a Mastermind word puzzle I decided to defect over to that instead, and so a bunch of us attacked the Mastermind part, mostly working in pairs. I helped get 2-3 of the words before it was almost 10pm and time to leave for another event.
Koi and I went to this one, and it was Registration Day, and... and... dude this really did not need to be an event. It could have been a paper puzzle. It was very disappointing. Basically, we showed up in Lobby 13, they told us we'd need to figure out our schedules for the upcoming semester, and that class offerings were posted on the 3rd floor of the infinite corridor in buildings 3/10/4.
So we, like everyone else, ran up to that hallway, and then we, like everyone else, took photos of every door that had a schedule on it, and we, like everyone else, basically found somewhere else to actually solve the puzzle, by ourselves.
Except that actually, we couldn't figure out how the fuck to solve it. Like, we had this page with "valid" and "invalid" classes, but it wasn't obvious to us at all how the hell the classes were valid or invalid. We had made a chart of all the courses and the possible times so that we could make a grid, especially since all the course numbers were 1-26, but... there wasn't anything obvious being spelled out. After about 30 minutes of staring at this like, what are we missing, we eventually decided to go back upstairs and see if anyone was still around who could hint us about it, and the people in the hall were like "well, didn't you pay attention when the Registrar was speaking at the beginning?" and we're like "we were supposed to get a clue out of something they were saying before we'd even seen the puzzle? what?"
Fortunately (?), the away team from East Campus was also running into the same issue at the same time we were, so they came back downstairs with us (Seth was like "I've been doing Mystery Hunt for 20 years, I always do the events, and this is the first time I've ever literally just had no clue whatsoever what to do at an event,") and we went to the registration table, and they basically did give us a hint (the funny part is that the solution page does not actually have the true solution nor any of the puzzle parts on it so I'm not even sure whether I CAN spoil it since I don't actually have the page they gave us in the first place) about how the valid/invalid classes were related, and Koi and I solved it like 3 minutes later.
Why was this unsatisfying to me as an event? (I figure I might as well rant, since future hunt organizers probably will see this, and I want them to know why I'm being so whiny about it; maybe my expectations are colored from going to so many events over the last 8 years of coming to Boston for hunt)
1) There was no collaboration with other teams. Or really any other interaction whatsoever. Usually events mean you get to do something with other people. Not always, but often. Like Ocean Pong. Or the escape-roomy-thingy. Or Pirate Songs. Or the one last year with constructing rule-based snacks, or Hungry Hungry Hippogriffs. Or the Adjective Speed Dating Game. Or Cards Against Wonderland. Or Wonderwang. Or all kinds of things. I always find them to be a nice opportunity to get to puzzle with some people not on our team. Maybe I'm weird.
2) There wasn't even anything you really had to do *at the event* as opposed to elsewhere. Like I said, this could have been delivered to us entirely as a paper puzzle, with 12 sheets of paper. Maybe it originally WAS meant to be delivered that way?
3) It wasn't actually fun or interesting. I feel like events should get some of you out of your conference room to do something that you get to tell a story when you get back when people ask you what the event was. Maybe it won't be fun for everyone (I'm looking at you, pool puzzle involving Set with rubber ducks), but you can usually at least see why it was worth the trip across campus for some people. (The story when you get back shouldn't be "Don't ask, it was stupid, coulda been a paper puzzle, here's the object we got")
I guess I also felt worse about this because I think the other events in this hunt were big hits -- the other two I went to, and doing a service event with the Boston Science Club for Girls, and even the two-legged semaphore thing, and so on. So it was like, yay, final event! Oh... sigh.
Getting the original schpiel from the Registrar
One of the doors with course info on it
As you can see, this is what every other team is doing too; taking photos and running off
Another door. If you want a hint about how this worked, let's just say that "Electro botcheries" is a weird phrase.
The map of the rooms, which was actually entirely irrelevant except to make sure you hit all of them, I guess.
Filling out our final course schedule once we figured out what was up.
It didn't help that well, we got back and then got stuck basically in slogs for the rest of hunt, or at least I did, with one bright exception.
While I was gone, everyone else had discovered that there was a hidden message in Connect Four saying "see recent gmpuzzles" and I was like, oh cool, that's Thomas Snyder's site, I do their puzzles all the time, HEY WAIT A MINUTE DON'T TELL ME, THIS IS ABOUT THOSE WEIRD-ASS FILOMINO CRYPTO PUZZLES EARLIER THIS WEEK and sure enough it was totally about those weird-ass filomino puzzles that week. Oliver and Cindy had done these before but none of the other people around us had, so we took the four puzzles and divided them up; I finished mine pretty quickly and then went to help Austin with his; Oliver did one on his tablet with a girl whose name I never caught, and Cindy did one either by herself or with someone else, I forget. (Also, haha, with Austin I was like "I hate to ask but can we make your colors into my colors? if 2 isn't red and 3 isn't yellow and 4 isn't green and so on I will get really confused" and luckily he was cool with it :)
So, okay, we solved these things. Yay. But then what? There was also this grid of ten words by ten words that was part of the puzzle that we weren't sure what to do with. And like, why did we mastermind originally? And why did they choose such weird crypto keys for the puzzle? I wrote out the crypto key for each one (like 1=D, 3=H, 4=T, etc etc) and we also noticed that if you went to the square in the 10x10 grid that said "CODE", that it wasn't chronological but that square on each filomino was a given letter that was C, O, D, E on different days. So it was nice knowing we were at least doing the right thing. But... I dunno, we wanted to somehow play Mastermind with the 10x10 grid and couldn't figure out a system that got it to work. Sigh.
Around this time we unlocked Sage Advice, so I printed that out and Chris and I started working on the "sageless" one, ie, the one where the word "sage" had been removed from the clues, and it was actually kind of fun for a while, until we just sort of got stuck (a lot of them you can sort of piece together from stuff around it, until you get stuck on all the things around it and then it's sort of fragmented). Chris decided to go to sleep, and I continued with it for a little while until Things got unlocked.
Sometimes I feel bad about butting in on people solving puzzles but I'm really glad I did with Things as it was probably my favorite puzzle of the entire hunt. Allen and Joel started it and they had figured out one of the songs in it was Never Gonna Give You Up (because of course it was) and then I was like what is this you are looking at and they showed me and I was like omg this is hilarious, and because I had just come back from Pirate Day a bit earlier, I immediately saw one of the songs being Tubthumping (because it literally is just the guy gets knocked down, gets up again, and drinks a lot of things and sings a lot of things). And I think they found I Want It That Way (we were all like WTF is this double negative thing) and I found Come Sail Away, and I was mostly laughing too hard to actually fill in the puzzle (seriously, when you abstract out songs to just "things I do, things you do, things you can't do", etc, it's pretty funny). But we couldn't quite get the final solution and were having trouble finding the other songs, until I did some lyric googling and found another, and Aaron walked by and we got him to Wheel of Fortune the final answer for us. (With 3 songs left, Chris was able to guess one of them later on when I showed him the puzzle without even using the internet, but the last two were pretty tough.)
And then... and then... WTF did I do between 3am and 5:30? It's weird, but I really don't remember. We had a lot of puzzles unlocked at that point, and that's sometimes exciting since you can just sort of grab whatever you think looks interesting, but it's super frustrating when you look at everything and none of it is actually anything you seem to be able to understand (ie, I thought Riding the Tube would be something up my alley especially since I still have a Tube map in my coat pocket from my trip to London a month ago, except rather than being an actual London Underground puzzle it was about a British comedy sketch, or same for Chicago Loop) or worse, you end up not even looking at the open puzzle that IS up your alley (in this case, He's Out!, which was a baseball puzzle, and somehow I didn't even SEE that one during the hunt, which seems ridiculous) or you find something that turns out to be up your alley BUT not until the second half, like the Star Battle one. These are all of course totally fair things to happen, it's just that if you encounter the puzzle by yourself at 3am you are less likely to actually have the right insight for it, which is the nature of Hunt I suppose, but man, I feel like I just got really unlucky with what I looked at vs what I should have looked at.
Around 4am we unlocked Small Steps, and I was excited for another runaround, but I was *not* excited to do a runaround at 4am by myself, so I filled in the locations of most of the pictures in a spreadsheet and put a note of "Deanna wants to do this when she gets back to campus in the early afternoon".
Also around then with some people who had returned, I went through the entirety of what we'd done with Connect Four, and there was some progress made (like we noticed Tim Marsden is an anagram for Mastermind, which actually kinda threw us off further), and we put all of the letters from all four filominos together but didn't think they spelled out words (oops). We even checked to see which letters in the 10x10 grid lined up the same as letters in the filominoes, but that didn't get us much either.
So I left at 5:30am just feeling kinda blah about everything, and the only good part is that it was snowing and I caught some more snowy Castforms on the way back to the Kendall.
Feeling quite trolled
Leaving the building at 5:30am to find tons of snow and people already out plowing/salting it away.
