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Join the 17th Shard puzzlehunt team for the next hunt!


Moonrise

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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:

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...

20201101_154353.thumb.jpg.90a5986636cb00c071c02dba01f9a3e2.jpg
 

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... 

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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)

Edited by Moonrise
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23 hours ago, Moonrise said:

Believe it or not, any topic can come up in a puzzle from university level physics/math to Pokemon evolutions.

Sometimes they even come up in the same exact puzzle :P

I'll throw a couple of my favorites from Teammate Hunt into the mix, too:

As Moonrise mentioned, we're always looking for new players--so if any of this is interesting, feel free to join us!

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I specifically want to say that we need a Pokemon expert. There are many, many Pokemon puzzles, and very few of us who know anything about it :P so if you've ever played a Pokemon game, consider maybe joining? 

This was a great hunt. We used voicechat properly for the first time, which actually went really well, and made it far more amusing when we ended up recruiting family members for that dang Asteroids puzzle. Unfortunately I was busy when the team got around to building a tesseract, but I really enjoyed everything I experienced!

I want to give a shoutout to:

  • the Games (all brilliant fun, except for the Mahjong one)
  • Love Stories (man, this was a ride given none of us knew any of the source material)
  • Puzzle Not Found (ingenious, though you need to be logged in as a team to solve it properly)
  • SpaceCells (solved this one solo despite never having played a Zachtronics game in my life, and wow was that an experience)

Alchemystery! Walkthrough v0.01 and Powerful Metamorphers were also quick, fun solves.

These are always a ton of of fun and genuinely beginner-friendly in the first few rounds, so I highly recommend these to anyone who finds them interesting! 

For reference, here are some past writeups and threads: 

Edited by MetaTerminal
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17 minutes ago, MetaTerminal said:

I specifically want to say that we need a Pokemon expert. There are many, many Pokemon puzzles, and very few of us who know anything about it :P so if you've ever played a Pokemon game, consider maybe joining?

What sort of puzzles are the Pokemon ones? Like is it game mechanics? trivia from the shows? The tcg? Just pokemon in general? I assume game mechanics from what you said, but is it basic game mechanics or is it more technical stuff like EVs and IVs? Consider my interest piqued.

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8 hours ago, The Awakened Salad said:

How time-intensive would you say this will be? I’d love to participate (and I have a decent amount of random Pokemon trivia stored away in my brain), but I don’t have a lot of time on my hands right now. 

I would say it is as time intensive as you want it to be! I go into nearly every hunt saying "well, I probably won't have much time for this" and proceed to lose more sleep than I care to admit (but in a fun way!).

Hunts are anywhere between 1-10 days long, but as a small casual team we don't really plan to working around the clock. The upcoming one on Nov 14 is open for 32 hours (I doubt we need that long to finish). The one in Jan is over the course of MLK weekend. It is the yearly highlight of the puzzlehunt community and I am most definitely losing sleep for it. 

There are usually only a few hunts per year, although because of covid there have been more because folk got bored perhaps.

 

8 hours ago, Danex said:

What sort of puzzles are the Pokemon ones? Like is it game mechanics? trivia from the shows? The tcg? Just pokemon in general? I assume game mechanics from what you said, but is it basic game mechanics or is it more technical stuff like EVs and IVs? Consider my interest piqued.

Pokemon stuff is really well documented in Bulbapedia so literally anything on there is fair game and it's a popular dataset for puzzles. Most hunts usually have at least one Pokemon puzzle with the exception of Smogon Puzzle Hunt, which since it is written by folks from the Smogon pokemon forums has a decent bit more. 

I've seen puzzles with id's, Pokemon evolutions, their skill sets... There was one in Smogon that you had to recognize was based on pokerap (which is apparently a thing??). Needless to say we did not get it and backsolved it. I also know of one which was a mashup of Pokemon and physics, and one which was a mashup of Pokemon and monopoly of all things. 

---

So, still interested? :P Or have I discouraged either of you? Pokemon or not, I learn a lot of random trivia because of puzzles so that's always entertaining.

