(SPOILERS) Dance of the Hours: A 2023 Puzzlehunt Recapitulation

Of course, the Big Hunt wasn’t the only thing on my mind in 2023. Nor is it the only hunt in a given year.

While writing the Mystery Hunt, I would occasionally distract myself by solving another hunt (partly to make sure no subject-sniping happened, partly because I could not resolve that addiction so easily). As it turns out, the ones I did were spaced out at around one hunt a month¹, making a pretty convenient timeline.

Februar: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

In my experience, it’s rather rare to have an online hunt so soon after Mystery Hunt. It’s nice to have a cooldown, and Grand Hunt Digital is a reasonable one.

Spoilery Details

Grand Hunt does put a lot of emphasis on the Classical Ciphers. The first round is essentially a speedtest on these, and I solved them as such. The other two rounds are fairly standard puzzles, though for my personal taste a little on the pop-culture-heavy side—more than once I hit a three-puzzle wall, and in general the puzzle that got me unstuck was also the one that didn’t have a pop-culture reference as an aha, though more often than not it was also the constitution check².

Of the metas, the second round meta stands up best. The first coheres with its round, though it might have been better as a standalone feeder. The third… doesn’t exactly stand up to how I would define a meta. It does use its answers, but in a sufficiently superficial manner that it can be circumvented entirely. I’m not entirely sure how to feel about it, since it’s otherwise mechanically sound?

None of the feeders really stood out to me in either direction, so no recommendations here.

Březen: Symfonické variace

…OK, not exactly a hunt here. ~~P.I. Hunt 9~~ R.T. 3 Riddle Search is the last ~~hunt~~ riddle search written by the late Jack Lance³, intended as an introduction to a whole new world of puzzling. It’s a masterpiece in doing a lot of things with one mechanic—a “theme and variations” approach the likes of which would fit right at home in a puzzle game.

Spoilery Details

Jack is a master at theme and variations—one look at his oeuvre of puzzle games says more than enough. Add to that a facility for spotting interesting coincidences in the world and you get an excellent recipe for a puzzle that only a search-like structure can accommodate.

This experiment also came with an epilogue. It's password-protected behind the code to the final riddle, which shouldn't be that hard to get to?

Essentially, R.T.3 is more like a commentary on what a puzzlehunt could be. Jack comments on a lot of established puzzlehunt staples (crosswords, metas, extractions…) and reimagined essentially every aspect from the ground up. Jack saw puzzles as a world of possibility that was surprisingly underexplored. Come to think of it, I also tend to enjoy hunts that push the limits of puzzlehunt design. Maybe I’ll try to think of an idea or two in this vein, but that’s almost certainly for later.

These thoughts came… maybe a bit late to consider into our Hunt philosophy. Plenty of other hunts have come up with exciting ways to buck the whole “answer” thing (more on that when I get to November), but we were fine with having a more “chill” structure year after seeing all the stops 2023 pulled.

Hits:

Basically the entirety of the main map is a banger, though how much of a banger depends on how much you like the theme.
- The number pad set in particular is awe-inspiring, with an unforgettable punchline.
- I didn’t do the QR codes on my first run-through (no printer). I did look at them later—very creative stuff.
- The card standalone. Also didn’t do it on the first run, but I went back to it later and it’s just magic⁴.

Passes:

After you do approximately 1/3 of the riddles, there’s a forced intermission five riddles long that must be passed before you return to the main map. It’s based around googlewhacking—essentially finding a phrase that gets a lot of Google hits paired with one word but fewer with another. The mechanic is… alright (it’s a strugglebus for me because I can’t free-word-associate to save my life), it’s the “you have to solve this to go back” part that sends me. Even in a freeform structure you’re going to want to avoid bottlenecks, and this was one for quite a while. If I were writing for the Harvard Riddle Search this is a tradition I’d be happy to do away with.

Апрель: Китайский танец

(Note: PKU2’s website is currently down. These comments are mostly from memory, so I know broad strokes but do not recall the details of individual feeders.)

