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Hello all! It’s been a while. For those of you who don’t know us, we are the 17th Shard Puzzlehunt Team, the unofficial puzzlers of the 17th Shard community. We compete in many different puzzle events and even ran our own event this year, Shardhunt. While we haven’t updated the thread very much recently (it’s been a bit crazy!) we wanted to let you all know that we are again looking for more teammates to join us for the biggest puzzle event of the year: the MIT Mystery Hunt, on January 14th 2022 running through the weekend. Everyone and anyone is welcome, regardless of level of puzzle-experience! A quick rundown if you haven’t heard of hunts before: puzzlehunts are collections of various puzzles that teams complete over the course of a few days. In a typical puzzle, you receive some information and have to extract an answer out of it, which is almost always an English word or phrase. Puzzles can come in many different forms; the only real commonality is that you usually receive no direct instructions, so it’s up to you to figure out how to make sense of the information you’re given. If you’re interested in logic puzzles, crosswords, puzzle games, esoteric trivia, ARGs, or anything like that, I highly recommend it! There is also a wonderful social element in solving puzzles with other people. Last year we had about 40 members on the team and solved over 100 puzzles; this year, we’re shaping up to get even further into the Hunt. We’d love for more people who are curious about the puzzle world to join us and experience these wonderful events. We’ll be running practice puzzle events and other fun things in the run-up to get acquainted with all of the new folk who will be joining us, so don’t worry if you have no experience in hunts! You can also look at our old thread that has some more information here. Let us know in the thread if you’re keen, want to show off your mad skills, or are curious and want to learn more!

For most of this last week of October, myself, @MetaTerminal, @Exalted Dungeon Master, and @Snipexe participated in the teammate puzzlehunt, an online competition of the nerdiest proportions. If you’ve never heard of puzzlehunts before, here’s a very brief summary: In a typical puzzle, you receive some information and have to extract an answer out of it, which is almost always an English word or phrase. Puzzles can come in many different forms; the only real commonality is that you usually receive no direct instructions, so it’s up to you to figure out how to make sense of the information you’re given. To name a few, information can be hidden in crosswords, images, videos, or logics. Think of it as an online scavenger hunt. The theme of the recent teammate hunt featured Matt and Emma, personas created by the organizing team, who are celebrating their sixth birthdays. As we progressed through the 38 puzzles, we explored the magical land Matt and Emma were transported to on their birthday. Despite the difficulty level of the hunt we are happy to say we placed on the leaderboard with 5 hours to spare and that it was an overall blast My personal favorite puzzles were: Functional Analysis -- (Solution) 20/20 Vision -- (Solution) Badge Collection Metameta -- (Solution) Do check them out along with the solutions! So what's the gist of this thread? We are now looking for more teammates to join our team for the next hunt on Nov 14 hosted by Puzzlehunt CMU and beyond in mid-Jan! Can never have too many teammates. Plus our mascot is a Nightblood wielding M-Bot. Do I need experience? Nope! Believe it or not, any topic can come up in a puzzle from university level physics/math to Pokemon evolutions. So whatever your knowledge base (or google-fu prowess) we would love to have you join us. So... what do you do again? For puzzle solving our team has collectively learned ciphers, played pictionary, programmed stuff, and confused our poor browser histories with all kinds of searches from Norse mythology to My Little Pony to chemical reaction synthesis. In the most recent hunt we even had to make a storming 4D hypercube. For the record, here is mine. Talk about a learning experience... That looks insane... Are all hunts insane like that? It honestly depends on the hunt, but usually hunt organizers go out of their way to make the hunt approachable for both new and experienced teams. Plus you'll be working with teammates and it's a lot of fun I recommend looking at Puzzle Potluck, DP Puzzlehunt, and Colby's Curious Cookoff if you have never seen this style of puzzling before. Our captain MetaTerminal has also written Sanderson themed puzzlehunts in times long past so check them out! There are rumours that a 17th Shard puzzlehunt will one day (soon) come back... ----- So, that's all I have. If you are interested in showing off your spreadsheet magic, some niche topic of expertise, or mad sudoku skills reply to the thread. We will also try to keep this thread updated with our future puzzle hunt adventures. (I also have no idea where to put this post. It can arguably go in STEM or Forum Games so as a compromise I put it in General)

