I’ve had a very, very long month thus far. The good kind of long, the kind you can only get from a state of prolonged bliss, for my last two-or-three weeks have been spent in the vicinity of people whose company I wholeheartedly enjoy.

This hunt was excellent, a truly one-of-a-kind experience that I am raring to postsolve at my own leisure. It was also an extremely wild ride, culminating in Literally Animal Farm’s first official finish, and full of memories that I wish to commit to writing, but just as readily wish to forget, to be able to experience it anew.

The obvious spoiler disclaimer follows, for I think the puzzles are best gone into blind; I for one am planning to postsolve functionally everything that I missed.

Jeudi: La mer est infinie

Unlike in past years, I spent the lead-up to hunt away from Boston, and thus not doing my typical thing of greeting people on the way in; I was in the DC area instead, having perched at Riley’s¹ just after New Year’s to hang out and enjoy a few days of MAGFest with friends. That was a good time.

Unfortunately I failed to coordinate with them for the most part and wound up taking a NE Regional back north over the Acela, which meant an hour longer on the train and marginally less socialization time. The upshot to this is that I could follow my own tendencies for transport and saved myself the agony of having a near-miss with the train schedule; several times this weekend I have seen people missing trains by minutes, and from what I hear my erstwhile housemates only barely made theirs.²

Thus I spent eight hours quietly hacking away at Rorschach’s River and some personal projects, after first meeting a few furries on their way to ANE³ who guessed I was going to Hunt off my vague description of “not going to ANE” and who coincidentally knew a few members of Death & Mayhem. Once the train emptied out a bit at New York I saved a few seats for Juro and Ryker, but they had a lot of luggage that couldn’t fit, so the seats were instead occupied by a group that didn’t exactly understand the meaning of “quiet car”.

Of course, there were also other puzzlers on the train up, several of whom recognized the suit as we disembarked.

I chose not to reside in my typical dorm room this time, instead taking a room at an AirBnB with most of the teammates I knew personally. It’s rare that I get friends in town. Besides, it’s Thursday night, an optimal time for social activity, and every puzzle furry in town had been invited to that very AirBnB to hang out.

The night was spent over an excellent home-cooked Chinese dinner, several episodes of Taskmaster, and what I can only describe as good vibes.

The Chinese dinner in question

Tomorrow was going to be a great day.

10 AM, Friday. We exchanged the typical pleasantries outside the Flour on Mass Ave before heading in for brunch. Of course, being Mystery Hunt Friday, the place was packed, but the food came and went quickly enough that we still made it to HQ with half an hour to spare. Then it was kickoff time.

Once again, though, unexpected (somewhat expected) construction in Kresge meant kickoff was split three ways, and thus had to be presented as a video skit. As I settled into a seat near the top, a nearby puzzler asked me if I was associated with Cardinality.

And, yes, I was wearing my fursuit partly to attract these kinds of questions. It was also not the only time I would be called a cardinal that weekend, though most of these were my teammates taking potshots at my expense.

Pre-kickoff material had us expecting a cryptid-like theme with some shades of Men in Black. Which is… kind of exactly what we got, if you count Pokémon—er, “Puzzmon”—as cryptids.

To make a short story shorter: one of them hatched from the egg discussed in the pre-hunt material, it opened a portal that is threatening to cause interdimensional collapse or something, that portal also happens to lead to a world of legally distinct⁴ fascinating creatures, please don’t sue us Nintendo, something something puzzles solve everything.

After kickoff, I took a brief detour to pick up the goodie bag of hunt materials. A bunch of it was stuff stated to be irrelevant—mostly the sponsor merch and the obligatory first-aid kit—but also a pair of blacklights, which scared us slightly, and the name tags, which we quickly noticed were a puzzle and solved before distributing them.

Nametag

After that, though, it was just waiting a half-hour for the puzzles to release formally. Besides that, the only thing on the site was a “How to Hunt” video.

…wait, what do you mean there’s a video—

Vendredi: Je me suis embarqué

They made Projection Device 2.

Projection Device 2

Anyone who knows my puzzle preferences well enough knows that I will sing the praises of the Projection Device until my throat runs dry. So hearing that Cardinality made another one should have sent me straight over the Moon. And on top of all that they start it off in the bird zone! What’s not to like?

Well, for starters, I had very little incentive to use the thing. I did play around with it a bit early on, accidentally discovered a song well before it was meant to be taught, and unlocked a puzzle, but ultimately didn’t see a point to me playing around with it more than I needed to. Unlike the Projection Device, which had plenty of reasons to dive back in and even a few puzzles designed with its multiplayer functionality in mind, and to a lesser extent Conjuri’s Quest where even the act of inputting the answer necessitated further interaction with the game, any given region of the MonQuest could be treated as a one-and-done thing. The “puzzles”⁵ inherent to the game could all be done by one person within one session of play, and if I tried to be there for it I would simply be retreading old ground unnecessarily.