So apparently China has its own puzzlehunting scene. Interesting.

I’m a sucker for puzzles based around non-English languages… so long as they treat the source material well⁵. If there’s anyone I trust to get Chinese right, it’s a team based in China. And hey, I speak Mandarin natively, so trying this can’t go that badly, right?

Spoiler alert: it went kind of badly.

This is where I reveal that I kind of have a skill issue with Chinese: I know nothing about Chinese proverbs and struggle with compound words, in a language where these kinds of things are extremely common. Yes, I also struggle with these in English, but the difference here is that in the worst case I have OneLook to use as a crutch. Most of my experience looking up Chinese phrases is complete-searching some list of three hundred compounds containing X character on Wiktionary and hoping something comes up—not too dissimilar to how I would handle something similar in English, but I can’t do quality control on this list like I could with OneLook. Which meant I was basically dead in the water on any puzzle that relied on this kind of thing. And since this is a rather common phenomenon in Chinese…

Needless to say, the struggle bus was real.

Hits:

I like how the first round (of relatively easier puzzles) all solve to a line from a classical Chinese poem. It’s the kind of thing you can only get from a Chinese puzzlehunt, and I especially enjoy how they come into play later (which would be spoilers for the final puzzle). The puzzles there are also short and sweet, enough that the answer curveball didn’t get in the way. I honestly think that this would have been enough for the hunt puzzle-wise, but it doesn’t exactly work plot-wise. (Not that I felt like I understood any of the plot, but that’s probably a Chinese comprehension issue.)

Passes:

The latter half is… interesting, to say the least. I can’t say much about the content, since I used the free answer button on half of them, but basically none of the answers have answer-y nature (meaning you get gems like ORME SHOE and ATE A BUZZARD⁶), which I later found out was because the answers had like three separate strong constraints each (their round meta, a part of the round 2 metameta, and the final puzzle.) Just a tip, but if your answers look like this, maybe consider not constraining them so much? Two constraints already makes things difficult enough. (So difficult that there’s a puzzle satirizing this concept in CCBC13.)
The hint system for this hunt is a pile of currency that accumulates over time/with solves, which can be used to purchase canned hints (often of the not-very-helpful variety) or freeform hints (at a significant markup and a 6-hour turnaround). The part I don’t really like about it is that the same currency just allows you to buy answers given enough time, which is a much more optimal use of the currency; I ended up doing this to about half of the puzzles in the latter half after accumulating a sizable nest egg from the first round, and the rate of accumulation at the point when I reached the latter half made it easier to wait for an answer than actually go in and deal with the inevitable skill issue.
The round 2 metameta song is AI-generated (or at least this is my recollection from reading the video title). It’s got a catchy melody, but I already have rather negative feelings about AI in art.

Maio: Recuerdos de viaje

OK, so I’m kind of lying to preserve the narrative here. I didn’t do the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt live, but I did start a postsolve after I got stranded in the north terminal of SeaTac airport⁷—long story there⁸. I continued solving it over the course of a month and change, finally finishing it at the end of June.

Readers of my previous post may also know that this was the hunt that caused the most headaches for us. Not just because there was an entire Classics round (which hit a few of our puzzles just on principle), but it also sniped all two of our “unique” round ideas. Part of the reason why I started the postsolve was because I caught wind of this and wanted to ascertain how much the ideas conflicted with each other. (The answer was kinda-sorta-not-really.)

Spoilery Details

A lot of my like for this hunt stems from each (post-intro) puzzle having extremely tight theming with its round. They didn’t have to title them this way, but doing this made each “course” actually feel like a university-level course.

