Time for the HOTTEST writeup of 2010!
(or at least the longest)
Ngamer Breaks Down the 2010 Elite Puzzle Hunt
Despite leading Team Elite to two consecutive Top Three finishes in 2009, this was the first time I'd actually
participated in a Puzzle Hunt. Needless to say, the whole experience was quite weird and scary to me, but in the end I'd have to say I enjoyed myself quite a bit. The puzzles were pretty solid, but I'm sure I would have had alot less fun if I hadn't been paired up with QB, a Hunt vet who was able to provide 90% of the brainpower for our team while I ran around doing some of the legwork, and occasionally bouncing wacky ideas off him when we got stuck. I'll be happy to compete in the next Elite Hunt, just as long as it doesn't happen again anytime soon, as being half of a two man team seemed pretty intense to me; personally, I was pretty much drained by the time we figured out some of the tougher puzzles. I could see myself doing well in a relatively minor role as part of a 5 or 6 man team though, so I'll keep my eyes open for a chance to do something like that in the coming months.
As for specifics regarding how the Hunt was run, I've got to say I was quite impressed. The website seemed well-designed and performed admirably all week, all of the puzzles appeared to have been carefully thought out and flowed logically once you discovered your breakthrough... all we needed was for someone to teach Neo how to respond to IMs in a timely matter, and this season would have been perfect! As for things that could maybe be looking into for next year, all I can think of would be minor stuff like:
* a javascript warning box could pop up whenever you click into a new Puzzle, saying "Are you SURE you would like to start this new puzzle? the timer for your team will start immediately!" (yes I realize this was explained in the rules, but I bet this would still be useful for less dedicated teams who didn't read them carefully enough. and would also prevent accidental misclicks)
* having to wait 6 hours before getting your first hint seems a little harsh. maybe that's standard procedure for these type of events, but to me it seemed way too long. I mean, I assume most teams were putting their heads together in the evening, so if after struggling for half an hour they were still stumped on how to start, the waiting period was so long that they'd have no choice but to go to sleep and try to figure things out based on the clue in the morning. what if the first clue would be released after only
three hours? then teammates would be able to puzzle things over for a while, and if totally stumped just agree to go eat dinner or watch a TV show and meet back afterwards, when the clue would hopefully provide the spark they needed
Now on to the puzzles themselves! I'll give some brief thoughts, then plop down a screencap from the Ng/QB spreadsheet (inside the spoiler tag) before breaking down how we approached each of them.
#1.
Overheard at Grauman's
Fun way to ease us into putting our thinking caps on. I agree that every Hunt should start out with a puzzle like this, one that won't scare people away from the whole concept before they've really gotten their brains in gear. But... I'd almost call this one TOO easy. Nice concept, but maybe it could have used one more permutation at the end, like having it come out "ouy anct nadlhe eht ruhtt!" with those spaces in there, so that people would have to at least solve all the quotes before jumping to the answer earlier based on context.
As you see from QB's note in A1, we were sure this would be a movie-related puzzle before opening it up, which put some pressure on. I mean come on, how could a team of
QB and
Ngamer not win a quiz relating to movies? There's a good chance we choked away the win, but I thought we performed well regardless- I knew Waterfront, Suspects, Casa, Apoc, No Country, Taxi, Nap, TDK, LotR, Terminator, Gilmore, and Titanic off the bat, and I think QB nailed a couple others before we pulled out Google. Only a couple minutes of searching had us within 4 letters of the answer, at which point QB Wheel of Fortune'd us to completion.
#2.
Man of the WorldCool little puzzle with just the right difficulty level for a #2, I felt. The "wiki changing the capital" incident was unfortunate, but really there's nothing that could have prevented it. Fortunately it was edited back to the correct answer by the time we looked, so for us at least the timing of this puzzle seemed right on the money.
It seemed I was only able to provide any kind of help whatsoever on half the puzzles; this was not one of them. Geography's never been my strong suit, but fortunately QB is pretty good with it. He recognized the flags straight out and knew three of the countries off the bat. I tried to assist on the last two, but couldn't find an "all country flags" image large enough for me to read the country name text. Then we were stumped until I pointed out the "CAP" and asked if there was a country with an all-red flag, at which point Q figured out what Cyber was getting at and we started googling for the capitals. All in all I thought this was a nice performance from us, one that will hopefully contend for the lead.
#3.
Fannee Doolee
Ugh, this was so strange. I'm sure this was a pretty dependably "Easy/Medium" puzzle for other teams, but for some reason we got trapped in all these really odd hangups and this ended up being my second to least favorite puzzle as a result. My lack of enjoyment was surely our own fault and not Third's, however, so I'm going to give him a free pass on this one. But check out our team breakdown...
