This was without a doubt, the best mystery hunt I’ve been to year. I wasn’t able to attend the mystery hunt for the past two years and due to this I’m not only seeing improvements that were made over the past year, but improvements that have been made prior as well.
Kickoff
The kickoff now occurs in an auditorium. You can hear everything! The plot is clear! They had joke memes up on projectors! The theme of this year’s hunt was Alice in Wonderland and the team did a fantastic job on the kick off event. They followed this up by having great little skits that they invited you to as you finished different parts of the hunt. We met the White Queen, the hare, the tweedle-twins and faced a jabberwocky and we didn’t even finish all of the hunt!
Puzzles
We finished move puzzles this year than my team ever has and had more fun doing. Nothing in the puzzles ever felt random or hard to figure out. I was able to look through the solution pages this year and go “OHHHHHH”. In previous years I’ve been too busy going “How the fuck am I supposed to know to do that!”
Favorite Puzzles
My favorite would have to be the one I managed to solved with the help of only one other team member: Assemble Me. This puzzle involved learning about Commodore 64 assembly language.
Another favorite puzzle was Across the Hall. My team figured out that you could apply rules to the gibberish to get a clue and they managed to solve most of the clues. My big contribution was realizing that you could apply the SAME rule to the solution to change the word into a MiT building name. From there my team was able to figure out that the numbers at the bottom overlayed onto the MiT map and were able to get the answer easily. I felt like I helped at least, even if it was just recalling a classic puzzle tactic (Applying the solution to one part AGAIN to another part).
A great hunt. I had a great time. I hope to give a small talk at work about the
hunt and how it works. Let’s see if I actually have the energy to do an issue of
panda as well. 