It really was just an unlock system with extra steps—mechanics for the sake of having mechanics—and ultimately didn’t feel like it added much to the hunt beyond, perhaps, a sense of immersion that doesn’t last. So after that initial honeymoon I left it to the remote contingent to unlock things; the only other time I hopped in on Friday was because I heard the word “sokoban” and couldn’t resist parallelizing the work for unlocking puzzles in the Brights.

The other noteworthy thing about the unlock mechanism is that Cardinality took the key-unlock mechanism from the last year’s hunt and made generating the necessary keys (now “Research Points”) contingent on completing tasks. Which is perhaps the best way I’ve seen of integrating the scavenger hunt into the experience. I still mostly failed to interact with the system, though I know it got several members of the team extremely enthusiastic about completing tasks.

And the first puzzle I pull myself to afterward is, of course, the one about birds. It takes one look at the puzzle for me to recognize it as being the third Wingspan puzzle in as many years.

That said, the birds still needed to be identified, so I begrudgingly put Merlin on my phone and had it listen to an endless well of birdsong. (I also couldn’t really use headphones for this, so I also subjected everyone around me to an endless well of birdsong. Sorry.)

Unlike with past years, though, I did not end up scoring the team’s first solve: Riley and a few teammates made quick work of a puzzle that turned out to be about Gen Z slang.

One of my teammates then came back from an excursion to HQ, bringing in tow a funny little toy and a map of campus. I never interacted with the toy⁶. I did, however, get pulled onto the map out of obligation, but fortunately I did not have to be the designated MITGuessr on the team this time: we had a remote alumnus who had already identified most of the sites by the time I got to it. I took over as soon as we realized we needed the back side of the physical map. Apologies in advance for perforating the map with a mechanical pencil—I couldn’t be bothered to check the backside in a non-destructive manner.

This got us enough to find our first “capstone” (distinct from “meta”, since these specified that they didn’t use any answers). So I started scrolling the Pokédex—er, sorry, “MonArch”—and giving the bird section a good long stare.

I don’t remember on which bird the idea hit me; the more likely explanation is that three of them (Zambia, PNG, Ecuador) found matches in my memory all at once. Either way, on the sheet they went. The extraction and solve followed a brief five minutes later.

We were barely an hour in, and there were already four rounds (of a theoretical nine?) open. Good omens. That said, I found myself with a dearth of things to do. I was briefly pulled in to help extract Mechanical Soft Diet, but in the meantime I was essentially just watching Ryker put on my and Riley’s fursuits for the Puzzmon Mascot task and waiting for an excuse to go to HQ and claim the reward from solving that capstone.

That, and we had actually run out of Research Points for the first and only time. So when we unlocked a task that involved walking to HQ I quickly volunteered to act as tour guide.

And so I led two people down the Infinite and into the Student Center. Looking at the form in retrospect, we probably didn’t even need to interact with Pokémon GO, but I decided it was a convenient way to contribute to multiple tasks at once.

Once I got to HQ I was given two things: a tiny orange envelope and a photo opportunity with the birds… well, bird singular. I didn’t know about the latter going in—I just thought it would be funny to pick the reward up as a bird—but whatever works.

Photo Op

I came back just as the team solved the second round’s capstone, which unlocked 26 �� … ��, �� .

��, �� ’� j�� -�� . �� ’� ��zz�� . �� zz��, �� zz�� m��m�� .

��m�� m�� m� �� M��j�� zz��, �� , �� m� ��zz�� . � ��m��a� �� a��, �� a� ��a� Ma�j�� a�� am, a�� a� �� 40 m��.

clicks button OK, enough of that bit for now.

Spoilers for ��, ???, ��

Fortunately, the board game puzzle was 90% images and 10% numbers by volume, meaning we could avoid the round mechanic for the time being. As we started identifying the games, we quickly cottoned on to the pattern of there being a ship, train, or plane on each game. But we knew nothing of what everything else in the puzzle was doing.

My eyes drifted to the title, hoping to find some clue, but only saw an enumeration and the suspicious ??? to guide me… and yet everything started making sense, all at once.

I practically yelled out “Game, Set, Match”. One of the people working on it next to me instantly understood the task. The other didn’t, meaning I had to spend a bit catching Riley up on the basics of SET, but once that happened he found a fitting description for the second category. We then spent a bit hemming and hawing over what the dice category could mean, eventually settling on an arbitrary split of “zero/one/many”.

This theory was slow to fall apart; while trying to find the necessary details we found that very few of the games had exactly one die (and in fact the only ones that did were the two we cited as our “example”). It took a lot more rulebook-diving (and disambiguating between the several games titled “Orient Express”) to correct this to a split I termed “zero dice, numbered dice, funny dice”. With that done we trudged through the rulebooks again while Riley set up a spreadsheet formula to make finding the sets marginally easier. The extract broke briefly because a few of the boards wound up non-unique, but we found a commonality⁷ between these and corrected the mistake.