This is probably the most entertaining and least standard of all our screencaps, which goes to show how utterly embarrassing our train of thought was throughout. As you can tell from the opening note, we'd already researched Fannee before clicking in, so picking up on the repeating letters should have been no sweat. We quickly IDed all the animal names, but that seemed to be a dead end, so we just spun our wheels for a half hour trying everything under the sun. QB googled all the names to see if these were real people, I was convinced that the Ganev names were just too weird to not be clues and ran them through anagramers to unlock them, then moved on to all the strange out of place words that had been used in an attempt to find a pattern. Finally QB got on the right path by spotting "rockier road, thought this, arcadia are", but I took his question marks there to be literal and researched arcadia wood as a result. Turns out that's the kind of wood the Ark of the Covenant was made out of, which seemed fitting given this was a Third puzzle, but didn't do much to crack the case!
But by far the strangest tangent was when I decided that the constant "Oh Henry!"s (there are two of them, plus an "O. Olivia!" later) must have been a reference to the famous short story writer, O. Henry. QB googled him and came across a crazy set of circumstances- O. Henry wrote a short story called "The Roads We Travel" or something, which contains three characters with animal names (like "Sammy Shark" and "Danny Dog" or something), and within two paragraphs one of them ejaculates and the other chortles! The writing style seemed way too similar to just be a coincidence, but again we didn't see how that brought us closer to the solution and plus the whole concept seemed way too complicated for an Easy/Medium puzzle. Eventually QB figured out the correct process after my mind had exploded, and we had our answer very quickly from that point.
#5.
Xbox Controller vs. KeyboardI liked this puzzle a ton. HOWEVER, as some others have pointed out, this didn't feel like a good fit as a "Medium",
especially not coming in off of #4 with people (I would assume) expecting something more along the lines of "Medium/Easy". Nothing about this was too brain busting in and of itself, but to work this out "properly" you're talking about a pretty significant amount of legwork up front, a breakthrough to switch to a keyboard 5% of the world has used, more fairly large legwork to solve the clues, a second remapping, and THEN answering more question to top it off. Frankly, that many levels would seem more suited to a #9 or #10 than a 5. Again, this is a super cool concept and was impressively executed, but to stay in place as a #5 I'd have tweaked it so that...
* more of the Live Names had only a few games on their profile, like Jimbo and I. I appreciate leaving out QB/Fal/Snap, but many of these choices still had 30+ games, making it quite a chore to find the one achievement in question!
* srx22 was replaced with someone else (apparently the guy either changed his name or deleted his profile in the last week, so QB had to dig around and find a google cache of his old true achievements page before we knew what games he had done!)
* mapping only to qwerty or just using the achievements instead of hints... something to take one level of complexity out of the equation
But yeah, really fun puzzle in any case!
Here's another that we should have destroyed. We're talking about the league's #1 expert on Live achievements (of the people Hunting at least) teamed with the guy who was bragging up trueachievements.com to the whole community only a few weeks back. And things DID get off to a hot start, as I correctly assumed that the Live tag in question had earned these achs and we used TA.com to complete our research at a pretty fast clip. Trouble was, at that point I convinced us to map everything straight to qwerty, which was of course a disaster. There was a delay before QB thought to try the other keyboard style, then a second delay when he called the Mass Effect race "Turian" or something, leaving us totally in the dark on the "qwerty" hint. Those snaffus were certainly time killers, but I don't think either was a real disaster, and I'm still expecting to have had a decent result on this one.
#6.
Bizarre Form of PoetryThis was... my favorite puzzle of the Hunt! I understand why so many were confused by having to think outside the box and actually send an e-mail, but I guess we lucked out by not being stuck there too long, so there was no delay there to affect my appreciation. Clever layout that resulted in some neat little poetry, a difficulty level that seemed spot on for this position, and an opportunity to write a poem about my favorite Eliter- what's not to like!
I'm terrible at geography and word play (anagram/scrabble kind of stuff), but finding connections between sentence snippets is right in my wheelhouse, so this puzzle was my chance to shine! Actually QB still probably did most of the work here, but I at least was able to make some decent contributions, so I was happy. I think I'd already been organizing the snippets into groups before he finished researching that name and announced the poetry style, and from there it was more or less smooth sailing (aside from some minor mistakes like me naturally assuming that "Contest Champ" would have been a reference to myself!) After figuring that Infil wanted an actual poem, I was put in charge of writing it, which proved a mistake... Infil mailed back the URL, but I forgot to give it to QB right away and we lost a couple minutes due to all the weird poker terminology messing me up a bit!
#7.