Sunday, well -- I got back to campus around 2:30pm after getting Chipotle for lunch again, and of course nobody had gone out for Small Steps because nobody really likes runarounds on this team except maybe Bryan. I even had sent Bryan a note about it and he said he'd be up for it, but when I got back he was working on a puzzle called First You Visit Burkina Faso which had been driving everyone crazy all through hunt, and still was. (I got as far in this puzzle as "find a country within the entire convex hull of another" and decided it wasn't my thing.)
So at 3:30 we set out to do Small Steps. By the time we had finished the first two paragraph paths, Bryan had both noticed that we were clearly tracing letters on the MIT map with our path, and also that the words we were getting all seemed space-themed (and at that point our next stop was to go to Ronald McNair's portrait in lobby 37). But we continued on, despite that it turned out to be annoying/difficult to get into many of the 30-something numbers along Vassar St (did anyone playtest this on a weekend with an alumni ID?)
When we were looking for where the mathematical shape models are in Building 2, we went down the hallway that has all the teams in it like Left Out, Galactic Trendsetters, etc, and I noticed that Left Out's headquarters was entirely empty. This was around 4:50pm, so I was like... "I have a feeling the hunt is ending soon..." especially when we went further down and saw that the Galactic team was still all there. But we continued onwards anyway, ending up at picture 9, which was also in building 37 (it was super embarrassing that we had not noticed it on our first trip through, but I guess that's the point of how they took these photos). Then Bryan's laptop had some issues and we had to pause for a bit for that. But it was okay. I mean, we weren't in a huge hurry in general (or maybe Bryan is just super-patient in dealing with me being random, or both), which was nice, because it meant that I also had gotten a chance to take a cool panorama photo of Killian Court in the snow, and I stopped for a minute to practice juggling with a friend of mine who was out in Lobby 10 with the juggling club. We also did things like trying out these weird folding seats that were all along the walls of buildings 37/35/33/9 and marveling at how they somehow weren't broken.
Anyway, after Bryan got his laptop working again, we continued onto Building 9 and took stock of the situation: we figured that the final phrase was gonna be "use moon" based on the paths it was having us take, and we knew there were moon things, but we still needed to get a few more of them, notably we needed to stop in the library for the book author, and to get the actual room numbers for the second O which was gonna go through building 8-ish we'd have to actually go there and figure out what room it was. But we didn't have to do these in the order the puzzle had suggested. So, from where we were in 9 we decided to go to the student center and grab snacks from LaVerde's because it was one of the photos, and then go look for photo 14 somewhere in Building 1 (I was pretty sure I knew where it was since it was near my room when I was with Up Late, but actually coming from the student center and confirming where the crosswalk was on the other side of where Bexley used to be was useful), and THAT was the moment -- sitting there across from the Nuclear Engineering poster -- that I saw the email saying that Left Out had found the coin and hunt was over. (And more specifically, the coin had been found AND Setec was shutting down their HQ, because it was Sunday night, so there wasn't even a point in continuing to puzzle.)
Not unexpected, but still, a weird feeling, being out on a runaround puzzle at the moment hunt ends; I'm not sure that's ever happened to me before. I think in general we usually get runaround puzzles much earlier? You could say it was stupid of me to start out on a runaround puzzle at all on a Sunday, but to be fair, I had been so stuck on the final extraction of everything else I'd looked at that I figured at least I could *do* a runaround rather than slog through other stuck things.
I asked Chris what was up at HQ -- specifically, would we miss out on dinner plans if we didn't get back immediately -- and he said some people were packing up but some people were continuing to finish up the puzzles they were working on, so plans weren't really imminent, so Bryan and I decided to just go ahead and gather the last three data points. We found the 8-204 starting place, and in reality we should have just assumed it was coming right back there but instead we walked around everything in the puzzle anyway to come back to it and see that 8-206 was the end point.
We headed to the Hayden library, and on the way we went past Left Out's HQ again and heard them all cheering and stuff. At the library itself, the staff were like "We're closing soon!" and we're like "We know, we just need to go find one book, don't worry, it's for the puzzle hunt" and they looked at us funny. But, we went downstairs and found the book (again, in retrospect, we totally could have gotten the author's name just by looking up the book name and which author coincided with a lunar landing site, but we weren't thinking of that at the time). And then, having confirmed the final part of the path, we returned to Plant HQ...
...where people were cleaning the room and vacuuming and rearranging chairs and everything, because, dang, we were late. So we helped with that.
The worst part was, we weren't even actually finished with the puzzle! There was going to be a second part where we knew we'd have to somehow map all of these instructions at the bottom onto the moon somehow, but we were like, well, let's do that after dinner or something.
I tried really hard to get photos like this all along (of the puzzle and the actual thing)
One of my snowy Killian Court panos
Building 14
Lobby 37; I had never been on the first floor before and had never gotten to see the tribute to Ronald McNair. In further sad things the word we needed from his portrait was "Challenger". :(
Going by an empty Left Out room
FINALLY the right "SCIENCE and" poster.
Left Out celebrating in the hall as we walk by.
Our final stop, as Bryan is pulling apart bookcases so we can get to the book we were supposed to find.
Consensus was established to go to Bertucci's (the one nearish-by) and Lee called them and said we'd be heading over with a group of 20ish people. Many of us went downstairs with stuff to load into people's cars to be taken home. Cindy told me to go back inside and tell people the cars were there, but when we got upstairs the only person there was Kate, so we told her, and then Chris and I headed to Bertucci's and were the first people there, and then the table got filled in by everyone, and I had a yummy pizza, but the restaurant screwed up Chris's order, but shrug. It felt very surreal also to see several photos of the Coin on my Facebook feed because, well, I'm friends with at least half of the people on Team Left Out because I know many of them from puzzle stuff in California (you could say, maybe, that I was feeling left out). The weird thing, in a way, is that I don't think most of the regular MIT teams actually know Left Out because it's sort of a different world. One person on Plant even asked me "Is this like that team that wrote the hunt full of NPL stuff?"
Chris and I went back to crash after that; some other people went to go drinking or hang out elsewhere. Bryan and I said we'd finish Small Steps in the morning; that never actually happened, of course. In the morning Chris and I got breakfast at the Kendall with some puzzle people who were around (I was very sad when Derek Kisman told me how Connect Four actually worked, and also informed me that I'd missed the Star Battle puzzle) and then checked out and headed over to 26-100 for wrapup; but it took a while for them to let people into the room, so we were stuck in the hallway for a while and it got too crowded to say hi to most people, so I ended up zoning out and sending Cosmic Ray Chandeliers gifts to people in Pokemon Go.
Wrapup youtube video is archived here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkKN2ZcCxpc
I'm not sure what to say about wrapup either. I'm a little sad they didn't talk more about the events, since they seemed to be putting together footage of them all to show, and I was curious about the two that I didn't go to, of course. I *was* blown away by the summary of all the metas and how crazy they all were, along with the explanation of the holiday selection and tying them together and all, and felt a little bad that I hadn't even bothered really looking at metas at all during the hunt.
The other irony is that we pretty much bolted right after wrapup was over, because we had a 4pm flight to San Jose to catch, dammit...
...but little did we know that most of Boston was going to end up snowed in and not actually get to fly out at all that day. Apparently Logan Airport was down to one runway, and a lot of flights weren't able to get in, so they didn't have the planes to fly back out. We didn't find out our flight was delayed until we were sitting down in the Legal Sea Foods in Terminal C to eat lunch -- we got there earlyish because we were worried about security lines, and there we are, shortly after 2pm, finding out our flight's delayed until 9pm. (And then it got delayed to 11. And 1am. And 2am. And cancelled.)
The one good thing about being stranded in the airport on the Monday of Mystery Hunt, though, is that there were like 40-50 other puzzle nerds in our terminal who were also stranded. (Probably more, really.) So we spent the day having a long post-hunt party with everyone we could find. We saw Derek in the food court, and Molly came to visit us at our gate for a bit (she had been in a lounge with Allen and Joel), and then I went to walk to Terminal E to do a Pokemon raid and I ran into Aaron on the way there, and Terry on the way back, and then we got dinner, and after that we went to meet up with Gaby and Mark and Pavel and Kenny and Jonah (the Seattle posse) at a restaurant near C11 but first I ended up talking to Nina and Wei-Hwa in the hallway for a while instead, and then I got triviaed out by Dave at the table with everyone and generally had a great time talking to people for an hour or two, and then around 11pm Chris and I decided to come to our gate and see how things were going - only to find another hour of delay - and he sat down to watch the Warriors-Lakers game and then I saw Matt and Kelly and Rick (from Rage, who I had yelled "hey it's the CMU posse!" at during the Friday night runaround) and talked to them for an hour or so. Our friend Brian who had been at Arisia also came by to say hi. Matt learns that the Dunkin' Donuts nearby technically closes "30 minutes after the last flight takes off", which makes us feel both bad for them and happy we can still get donuts. (I've never eaten so much Dunkin' in one weekend before.)
