Here’s my annual recap of the MIT Mystery Hunt. This year we hunted as “The Team Your Team Could Smell Like,” which may be one of our most brilliant team names ever. While we did manage to find the coin, we were the third team to do so. Thus, the brilliant hunt theme harveyj and I are planning will have to wait until 2013.
This year, the theme was Mario — he was finally going to marry Princess Peach, but Bowser kidnapped her at the wrap up and, what do you know, the wedding is in another chapel! No wait… it turns out it was all masterminded by GLaDOS from Portal through a convoluted chain of video game villains all controlling each other in a hierarchy. (I’d be lying if I said I knew who GLaDOS was before hunt, but there were members of my team who guessed the Mario theme with a tinge of Portal just based on the invitation we received before the hunt to a wedding between M&P where cake was promised.)
While the theme was perhaps not up my alley, though well done, there were a number of puzzles I did like.

• Good Vibrations — Yes, this puzzle is about that Good Vibrations. I cracked it off of “Rubber Duckie.” I am not embarrassed that I knew that and it was hilarious to solve once we figured it all out.
• Walkthrough — This led to one of my favorite reasons for the a-ha moment. When the puzzle first came out, a bunch of undergrads, convinced it was a runaround, asked me to join them on the trek to Kresge so that someone experienced was with them. (Plus, I had asked for an excuse to leave HQ.) So, off we trekked, but when we got there, nothing seemed to match the second step. I read the rest of the puzzle and decided that we probably weren’t going to find an island of Chinese pirates on MIT’s campus and directed us back to HQ, brainstorming along the way about what the puzzle might actually be. First we called HQ to let them know we were on our way back and asked them to check the page source for any clues we may have missed — nothing. Then James, a sophomore, noticed all of the Wikipedia signs around campus for the 10 year Wikipedia anniversary and suggested that maybe it was a “Wikipedia runaround” of sorts… which of course, it was. It was the sort of brilliant serendipity that I approve of — if I had read the whole puzzle first, I would have talked us out of going to Kresge and James probably wouldn’t have seen the signs that led us to the actual solution. Plus, it was fun to solve.
• Flat Head — I completely forgot this puzzle existed until thedan reminded me that I solved a bunch of it. Hurray for NPL flats… and Canada.
• The Word — Okay, to be fair we only solved one of the three puzzles in this one, but we solved it fast. This made it somewhat disappointing when we realized that there were two other puzzles embedded in it.
• Drafting Table — It’s not that this puzzle was particularly amazing, but it is the only one in which I was the first person to look at it (with a few others… amittai, dwilson, and mehtank, I think) and we solved it without needing any additional fresh eyes.
• Soooo Cute — I didn’t actually solve this because too many people jumped on it right away, but it worked basically the way I expected it too. Plus, ZooBorns is one of my favorite blogs.
• The Mega Man Meta — Again, I didn’t solve it, but it is one of the most beautifully constructed things I’ve ever seen.

And a few additional honors go to…

• Crowd’s Chant — I really want this to be my favorite puzzle ever, but I think it needs a slight tweak in the flavortext to be a good clean solve. That, and I need to remember from now on that the cheap toy keyboard I have is a half-step flat. ‘Cause that screwed us up for awhile. But still, a puzzle about music theory and baseball? What’s not to love (besides the actual execution)!
• Fascinating Kids — This wins the WTF award. Just read that solution and tell me it is at all a reasonable thing to do. “Near-integer grade level”? From an obscure metric that is clued only by its initials? Yeah, no.

In the end, GLaDOS was defeated and we found the companion cube… well, what was left of it after Codex got there first. Next year, we’re prepared to be that much faster!