Symbolic TypoUrrrrk, really didn't like this puzzle. In hindsight I've got to admit that it was actually pretty good, but the circumstances of the time dictated that I
wanted to die the entire time we were working this one over. And that took a looooooong time, as it turned out. More on that below... but oh yeah, I AM still a bit miffed that the word featured on the title of a puzzle hunt challenge could be spelled wrong, yet that is in no way a hint toward the solution! *gives Cyber and Infil the evil eye*
My schedule got messed up like crazy in the middle of last week, resulting in my getting only three hours of sleep the night before... yet we had to press on and complete the puzzle before I went to bed, since QB was leaving for the FL meet the day afterwards! Needless to say I was running on fumes, which combined with how I can't anagram to save my life resulted in a pretty ugly situation once we cracked the code here. But even figuring out what was going on was a huge struggle- we tried swapping out vowels in place of other vowels (as "hinted at" by the typo in the title), figuring what the words had in common, taking the 1st letter of #1 and the 2nd of #2 and 3rd of #3 and so on to see if those made any words... I even researched what 15 "symbols" we might be trying to make, looking into stuff like astrology and the signs of the zodiac. Eventually QB found the words "bass" and "tuba" and suggested we might be looking at something musical, but that could so easily have been a coincidence that I wasn't convinced. My one contribution was finding "bag pipe", which I think was the tipping point into heading down the musical road. But after that my brain hard locked and the letters just swam in front of my eyes; I'd still have been trying to spot instruments
right now in that state.
Oh, I did have one other contribution! Right at the start of the puzzle I did us the service of copying all the words from the site into the spreadsheet, and somehow translated Holeless into "Wholeness", costing us about 10 minutes before QB finally figured out what had happened. Oh, how we laughed! I DID have one other idea though, once we had our instruments in place: I suggested that we could order them based on where those instruments would have been placed on stage in an orchestra. QB pointed out that it wouldn't be possible given Cyber's instrument choices, which was of course right, but I still maintain that my solution would have been
totally sweet.#8.
Une Facon de Cacher les Secrets FrancaisI had a blast with this puzzle, would easily rate it as one of the top four of the Hunt, but even so I've got to admit it was something of an oddball. QB did some excellent research before we got too deep into spinning our wheels, came across the right cipher, and BAM, we were finished with this in no time. Which would normally mean this puzzle was a little too easy for the #8 position, and yet had we struggled on that first step, this would easily have been the most difficult challenge of the night. I'm not sure what could have been done to give this one better "balance"- it was suggested that once encoded the questions could have been in French, but with the word "Vigenère" running down the middle of the clues on the page so you'd at least know where to start... that seems kind of crazy. But in any case, I really liked doing this one!
I was sure we were looking at an encrypted message right from the get go, not only from the title but also because the "sentence structure" was just too perfect for things to have been just thrown together randomly. I haven't heard much about encrypted communication in modern times, so I started looking into secret codes that were used back in WWII, figuring the answer would probably be something used by the French Resistance. Luckily QB's research proved more fruitful, as he came across the Vig cipher and a translation page pretty quickly, then figured out the "middleoftheroad" hint right off the bat to boot. We were trading off questions and answers on the first few hints, but then I kicked it into OVERDRIVE and translated/solved everything from the 90s shortstop to MADTV myself (except for that one hokey question). That freed up QB to start working on the final encryption/answer, which he nailed only seconds after I figured out Lamarr. All in all this had to be our most efficient and impressive performance of the Hunt!
#10.
The Evolution of PuzzlesMan, this puzzle was sweeeet- I think I'd call it my second favorite of the competition! The only downside was, as others have mentioned, it seemed to be a
touch easy for the #10 position... not terribly out of place, just a touch. I mean I understand its placement, since being rewarded with that great "Success!" video at the very end of a long Contest was unexpected, rewarding, and maybe even a little bit hilarious... just wish one of the layers of complexity could have been deleted from #5 and added here, then this would have been perfect.
I thought this was one of our better performances, and we did a pretty respectable job of turning on the jets once we got by the breakthrough moment. Only trouble was, the youtube breakthrough took us a shamefully long time to figure out, especially given the circumstances. Not only did I fail at identifying a video I'm very familiar with in "Evolution of Dance" (heck, I even asked a KotH question regarding its popularity this past season!), I was also a major flop considering I've
done this exact thing with youtube IDs in the past! (For everyone's voters page during the '08 Summer Contest, I set up the "random character" URLs by just visiting random youtube vids and coping down those IDs.) I also messed up by not turning off annotations on the video right away; I was just about to, but then QB mentioned that he "just saw the code!" in a frame without removing the boxes from the screen, so I figured it must have been clearly viewable without messing with any additional settings. Whoops!
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tl;dr version: This was a fun Hunt! I award it a B+, and look forward to next season!
