Time for my Mystery Hunt review. I'll discuss individual puzzles in a future post. This year's hunt, Escape from Zyzzlvaria, was put on by the Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb at Midnight who also wrote the hunt from two year's ago. It was fun, beautiful, and very ambitious. I subscribe to the Setec opinion that your first hunt should be short and clean, and your second hunt should push the envelope. By that metric the Bombers have been a great success. Furthermore this hunt fixed many of the issues that made my team not really enjoy their first hunt (lack of a feeling of progress, too much data mining, not enough puzzles available ever, and no pure metas). Although it went long, we had a lot of fun almost the whole time. Thanks a bunch to the Bombers for putting on a great show.

It's good to have an overambitious hunt once in a while that can raise the bar a bit and have lots of new ideas for other teams to process in their later hunts. Monopoly, Matrix, Time Bandits, and this hunt are the recent ones that had lots of new ideas. Of those Monopoly was perfect, while the other three wold have been improved by dialing it back a bit. It could rightfully be said that most of the structure of our SPIES hunt was just taking a third of the ideas from Time Bandits and doing them well. Of these I think Zyzzlvaria will be remembered as being the most innovative, and its impressive that they managed to be that overambitious while still ending up with an good product (sorry Time Bandits).

The dollarbucks round opening mechanism was really really good. Other teams in the future should just steal it. Really. The first round metas were beautiful, and by using round titles as a clue for each they allowed themselves more flexibility to use ideas that would otherwise have been too difficult (for example, Hiigari). I liked the idea of having a first half with pure metas and a second half with shell metas (although, see rant below). Having some pure metas is important to me as Mystery Hunt is almost the only time I get to work on them, but I'm happy with 5 good ones and shell metas allow for more flexibility. The Bombers used this flexibility very well. The production values raised the bar a lot (an actual game for each of us!). Finally the second half of this hunt had a greater number of interesting structural innovations than the last three hunts combined. It's really fun to figure out how different hunt structures work, and one of the downsides of mystery hunt relative to similar events is that there's often only one structure to figure out which leads to a low puzzle to structure ratio.

The puzzles were hard but fair (but hard!). It seemed to me that there were many fewer easy puzzles than in the Normalville/SPIES/Hell era. I was happy that this year seemed to have less data mining than Hell, but on the other hand it seemed that there were more puzzles where the answer extraction was difficult. I firmly believe that answer extraction should be either interesting or easy. Many puzzles (the hitchhiker's puzzle comes to mind) had fair gettable answer extractions that were still difficult to find and detracted from the overall quality of the puzzle. Nonetheless the puzzles on the whole were excellent. I'll have some shoutouts on particular ones after I get to go through the puzzles I didn't see.

Now for the rant... The second round metas... I joked at some point on Sunday that after everyone complained about the Senate meta the Bombers decided "Well maybe if we just make all our metas like this people will stop complaining and just figure that's how metas are supposed to work." Of the 7 metas we only solved Lazyr Zone. Nonetheless we had also solved Orbital Nexus modulo reading the clue phrase, and for both Astro Jail and Harvoid it was our fault not the puzzle's fault (we were close on Astro Jail but missed the connection with the cards even though we figured this meta used the cards, and on Harvoid we misplaced the box and forgot about it). The remaining three all had major major issues. Of the 4.5 point people from our hunt (Reid, Roger, Aaron, Andrew, and half me) I can't imagine any of us approving any of these three puzzle ideas without modifications. I'm still baffled by how they got in a hunt that otherwise was of such high quality. A checkers puzzle where not all the pieces are on the same colored squares?? Really? How could this possibly be a good idea?

Sometimes in these post hunt discussions I feel like some other people have a puzzle aesthetic that's totally foreign to that of my team. I can already anticipate someone commenting "Yes but the switching colors was clued! So it's fine." I don't care if it was clued, it's still ridiculous. The key property of checkers is that it only takes place on one color, a puzzle that ignores this is a bad puzzle. When you think of checkers as an option the first check about whether it's a sensible theory is to check if the pieces are all on one square.

On Combat Zone, I essentially solved the meta on my walk in on Sunday (my one good idea all hunt, I was mostly off my game), I showed up with a complete theory of how it worked that turned out to be exactly right. Except that the two obvious checks for whether my theory was right failed (the mapping wasn't well-defined because some of the reversed letters occurred multiple times on the same dice, and the ominoes didn't fit into a rectangle). We still tried it, but when we couldn't make out any words (we never had more than 7 puzzles) we assumed that we must be missing something (something in the names of the gods? the "God given order" given by the order of the gods? the pairing between puzzles and shapes?). Any small confirmation and we'd have solved this puzzle. Why not make it a rectangle? Why not make the mapping well-defined? Why not mark the boundary edges of the final shape? Why not put the gods in the same order as the puzzles? Sure the puzzle was solvable as is, but why not make it better?

The Virtual Sectors meta I just don't even want to talk about.

Our team's aesthetic is very much based on Setec's hunts and on the advice they sent us about puzzle writing. These three meta puzzles all fail badly: Was there only one aha? No. Were the steps obviously right in retrospect? No. Is the puzzle solvable without psychoanalyzing weird flavor text? No for two of three.

Again, other than these three puzzles (which didn't spoil our enjoyment of the hunt that much) it was an excellent fun hunt. But I'm really curious about how the second round meta debacles could have happened and how future teams can avoid it. Especially because in my mind it was only this issue that stopped this hunt from being in the argument for best hunt ever.