My stery Hunt 2011
Jan. 16th, 2011 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuA shorter writeup than usual, since I participated less than usual.
I missed Friday, which was a bummer because that's when I usually get to see my out-of-town friends who are on other teams, and because the first round of puzzles is usually gratifyingly quick. Oh, well.
Saturday night after havdallah I came in to campus. I received a warm welcome from my teammates when I arrived, which was very nice. My favorite puzzle was "Hints, with a bit of love!" which I glommed on to from across the room as soon as I heard Tahnan say, "Oh, it's an and-lit puzzle!" (And-lit clues are a particularly elegant form of cryptic crossword clue where the entire clue serves as both the definition and the wordplay.) Even though the four of us working on it disposed of it fairly quickly (with Tahnan and Jangler working on it, I was lucky to have a chance to contribute to solving this one at all!), it was elegant, fun, and appealed to my taste in puzzles.
Other than that, though, I'd have to say that the puzzles I got to see this year were not an ideal match for my tastes and talents. Part of that is that I missed my usual Friday afternoon solving, and I actually went home at midnight on Saturday to get some decent sleep instead of pulling my usual all-nighter; between those two, I lost about 12 hours of solving. But even so, there simply weren't a lot of puzzles this year that were my kind of thing.
Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy myself. II&F is made of pure awesome, and 75% of why I love Mystery Hunt is the chance to hang out and co-solve with some delightful and brilliant friends. And Metaphysical Plant did a wonderful job of keeping the overall flow of the Hunt enjoyable, with some creative flavoring and a really great mechanism of keeping new puzzles coming out regularly. Kudos to them as well for keeping Hunt going even after the first team found the coin; we called in our last meta solution 5 seconds before the time we had decided to strike our rooms and when we got the confirmation that our sol was correct the room exploded in cheers. It didn't matter that we never found Princess Peach; what mattered was that we had reached the final goal we'd set for ourselves.
Congratulations to Codex for winning, and to Manic Sages for also completing the runaround within the alloted time. And congratulations and thanks to Metaphysical Plant for an elegant and well-run Hunt that featured some great innovations that I hope Codex and others will continue.
I'm looking forward to wrapup (in just under 2 hours) and to the reception afterwards, when I hope to get my missing socializing in.
I missed Friday, which was a bummer because that's when I usually get to see my out-of-town friends who are on other teams, and because the first round of puzzles is usually gratifyingly quick. Oh, well.
Saturday night after havdallah I came in to campus. I received a warm welcome from my teammates when I arrived, which was very nice. My favorite puzzle was "Hints, with a bit of love!" which I glommed on to from across the room as soon as I heard Tahnan say, "Oh, it's an and-lit puzzle!" (And-lit clues are a particularly elegant form of cryptic crossword clue where the entire clue serves as both the definition and the wordplay.) Even though the four of us working on it disposed of it fairly quickly (with Tahnan and Jangler working on it, I was lucky to have a chance to contribute to solving this one at all!), it was elegant, fun, and appealed to my taste in puzzles.
Other than that, though, I'd have to say that the puzzles I got to see this year were not an ideal match for my tastes and talents. Part of that is that I missed my usual Friday afternoon solving, and I actually went home at midnight on Saturday to get some decent sleep instead of pulling my usual all-nighter; between those two, I lost about 12 hours of solving. But even so, there simply weren't a lot of puzzles this year that were my kind of thing.
Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy myself. II&F is made of pure awesome, and 75% of why I love Mystery Hunt is the chance to hang out and co-solve with some delightful and brilliant friends. And Metaphysical Plant did a wonderful job of keeping the overall flow of the Hunt enjoyable, with some creative flavoring and a really great mechanism of keeping new puzzles coming out regularly. Kudos to them as well for keeping Hunt going even after the first team found the coin; we called in our last meta solution 5 seconds before the time we had decided to strike our rooms and when we got the confirmation that our sol was correct the room exploded in cheers. It didn't matter that we never found Princess Peach; what mattered was that we had reached the final goal we'd set for ourselves.
Congratulations to Codex for winning, and to Manic Sages for also completing the runaround within the alloted time. And congratulations and thanks to Metaphysical Plant for an elegant and well-run Hunt that featured some great innovations that I hope Codex and others will continue.
I'm looking forward to wrapup (in just under 2 hours) and to the reception afterwards, when I hope to get my missing socializing in.