We then extracted a phrase, concluded that we needed to know an eight-letter game about trains with numbered dice… and spent the next half hour diving through the train category on BoardGameGeek. Several times throughout this search I voiced a thought that the writers must have made this an extremely easy game to think of, and yet we kept drawing blanks throughout this process, all the way to the last page in the category.

The moment we realized the intended game I could only muster an utterly exasperated desk slam. Fortunately not in vain, because this puzzle got the letter O for the rest of the round.

During this time there was a random request for the room to get into a party-like atmosphere, which was a good excuse to take a break from things and put my head on for a bit.

I spent a spell jumping around the rest of the round to see what that letter had contributed, eventually deciding that I couldn’t push that round forward in a meaningful way for the time being. I briefly stared at Go Back to Square Fourteen and IDed some building numbers based off my own memory of campus, before postulating that I probably also needed knowledge of the exact fonts used in the text, knowledge that was notably lacking on my end.

I moved off once I found another puzzle that attracted my interest. We eventually found a font enthusiast, but would end up stuck on this puzzle for the better part of 24 hours, due mostly to a few mistakes I made in building ID; one was fixed quickly, but the misidentification on the fire hose quote stayed.⁸

Instead of fixing anything, though, I was too busy staring at a messed-up LaTeX document and debating math symbols. Whoops. (In my defense, the LaTeX document puzzle was too great a siren song for me to ignore.)

In that timespan we had found four of the five vowels and a decent collection of consonants, meaning we could start guessing at the titles of most of our unsolved puzzles.

I eventually landed on a black box puzzle we guessed was called “Recombination”. After playing around with it for a bit, I could pretty easily guess at what it was meant to be emulating, though Juro took a brief look at what I had and just as quickly decided we needed more letters for it.

Fortunately, I already knew that every puzzle that didn’t contribute had already been solved, so I could just focus on puzzles that were close. I spent a few hours on this task⁹; eventually I felt I had amassed a decent selection of letters and went back to it.

Not for long, though, because Juro promptly hauled me off to the Student Center for an event that supposedly benefitted from MIT knowledge because I happened to be the only on-site MIT person there at the time it was scheduled (2200). I acquiesced, reasoning that the puzzle would still be there when I got back¹⁰, and I can use the time in between to iron out the inconsistencies I’d been seeing up to that point.

I can confidently say that having to lip read two phrases (and then mouthing two such phrases back) was not a productive use of 30 minutes. I can also confidently say that I am bad at lip reading.

I sat back down at my desk. Riley was apparently baffled that the puzzle he was working on had been solved despite only extracting two of its five letters. I was more excited by the fact that it had returned the R to the remaining puzzles, which was six codons’ worth of information I could use on Recombination.¹¹ Surely I could finish the puzzle from here…

Get backsolved idiot

F-ck.

This confused me for a bit, since as far as I could tell there was no other work besides mine on the puzzle. Until people reported that there was backsolving going on in the round, and apparently the answers for this round had an extremely exploitable property that allowed it to be solved entirely with enumeration.

One very terse crash-out later, I decided I needed a break from the spreadsheets. And conveniently a physical puzzle had arrived: a box of all-black jigsaw pieces…

Spoilers for Starry Night

…that only revealed a hidden pattern if you used Chekhov’s blacklight on them.

I spent the next hour assembling the jigsaw, wound up displacing two of the people who were there first (whoops), and dirtied my claws with a lot of flaky black pigment. In the end, we had our Black Square, after which we turned the lights out on the entire room to get a good picture with our limited blacklight supply.

Black Square

Photo by Emerson, alias Rook.

The symbols, of course, we understood the moment we laid eyes on them. It took me a while to discern what was what, but it sufficed to solve the puzzle in an image editor from there.¹²

In the meantime, the rest of the room had cracked the next two capstones before slowly emptying out, until Riley and I were the only solvers still there. Riley was busy trying to code a Z3 solver for Turing Machine; I guessed that it was going to be a lot easier to do by hand, but I did one to check his work and was promptly proven right when a group of remote solvers came in with the answer ten minutes after.

Either way, it was time to pack up. I spent the walk back in indignation about getting sniped by a backsolve, and decided that if it happened a second time I was going to make it more than one person’s problem.¹⁰

Upon returning, I found Sniper and Juro still awake and hacking away at the recently-unlocked metas for the early rounds (two of which had been found while we were on the walk home). Obviously, we kind of knew something shaped like a meta-matching puzzle was coming—none of the capstones used this information, after all—but we still didn’t have complete information on the puzzles in this section, with two rounds yet to be unlocked.