(I have no idea if this is in the right forum, but Kelek’s breath if I couldn’t find a better one. Not Sanderson-themed, but definitely applies to the Shard itself... Apologies to the mod who will inevitably have to move this post.) There was an international competition, called the Galactic Puzzle Hunt, that ran at about mid-March. We represented the Shard in it! Out of the 717 teams that competed, and the nearly three thousand participants, our team of nine Sharders came in the top 100! Ninety-third, to be exact. You can see the leaderboard here. For those who know the Sanderson Puzzle Hunts, this will be a familiar conceit - there are 42 puzzles released to all teams to solve which have an English word or phrase as an answer. You solve them as quickly as possible over the ten day period. The first team to solve all the puzzles wins. (Though the teams that finish are very much in the minority. Finishing at all, in fact, is a tremendous achievement - the teams marked with aeroplane emojis on the leaderboard were the ones who finished. We got about two-thirds of the way through, and probably wouldn’t be able to get any further even with extra time.) The puzzles weren’t standard formats - they ranged from logic puzzles with a twist, to multiple video games, to those match math puzzles (but instead of basic arithmetic, there’s calculus and sigma notation). Anything and everything is fair game - puzzles about words inside other words, country flags, TV shows, movies... Sometimes standard internet puzzle territory, sometimes not. Often, you think a puzzle will be about one thing, but it’s actually about another. Difficulty ranges as well: early in the competition, puzzles are fairly straightforward. By the end, they are almost impenetrable. The initial plot of the Hunt was Antarctic Artifact. We were 'invited' to an archaeological dig - as the supposedly best archaeologists and enigmatologists in the business - and had to piece together the meaning of the remnants of an ancient stone tablet. We soon discovered that the stone tablet was, in fact, a part of a centuries-old alien 'cold war' (in Antarctica? see?) and that we were required to uncover more artifacts and decode the galactic language in order to work out why each of the alien races weren't getting along. The round consisted of two main parts: pre-Artifact assembly, where the puzzles were easier (the 'intro' round); and after we had pieced it together, where the puzzles became considerably more difficult. During the first two days, we had a quick pace, though we were quickly overtaken by many, much faster teams. (The first puzzle took us an hour to solve. The best team took only eleven minutes.) We hovered between 120th and 160th for the first few days, jumping ahead and falling behind as we battled with teams with more spread out time zones. Solving the first artifact caused puzzles to increase in difficulty amazingly quickly. As a result, our rate of solving (initially about four per day) dropped, first to about two per day, and then one as the competition went on. Thankfully, the other teams appeared to be having just as much trouble with the higher difficulties, allowing us to creep into the top 100 as we approached the final week. From there we hovered around the 100th position until the end of the competition. For a little while it looked like we were in danger of finishing outside the double-digit bracket, until a number of solves (brought home by some hard, late night work and utilization of hints) on the final day pushed us over the finish line. Our fantastic team was myself, @AonDii, @Snipexe, @Babilarian Darkeyes, @MistCLOAKed Mountains, @MiToRo94, @Exalted Dungeon Master, @RShara and @Devotary of Spontaneity. All of these people provided amazing work and activity, and we wouldn’t have gotten the place we did if even one of them did not take part. Special shoutouts to Exalted and MiToRo, who managed to solve puzzles singlehandedly (Line Plots and Twitch Plays GPH respectively). But I am glossing over so much skill and effort that went into this - as someone said, part of our strength is having a lot of different people with different skill sets. With even one person missing, it's doubtful that we would have done as well as we did. Puzzles we/I liked: Race for the Galaxy 50/50 Peaches (this might be Stockholm Syndrome talking) Puzzles that caused us/me the most anguish: Ministry of Word Searches Colors The Last Databender General stats: Placing: 93/717 Puzzles solved: 27/42 Fastest solve: 1hr2mins, Cross Lines Slowest solve: 169hr49mins, Cuspidation Number of Sanderson references made during solving: needs improvement Number of friends and family contacted to help with obscure topics: 2 Placing of the team named WIT: 50 (always a few steps ahead!) Number of times we got rickrolled: 2 (Apologies to anyone who is skilled at puzzles but got overlooked for the team - I tried to get everyone that I knew had ability, but I was conscious of team size limits (10 maximum) and it's entirely possible that I missed very talented people. Send me a ping and I'll be sure to keep you in the loop next time.) It is many months until the next large puzzle competition, so it's unlikely you shall hear from us again until near year's end. Yours cryptically, MetaTerminal, Team Captain

Do you enjoy solving puzzles? How about books by Brandon Sanderson? How about puzzles that are all based on books by Brandon Sanderson? If you enjoy escape rooms, reading books about people solving riddles and challenges (such as the 39 Clues), games that require you to think logically or outside the box, problem solving, or ARGs and similar puzzleshunts, then you'll love the Sanderson Puzzlehunt. We have designed a number of riddles and puzzles for teams to solve that require both puzzling skills and Sanderson knowledge. These teams will compete against each other to solve all the puzzles, climb the leaderboard and win the rounds. If you want to participate in this event, sign up below! In the spoiler I'll go into more detail about what we're planning. TL;DR If you like puzzles, crosswords, escape rooms, mysteries, fictional puzzlehunts, consider yourself a Sanderson Scholar, are good at either logical or lateral thinking, want to have some fun with a team of people, or are a human being, you should join the Sanderson Puzzlehunt! Mods for this event are @MetaTerminal. Huge shoutouts to @MacThorstenson, who was the original creator of the idea and helped design but was unable to mod due to timing issues. Links: