Dave "Novalis" Turner ([info]novalis) wrote,
I helped write and run HRSFA's puzzle hunt, which just finished a few hours ago. All three teams completed the hunt successfully, the first in roughly the predicted amount of time. I co-wrote the runaround, which the first team team took forever and a day on (still beating out all the other teams), and everyone else zipped through in thirty minutes. I also wrote two of the eight main puzzles. Actually, I wrote four, but one got lost (it involved physical objects), so it was never test-solved, and one was cut before it was even edited due to lack of space.

I promise these two are much easier and more elegant than the last puzzle I posted.

I liked most of the other puzzles (that I saw -- I still have yet to look at [info]occultatio's) as well -- [info]dumble's Facebook puzzle was cute, Shmike's looked like it was even harder to construct than mine, and [info]ophblekuwufu's used a piece of one of the other puzzle ideas I was thinking of.

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  • 6 comments

[info]dougo

September 17 2005, 13:27:23 UTC 6 years ago

Shmike spent all of game night not playing games because he was constructing the puzzle.

[info]pastwatcher

September 17 2005, 15:56:34 UTC 6 years ago

Again, the first one (haven't done second) was great :)

[info]lowellboyslash

September 17 2005, 16:56:24 UTC 6 years ago

From everything I saw, it was an amazing success. Everyone seemed to be having fun and seemed to think it was well written. You & [info]dumble & [info]mikevonkorff & [info]edjoesu & [info]pastwatcher & [info]ophblekuwufu &c. are to be congratulated.

Next year, you might want to ask more alumni to write, if that helps.

[info]ophblekuwufu

September 17 2005, 23:53:44 UTC 6 years ago

[I expect more alums /will/ be involved next year, if only because some of the very active contributors to last year's were alums who then got sucked into writing the Random team's mystery hunt this year.]

[info]regyt

September 21 2005, 13:49:55 UTC 6 years ago

I have never gone near puzzles of this sort. The style/concept itself is totally novel to me, which leaves me really bewildered about where to start. I felt that way about your last one, too. No sense of even the type of solution it's looking for. Are there books or sites with puzzles like these you could recommend to me?

[info]novalis

September 21 2005, 16:45:40 UTC 6 years ago

It's bit like Zendo, actually. You've got some things, and you want to figure out some sort of pattern.

The typical solution is a word or short phrase. Here's last year's MIT mystery hunt. My puzzles are probably easier than most Mystery Hunt puzzles. But if you want to see a relatively easy example from the mystery hunt, try Girls, Girls, Girls. Like many mystery hunt puzzles, there's a phase where you determine the answers to clues, and a phase where you figure out what to do with the answers. Sometimes, puzzles tell you what to do. Sometimes, they even tell you how to do it. Sometimes puzzles require knowledge. Sometimes, they require clever googling.
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