Not that this was much of a deterrent—Juro had one of them within an hour. I had another down to a description of the maze-assembling mechanics and was simply wanting for answers to fill the grid with—answers that turned out not to be necessary, for I tabbed out briefly to look at something else and came back to a fully-assembled labyrinth that had for one reason or another failed to extract. So I finished the job and cranked out a list of theoretical backsolve answers.

By now, I was starting to run on fumes, so I traipsed off to bed. Before I fell asleep, I checked for puzzles stuck on extraction; seeing a recent ping on Point of Divergence and being somewhat intrigued by the title¹³, I checked the sheet and then formulated a guess for what the extraction could be based on the title.

I couldn’t follow through on it though, because I was on the cusp of falling asleep, so I simply threw that idea into a spreadsheet cell and then mentioned it in the chat. The puzzle was solved 15 minutes later.

Samedi: Diane, Séléné

Second verse, same as the first—up at 9, out the door at 10-ish. I saw that a few puzzles had been solved while I was out, but nothing too major.

Up until the fifth capstone gets solved just as I walk into HQ, meaning I got to experience the simultaneous wonder and horror that is opening up the Atlas of Mosaics.

Spoilers for the Atlas, and several puzzles within, as well as Filial Pie Tree and People on the Main Block

Imagine the first round of the 2025 Galactic Puzzle Hunt¹⁴, whose main gimmick was that the puzzles came in pieces that needed to be assigned and arranged (and was really the only round to take full advantage of the arrangement side). Now unimagine the Galactic Puzzle Hunt, because the relationship between the pieces and the puzzles is inverted—you’re fitting a bank of pieces into a frame, like a giant jigsaw. Now imagine the puzzles are over ten times that size by sheer cell count. Now unimagine that, because the puzzles here are actually clusters of minipuzzles carrying variations on the same theme. Now imagine these clusters exist on a hexagonal board a hundred cells to a side, unlocked in the vein of a Metroidvania. That is the Atlas of Mosaics, hands-down my favorite round of the hunt.

At first, I’m confused by the interface. All we see is a hexagonal crossword; why do we have to drag-and-drop all the letters when typing would suffice?

The crossword takes all of five minutes to resolve, and opens up into three more crosswords. All of which suddenly have rebus elements in their piece bank.

Oh. That’s why.

I carry myself northwest to the playing card section, where every cell involving one stands for a number or suit one way and groups with other cards to form a poker hand in the other. Others move to the color section—the same gimmick with pride flags—and still others are assembling concepts out of emoji.

The section I’m working on takes about an hour. And while the color section opens up into a deduction puzzle in the mold of Case of the Golden Idol, ours reveals a steeplechase through a bevy of trivia topics, and that was too great a siren song to ignore.

We tear through the Pokémon section; I move southwest with a group to help with years, others move northwest to the newly-revealed section about Beatles songs. We finish those; I swap northside to deal with a section on flags, another group tackles sports teams and celebrities.

Thus we come upon the real puzzle: a single cell in the center containing data that relies on our new arrangement. This was fairly trivial to resolve after throwing in the requisite knowledge about Trivial Pursuit colors.

With that done we had revealed such esoteric horrors as a hexagonal Befunge variant, an animated jigsaw consisting entirely of moving dots, and a transparent riff on the MIT Aquarium Hunt. (One of those things is not like the others…) I briefly turned to join Sniper on the esolang, but got pulled away from the Atlas for the time being.

I had apparently not yet been informed that the seventh capstone we had unlocked earlier in the morning was actually partly a historical linguistics exercise.

I say “partly” because there’s… basically no historical linguistics. The tree was just a framing device for a chain of indexing operations. The first stage goes into English words—sure, fine. You get words from this, if you can even call them that since you’re just making best guesses at past words in the case of Germanic and Slavic, and everything is Romanizations at best, a necessity for the puzzle to even allow for reindexing in the first place. And a few of the words aren’t even used in the context the clues suggest—Sanskrit has existing mathematical nomenclature entirely separate from the Western one!

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been pissed off by bad linguistics in a puzzle I’d have that many nickels too many. But that’s another post for another time.

So a few ideas, two diagrams for the people confused about what I had found, one answer, one slightly disappointed bird, and one minor assistance with a cryptic clue¹⁵ later, I went out the door for a breather… and also to solve People on the Main Block. Three steps in, I had “LEF”, immediately remembered that campus was symmetric, and proceeded to ignore the rest of the first half of that puzzle.

I reenter HQ to a pleasant surprise nestled in the south of the Atlas.

CONLANG ALERT

I’m a simple bird. I see an IOL problem, I do the IOL problem. Nothing special here, just two and a half hours of running through the levels (with a brief interruption for Jam Session), being pleasantly surprised at JFK’s inaugural speech showing up as something I needed to translate, and being unpleasantly surprised that one section was entirely devoted to anti-jokes about birds.¹⁶

Closer to the end, I do start to get tripped up by the cultural references, especially once I needed to respond to language text with more language text, and I also had some trouble with the final cluephrase. Fortunately, I have media-literate teammates.

