The 2017 MIT Mystery Hunt was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last weekend. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was on a Hunt organizing team for the first time. I also mentioned that I didn’t participate in the pre-Hunt preparation as much as I wanted to due to work and some other issues. Once I arrived in Boston on Thursday night I planned to devote my efforts to the Hunt full-bore. I made my way to our team headquarters in Building 10 (a more team-friendly, central location than our usual digs in the Stata Center) and helped the team get things ready for the kickoff skit on Friday afternoon.
The theme of the Hunt was revealed in the skit. A group of MIT students playing a fictional role-playing game Monsters et Manus (a riff on the MIT motto Mens et Manus) accidentally conjure an eeeeevil sorcerer who possesses the dungeon master and traps the the other players in a medieval fantasy realm. The Hunt solving teams figured out puzzles that would level-up the role-playing characters to be powerful enough to face the sorcerer. The theme idea was proposed by my teammate T K Focht as a way to give solvers more transparency and control over the way that puzzles became available. Solvers would see that a puzzle in a particular round could be unlocked if a certain character were at a certain level, and then make other actions to expedite level-ups for that character. Traditional role-playing games have frequently been referenced in past Hunt puzzles but have never been the overall theme. When my teammates playing the MIT students in the opening skit opened their dice bags, the spectators reacted in hearty approval.
All of the Monsters et Manus puzzles, with solution links, can be found here. The Character puzzles, which were written to have the lowest difficulty, can be accessed by clicking on the icons on the left. The more difficult Quest puzzles can be accessed by clicking the icons on the map on the right. I have construction credits for the following puzzles that can be found on the master list: The Fighter (meta puzzle), Adactyly, Attention Span (just artwork), Epic Raft Battles of History, Maniacal Merchants, and Replenish the Treasury.
The Hunt also featured several live interactions and events. I was on the team that developed the events and I, along with many of my teammates, facilitated these events through the course of the weekend. Three of these events were rescues of the trapped MIT Students. The Linguist could be rescued by a pair of solvers by verbally communicating long, intractable computer passcodes (sample attempts can be seen in this video starting at the 58:55 mark). The Economist was trapped in a endless loop playing Bob Barker in the bidding game of The Price is Right. They could be rescued by bidding a preassigned, exact price of some random item in a team’s headquarters. The Chemist needed a potion to be rescued from a foul mood. Solvers mixed non-alcoholic cocktails inspired by adjectives and nouns drawn from three decks of cards, as in “Enchanted Elfin Stinger.”
The scheduled events included a Super Speed Dating activity in which solvers were given cards with personality types and needed to find another solver with the same type by sitting down for multiple speed dating encounters. The Running Techies event was a series of footraces featuring notable alumni of MIT. Solvers won by successfully selecting a trifecta before the race, and they increased their odds of doing this by noting the placement of the runners in earlier races (and never betting on Richard Feynman). In the photo below I am the racer dressed as Norbert Wiener, third from the left. Hungry Hungry Hippogriffs combined Bananagrams and Hungry Hungry Hippos (see 103:08 in the previously linked video). Pub Quizardry was a game I wrote and presented on Saturday night. I read trivia questions that the solvers found easy on first hearing, but then realized that the answers needed to be transformed in various ways.
Our team planned to run the Hunt through Sunday evening and we expected the first team to find the coin, or two-sided die, in about 35 hours. We underestimated the drive of the solvers and had three level-up their characters before the sun rose on Saturday. This caused a problem because teams needed to participate in the scheduled events before being eligible to face the sorcerer, and we realized that it would be unfair to force these teams to wait while other teams caught up. So, we put together single-team versions of the events and led the them at reasonable increments throughout Saturday. The endgame of the Hunt had two parts. A Character endgame was a puzzle that a solving team performed on a board designed to resemble a hexagonal role-playing mat. Teams answered trivia questions to uncover a group ability under the game-board hexagons: HIVE MIND. The Hunt endgame involved a life-size role-playing surface, and under the hexagons were instructions to convert the previous ability into a new one: GROUP HUG. At this point a solving team went on a campus runaround to find the actual D2 hidden outside the Management building.
My experience at the Hunt as an organizer was similar to my experience as a solver. I had brief interactions with almost all of my teammates while at headquarters, but then found a comfortable place to set down my laptop and worked solo. I ate a lot of junk food because it was there and I have little self control. I did enjoy the opportunity to see the headquarters of other teams, meet people on teams that I wouldn’t ordinarily interact with, and learn more about navigating the campus.
Congratulations to Death and Mayhem, the team that first completed the Hunt! I wish them well on their new quest: to design the Hunt for 2018.
life as a puzzle 