After having run out of people I actually knew to talk to, then I went and started talking to a group of Asian guys who had been saying something about puzzles; they were from "teammate" and one of them was also a CMU alum and Google employee (and I ran into him a few days later at a Pokemon raid back on campus! how funny is that?), and then at 2:30am when our flight got cancelled and we ran out to the ticketing counters with everyone else, the two guys behind us also worked at Google and had done Hunt, and then after talking to one of them for a while, Tom, it was like "oh we've done all the same hunts in CA but just never met" so that was kind of cool. And then Ben from our team was in a ticketing line across the hall; apparently I had just not seen him any of the times I walked past the SF gates, so I came over to say hi to him too.
But frankly, when we got a confirmation of a rebooking on a flight the next night at 9pm, even I had had enough of this crazy post-hunt party. Especially as I was watching a lot of my friends actually manage to make it onto flights taking off to SFO in the morning and was getting kind of jealous.
So Chris and I took a taxi back to Kendall, and the Marriott was willing to let us stay a night on the Hunt rate and give us a 1pm late checkout, so we went to sleep around 5, got up around noon, and went to hang out at Google for the day. (Chris doesn't work there anymore, but I got to go around and see some people and hey, it was warm and comfortable and had reliable wifi and outlets and all.)
Of course, 3pm hanging out there we see that our 9pm flight has ALSO gotten delayed, because of course it has. I debate the idea of just checking back into the Marriott and doing laundry, because well, I had brought one extra day of clothing, kind of (I wore the same jeans for like 4 days straight) and Chris hadn't brought any, and this was getting kind of icky. Friends are advising me on what to do -- wait until the plane takes off from SFO to come to Boston, because if it does, theoretically they'll have a crew ready for it when it gets here, right?
WRONG. We get to the airport around 10pm (after taking advantage of another night in Cambridge to go to Friendly Toast for dinner, where it turns out they have trivia on Tuesdays -- who knew, we're never in Boston on Tuesdays) and go through another night of waiting, watching our flight come in, and watching our goddamn crew clock out YET AGAIN and our flight is cancelled at 2:30am again. I even joke that we are clearly not managing to get through the REAL final puzzle of hunt, the "Groundhog Day - Snow Day problem". Someone points out that Snow Day is a real movie too. Oops.
We get rebooked AGAIN to a 6:30pm flight on Wednesday (50 hours after our original planned departure), and go BACK to the Marriott, where they are happy to let us sleep there, and they even give us the same room, but this time we have to pay the normal rate, which it turns out is quite expensive. We're happy to get to sleep though, and I even wake up at 11am to do laundry, which makes me feel better, because then at least that solves one problem of being stranded forever. And we go BACK to Google for lunch AGAIN, and I run into people who are now rather than being like "oh, you're here! yay!" like "YOU'RE STILL HERE??? WTF??" On the other hand I must be honest -- I did get a chance to catch up with several people in the Cambridge office who I would not have gotten to see otherwise, and I'm really glad I got that time to talk to them, so.
At 3pm our flight still hasn't been delayed, so we head to the airport, check in, etc. Our flight still isn't delayed. We go to our gate and I run into Pat and Amy from my old team in Google Research, since they're on our flight home. Turns out Pat had a talk at Harvard on Tuesday, so when I'm like "How long have you guys been stranded here?" he's like "Stranded here?? It took us an extra day just to GET here!" How weird. Tom who was in line with us the first night, he shows up and we say hi too. And fortunately I actually *don't* recognize anyone else there, because I'd feel bad if they were STILL stuck. Also, the airline gave me and Chris the really cushy exit seats where just the two of us get to sit together, so we even did have a relatively nice comfortable flight home.
It's taken me 2 weeks since hunt to write this, which both feels REALLY long and simultaneously not actually that long since it's kind of a monster entry. But I think in the future I'm going to be happy to have this record of all the crazy stuff that happened?
I can't imagine anyone actually read all of this, but if you did, I hope at least some of it was enjoyable.
Spoiler Warning: I talk about actual things that happened solving puzzles here so if you see me mention a puzzle name you want to work on sometime, skip the next paragraph, because I will likely spoil you on it. This is your overall entry spoiler warning.
Also as a note: I'd usually include more photos, but their solutions pages are relatively good about having them when relevant for puzzles, so I'm only going to include a few of things I don't think are included there.
This year was my third year hunting with Metaphysical Plant (is the joke about "marrying into Random" still funny?) and just like the past few years I flew into Boston on the Wednesday night redeye and spent Thursday working at the Google Cambridge office, where we had a Mystery Hunt lunch with 20 or so people from many different hunt teams. I also ducked out in the late afternoon for a little while to go to Trapology and do two escape rooms with friends from Seattle (Jennifer Geske invited me, but I was in a group with the Wallaces and Jay McCleery and Dave Miller), which was fun, and convenient because it's really easy to get around Boston by public transit. Then I went back to work for a bit, and in the evening I joined the Plant team dinner at Christopher's in Porter Square; Chris still wasn't there, but at this point I know enough people that it didn't feel too awkward to be there without him (if nothing else we had just seen Bryan in NZ a few weeks prior and we spent a week on the Joco Cruise with a bunch of others from the team last year too, so I mostly sat with those people).
Then I went back to the Kendall and crashed really hard because I barely slept on the redeye. I kind of remember Chris arriving but not really.
Friday morning we got up, got breakfast in the hotel, and went to building 46 to help set up, but we were running a little late and there wasn't much to set up, so it was mostly saying hi to people and then running off to Kresge for kickoff. There were people to say hi to, and then there was an opening skit, and then there was hunt.
(Kickoff video is now archived here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ4V_PDNEv0)
I know it's not nice to say things like this but I was actually pretty underwhelmed by the opening skit, probably because last year Death and Mayhem went overboard with production values for Inside Out and even two years ago when Setec last ran they did a really funny D&D skit thing that made you excited to see what was coming next. This year's theme turned out to be holidays, and the skit started out being about making a new holiday to remember the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, apparently a long-standing inside joke for the Setec team. Midway through the skit, the team is visited by Santa Claus, Jack Skellington, some Thanksgiving people, etc, and everyone is like, you can't just make a new Molasses Awareness Day without seeing how all of the other Holiday Towns react to this, it's going to cause problems between all of us. I mean, it was fine, it was clever, it's actually a pretty brilliant Hunt theme, it just didn't get me as excited about hunt as some previous openings have.
My original plan was to get free lunch from Google before heading back to Plant HQ but Chris wanted to just grab food in the student center, and I figured it was probably quicker to do that, and I wasn't hungry anyway, so a sandwich would be good because it could be eaten a few hours later. We tried to go to Laverde's, except that OMG THEIR KITCHEN WAS BROKEN and they had a sign up saying they'd be shut down until Jan 24th, which freaked me the hell out because I think I literally eat at least 2-3 meals there every Hunt since I get hungrier later than everyone else so I often stop by there for a sandwich while out on some other kind of runaround or whatever. (I genuinely like their deli sandwiches!) So we got sandwiches from Subway instead, running into a few other friends in the food court there, and then we got back to HQ a little while before puzzles came out.
As usual, there were too many people and not enough puzzles at the start, so people split into the 3ish groups for the 3ish open puzzles. I helped with a thing called Nobel Laureate, which we quickly realized were things all describing lyrics of Bob Dylan songs, and we just had to identify the songs and figure out how to index into them to get a message out of it (and of course there were some times that the song titles weren't straightforward (Quinn the Eskimo, I'm looking at you)).
It took us about an hour to do it, and I noticed we'd unlocked a thing called Theater Pieces, which said to go request an interaction with HQ, so I did that. I was told to go to building 13 and request "157 Easy Pieces", so I did that; actually, I forgot the adjective on the way so when I got to HQ I said something like "Hi, I'm here from Metaphysical Plant and I'm here to pick up ummm... 157 frickin' pieces or something". They had me knock on the door and who answers it but Brad Schaefer. But, I learned my lesson last year, so now I know to pretend I don't recognize him, and I politely thank him for the bag of jigsaw puzzle pieces he hands me, and back I go to the trenches.
Theater Pieces involved putting together a bunch of jigsaw puzzles, and they had various muppets on them. Eventually one of us realizes they're all scenes from Monsterpiece Theater, so after putting together 3-4 of them, I let other people work on the jigsawing and start looking up the Monsterpiece Theater movies and trying to figure out which is which. Some of them weren't too hard to guess what it was (ie, a thing with Prairie Dawn sitting on a Little House, or Grover rowing a boat as the Old Man and the Sea) but some of them were REALLY obscure or didn't have a lot of good things identifying them (like Chariots of Fur). You can look at the Solution page here to see what some of those images looked like and get an idea. Not to give away the entire ending, but once we had everything identified it wasn't hard to get a final answer. It was a cute puzzle and also took us about an hour total.