By now, some of us had noticed that the Atlas was beginning to take on a very… “Hexagonal” shape. Knowing the geography of France was now relevant, and knowing that the person sitting across from me had become mired in a complicated board game mashup in Poitou, I hopped on the first TGV out of Toulouse¹⁷ to attempt to get to Finistère from the other direction.

Which meant wading through Normandy and its souped-up versions of Aquarium Hunt puzzles. Fortunately this proves not too difficult (though the extraction segment stumps us for a while after this), and the Firefly puzzle in Brittany was also reasonably simple to resolve.

This point is where I depart the land of the hexagons. But I am certain to revisit in the future, and if you haven’t seen it and read through anyways despite the spoiler warning I wholly recommend giving it a try… once it’s in a postsolvable state again, of course.

So how about a land of heptagons instead?¹⁸

Spoilers for Hyperbolic Space (and some puzzles within)

Hyperbolic Space was a round we had unlocked as HQ was closing at the end of the previous night, upon which we saw 4 puzzles with content… and 12 blanks.

One blank puzzle is business as usual—it typically indicates that whatever shenanigans were afoot were typically contained within the puzzle itself. But when blanks come in groups, it could only mean the round’s gimmick is backsolving.

After a brief stint extracting Had (a zebra puzzle riffing on the infamous lexically-ambiguous sentence), I was brought on to the meta. Riley had by now realized that the meta takes place on a heptagonal tiling of hyperbolic space, and had already put together a small portion of it.

Of course, five tiles was nowhere near enough to get anywhere for now, so we rushed down a sixth: Devilish Devilries, a printer’s devilry puzzle that turned out to be way funnier than it had any right to be. A lot of time was spent groaning at the phrases we did manage to connect to or whether the phrase “dick move” was sufficiently blue to actually merit inclusion in the puzzle. Needless to say there were a few failed Wheel-of-Fortune attempts from that.

We went back to our meta corner. A seventh puzzle soon joined our other six, and we could, perhaps, finally make some headway in determining the layout.

Then someone snipes a blank puzzle straight out of the aether.

Yes, not a backsolve—just a straight up guess. Well, okay then! Certainly not looking a gift horse in the mouth! Unfortunately it also invited a slew of wrong guesses from enterprising individuals looking for the same dopamine rush.

We kept focusing the meta. The layout had hit critical mass by now, meaning we were locking down a new heptagon every few minutes. This did also mean we were paving over some non-blank puzzles, too, so apologies are in order to however many cats were working on the Warrior Cats puzzle.¹⁹ (They were fifteen minutes away from the answer, so we wound up recording it as a forward solve in our tracker once they were done.)

Fifteen minutes to midnight. With the full layout, we could move on to the meta proper… a LaTeX diagram marked with cubes and tetrahedra.

3D shapes? On my 2D layout? While I knew that the vertices of a cube could be partitioned into two tetrahedra, and that the vertices of each tetrahedron would be able to form an answer to a clue with one additional letter, I couldn’t see how to find the necessary 3D shape on a 2D surface. Riley, not minding these implications, had begun drawing lines on his diagram, quickly noticing that the shapes actually had a period of 4 along any given straight line, and also outlining a shape containing one copy of each heptagon (which would prove very helpful for visualizing).

I finally hit upon something while trying to determine why the sixth row had colors attached to it. It was a property we had discovered (and subsequently failed to exploit) trying to assemble the shape: the red heptagons could be grouped into four mutually-adjacent “triangles” sharing one vertex. We soon found that the blue heptagons were similarly arranged.

The arrangement of vertices revealed by this looked rather curious. Each vertex of one color was actually equidistant from three of the other, and in fact I could find a consistent pattern in the path taken between each. Not to mention the period of 4 in any given direction. Almost like a cube…

And as soon as we found suitable answers for the clues, we knew we had hit on the right line of thinking. I traced out another two cubes based on the same pattern before the clock struck 1 AM. One of the tetrahedra I found happened to have the letters ADAL, which became the source of a lot of cheap laughs at my expense, especially once Juro figured out the associated clue on the walk back.

We rang in the meta solve after another half hour—our second of seven, having finished off the Land of No Name a few hours earlier and having discovered a new “Keepers” category that spoiled how many there would be.

And while I was almost ready to call it a night, I was informed of an IPA cryptic crossword in a newly-unlocked round. I turned to work on it, and even identified that a few clues assigned here instead operated on letter shapes, but a bit later I am distracted by the news that we had completed the last capstone, which finally gave us the overarching meta for the “main” round, and I decided that took priority.

Spoilers for Connect the Clans

And taking a look at the emblems we had collected across the round, now presented all on one page, I was suddenly struck by a thought.

I’d seen this exact set before.