Hits:

I could fill out a ten-page research paper with praise for all the puzzles that I liked, but for brevity’s sake I’ll list my favorite from each round after the first. (Note: links will likely not show up unless you manually press the unlock all puzzles button in Continuing Education.)
- Macroeconomics, a puzzle about reconstructing “ciphered” C++ code⁹. It’s been a long while since I’ve had to do any C++ coding, but the punchline at the end made relearning the whole thing absolutely worth it.
- Counterpoint, a puzzle about antonyms. Very long and non-trivially grindy, but the conceptual evolution of the solve for a concept so simple is the envy of puzzlewriters.
- How the Other Half Lives, a conundrum. Words can’t do it justice. Go solve it. Now.
- The Hundred Years’ War, a puzzle about war, because I’m a sucker for the Chinese Remainder Theorem and love when it shows up in a seemingly-unrelated puzzle.
- CS is a complicated matter—I can’t rightly recommend any one puzzle in the CS round without also recommending the round as a whole. If I had to pick one, though, it would be EMPTY, for funny value.
- Regular Numbers, a puzzle about regular expressions… and also math, using the math-y symbols found in a typical regex. Very clever premise.
- Ozymandias, again for the absolutely brilliant premise and execution.
- Sociology (AKA the round that sniped Hell) is also very hard to nominate any one singular puzzle on due to structure. I can only really recommend the round as a whole.
Can’t forget the metas, either. Math and Sociology are brilliant. I also liked Music and English.

Passes:

...OK, let's talk about funny farms.

For those unfamiliar, Funny Farm is a word association game, where the goal is to progressively fill out an adjacency graph of words by guessing what can appear in the box. Words are connected by a line if the two words satisfy some non-trivial relationship.

There are ways to do the concept well. If the definition of what constitutes a line is fixed to something reasonably concrete, then it becomes a puzzle about that something—a good example is Analogy Farm (though it does not appear to be up right now). Anything that reduces the word search space is also welcome (see: Word Wide Web, which I still didn’t solve live because I had the wrong image about the mechanic).

But for the most part funny farms consist of throwing English dictionaries at the wall and seeing what sticks—and even this isn’t guaranteed to work. A line can be as concrete as “these are two sides of one coin” or as spurious as… uh… handwaving motions, and the solver has no way of knowing where on the sliding scale it lies until they get the word. It’s the distilled essence of “guess what the author is thinking”, the archetypical universally reviled mechanic. Honestly, the fact that “funny farm” in common parlance is a slang term for “psychiatric hospital” makes it a completely apt name for the genre. There’s a reason puzzles of pure word association are generally consigned to joke mentions as data fodder for a larger puzzle. Yet, not here.

This hunt does it worse, by placing them at the two most important chokepoints in the hunt (the Intro’s last puzzle and the hunt’s last puzzle¹⁰). Both were painful to slog through.

Look, I get it. Teams find them fun because it builds rapport and disparate knowledge bases naturally complement each other. I know people who think I’m just salty about it because I’m a solo solver with a broken word association function and thus solidly outside the target audience. But even the best knowledge base in the world can’t trump “guess what I’m thinking”. At some point, it slogs to a standstill, and the fun value drains away. This point has a logarithmic relationship with team size¹¹, but the point still exists, and it’s easy to hit for this kind of puzzle.

And for me, it’s also become a fatigue issue. 2023 had four Funny Farm puzzles that I know of. Zero have “done it right”. So now I’m disinclined to trust that any funny farm puzzle in the future will do it well. The joke’s been played out.

Juni: Also Sprach Zarathustra

So teammate cut basically an entire round out of the Mystery Hunt. For length sanity reasons, as I’m sure you’re all aware, but that’s a whole other discussion I do not want happening here.

Now, I kind of knew this was coming—one of the authors tipped her hand in my general direction about a puzzle that wasn’t in hunt but definitely seemed like it was going to be in hunt—but the round still blew me away by sheer scale.

Admiral Boötes did seem unusually short for a Mystery Hunt round, but I figured that ASCII art wasn’t that easy of a concept to design puzzles around. As it turns out, it wasn’t just meant to be ASCII art (despite round design suggesting otherwise).

Of course I wasn’t going to be able to tackle this myself, especially given the high difficulty curve expectation. Thanks to the ~~furries~~ folks at Literally Animal Farm for inviting me to play along.