Right around when we finished that we'd unlocked something called Funkin', which also required going to Hunt HQ and telling them to FEED ME, so Brackett and I walked over and went to pick up our puzzle, which was... a Dunkin' Donuts box with 12 donuts and two donut holes in them, with some plastic things attached... amusingly, we walked by other puzzle hunt teams/friends on the way and fortunately they'd already gotten their donuts or that might have been awkward! Like we stopped by Rage since we were walking by their room and Glenn saw me through the window and waved.
Anyway, we get back with this box of donuts and figure out that the plastic things in the donuts are all little USB flash drives. I'm sitting at one end of a table with Brackett and Joel at that point and I'm like, well, this is my work laptop, so *I* don't think I should try to read them. Joel has no worries about this and so he starts looking through them.
Meanwhile I see Koi and (I think it was Daniel) cutting out You're Gonna Need a Bigger Gravy Boat at the other end of the table, and Daniel went off to do something else, so I finish cutting out pieces and Koi and I finish Gravy Boat while Joel goes through Funkin' files. I should have written them down at the time but all kinds of silly quotes came out of that, like "These donuts are filled with flash drives," and "Each donut has 19 mp3s in it", and so on.
"Yup, there's definitely something stuck in those donuts..."
Brackett carefully extracts the flash drives so that the donuts are still mostly edible afterwards.
Gravy Boat wasn't too horribly difficult, or at least, it was fairly straightforward what to do? Like you had to just assemble the pieces, and once you realize they're navy flags it gets a little easier, and then you read the clue saying the next part is semaphore, and of course we kind of sloppily assembled the last few pieces because we were just trying to get the entire picture, so when we realize that each dot has to become a semaphore we're like, oops, and then tried to assemble it a little better, and then I did the logic puzzle part to get semaphore letters, and I had most of it with a few little ambiguities that Koi helped work through, and we got the solution a bit later (again, the whole thing took about an hour).
I helped out a bit more with Funkin' (namely -- Joel and Allen had gotten a bunch of the setlists, and Terry noted that they had a lot of songs covered by Phish in them, and I googled some stuff and was like OMG YOU GUYS PHISH HAD A TOUR CALLED BAKERS' DOZEN WHERE THEY NAMED EACH NIGHT AFTER A DONUT, ALL OF WHICH WERE IN THAT BOX, but that was about it.
Mostly, because about that time Chris was working on We See Thee Rise with people and was like "oh, this needs to be pentominoed, my wife will do that for you very quickly" and I was like, pentominoes? where? And so I came over to work on that -- and sure enough, between knowing that there needed to be stripes of RED and whatnot, I was able to pentomino it out (and rearrange some words) pretty quickly. But then what? That was the problem -- we sat there basically trying to figure out how the hell to get a message out of what should have been the leaf of the Canadian flag for quite a while. I even was like "that J has an arrow, we need to read from it" and we got "JONES WIN ACTOR" but the rest was pretty garbled. Someone thought the rest was "SKIKDA PIU" which made very little sense, but eventually someone else realized it was SKIKDA PIC and that Skikda was infact a city and you could go north from it (the clues for each piece had involved switching things to be one thing north from the clue, like "this Maryland railroad" would be "this Pennsylvania railroad" and such.
We See Thee Rise unlocked 7 Little Dropquotes when we solved it, so we printed that out and 7 people took one each, and since I cheat at dropquotes in general (shrug, not really, I just strategically use Nutrimatic to get an in, is that actually cheating?) I solved mine really quickly and figured out the words at the bottom with the word piece hook, and handed it off to everyone else; I would have worked on more dropquotes but it was getting near to 7pm, and the first event of the hunt was going to be Groundhog Day something at 7:30pm in the student center, so I went over to that with Brackett.
Groundhog Day was... frustrating, on purpose. You come in and they introduce the event with a clip from Groundhog Day the movie (ie, "I Got You Babe" playing and a thing saying how we'd see the groundhog, and then where'd he go, and can all of you go solve some puzzles to find the groundhog) and then they let us loose. They had 6 stations with things to solve at each; one was a word ladder where a new ladder item came in about every 15 seconds but old ones would disappear too, one was a thing that described fruit-related actors/movies, one was a pixel image that kept getting more enhanced, and one was Wheel of Fortune (same gimmick, letters would appear and disappear in the grid, so you had to watch for a while). Those four were on screens; the other two were on papers, one was an I Spy and one was a hex maze but you had to do it in your head without writing on it. The thing is, you had to not only get an answer to the station you were working on but you had to get in line and go talk to one of the Groundhog Day City Council people and get your answer stamped and get a transparency piece for it... AND you had to have your team's sheet (so the two of you had to be careful what lines you were in)... AND you had to do this within the 4-minute time loop or so that we had - if you were waiting in line for a stamp when I Got You Babe started playing, you were just screwed. Which happened to me like twice in a row, so actually, I just decided to not bother going up for the third round and just watched like all 4 of the computerized puzzles to gather data (figuring they were going to repeat anyway). On the fourth loop I was able to get the Word Ladder one and Brackett got Wheel of Fortune, since the crowds were thinning out, I got the fruit thing next while she found the I Spy, and then I did the hex maze while she identified the enhance image. Then we had to overlay the transparencies to make a cute picture of a groundhog and it was a polarizer, which revealed the overall event puzzle on a thingy in the other room. Fun. I was super frustrated by this at first but it wasn't so bad once the lines died down.
The mayor and the puzzle checking table, where people would eventually be scrambling.
Wheel of Fortune puzzle
Hex maze in your head
Do you know your cartoons?
After assembling all 6 transparencies
The groundhog's "shadow" was a polarizer that showed letters on a screen in the other room.
We bought some food/snacks/chocolate/whatever in Laverdes and went back to HQ, where outside our room I found that people had ordered Bertucci's pizza! Argh! But Josh assured me that there was undoubtedly some extra since he'd ordered a lot, and if I just waited like 10 minutes I could have some, so I ate some bread rolls and also my wrap that I got at Laverdes and went inside for a bit. I I found Koi and Chris and Austin (I think) and Cindy and I forget who else working on A Tearable Puzzle which looked awesome; the state I came into the puzzle, they had answers for maybe 9/12 of the clues and Austin and Koi were folding the edge thing into diagonal state abbreviations (which was clued in the main word find). I helped the remaining clues (notably the Sonic the Hedgehog one and the Rocky on the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum one; the White Stripes turned out to be slightly off too). Then I helped people find a bunch of the words in the grid (they were bent into corners, so Austin or Koi would read off letters to me and I'd tell them if they matched the current scheme (like Scrabble letters summing to 8?)), by which point Koi figured out to overlay the folded strip over the grid and start getting messages, so then I helped with the refolding, and things were relatively straightforward after that. I thought it was pretty impressive how they made all of that work out!
(And also, inbetween some of that, I went outside and ate pizza with Josh and some other people who I have forgotten now, one of whom was an actual undergrad hunting with us (whoa)).
Solving Tearable unlocked Cross Campus, which I jumped on because campus puzzle (yeah I know. Our team is about 50% MIT alumni and yet I am always jumping on campus puzzles because, I dunno, maybe it doesn't give me PTSD. Kidding. Maybe.) I went through and identified about 65% of the places in the video on a first runthrough, then I got Bryan to watch it again with me and he identified another 25% (we were both like "omg building 12!"), so we had almost everything, and we also identified a whole bunch of the items being held up, and so on, and then it was like, okay, now what?
Well, actually, "now what" turned out to be unlocking an ACTUAL runaround puzzle called Running for Office. Tim and Alya and Molly were going to go on that, but I was like runaround! I wanna runaround! And so did other people, and Tim was like "well we're not trying to win hunt, so who cares if we have 7 people on this?" and so the away team ended up being Tim, Alya, Molly, Joel, Terry, Bryan, and myself.
Sorry, gonna just tell stories here. So, spoilers. We started off at 26-100 and found the picture needed for the first part, which said to go to Morss, which is the ballroom thingy inside Walker. (Side note: We actually walked through the first floor of Building 12 for a bit as we passed by, since people wanted to see it, and the Rage away team walked by us as we were coming out, and we ran into them a few more times and apparently they were super confused what route we'd taken since we shouldn't have been in 12 so early.) We got to Walker and had to overlay some stuff on the Walker Memorial Mural and take some letters out; also not too hard. Next thing was the "friends" list in the Stata Center, and it was just a matter of doing annoying arithmetic (like it'd say "friend for 82 years" so you had to realize that meant 1937 and find the person, etc). We split up the list and got the phrase about "attics of pavilions" and figured we were headed to Killian Court for the next one. (We also ran into Rage again at this point in Stata, and recognizing most of them, I called out "It's the Carnegie Mellon runaround team!")
