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Mystery Hunt 2013
I'm putting together a team to participate in the 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt, and you're all invited!
What's Mystery Hunt? It's basically a crapton of puzzles. You solve each puzzle by working with the clues to get a word/phrase/string-of-letters as the solution.
Mystery Hunt 2013 will take place on 18~21 January 2013.
Details about Mystery Hunt:
Traditionally, Mystery Hunt begins at noon on the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day (a U.S. holiday), with an introductory skit held in Lobby 7 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (which is usually webcast). Then us teams are directed to a special puzzle server, where we each login with our team's username and password. (FYI, the skit will be at Rockwell Cage, building W33, this year.)
The hunt lasts until a team finds the coin (the ultimate objective of the Hunt, which few teams ever reach), usually sometime on Sunday, but the past few hunts have seen the organizers have usually let the hunt continue until Sunday afternoon, when there's a wrap-up held on campus where the organizers discuss the hunt, which is webcast for remote solvers.
(The prize for being the first team to recover the coin is to be blessed with suck: your team gets to write next year's Mystery Hunt. :P)
To complete the Hunt, your team must have an on-campus delegation, as certain events/activities and a small minority of puzzles require live presence. However, we won't get anywhere near that, and for the first time, this year, the Mystery Hunt is allowing fully-remote teams to register!
You don't have to be available all weekend long to participate--you can pop in and out anytime! All I ask is that you register your name if you even think you might want to play, because we need a forum and we're not allowed to keep it public, so we can get you on board before the hunt starts. You're allowed to join anytime during the hunt, too.
The hunt lasts until a team finds the coin (the ultimate objective of the Hunt, which few teams ever reach), usually sometime on Sunday, but the past few hunts have seen the organizers have usually let the hunt continue until Sunday afternoon, when there's a wrap-up held on campus where the organizers discuss the hunt, which is webcast for remote solvers.
(The prize for being the first team to recover the coin is to be blessed with suck: your team gets to write next year's Mystery Hunt. :P)
To complete the Hunt, your team must have an on-campus delegation, as certain events/activities and a small minority of puzzles require live presence. However, we won't get anywhere near that, and for the first time, this year, the Mystery Hunt is allowing fully-remote teams to register!
You don't have to be available all weekend long to participate--you can pop in and out anytime! All I ask is that you register your name if you even think you might want to play, because we need a forum and we're not allowed to keep it public, so we can get you on board before the hunt starts. You're allowed to join anytime during the hunt, too.
Here are some examples of Mystery Hunt puzzles. You can click the solutions links on each puzzle's page to see the solutions for each:
One of the more fun puzzles.
One of the more difficult puzzles.
A recognition-based puzzle.
A biology puzzle.
One of the more difficult puzzles.
A recognition-based puzzle.
A biology puzzle.
The solutions to puzzles like these are themselves clues in a metapuzzle, and multiple metapuzzles' solutions are clues to a supermeta. For an example of a metapuzzle (well, this is actually a supermeta), check this out.
You may want to check out the 2011 Hunt, which is one of my favorites in recent memory. It illustrates the metapuzzle and supermeta structure rather clearly--the Mario "world" has a set of rounds, whose solutions are combined into a metapuzzle, and the three metas' solutions are used in the world's supermeta. The Mega Man world has a set of rounds, whose solutions are combined to produce each robot master's weapon (or metapuzzle's solution), and those are combined to solve the supermeta. (The Zelda, Katamari, and Civ worlds have more unusual meta/supermeta structures.)
And yes, each year's hunt has a different theme. In 2011 it was video games. In 2012 it was musical theater. The theme might inform the puzzle titles, but usually has nothing to do with each individual puzzle itself.
Interested? Request an account here: http://ducksoup.vbprog.zonexus.net/
Comments
Registered, though I doubt I'll really participate all that much.
totallyforgotaboutthis.jpg
I'll join, but I'll also be extremely useless.
We're all extremely useless by ourselves. It's all about a team effort, and you very often get maybe a core group of people working on one puzzle getting help from all sorts of other people (and other sources).
Well, like Glenn said in the Updates thread, this is meant to be a teamwork thing, so the more of us jump into the fray at the same time, the more likely we are to not come out the other end smelling like...tar...
...I shouldn't try to do motivational talks after I only just got out of bed.
Ninja'd. Anyway, count me in too, I suppose. Seems like fun.
Bumping this thread...the Hunt starts in less than 48 hours!
Wonder if there will be a chan team participating in this thing.
I don't think so; most participating teams are strongly MIT-based.
That said, I could be very wrong. There could very well be a team with lots of channers. However, their home base won't be public, because that's not allowed under hunt rules.
Mystery Hunt starts NOW!
Well, actually, they're doing the opening skit now, and not broadcasting it, but we'll find out the puzzle server soon.
In the meantime, get set up by:
* joining our IRC channel, by going here: http://webchat.esper.net/ , entering your username of choice, entering #ducksoup in the Channels box, and clicking Connect
* joining our forum, by going here: http://ducksoup.vbprog.zonexus.net/ , and requesting an account by clicking "sign in" then "create one" and filling out that page. I'll approve your request quickly.