Spoilery Details

As mentioned previously, the ASCII art answers from part 1 were only a third of the equation. We didn’t know this going in, of course, which led to some… interesting interpretations for answer submissions. At least until we found The Other Shenanigans.

The other two shenanigans in question were “at least one non-alphanumeric character” (e.g. that exclamation point, though this is also present in the ASCII art part of the round to some extent) and “a direction word is entered as an arrow” (and the submission box hijacks the actual arrow keys to enter them for maximum funny value, just as it hijacks the enter key for newlines).

Of course, these were cut out of a late round of that Mystery Hunt, so it’s got a difficulty curve to match. There were a lot of hard puzzles, though our team managed to strike one particular puzzle with a metric mountain of cheese (by straight-up guessing the answer after identifying the theme).

Hits:

Ted Tales, the Designated Conlang Puzzle for the hunt. (No surprises there, because I like basically any conlang puzzle that isn’t internally inconsistent, which is… all of them, so far at least. Don’t make me regret making this statement.)
The metameta (Admiral Bootes), which is definitely the true heart and soul for the round.

Passes:

I’ve got mixed feelings on ship. The first part (using the Unicode names) is fine, and absolutely hilarious (see: digittwodigitzerodigitzerodigitonecolonspaceaspacespacespaceodyssey). The second part is free word association hell 2: [meta answer] Boogaloo. I feel like the only reason we even got past that point was a random Google search bringing up the existence of Hippodamia parenthesis… and then we got stuck for another hour trying to make every word match a punctuation mark.
I had aspirations of making a giant retrograde analysis problem on my favorite board game once¹². Of course, on a board game with as many independently-moving parts as Spirit Island, a retrograde analysis becomes a bookkeeping nightmare. At some point this became the last puzzle we had unsolved besides the metas (and thus the only puzzle that we could hint), so I just started funnelling my hint requests into a DM stream with lumia instead because that was faster. Personal feelings on Spirit Island aside¹³, really only do this if you have a full day or two you’re willing to burn, and you’re intimately familiar with the material in question.

Fear Incarnate

Other puzzles I worked on:

Playful Sounds, more specifically the LoZ, Minecraft, and Wii Sports parts, as well as some work on LoL, Sonic, and Undertale. Looking at the rest, though… hm. Hollow Knight looks sane enough (assuming you have a map), but Kirby and Xenoblade look like separate full puzzles that got ported in on thematic relevance (which means they got WoFed away purely for ergonomic reasons), and StS is intractable without having the game itself (yikes).
The second part of The Sensorium. Thankfully a lot less jank than I was imagining (and pretty fun assuming you have a 4D modeling implement on hand¹⁴), though I did have like eight extra cubes that I couldn’t account for (and still have no idea what they account for).
Deconstructed Crossword, in part.
The Mystery of Cabin 14C, though just to check work (by cheesing the ASCII tables).
Space Place, wherein I half-assed a satisfying loop and was completely surprised to find out it actually spelled something.

Lipiec: Fantazja-impromptu

Shardhunt! (You might notice I’m starting to run out of creative intros. Oops.) Didn’t really know what to expect (this was a team new to huntwriting¹⁵ as far as I knew), came out with a reasonably-blown mind.

Spoilery Details

The hunt was mostly standard, but a few puzzles throughout the hunt did involve a custom-built Library of Babel implementation—true to the theme being about said library. An… interesting decision, given the main feature of the library didn’t get much spotlight and the puzzly bits are the bells and whistles attached to it, but those are some good puzzles.

On the other hand, they are very cheesable puzzles, though I’m told that this is by design, since 17th Shard is a rather backsolve-friendly team?

Hits:

Go play Pushing the Rules.
Basically everything that used the library in some way, whether layout (two puzzles) or function (two puzzles). Babelbees in particular I had fun deriving an extremely deranged Google Sheet for all the m a t h.