Being as it was almost midnight at this point, people had to go actually gather the names of all the people around the court since we couldn't just see them all from the center (and we ended up with too much information; apparently you really only needed the 8 names, not their subgroups, oops). We adjourned to a nearby classroom in Building 4 to actually solve the puzzle (because like, it was cold and snowy outside) and then somehow this tripped us up for half an hour. (I have to admit -- I spent about 5 minutes frantically opening Pokemon Go gifts before midnight and *then* started focusing on the puzzle) I wrote a pigpen cipher chart up on the board, and listened to people talk about which combination of names made which combination of the arts, and then I tried to use quipquip to just flat out cipher it, which didn't work, so then I asked Terry where people were thinking they had letters, and he showed me where the O's were, and since they had two towards the end I said "well that's gonna be either "DOOR" or "ROOM" right? Let's see what happens if we assume one of those words?" and so Terry and I put together some letters and next thing you knew we had "O_DMEDI____DOOR" and was like "uhh... could this be "old media lab door"?" and everyone was like "sure, but how did you get there?" and I was like "shrug, cryptogramming with some smart guesses?"
We lost Alya at this point and went into the tunnels to get over to the media lab, going past all the paintings down there and various other things (which I both thought were new and old; looking at my photos of the same tunnel from 1 and 2 years ago, many of them were there then too).
The media lab thing tripped us up too -- well -- more like, the problem I had was, I had the bad printout with the poor coloring, so I couldn't even really see the actual colors on the puzzle. We looked at the part of the building where the old entrance was, couldn't figure out what to do immediately, found a way into the building, and... and I started working on seeing if I could break the dropquote in puzzle 9, since I couldn't do the colors anyway. Everyone else eventually solved it anyway and off we went to the Rotch library in building 7.
3 members of the running team were outside Rotch when we got there, and we couldn't all fit into the doorway anyway, so half of us did the puzzle and the other half talked to the Setec folks about Common Flavors, this puzzle involving identifying a whole ton of tea, which I totally did not work on but which Molly had been buried in. Again, I didn't have an ideal printout with colors, but the shapes of the corners in the library design were unique enough that it wasn't too hard to do without having exact colors.
This told us to go to the ice arena, which you can't get into at 1am, conveniently, but we figured that the puzzle was actually referring to the three sports figures hanging off the ceiling in the sports center, which we could see from the outside. We took a picture of them and went into the student center to finish solving it...
...and got accosted by a guy from Special Events, who was basically like "What are you people doing here? There is not supposed to be anyone camping in this building after hours," and we were like, WTF? And he said, are you MIT students? and we were like, alumni? (not me, but everyone else in the group was, and had alumni IDs) And he insisted that people weren't supposed to be in the student center, and we're like, we're not camping -- we're solving a puzzle -- and infact, we had just solved the part that said the next thing would be to go downstairs (ie, it was "W20 basement") so the puzzle even explicitly told us we needed to come into the student center, so how on earth was there a miscommunication that led this guy to think nobody would be in the student center overnight? Since it's not like they could control what time of day the puzzle would hit teams, and the instructions even explicitly said "Bring your MIT ID and watch the weather."
Anyway he was all like, well, I'm gonna go talk to the liaison I have for this hunt thing and tell him that you guys were here overnight, and we're like, uh, okay, you do that. Nevermind that literally any day of the year, any alum with an MIT ID could get into the student center, of course. Later on we heard that they started locking the student center to people without IDs after 9pm because homeless people had been coming in and sleeping in there, which I guess maybe was what he was referring to as "camping out", but did a bunch of us with clipboards and pencils and puzzles, during a puzzle event on campus, actually look like a group of homeless people? WTF?
We went downstairs, and the dropquote in the basement was much easier when you had the actual painting with the quote it was on :)
Dropquote told us to go over to the thingy outside 10-250 and oh my god there was this gigantic thing listing all of the MIT Sustaining Fellows and even though we knew exactly what we had to do -- find pairs of these first names with the same last name -- it was still pretty tedious and took a while -- about 40 minutes by my timestamps on photos. Also, since it was past 2am, at this point the only people left were myself and Bryan and Terry; we basically lost everyone else after either the gym or the student center. So, I started at the right side, and Bryan and Terry started at the left, and we eventually found enough of them to get enough of the final phrase for how to extract an overall answer. Spoiler: it had to do with identifying the MIT presidents associated with each building we'd been in (since it was called Running For Office after all, but even for the MIT alums it was hard to remember things like, the area of the Stata Center we were in is technically the Vest Student Street, stuff like that) and putting them in the proper order to extract overall from our puzzles. We went over to 26-100 to do it, actually, because we weren't even sure which president that was (turns out it's Compton; 26-110 across the way is the Karl Taylor Compton Reading Room or something). We did this, and amusingly, the final answer did involve going back through Building 12, which is no wonder why everyone was confused to see us there earlier on.
They don't actually have a picture of Tearable in action so here is one.
Walker memorial mural
Stata center cranes and names
One of these things is not like the others
Old Media Lab Door
Rotch library patterns
Dropquotey painting thing
Possibly the most tedious part, finding names in the MIT Sustaining Fellows
Finishing up the final steps, back where we started in 26-100
So we got back victorious around 3:30am (though Bryan gave up for the night at that point) and the next thing that happened is I came back to the Cross Campus puzzle; I mentioned that we'd identified almost all the locations and many of the objects in them beforehand, and I'd even split it up by timestamps in our spreadsheet, and I could then confirm the ones that were "maybe building 12?" at that point. Reid had been looking at it, noticing that the camera panned in each video clip, so I went and added the videoclip pan directions and the postit notes directions. He figured out that it had to be a big crossword over main campus, and I figured out that: the postit notes only showed up in even buildings, and that each of those buildings had exactly one clip pan left to right and one clip pan up to down, so they must be across and down clues, and next thing I knew Reid had filled out almost all of the grid. The only clue that took us absolutely forever to figure out was the satin pods (seriously WTF) and it didn't really matter since he just spotted the extraction anyway.
Solving Cross Campus unlocked a puzzle called Twelve! Eleven! and so for whatever reason, rather than going to sleep, Laurel and I started working on it (with someone else too but I forgot who since they were mostly in the spreadsheet). We weren't sure how to partition things at first but like, we quickly made the group of the Twelve Days of Christmas things, and we noticed that you could read a message vertically in the 5-letter things if you ignored one of them, so it seemed that we were going to make groups of 10. And some weren't so bad... we found 10 sports teams, we found 10 moons, we found 10 cities on islands, and 10 winter olympians, but then after that it was very... well... we thought we had a group of comedians (but how to sort? top ten emmy getters?) and we definitely had a group of songs from musicals (but also how to sort??)
Also gotta admit something funny: I don't think we ever actually sorted the Olympians, for example, I just found the word "backwards" in the 5th column and noticed the rest made a message; same for the sports teams, since they were 2 from each major sport here I just started playing with the order and got the things like "what" and "going going" and such and managed to piece it out. And infact with musicals I even had the word "explode" in the 5th column but couldn't seem to get everything else to fit together ("junmuta" doesn't really look like anything compared to "cajun mutant"...) We also, for the longest longest time, had no frickin' clue where Green Pants was supposed to go. Laurel was positive it was a musical song, but like, what damn musical? Neither of us had heard of it.
Anyway, I got the David Letterman one by Googling a set of the comedians names and was just like OMG WHY DIDN'T I DO THAT EARLIER and then figured out the 2003 recall election one a bit later -- a lot of those names were deceptive (like "Carey" seemed like it could be Drew Carey, the comedian, but it was actually Mary Carey, and Coleman we thought might be Gary Goleman, and so on) and so once we had those, it wasn't hard to figure out where Green Pants was and to figure out that the last category was frickin' characters in top 10 movies (I had, infact, immediately thought of Don Lockwood when I saw "Lockwood" in there, but I figured that was just bias because Singin' in the Rain is actually one of my favorite movies, has been since I was around 8 years old, and I have the entire thing memorized), and to finish the rest of the puzzle.
By that point it was around 8:30am and definitely felt like time to leave and go sleep. Around 7:30am Reid's mom had shown up with an assortment of bagels and spreads and juices for breakfast, which apparently was a Hunt tradition for this team, but I'd never been awake and in the room at the right time for it before (I think in past years I came back later and was like, oh look, bagels, that's cool) and infact a bunch of us went downstairs to get them, which is when I realized it was really morning and light outside and all. Yay, bagels.
This also meant that I got *back* to the Kendall during breakfast, but didn't really feel like having any, so I didn't, and just went upstairs to go sleep, falling asleep around 9am I suppose. I set my phone to wake me up at 3pm.
zzzzzz...
I did infact wake up at 3pm, and showered and changed and walked out of the hotel towards the Chipotle next to the T station to grab lunch, when who do I see coming down the street but Terry -- he left around the same time I did in the morning, maybe later -- he asked where I was going and I said Chipotle, so he came with me and also got something to eat there and we walked back to Building 46 together, and ran into a bunch of people from Central Services in the lobby since they were also hunting in 46.
I should have taken a photo of the mostly-empty team room at 4:30am; this is a photo of the room at 4:30pm when I got back.
