the mit mystery hunt happened again this weekend and once again it was a fantastic accomplishment, with tons of interesting puzzles and new innovations in doing silly things with the format (this year included a playable mini pokemon walkaround game and a sprawling multiplayer hex crossword with increasingly complex gimmicks). if you've never heard of a puzzle hunt before, it's a type of arg-adjacent real life puzzle game people have been doing for decades that has gotten a LOT easier to explain now that people know what escape rooms are (and a bit harder once people started forgetting what an arg actually is). you get a pile of esoteric and obscure looking things and have to figure out what they're asking of you and how to get to the end -- things like crosswords, or physical objects, or simulated geoguessr; trying to present as much variety as possible is half the point. one year had a puzzle that was just the line of text "JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS" if you want to try to figure out the answer to that yourself
i'm making an effortpost though because i feel like something that gets lost along the way sometimes is that both the authors of a puzzle and the target audience of solvers are on the same page on one very specific goal: everyone wants the puzzles to get solved from start to finish. a well-designed puzzle will have information in it throughout the solve path to guide people the entire way. i'm sure people are familiar with modern day """arg puzzles""" which instead _don't_ want the puzzles to get solved and instead use them as delaying tactics, but that's a different rant. this year's hunt was great and I felt that basically everything had very smooth solve paths - no complaints there!
on the _solver_ side though, i feel like my team at least was getting a bit too lost in free association than i felt in previous years & i'd like to reemphasize that the authors want you to solve their puzzles! sometimes it's easy to rabbithole down several consecutive leaps of logic, and it's good to realize when that's happening and to take a step back and go 'what in this puzzle have we not used yet, particularly in flavortext or if any attempts had feedback that looked useful.' that's not to say that spitballing and sharing ideas *isn't* something to make sure to do -- when solving with my smaller team year-round I constantly encourage people to say their thoughts because I'd rather someone say something a little silly that didn't work versus not saying something and having it be the correct path in hindsight. it's just good to make sure that what you're doing fits the totality of what you're being presented with the puzzle! i feel like it generally becomes fairly obvious in a well-designed puzzle when you're having trouble fitting your idea to all parts of a puzzle, versus when you have an idea and suddenly everything starts fitting together
still though, we were one of the teams to both see every puzzle in the hunt and cross the finish line so the rabbitholing didn't end up too much of a pain in the long run. plus we didn't get first place which means we get to solve next year's hunt instead of being cursed with having to write it, so who's to say that the struggling wasn't useful anyway :V
someone poke me in a few days and i'll see if i can do a writeup highlighting some of my favorite puzzles from this year