Passes… well, less passes, more minor gripes with some puzzles, but nothing major. Like I wish for example that The Launch of this Puzzle Has Been Delayed clued its last step better, but this doesn’t really affect my opinion of the hunt as a whole.

Augusztus: A csodálatos mandarin

(Note: CCBC13’s archive is… also down. These comments are mostly from memory, so I know broad strokes but do not recall the details of individual feeders.)

You’d think I’d’ve learned my lesson the first time. I’ll admit that my primary interest in Chinese-origin hunts originally derived from people talking positively about CCBC12, so I had to at least give that a try before writing Chinese-style hunts off entirely.

Spoiler alert: basically the same story.

The hunt structure consisted of a bunch of nazo¹⁶-like “Asteroid” puzzles, a “main round” of standard (Chinese) hunt puzzles, and a surprise entry of a second “main round” (billed as the “successor hunt”, CCBC14). The asteroid answers figure into two of the main round feeder puzzles but don’t otherwise contribute to structure.

Asteroids were enough of a breeze that I spent my first few hours of hunt just speedrunning through as many as I could. The main body was about as hard as I expected given prior experience (i.e. skill issue on basically every puzzle using the Chinese language). I finally tripped over the finish line for CCBC13… and then felt a lot of whiplash when a CCBC14 suddenly showed up.

At this point, though, the skill issue I have with Chinese puzzles has me convinced that I don’t know enough Chinese for the Chinese hunts.

Hits:

Nazo are basically always fun.
The last puzzle suddenly swivelling into a Chinese answer and mechanic from English answers was… kind of out of left field? The entire rest of the hunt used the English just fine. (See also aforementioned skill issue, which was very present in this puzzle.) Ignoring that, though, great construction.

Passes:

See PKU’s spoiler entry for the same complaint about what is apparently the standard hint system for Chinese hunts.
One does not simply make an answer refer to racism without some pushback. I’m sure there was better. (It was on a puzzle I didn’t solve, and I refused to submit the backsolve answer on principle (submitting a protest answer instead).)

September: Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt

This was my first experience with Labor Day Hunts, which are generally themed around some cultural element (Hawaiian religion in this case). Which was… interesting, given that I was concurrently working on a mythology hunt, but they already covered Heracles and Odysseus in the very first iteration, so Greek was well-trodden already.¹⁷

Spoilery Details

The puzzles were, for the most part, about what I expected: roughly similar to a P&A in difficulty, spread, and layout (though no Einsteins).

Unlike P&As, we (yes I did this one with ~~the furpile~~ LAF again) also collectively skill issued on the meta. Too wordplay for us, whoops.

Not much else I can write here—none of the puzzles stuck particularly well to my memory. If I had to name a favorite of them, Laka is pretty fun.

Октябрь: Гибель Тибальда

And this was my first experience with a Puzzle Boat.

The main Thing with Puzzle Boats is that all the… checks notes 100 or so puzzles?¹⁸ feed into a meta-matching festival. I’ve been interested in seeing how it works firsthand for a while—thanks again to LAF for letting me onboard.

Spoilery Details

The boat this year was based off a murder mystery. Someone died, you have a large list of suspects, each meta gives a motive for a suspect, some of the puzzles provide random demographic information about the suspects that then also feed detective puzzles, some puzzles solve to an answer that needs to be transformed based on a detective answer… you know, standard fare.

Finding the information in the haystack was half-fun half-tedious (to the point where we had two sheets tracking it—one for general use and one because I got compulsive in checking for missing information and wanted to be dead sure about it). The actual metamatching part, and most¹⁹ of the metapuzzles, were fun!

I’d say more on the hunt and puzzles, but there’s a veritable mountain of feeder puzzles that all just blend together in my mind, and also the hunt is paid so I’m disinclined to say more about it than the overarching structure. Instead have this out of context screenshot, which spoils one²⁰ clue in one puzzle.

Psy-op

Novembre: L’apprenti sorcier

…wait, I miscounted because I failed to account for a CMU hunt. Oops.