However, being as it was like 4:30 when I got back and there was an event going on at 5:30, I didn't really want to get involved in too much -- instead I ate my burrito and got involved in recruiting someone else to come with me to Talk Like a Pirate Day (that links to the solution, which also has the sheets that teams got). I thought we might need to dress like pirates so I tried to make a hat or eyepatch out of paper but eventually just gave up, and I recruited Joel to come with me.
Talk Like A Pirate Day was pretty awesome IMO! (I am not sure if Joel had a great time, but I did!) What happened there was, you were paired with 2 people from another mystery hunt team (we got paired with Illegal Immoral and Fattening), and in your group you were told we were "pirating" songs, which turned out to mean that you'd rewrite a few lyrics into Talk Like a Pirate speak and perform part of a song, with a responsive chant from the entire audience.
We were in Group A, so we got a sheet that had an example song of:
Jeremiah did a bullfrog be!
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
Aye, and 'twas he a fine matey!
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
Ne'er did he arr-ticulate!
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
Twas a scurvy drunken mate!
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
bein' a pirated version of Joy to the World by Three Dog Night (you know, the song that starts "Jeremiah was a bullfrog, was a good friend of mine")
Group B got the response chant of
Line A
(Wey, hey, blow the man down!)
Line B
(Give me some time to blow the man down)
Repeat, with Line C and D the same way.
And Group C got the even harder one of
(Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!)
Line A
(Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!)
Line B
(Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!)
(Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!)
Line C
(Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!)
Line D
(Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!)
(Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!)
The twist here was that you would get points for this event in two ways:
1) guessing other people's songs
2) having other people guess your songs... up to 2/3 of the room, after which you would lose points for people guessing your songs.
So you wanted to come up with something guessable but that would fool some number of teams, or maybe they just didn't know the songs anyway. They said using cellphones to find lyrics while writing your song was fine, but you couldn't use them while guessing songs (like standard pub trivia).
Trying to think of a song that I thought would both be thematic and not guessable by everyone, I suggested "My Heart Will Go On", because 1) it is associated with a boat and 2) it is from 1997 therefore current undergrads weren't alive then lol and 3) I went to see Come From Away last week again and one of the characters, there's a running gag where she keeps getting up and singing "NEEEEEAAAR, FAAAARR, WHEREVER YOU ARE..." so it was probably on my mind as an annoying karaoke song.
Everyone else went along with my idea though so it worked out :) Our lyrics were:
Though ye be near or farrrrr away
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
Me heart still beats fer another day
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
Throw back the latch, re-open the hatch
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
You're safe in me heart, where forever ye'll stay
(Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)
And I think it went well, since I was watching the room when Kath was performing it and I could see about half the people with this look of "WTF is this" and the other half of the room laughing like "oh haha I get it", which seemed about as optimal as it could be.
So there were some pretty funny songs that got performed. I only took pictures of the second and third round guessing sheets for us so I've forgotten some, but the first round also had a group do Barbie Girl (right before us, even) and a Bohemian Rhapsody and two teams did Sounds of Silence (including Todd Etter, and I was pretty sure that's what he was doing but our team guessed Enter Sandman for it), and there were a whole bunch of Beatles (like Let it Be and Hey Jude).
The second round included things like David Reiley performing Money For Nothing, and another Bohemian Rhapsody, and a team doing YMCA ("Arr, laddie, there be a port ye can stay"), and my two personal favorites of the entire event, Tubthumping, and Re: Your Brains ("Harr, Tom, it be Bob from the other ship"), which I thought was particularly brilliant not just because it was really funny but also because several people might not recognize it AND even if people do recognize it they might not know the title, since I think a lot of people understandably think it's called All We Want To Do Is Eat Your Brains.
The third round was surprisingly much harder than the other two rounds to decipher, maybe due to the way the songs were formulated? Or maybe people were just better at obscuring things. The first one was Smooth Criminal, which I was proud to get off of a repetition of something like "Annabel, lass, be ye doin' fine?" and the second was Call Me Maybe and I cannot even remember how the hell I figured that out. Joel figured out the 5th one was Harder Better Stronger Faster, which wasn't even really pirated lyrics, the people just got up like "the first word be ____, the second word be ____" and so on. There was also Wannabe by the Spice Girls and Toxic by Britney Spears, and then there were a whole bunch of others we just had no idea (and in some cases, there were incomprehensible singers anyway). But overall it was pretty entertaining and our team did get bonus points for scoring well so that was good.
Our rule sheet and our lyrics sheet
The rest of Group A ("Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum")
Group C ("Drink up, me hearties, yo ho")
Anyway, that was basically the high point for me and Hunt was completely downhill from then on.
(yeah, I know that's a big thing to say, but bear with me.)
We got back and I was like, okay, what now? And Chris said, well we're working on this fucked-up wordfind, and you're good at those, wanna stare at this a little? It was a puzzle called Have You Seen Me and basically, the first part of it had involved finding characters in James and the Giant Peach, and then filling in a playfair cipher grid in the middle of the word find. Ciphering the grid gave us a second grid where we found Frodo and Boromir but nothing else, and another way of ciphering it gave us Aragorn somewhere, but never all at once, and I really did stare at this forever looking for names and just plain didn't really find much.
So when we unlocked a puzzle called Connect Four which appeared to start with a Mastermind word puzzle I decided to defect over to that instead, and so a bunch of us attacked the Mastermind part, mostly working in pairs. I helped get 2-3 of the words before it was almost 10pm and time to leave for another event.
Koi and I went to this one, and it was Registration Day, and... and... dude this really did not need to be an event. It could have been a paper puzzle. It was very disappointing. Basically, we showed up in Lobby 13, they told us we'd need to figure out our schedules for the upcoming semester, and that class offerings were posted on the 3rd floor of the infinite corridor in buildings 3/10/4.
So we, like everyone else, ran up to that hallway, and then we, like everyone else, took photos of every door that had a schedule on it, and we, like everyone else, basically found somewhere else to actually solve the puzzle, by ourselves.
Except that actually, we couldn't figure out how the fuck to solve it. Like, we had this page with "valid" and "invalid" classes, but it wasn't obvious to us at all how the hell the classes were valid or invalid. We had made a chart of all the courses and the possible times so that we could make a grid, especially since all the course numbers were 1-26, but... there wasn't anything obvious being spelled out. After about 30 minutes of staring at this like, what are we missing, we eventually decided to go back upstairs and see if anyone was still around who could hint us about it, and the people in the hall were like "well, didn't you pay attention when the Registrar was speaking at the beginning?" and we're like "we were supposed to get a clue out of something they were saying before we'd even seen the puzzle? what?"
Fortunately (?), the away team from East Campus was also running into the same issue at the same time we were, so they came back downstairs with us (Seth was like "I've been doing Mystery Hunt for 20 years, I always do the events, and this is the first time I've ever literally just had no clue whatsoever what to do at an event,") and we went to the registration table, and they basically did give us a hint (the funny part is that the solution page does not actually have the true solution nor any of the puzzle parts on it so I'm not even sure whether I CAN spoil it since I don't actually have the page they gave us in the first place) about how the valid/invalid classes were related, and Koi and I solved it like 3 minutes later.
Why was this unsatisfying to me as an event? (I figure I might as well rant, since future hunt organizers probably will see this, and I want them to know why I'm being so whiny about it; maybe my expectations are colored from going to so many events over the last 8 years of coming to Boston for hunt)
1) There was no collaboration with other teams. Or really any other interaction whatsoever. Usually events mean you get to do something with other people. Not always, but often. Like Ocean Pong. Or the escape-roomy-thingy. Or Pirate Songs. Or the one last year with constructing rule-based snacks, or Hungry Hungry Hippogriffs. Or the Adjective Speed Dating Game. Or Cards Against Wonderland. Or Wonderwang. Or all kinds of things. I always find them to be a nice opportunity to get to puzzle with some people not on our team. Maybe I'm weird.
2) There wasn't even anything you really had to do *at the event* as opposed to elsewhere. Like I said, this could have been delivered to us entirely as a paper puzzle, with 12 sheets of paper. Maybe it originally WAS meant to be delivered that way?
3) It wasn't actually fun or interesting. I feel like events should get some of you out of your conference room to do something that you get to tell a story when you get back when people ask you what the event was. Maybe it won't be fun for everyone (I'm looking at you, pool puzzle involving Set with rubber ducks), but you can usually at least see why it was worth the trip across campus for some people. (The story when you get back shouldn't be "Don't ask, it was stupid, coulda been a paper puzzle, here's the object we got")
I guess I also felt worse about this because I think the other events in this hunt were big hits -- the other two I went to, and doing a service event with the Boston Science Club for Girls, and even the two-legged semaphore thing, and so on. So it was like, yay, final event! Oh... sigh.
Getting the original schpiel from the Registrar
One of the doors with course info on it
As you can see, this is what every other team is doing too; taking photos and running off
Another door. If you want a hint about how this worked, let's just say that "Electro botcheries" is a weird phrase.
The map of the rooms, which was actually entirely irrelevant except to make sure you hit all of them, I guess.
Filling out our final course schedule once we figured out what was up.