Is this a f-cking Game of Thrones reference

Sketch by Riley.

Five years back at my first Mystery Hunt, another meta drew upon the coats of arms from A Song of Ice and Fire for its own ends. And despite almost never engaging with the source material, I remembered the seven used there, and I quickly remembered Greyjoy’s squid as one that hadn’t been used²⁰. I get to work and find a dragon to close out the set. The bizarre choice of meta answers starts to turn gears as well, giving me a partial ordering.

I look away from the spreadsheet for a few minutes; upon returning I find it populated with a shortlist of strongholds. The implication is clear. I pull up a map and drop pins and string across it. A clean solve spanning just over 40 minutes (after accidentally tripping over myself trying to construct the pun).

A new round enters the picture shortly after, but I’m too thoroughly spent for a hat trick and practically fall into bed.

Dimanche: Vaisseaux, nous vous aurons aimés

Unfortunately, the IPA cryptic was solved over downtime, which was a result I expected. I actually did not end up interacting with the rest of the casino.²¹

The morning greets us with a fresh snowfall. I start off by heading to the interaction we had unlocked by solving the aforementioned Kingdom meta; we had also finished the Artifacts overnight, but that was a separate interaction at our HQ. “Swatching the wall”, as it turns out, meant playing pictionary with physical pixel art.

Except the things we needed to Pictionary were scenes of two PuzzMon interacting with each other in particular ways. Ways that were kind of hard to clue as a static image, but there were plenty of allowances for getting around this.

Modern Art

After that, we got to construct a few panels to add to a large mural on the wall, though some of us (read: Juro) were less interested in the artistic content of the mural and more in counting how many panels were there before we came in. Then we got to ask 75 seconds’ worth of questions to the “master” of the realm. In between the obvious questions about how well we were doing (“it’s complicated”) and the obligatory “can we get a free answer” question (“I don’t know”), we also asked some… very important lore questions.

So now we know that it’s theoretically possible for a human to become a PuzzMon. Absolutely no reason why we asked that in particular. There are no furries on Literally Animal Farm.

We split up afterwards; Juro, Ryker, and I went to the Flour for brunch, the rest to HQ. While in line, we met someone from another team who (seeing me in fursuit) assumed I must have been a spoiler for a later part of the hunt.

Back at HQ, I took a look at the new round we had opened last night. I slept through the entire discovery phase, so I was left picking up pieces from what were apparently relatively simple puzzles and attempting to solve a yet-unsolved meta with them.

Thus it was that I started on Dichotomies. Unfortunately the sheet was extremely scant on documentation, so I wound up having to derive how the subpuzzles worked from first principles; fortunately, every subpuzzle worked the exact same way, and this gave me enough of an understanding to piece together the mechanics of the minimeta.

This left actually implementing the thing. Which took a bit, since I couldn’t find anyone else’s code, but I decided coding and debugging it myself was probably going to be faster than asking.

In the meantime, we had finally discovered the last round: a light at the end of the tunnel. It became clear at this point that we needed to push the Glitch round as quickly as possible to see everything and have the best chance of finishing.

Spoilers for Glitch

Thankfully, it appeared that the round had no grand experiments like the last five, just a classic denouement à la Cactus Canyon. I join in on a cryptic and could immediately see based off the numbering that its diagram was the Interstate System.

There’s just one problem: some of the numbers don’t quite match. I quickly see a pattern to those, though, and continue as if the issues weren’t there.

As it turns out, that was the round’s grand experiment: some data in every puzzle was damaged in a somewhat-obvious way. We could just fix it and treat it like any other puzzle. So really it was still business as usual, just with a few bits that were in all likelihood meta-relevant.

Of course, cryptics will be cryptics, so we still ended up having some trouble with a few rather key clues²². More importantly, we didn’t have an extract from the grid… until we found a way to make a clue work, which solved both problems at once.

We spend a few hours targeting the point of least resistance on Glitch, since the other puzzles in the round turned out to be quagmires that had been eating up a considerable amount of manpower. First up was a puzzle that was very transparently about DNA, and then after the obvious BLAST search turned out to be more specifically about cat DNA. A simple concept that in practice took about an hour to execute because BLAST searches and counting were both slow and slightly error-prone.

During this solving fest, a couple members of ✈️✈️✈️ Galactic Trendsetters ✈️✈️✈️ (also good friends of ours) then swung by our room for a visit—they had just finished, and only knew that they weren’t in first (not that they were aiming for first). Sure enough, an announcement comes in: Providence had found the coin, HQ would be closing at 1900, and we had until 2000 to finish everything if we wanted a runaround.

Then we took on a crossword that all but declared itself to be a ciphered periodic table. With that immediate realization a lot of cursors jumped onto the puzzle to “help”, but it wound up devolving into a too many cooks situation as people fought over where precisely each letter was supposed to be placed. Yet it was also a situation that didn’t even need the full crossword as much as it needed someone with organic chemistry knowledge.