Honestly, my memory of CMU hunts is so hazy that I don’t even remember whether I went in solo or on another team on any given one. So uh…

November (again): Hasche-Mann

Cards!

Prior iterations of GPH have tended to occupy the niche between Mystery Hunt and smaller-scale hunts like Potluck. They also tend to be pretty unique, and I like them for just that reason: 2019’s GPH is still my favorite non-Mystery Hunt on the record²¹, and even then it’s only beaten by plane noises Galactic Trendsetters’ more plane noises own Mystery Hunt²².

In general, though, I walk in still expecting the same standard type of hunt puzzle. So imagine my surprise when, on opening my computer to solve what was totally going to be your average spelunking-themed puzzle hunt, I instead get thrown directly into a card battler.

Even funnier? I opened this up while at a board game night. (Because functionally nothing gets in the way of puzzling.)

Even funnier funnier? Someone who works on GPH also comes to this game night, and also knows that I do puzzles. Makes for at least one possibly awkward conversation every time a hunt happens.

I’m a bit of a board game maven²³. I have not, however, interacted with MTG or any other card battler in basically any way aside from this. So, pleasant change of pace from my standard fare, though chances are I still won’t be touching those any time soon.

Spoilery Details

Here’s how the puzzles break down:

7 standard battles, generally pure battles, whose only purpose is unlocking more cards. I generally found these less enjoyable than the legendaries, simply because the battle element overpowered whatever puzzly element was present. I wound up skipping one (I simply didn’t want to bother with digging my card collection for Leech Seed counters).
11 Legendary battles, which are more gimmicky in nature and contribute to opening up the final boss. These I enjoyed a lot more. (Incidentally, 2024 Mystery Hunt was developing Queen Marchesa to g4 at around the same time, and that scratched… much the same itch? Not that I’d know, I wasn’t an author on it, and also I am still extremely unfamiliar with MTG keywords.)
18 standard hunt puzzles, significantly toned down in difficulty.
The “Mastery Tree”, a way to buff your battling ability and also the meta.
The final boss, which technically isn’t a metameta. More on that later.

Overall, the hunt definitely felt a lot more freeform than the others. You don’t get one fixed answer or have to follow one particular solve path—instead it’s a few finer points of strategy and then all user-defined implementation.

Generally, though, I’m horrible at coming up with my own ideas. If every puzzle here was an optimization problem, I would experience ten times the AP that I get from a large Euro game. There were still quite a few that I would qualify as optimization (more on those later), but Galactic changed up the formula enough that it didn’t feel stale.

This hunt did spark a… particularly lively (putting it generously) debate about what constitutes a puzzle hunt. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, capital-D Discourse is not something I want to weigh in on. (Especially not a full year after the fact.) Moving on…

Hits:

Galactic did quite a good job differentiating the legendary fights from each other. I’d say the most unique ones are Coloring and Slime?
Shoutout to Othello for getting me to actually read an Othello strategy guide²⁴ on my way back from SGS. Beating it at 4 AM gave me a lot of dopamine, enough that I continued doing the hunt for another eight hours before (involuntarily) conking out. (Also Othello has a birb²⁵, how could I not?)
The final boss being “find synergies between the legendary cards” felt like such a natural evolution of the card game structure.

Misses:

Aforementioned optimization problems, most prominently showing up as Asteroid (deal n ≥ 100 damage in 10 turns). And yes, technically the capstone fits this as well, since I initially treated it as that (how do I hit something twenty times in five turns?) before I gave up on the hintless run.

Mild annoyances:

The bees have an idiosyncratic speech pattern of spelling out words to emphasize (?) them. The problem is that their separator of choice is commas, which meant that every time a bee showed up it stalled out the part of my brain responsible for text processing. Hyphens were right there!

Dezember: Erlkönig

And to close out the year, a third Huntinality. There’s a whole fairy-tale song and dance attached to it, complete with both the intro and the capstone being Into the Woods references.