It didn't help that well, we got back and then got stuck basically in slogs for the rest of hunt, or at least I did, with one bright exception.
While I was gone, everyone else had discovered that there was a hidden message in Connect Four saying "see recent gmpuzzles" and I was like, oh cool, that's Thomas Snyder's site, I do their puzzles all the time, HEY WAIT A MINUTE DON'T TELL ME, THIS IS ABOUT THOSE WEIRD-ASS FILOMINO CRYPTO PUZZLES EARLIER THIS WEEK and sure enough it was totally about those weird-ass filomino puzzles that week. Oliver and Cindy had done these before but none of the other people around us had, so we took the four puzzles and divided them up; I finished mine pretty quickly and then went to help Austin with his; Oliver did one on his tablet with a girl whose name I never caught, and Cindy did one either by herself or with someone else, I forget. (Also, haha, with Austin I was like "I hate to ask but can we make your colors into my colors? if 2 isn't red and 3 isn't yellow and 4 isn't green and so on I will get really confused" and luckily he was cool with it :)
So, okay, we solved these things. Yay. But then what? There was also this grid of ten words by ten words that was part of the puzzle that we weren't sure what to do with. And like, why did we mastermind originally? And why did they choose such weird crypto keys for the puzzle? I wrote out the crypto key for each one (like 1=D, 3=H, 4=T, etc etc) and we also noticed that if you went to the square in the 10x10 grid that said "CODE", that it wasn't chronological but that square on each filomino was a given letter that was C, O, D, E on different days. So it was nice knowing we were at least doing the right thing. But... I dunno, we wanted to somehow play Mastermind with the 10x10 grid and couldn't figure out a system that got it to work. Sigh.
Around this time we unlocked Sage Advice, so I printed that out and Chris and I started working on the "sageless" one, ie, the one where the word "sage" had been removed from the clues, and it was actually kind of fun for a while, until we just sort of got stuck (a lot of them you can sort of piece together from stuff around it, until you get stuck on all the things around it and then it's sort of fragmented). Chris decided to go to sleep, and I continued with it for a little while until Things got unlocked.
Sometimes I feel bad about butting in on people solving puzzles but I'm really glad I did with Things as it was probably my favorite puzzle of the entire hunt. Allen and Joel started it and they had figured out one of the songs in it was Never Gonna Give You Up (because of course it was) and then I was like what is this you are looking at and they showed me and I was like omg this is hilarious, and because I had just come back from Pirate Day a bit earlier, I immediately saw one of the songs being Tubthumping (because it literally is just the guy gets knocked down, gets up again, and drinks a lot of things and sings a lot of things). And I think they found I Want It That Way (we were all like WTF is this double negative thing) and I found Come Sail Away, and I was mostly laughing too hard to actually fill in the puzzle (seriously, when you abstract out songs to just "things I do, things you do, things you can't do", etc, it's pretty funny). But we couldn't quite get the final solution and were having trouble finding the other songs, until I did some lyric googling and found another, and Aaron walked by and we got him to Wheel of Fortune the final answer for us. (With 3 songs left, Chris was able to guess one of them later on when I showed him the puzzle without even using the internet, but the last two were pretty tough.)
And then... and then... WTF did I do between 3am and 5:30? It's weird, but I really don't remember. We had a lot of puzzles unlocked at that point, and that's sometimes exciting since you can just sort of grab whatever you think looks interesting, but it's super frustrating when you look at everything and none of it is actually anything you seem to be able to understand (ie, I thought Riding the Tube would be something up my alley especially since I still have a Tube map in my coat pocket from my trip to London a month ago, except rather than being an actual London Underground puzzle it was about a British comedy sketch, or same for Chicago Loop) or worse, you end up not even looking at the open puzzle that IS up your alley (in this case, He's Out!, which was a baseball puzzle, and somehow I didn't even SEE that one during the hunt, which seems ridiculous) or you find something that turns out to be up your alley BUT not until the second half, like the Star Battle one. These are all of course totally fair things to happen, it's just that if you encounter the puzzle by yourself at 3am you are less likely to actually have the right insight for it, which is the nature of Hunt I suppose, but man, I feel like I just got really unlucky with what I looked at vs what I should have looked at.
Around 4am we unlocked Small Steps, and I was excited for another runaround, but I was *not* excited to do a runaround at 4am by myself, so I filled in the locations of most of the pictures in a spreadsheet and put a note of "Deanna wants to do this when she gets back to campus in the early afternoon".
Also around then with some people who had returned, I went through the entirety of what we'd done with Connect Four, and there was some progress made (like we noticed Tim Marsden is an anagram for Mastermind, which actually kinda threw us off further), and we put all of the letters from all four filominos together but didn't think they spelled out words (oops). We even checked to see which letters in the 10x10 grid lined up the same as letters in the filominoes, but that didn't get us much either.
So I left at 5:30am just feeling kinda blah about everything, and the only good part is that it was snowing and I caught some more snowy Castforms on the way back to the Kendall.
Feeling quite trolled
Leaving the building at 5:30am to find tons of snow and people already out plowing/salting it away.
Sunday, well -- I got back to campus around 2:30pm after getting Chipotle for lunch again, and of course nobody had gone out for Small Steps because nobody really likes runarounds on this team except maybe Bryan. I even had sent Bryan a note about it and he said he'd be up for it, but when I got back he was working on a puzzle called First You Visit Burkina Faso which had been driving everyone crazy all through hunt, and still was. (I got as far in this puzzle as "find a country within the entire convex hull of another" and decided it wasn't my thing.)
So at 3:30 we set out to do Small Steps. By the time we had finished the first two paragraph paths, Bryan had both noticed that we were clearly tracing letters on the MIT map with our path, and also that the words we were getting all seemed space-themed (and at that point our next stop was to go to Ronald McNair's portrait in lobby 37). But we continued on, despite that it turned out to be annoying/difficult to get into many of the 30-something numbers along Vassar St (did anyone playtest this on a weekend with an alumni ID?)
When we were looking for where the mathematical shape models are in Building 2, we went down the hallway that has all the teams in it like Left Out, Galactic Trendsetters, etc, and I noticed that Left Out's headquarters was entirely empty. This was around 4:50pm, so I was like... "I have a feeling the hunt is ending soon..." especially when we went further down and saw that the Galactic team was still all there. But we continued onwards anyway, ending up at picture 9, which was also in building 37 (it was super embarrassing that we had not noticed it on our first trip through, but I guess that's the point of how they took these photos). Then Bryan's laptop had some issues and we had to pause for a bit for that. But it was okay. I mean, we weren't in a huge hurry in general (or maybe Bryan is just super-patient in dealing with me being random, or both), which was nice, because it meant that I also had gotten a chance to take a cool panorama photo of Killian Court in the snow, and I stopped for a minute to practice juggling with a friend of mine who was out in Lobby 10 with the juggling club. We also did things like trying out these weird folding seats that were all along the walls of buildings 37/35/33/9 and marveling at how they somehow weren't broken.
Anyway, after Bryan got his laptop working again, we continued onto Building 9 and took stock of the situation: we figured that the final phrase was gonna be "use moon" based on the paths it was having us take, and we knew there were moon things, but we still needed to get a few more of them, notably we needed to stop in the library for the book author, and to get the actual room numbers for the second O which was gonna go through building 8-ish we'd have to actually go there and figure out what room it was. But we didn't have to do these in the order the puzzle had suggested. So, from where we were in 9 we decided to go to the student center and grab snacks from LaVerde's because it was one of the photos, and then go look for photo 14 somewhere in Building 1 (I was pretty sure I knew where it was since it was near my room when I was with Up Late, but actually coming from the student center and confirming where the crosswalk was on the other side of where Bexley used to be was useful), and THAT was the moment -- sitting there across from the Nuclear Engineering poster -- that I saw the email saying that Left Out had found the coin and hunt was over. (And more specifically, the coin had been found AND Setec was shutting down their HQ, because it was Sunday night, so there wasn't even a point in continuing to puzzle.)
Not unexpected, but still, a weird feeling, being out on a runaround puzzle at the moment hunt ends; I'm not sure that's ever happened to me before. I think in general we usually get runaround puzzles much earlier? You could say it was stupid of me to start out on a runaround puzzle at all on a Sunday, but to be fair, I had been so stuck on the final extraction of everything else I'd looked at that I figured at least I could *do* a runaround rather than slog through other stuck things.
I asked Chris what was up at HQ -- specifically, would we miss out on dinner plans if we didn't get back immediately -- and he said some people were packing up but some people were continuing to finish up the puzzles they were working on, so plans weren't really imminent, so Bryan and I decided to just go ahead and gather the last three data points. We found the 8-204 starting place, and in reality we should have just assumed it was coming right back there but instead we walked around everything in the puzzle anyway to come back to it and see that 8-206 was the end point.