The unlock from that, though, was a puzzle I didn’t have altogether that much interest in. I still listened in, since Riley became engrossed in it after identifying what the puzzle was trying to do, but it got stuck in an endless spiral of ideation after filling in the crisscross.

By now the hunt strategy had become a game of aggressively and efficiently using our hint in a mad bid to find and finish our three remaining metas by the designated cutoff. We were decently close on the Casino meta already, and Glitch had gotten mired, so once the hint came back for the Trends minimeta I swapped over to the Terminus feeders, mostly as moral support. Psychology soon gets a hint of its own and finishes, finally granting us access to the Terminus meta.

Spoilers for Terminus

Unfortunately I hadn’t been onboarded to how Terminus worked, and any documentation we actually had in the sheet wasn’t exactly helpful for gleaning this information, so instead I had to onboard myself by whacking at the terminal.

The Terminus round is a classical two-layered round: a meta whose feeders were themselves minimetas. The tricky part comes in the unlocking system, which is a variation on a black box: you give an input, the round checks against a laundry list of conditions to determine which puzzle(s) it unlocks. And while initially I only tried words, I quickly discovered that numbers, emoji, color hex codes (required to be an alphanumeric mixture), slash-separated dates, and “sentences” (space-separated words) were also valid inputs, and in fact the round had specific rules to convert between them automatically.

The diagram in the puzzle, of course, caught my interest immediately—one arrow was colored in blue, the same color that always tinted the word “convert” in the round. Initially, I tried some of our answers, but saw nothing odd. On a whim, and remembering the one answer I actually contributed to in the round, I instead try June 6, 1944—the date of Operation Overlord, better known as D-Day.

The interface gave me question marks instead of its normal output—a clear indicator that this was on the right path. Inspired, I try more, getting a few before pivoting to finding the necessary conversion rules instead. Cue absolute incredulity when I (re?)discover the rule for converting Date to Integer is just division.

After a short indexing session into a long poem and a failure to remember that A was equal to 0 in this round, I now had six pieces of data… and no idea what to do with them. The hint was not being used at the time, so I threw one in.

There was some very excited chatter in the background—one of the big puzzles near the start of Glitch had fallen and unlocked a Quiz Bowl puzzle. This briefly interests me enough to discover it’s Before and After again²³, but I’m pulled back into Terminus once the hint returns, telling us to focus on the flavortext and a particular subset of our new data. Someone soon finds the new data is used to represent winners of the Grammy Award for Best Song; I’m slightly annoyed at the swerve but am too relieved to be done with the puzzle to air it.

Just one round left, but I don’t get to contribute to the Quiz Bowl puzzle for long before Juro wolfs it down. Which opens the meta. Someone soon notices a place to use our glitch documentation, and we get to work.

Spoilers for snalC eht tcennoC

What I was not expecting the meta to be was a clone of the Connect the Clans meta I solved the previous night. And as soon as I discover the results of the unglitching are the same length as the meta answers, I sigh and pull up the map on the other sheet to do the whole endeavor anew.

Spreadsheet chaos

Do not the bird.²⁴

Throughout the process I was somewhat confused that the answers hadn’t come into play yet. So when my work surfaced a partial I was equal parts relieved and scared. The people next to me, meanwhile, were all too happy to explain the details of how to encounter a MissingNo. in the Pokémon games and how they thought it matched up here.

So I dove back into the MonQuest in bird land, talked to the old man at the start, then walked over to the helicopter. Just as I send myself to Eland as suggested, though, I see an option that wasn’t there originally.

It takes me a bit to reroute myself to Cardinal Island. Someone relays this information to the discord. The obvious jokes follow.

We quickly find MissingNo and transcribe the information therein. I write down “TRIBUNE” without noticing that one of our answers was close to it. The puzzle is then torn apart in a torrent of ahas and cursors.

We had finished.

Everyone was milling about in celebration and mirth; some of us were fervently hoping that a runaround would happen that night, given the finishing time was just a quarter past the cutoff. I was just too tired and lightheaded by that point to process anything.

The call soon comes, and Juro reports that the runaround was scheduled for 2300. Riley, wanting to move his stuff back to the AirBnB and also needing some time away from the room, asks me to tag along. We spend some time recharging, reflecting on the hunt and our experiences.

I check my phone. Runaround had actually been moved forward by an hour, so our downtime was being cut slightly short.

We returned right on time for the runaround, which was more like an excursion to the Borderline just past Landau. They make a point about avoiding the outdoors due to the snowfall, so I take point on navigation… only to run headlong into a dead end in the far corner of Landau after avoiding taking every stairway along the way, forcing everyone out into the cold for a bit. Whoops.