I liked the previous Huntinality (though, generally, more on aesthetics than on puzzles, and also because birds). So what did they cook this year?

Spoilery Details

Uh, let’s see…

A round with zero alphabetic characters? None of which have a traditional answer format, either (they solve in an interactive manner).
A bunch of fish-y puzzles, some of which spawn on the main page.

Certainly more innovative in round structure than 2.0 (which was four whole vanilla rounds). Though, I don’t think I enjoyed these more than I would a normal round? IDK, YMMV.

Hits:

You probably know my type by now: Witch’s Hut meta, for well-constructed wordplay.
Keep Out, for funny value.
Bird Conundrum, because I’m biased. Towards the Chinese Remainder Theorem. What, you thought it was just the birds?

Misses:

🤫. See previous discussion about funny farms, except this time it’s throwing the entire Unicode emoji block at the wall, and you don’t even have enumerations to help you, because everything has an enumeration of 1. I never got anywhere past the starting node; the only saving grace is that it can be solved around.

Mild annoyances:

The fact that the witch insists on turning people into mammals. I don’t want to be allergic to myself, dang it!

This calculation ignores P&As. ↩
I generally define a hunt skillset using the non-charisma DND stats (in rough order, hard logic, soft logic, gruntwork tolerance, convention knowledge, lore knowledge), so a CON check is a puzzle with a lot of gruntwork. Note: I do not play TTRPGs. ↩
It can be argued that OCTOGRAM is a search-like… thing, since it plays around with the same theme and variations approach. ↩
Pun 100% intended. ↩
Unfortunately for my sanity there are plural examples of puzzles that do not, and those puzzles instantly soured my opinion of their respective hunts. I took extra measures to ensure an instance of this didn’t show up in Mystery Hunt this year. ↩
Do not eat the birb. :< (Says me, who eats chicken basically every day.) ↩
Interestingly, Microsoft’s headquarters is just twenty miles out. ↩
Midnight is the worst time for a layover. The lounges were closed, and the train system in the airport shut down basically directly after it dropped me off. ↩
The puzzle also makes me really scared of people who know how to codegolf. ↩
Intentionally avoiding the word “meta”/”metameta”, mostly because they don’t really use the answers in a meaningful way besides as points in the web. It’s a Spaghetti that works on literally any set of answers. ↩
Notably, ln(1) = 0, though the exact value of 0 for this approximation is more like an ε > 0. Except in the one case where it was exactly zero. ↩
I let off some of this steam with Modern Architecture. While I still think about making something larger, I… also play a lot of board games with a lot of moving parts. ↩
Admittedly, two reasons. One is a disdain for alpha-gaming that affects my opinion of every cooperative game (and in fact I preferentially play solitaire games over co-op precisely to avoid this). The other is that I got sick of people in my general circle talking about it so much. (And before people say the obvious response: I have played it exactly once. It didn’t click.) ↩
I used Minecraft, though I had to open a modded version because my computer refused to launch vanilla. It turned out better in the end, because said mod let me label the sides of the cube. ↩
I’ve heard that they hosted a few prior hunts on a forum for Cosmere fans? IDK, haven’t seen it. ↩
Nazotoki, a Japanese term (lit. “riddle solving”) for a particular style of short, visual puzzle. ↩
Adal from the future here: 2024’s drew from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. ↩
This is an estimate, and no, I’m not hashing out this point again. ↩
There’s like one meta I’m annoyed by because it uses DALL-E, and one detective puzzle we skill issued on. ↩
+ε, ε>0 ↩
I’m sure you can guess why just from looking at it. ↩
Probably at least partially influenced by primacy bias. ↩
I have posted prior about my favorite (and wrote 1/4 of a puzzle about it), but in general I don’t have a particular preference to what I play at game nights. The best I have is a list of games I disprefer playing. ↩
Abstracts (chess, go, Hive) are one category I really don’t gel with, so this is an accomplishment on its own. ↩
Which I assume is a reference to Aladdin’s Iago. ↩