I finally have recovered from my annual return-to-MIT-for-the-Mystery-Hunt excursion. (Well, in a literal sense that’s not quite true… I still have laryngitis, but it’s more likely that I caught it pre-hunt from a fellow Glee Clubber. If members of my team find themselves losing their voices in the next few days, I apologize profusely.)
The hunt was a little strange for me this year as certain hunt regulars opted to hunt remotely for various reasons instead of being there in person. But it only took about five minutes to get over being the eldest putz alum (with the exception of Benoc, who by all accounts including his own, seems to live on 2W these days and is therefore more familiar to the undergrads than Harvey). After all I still had Amittai to mock me endlessly upon learning my AIM screenname. (It’s Dutch, okay?)
Quality-wise, this was probably the worst hunt since, well, the hunt we wrote. The theme was dull and unimaginative (a murder mystery) and the structure was needlessly complicated and somewhat broken. (It turns out that because of the way they released puzzles, solving one of the layers of metas (grouping the suspects) gave you absolutely nothing.) I was also shocked to hear that one of the puzzles (Underpants Gnomes) was missing an entire page of clues and Dr. Awkward didn’t feel the need to issue an errata to rectify this, even after they noticed it. I can say from experience that if your puzzles are broken, you need to own up to it as soon as you recognize that. Other puzzles weren’t broken per se but involved so many “A ha!” moments that they were essentially unsolvable — I still don’t know how Knots and Crosses works, even though I listened to the author explain it at the wrap up.
I also have a gripe about the webpage format of the puzzles — if I’m looking at puzzle and want to tell, say, a remote solver to look at it, I should be immediately able to determine what round the puzzle is in based on the header of the page. At the very least, I should be able to look at the round page and tell the name of the puzzles without having to mouse-over each link. This is a really easy thing to implement and it makes a huge difference.
But despite the fact that many were severely flawed, I did have a number of favorites. The puzzles themselves haven’t been archived, so I’ll have to go back and add links later.

• Nationwide Hunt — This puzzle had six very straightforward clues which were ungoogleable (except for one) and required you to be in a different city, such as “The fourth word is located in SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA. Looking out from the front steps of the City Hall, there is a row of flagpoles on the right that extends forward. On the fourth flagpole, there is a plaque. Take the second word on the plaque.” I contributed to this puzzle by calling Breath and sending him to San Francisco’s City Hall to get that word. But the highlight on our team was one of our undergrads getting a hold of a directory listing for an apartment building in New York and cold calling strangers until one of them agreed to help us.
• Cursed — This was a cross-sum (aka Kakuro) where you looked for factors instead of sums. As an added bonus, it was in Hexadecimal (as clued by the title). Galen refused to let me go work on the cryptic puzzle until I finished solving the grid.
• The World’s Tallest Cryptic — The aforementioned cryptic, this puzzle is an absolute work of art. I am only disappointed that a) Anand and I goofed level 1 and didn’t notice right away and b) I was so exhausted that I had to pass out before said error was noticed and we could appropriately solve it. But seriously, this is the most amazing crossword-type puzzle I have ever almost-solved. I cannot imagine what went into constructing it.
• Cross-Examination — Another cryptic. Not as nice as the infinitely repeating one, but still fun.
• Propaganda — I have mixed feelings about including this as a “favorite” as it was nearly identical to Land That I Love from the 2006 Spies Hunt, but instead of getting the “facts” from America: The Book, they were taken from the Caltech hacked version of the MIT Tech. Still, I hadn’t been aware that it existed before, so it was fun to read through it as I searched for “answers.”

I also heard that Subservient Chicken Loves the 80s was fantastic, but I never got a chance to look at it as Benoc decompiled the Flash animation thereby making it ridiculously easy to solve.
I do give Palindrome credit for attempting to have a lot of MIT-type puzzles even though they have a lack of MIT-types on their team. However, I’d just like to note that having a bunch of puzzles that have pictures of MIT’s campus is not what defines “MIT-type puzzles” for me. I miss the ones that require knowledge of MIT culture (hence citing Propaganda as one of my favorites). I also miss the music puzzles — not the “Identify these songs” puzzles, but ones where you need some actual musical knowledge. My pitch pipe was woefully underused (except for the Scavenger hunt).