We headed to the Hayden library, and on the way we went past Left Out's HQ again and heard them all cheering and stuff. At the library itself, the staff were like "We're closing soon!" and we're like "We know, we just need to go find one book, don't worry, it's for the puzzle hunt" and they looked at us funny. But, we went downstairs and found the book (again, in retrospect, we totally could have gotten the author's name just by looking up the book name and which author coincided with a lunar landing site, but we weren't thinking of that at the time). And then, having confirmed the final part of the path, we returned to Plant HQ...
...where people were cleaning the room and vacuuming and rearranging chairs and everything, because, dang, we were late. So we helped with that.
The worst part was, we weren't even actually finished with the puzzle! There was going to be a second part where we knew we'd have to somehow map all of these instructions at the bottom onto the moon somehow, but we were like, well, let's do that after dinner or something.
I tried really hard to get photos like this all along (of the puzzle and the actual thing)
One of my snowy Killian Court panos
Building 14
Lobby 37; I had never been on the first floor before and had never gotten to see the tribute to Ronald McNair. In further sad things the word we needed from his portrait was "Challenger". :(
Going by an empty Left Out room
FINALLY the right "SCIENCE and" poster.
Left Out celebrating in the hall as we walk by.
Our final stop, as Bryan is pulling apart bookcases so we can get to the book we were supposed to find.
Consensus was established to go to Bertucci's (the one nearish-by) and Lee called them and said we'd be heading over with a group of 20ish people. Many of us went downstairs with stuff to load into people's cars to be taken home. Cindy told me to go back inside and tell people the cars were there, but when we got upstairs the only person there was Kate, so we told her, and then Chris and I headed to Bertucci's and were the first people there, and then the table got filled in by everyone, and I had a yummy pizza, but the restaurant screwed up Chris's order, but shrug. It felt very surreal also to see several photos of the Coin on my Facebook feed because, well, I'm friends with at least half of the people on Team Left Out because I know many of them from puzzle stuff in California (you could say, maybe, that I was feeling left out). The weird thing, in a way, is that I don't think most of the regular MIT teams actually know Left Out because it's sort of a different world. One person on Plant even asked me "Is this like that team that wrote the hunt full of NPL stuff?"
Chris and I went back to crash after that; some other people went to go drinking or hang out elsewhere. Bryan and I said we'd finish Small Steps in the morning; that never actually happened, of course. In the morning Chris and I got breakfast at the Kendall with some puzzle people who were around (I was very sad when Derek Kisman told me how Connect Four actually worked, and also informed me that I'd missed the Star Battle puzzle) and then checked out and headed over to 26-100 for wrapup; but it took a while for them to let people into the room, so we were stuck in the hallway for a while and it got too crowded to say hi to most people, so I ended up zoning out and sending Cosmic Ray Chandeliers gifts to people in Pokemon Go.
Wrapup youtube video is archived here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkKN2ZcCxpc
I'm not sure what to say about wrapup either. I'm a little sad they didn't talk more about the events, since they seemed to be putting together footage of them all to show, and I was curious about the two that I didn't go to, of course. I *was* blown away by the summary of all the metas and how crazy they all were, along with the explanation of the holiday selection and tying them together and all, and felt a little bad that I hadn't even bothered really looking at metas at all during the hunt.
The other irony is that we pretty much bolted right after wrapup was over, because we had a 4pm flight to San Jose to catch, dammit...
...but little did we know that most of Boston was going to end up snowed in and not actually get to fly out at all that day. Apparently Logan Airport was down to one runway, and a lot of flights weren't able to get in, so they didn't have the planes to fly back out. We didn't find out our flight was delayed until we were sitting down in the Legal Sea Foods in Terminal C to eat lunch -- we got there earlyish because we were worried about security lines, and there we are, shortly after 2pm, finding out our flight's delayed until 9pm. (And then it got delayed to 11. And 1am. And 2am. And cancelled.)
The one good thing about being stranded in the airport on the Monday of Mystery Hunt, though, is that there were like 40-50 other puzzle nerds in our terminal who were also stranded. (Probably more, really.) So we spent the day having a long post-hunt party with everyone we could find. We saw Derek in the food court, and Molly came to visit us at our gate for a bit (she had been in a lounge with Allen and Joel), and then I went to walk to Terminal E to do a Pokemon raid and I ran into Aaron on the way there, and Terry on the way back, and then we got dinner, and after that we went to meet up with Gaby and Mark and Pavel and Kenny and Jonah (the Seattle posse) at a restaurant near C11 but first I ended up talking to Nina and Wei-Hwa in the hallway for a while instead, and then I got triviaed out by Dave at the table with everyone and generally had a great time talking to people for an hour or two, and then around 11pm Chris and I decided to come to our gate and see how things were going - only to find another hour of delay - and he sat down to watch the Warriors-Lakers game and then I saw Matt and Kelly and Rick (from Rage, who I had yelled "hey it's the CMU posse!" at during the Friday night runaround) and talked to them for an hour or so. Our friend Brian who had been at Arisia also came by to say hi. Matt learns that the Dunkin' Donuts nearby technically closes "30 minutes after the last flight takes off", which makes us feel both bad for them and happy we can still get donuts. (I've never eaten so much Dunkin' in one weekend before.)
After having run out of people I actually knew to talk to, then I went and started talking to a group of Asian guys who had been saying something about puzzles; they were from "teammate" and one of them was also a CMU alum and Google employee (and I ran into him a few days later at a Pokemon raid back on campus! how funny is that?), and then at 2:30am when our flight got cancelled and we ran out to the ticketing counters with everyone else, the two guys behind us also worked at Google and had done Hunt, and then after talking to one of them for a while, Tom, it was like "oh we've done all the same hunts in CA but just never met" so that was kind of cool. And then Ben from our team was in a ticketing line across the hall; apparently I had just not seen him any of the times I walked past the SF gates, so I came over to say hi to him too.
But frankly, when we got a confirmation of a rebooking on a flight the next night at 9pm, even I had had enough of this crazy post-hunt party. Especially as I was watching a lot of my friends actually manage to make it onto flights taking off to SFO in the morning and was getting kind of jealous.
So Chris and I took a taxi back to Kendall, and the Marriott was willing to let us stay a night on the Hunt rate and give us a 1pm late checkout, so we went to sleep around 5, got up around noon, and went to hang out at Google for the day. (Chris doesn't work there anymore, but I got to go around and see some people and hey, it was warm and comfortable and had reliable wifi and outlets and all.)
Of course, 3pm hanging out there we see that our 9pm flight has ALSO gotten delayed, because of course it has. I debate the idea of just checking back into the Marriott and doing laundry, because well, I had brought one extra day of clothing, kind of (I wore the same jeans for like 4 days straight) and Chris hadn't brought any, and this was getting kind of icky. Friends are advising me on what to do -- wait until the plane takes off from SFO to come to Boston, because if it does, theoretically they'll have a crew ready for it when it gets here, right?
WRONG. We get to the airport around 10pm (after taking advantage of another night in Cambridge to go to Friendly Toast for dinner, where it turns out they have trivia on Tuesdays -- who knew, we're never in Boston on Tuesdays) and go through another night of waiting, watching our flight come in, and watching our goddamn crew clock out YET AGAIN and our flight is cancelled at 2:30am again. I even joke that we are clearly not managing to get through the REAL final puzzle of hunt, the "Groundhog Day - Snow Day problem". Someone points out that Snow Day is a real movie too. Oops.
We get rebooked AGAIN to a 6:30pm flight on Wednesday (50 hours after our original planned departure), and go BACK to the Marriott, where they are happy to let us sleep there, and they even give us the same room, but this time we have to pay the normal rate, which it turns out is quite expensive. We're happy to get to sleep though, and I even wake up at 11am to do laundry, which makes me feel better, because then at least that solves one problem of being stranded forever. And we go BACK to Google for lunch AGAIN, and I run into people who are now rather than being like "oh, you're here! yay!" like "YOU'RE STILL HERE??? WTF??" On the other hand I must be honest -- I did get a chance to catch up with several people in the Cambridge office who I would not have gotten to see otherwise, and I'm really glad I got that time to talk to them, so.
At 3pm our flight still hasn't been delayed, so we head to the airport, check in, etc. Our flight still isn't delayed. We go to our gate and I run into Pat and Amy from my old team in Google Research, since they're on our flight home. Turns out Pat had a talk at Harvard on Tuesday, so when I'm like "How long have you guys been stranded here?" he's like "Stranded here?? It took us an extra day just to GET here!" How weird. Tom who was in line with us the first night, he shows up and we say hi too. And fortunately I actually *don't* recognize anyone else there, because I'd feel bad if they were STILL stuck. Also, the airline gave me and Chris the really cushy exit seats where just the two of us get to sit together, so we even did have a relatively nice comfortable flight home.
It's taken me 2 weeks since hunt to write this, which both feels REALLY long and simultaneously not actually that long since it's kind of a monster entry. But I think in the future I'm going to be happy to have this record of all the crazy stuff that happened?
I can't imagine anyone actually read all of this, but if you did, I hope at least some of it was enjoyable.