We spent close to an hour down there doing a bunch of individual minipuzzles, particularly having trouble with interpreting the bees and the color identification. For my part, I picked up a simpler puzzle and then just directed people to their relevant artwork.

We were then sent to ✈️✈️✈️ Galactic Trendsetters’ ✈️✈️✈️ old room for the second part: a wacky mashup of every other prior mechanic. I sat by Juro and completed a small Rows Garden with him, then positioned myself by the computer to unredact a list of clues as the letters came in from the gachapon. The table next to me was littered with shapes, as we meticulously assembled another hyperbolic tiling before laying more words on top.

The room was alive with a spirit I hadn’t seen for many years, if at all.

The clock struck midnight just as we finished up and left the room, heralding the start of one last day.

Wrap-up and the interactions that ensued were a much more subdued affair. A quick breakfast, a brief hangout with MIT Puzzle Club past and present, a somewhat expensive lunch with the team and some friends.

A rush of frantic packing, and a flurry of farewells.

Leaving just me, to follow in another two weeks.

I’ve had a very, very long month thus far. The bad kind of long, the kind born only out of existential dread, out of gazing into a nebulous future wondering what comes after what has up to that point been your entire world.

This hunt was an excellent experience, a strong contender for my all-time favorite. It is also my last hunt as a student (of some definition) at MIT, and probably my last as a Boston local. The thought of leaving my entire social net behind has weighed my head down for the last two months. And making plans for the future has never been my forte²⁵. It’s a thought that has been suppressed by the last weekend, but never fully—and with the weekend having sailed past it leaves in its wake a gaping void. A bitter aftertaste to the sweetest of events.

All too many words to convey a feeling that would be better expressed as a very emphatic swear word.

But I do believe there will be better times to come. I just hope they come sooner rather than later.

Après la pluie, le beau temps.

I will regularly refer to a small collection of teammates by the names of their sonas. “Riley” is a new name, but only because I used “Grackle” for him in the last Mystery Hunt post. ↩
I am extremely paranoid about missing trains/planes, and would typically rather spend an extra hour idling in the station than risk traffic or the delays endemic to Boston public transit. ↩
Unfortunately, the local furry convention moved to the weekend of Mystery Hunt last year. Disappointment immeasurable, year ruined etc., but I got it out of my system ages ago. ↩
I was very tempted to title this post “Legally Distinct” if I couldn’t find a fitting work. But, well, a fitting work was found. ↩
None of which were puzzles that contributed to a meta or capstone—they were all either unlock mechanisms or research tasks, with one very notable exception that will show up later. ↩
Having played around with it later: very fun. ↩
Unrelatedly, I now rank images of the game on BGG as more trustworthy than non-official-source rulebooks. Thanks, Kaivai. ↩
It didn’t help that the exact same quote appeared at Stata, just with different surrounding context, and was also the more memorable one due to being directly next to an actual fire hose. ↩
For the shortlist: Imaginary Factorizations had already extracted a second instruction that I interpreted but wound up being too lazy to implement, Numbered Clues I did some clue-solving work for after the idea was found, Calls of the Wild ticked me off about its treatment of foreign languages but whatever I guess²⁶, and Unlike Like I did end up scoring extraction for. ↩
So foreshadowing is a literary device in which— ↩ ↩²
The three amino acids that contribute the most information to this puzzle are Arginine (R), Serine (S), and Leucine (L), being six codons each. ↩
Virgo, however, I decided was Cancer instead, since the silhouette of a girl’s head looked to me significantly closer to a horseshoe crab. ↩
I only knew the term from its use in discussions on alternate history and wondered how that could possibly be incorporated into a puzzle. Some slight relief followed when the puzzle turned out to be about lyrical unison. ↩
Smaller hunt post coming soon™. ↩
Solvers on The Puzzle That Cannot Be Named wanted my take on a clue involving some language knowledge. TIL Michif. ↩
do not the bird. ↩
I guess there’s no LGV out of Toulouse until 2032, but Montpellier doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well. ↩
Do not make the joke. I’ve heard it enough. ↩
The foreshadowing was about me. Whoops. ↩
Why did Greyjoy spring first into my mind? I forget the precise details, but I recall playing the GoT board game as Greyjoy many, many years back. ↩
If I had to ascribe it to anything, my reasons land somewhere between “I hate gacha games with a burning passion” and “I have PTSD from (A)isle of Crosswords”. ↩
Annoyingly, Maine has exactly one bordering state, which leaves it unchecked in this grid. ↩
Oxford Fiesta flashbacks. ↩
The aluminum oxide bit is probably tied in some way to the Psychology minimeta that took a bit to solve, but I wasn’t looking too closely at it. ↩
Especially not with the current economy or climate. ↩
Someday I will write a puzzle that uses a perfectly correct indexing scheme but everyone will get mad at me about it because the bloody Anglos think every language ought to index like English and Romanizations are the One Correct Way to write everything. ↩