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If you want a comprehensive list of every Pokemon puzzle from the MIT Mystery Hunt, you can find one here: https://devjoe.appspot.com/huntindex/keyword/pokemon Particularly draw your attention to the Pokemon Round from 2018. But that's just for MITMH and leaves out ones I remember from Potluck, Teammate, Reddot, and probably others. (I didn't play Smogon but I imagine that they had plenty of different Pokemon themed puzzles as well!)

As Moon said, puzzles can be as intricate and obscure or as basic as you can imagine. I would bet good money on there being at least one Pokemon puzzle at MIT (though not necessarily! and potentially more than one). Any information you could find online is fair game.

15 hours ago, The Awakened Salad said:

How time-intensive would you say this will be? I’d love to participate (and I have a decent amount of random Pokemon trivia stored away in my brain), but I don’t have a lot of time on my hands right now. 

You can participate as little or as much as you'd like, really! The Mystery Hunt is in January, if your schedule is a little different then, but for something coming up soon I believe CMU is this weekend. From kickoff to closing (or when you finish) the team can submit answers that entire time, so some of us tend to devote a lot of attention :P but there's plenty of time to eat, sleep, and take some non-puzzle moments during the actual competition. Some people just drop in when they can and help with one puzzle and that's completely fine too.

7 hours ago, Moonrise said:

I learn a lot of random trivia because of puzzles so that's always entertaining.

Man, you have no idea. I now know way too much about Taylor Swift music videos

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You're probably not allowed to ask friends for help, but if you do ever have the chance to, I know the games decently well. I unfortunately don't have the time or mental energy to devote to this. I hope you guys all have fun though! 

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@The Awakened Salad not a problem, the next one is over MLK weekend in mid-Jan. If you would like, you can join our discord server to get the latest news on which hunts we are doing. I promise the chat is otherwise pretty quiet, but let me know and I'll send you an invite. Same offer to @HoidWasTaken of course. 

We'll probably post again on the forum closer to the date about it, but we could as likely forget.

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  • 3 weeks later...

(Ah, the infamous yet inevitable double post) It would be amiss if I do not ask if anyone would like to join for two upcoming puzzlehunts: a Pixar themed one and a not really sure what their name means one. The first is this weekend and runs from Dec 4-6 and the latter is open Dec 12-20. We might field a team for both so let us know if you are curious to see what this is all about;) 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I suppose now is a good time - late, rather than never - to do a little update! 

Since the last update, we've done three puzzlehunts. The last one is still running for some teams, so I won't discuss it at all here, but the first two were amazingly fun!

CMU Puzzlehunt

This was the first time we experimented with voice chat, and it worked pretty well. We had a quick solve rate of about 30 minutes, but finished at about 97th owing to a few different reasons. The metas also had an interesting structure: winners were ranked by solve time of the third meta (a puzzle that requires the answers of other puzzles; think of it as the 'capstone' of a round), so technically the first two metas weren't required to finish; except, the answers to the first two metas were inputs into the third and final meta in addition to all of the round three puzzles. We ended up going back to solve the second round meta just so we had enough inputs for the final one.

Favorite puzzles that I worked on:

And a puzzle that some here might be interested in:

One backsolve (kinda, it used forward and backward constraints), Honest Poker.

DaroCaro's Pixar Puzzle Hunt

I feel like this is the one where we really hit our stride with voice chat: we finished all the puzzles in a single sitting! we placed 17th (our best placing and thematic)! The puzzles were mostly pretty small, and pretty fun! We got a really clean cryptic solve, and got our first solve in 17 minutes. That owes a lot to the relative simplicity of the puzzles, yes, but it was also a really cool experience, and there were some very enthusiastic (though tired, it was 4AM Eastern by that point) when we finished and finally placed.

Favorite puzzles I worked on:

One backsolve, Highway Petrol. We solved it most of the way forwards, but we got stuck on the final step. (Also a pretty cool puzzle, too, would have been nice to fully forward-solve.)

And finally:

CRUMS Puzzle Hunt

This one is still going, so I won't discuss it here, except to say: 30th place. Which, I believe, is our second-highest placing ever. And some really, really cool puzzles I'll probably want to talk about later.

Some Admin Stuff

If you're curious about puzzle-hunting and want to see what it's like, we're doing a MIT Mystery Hunt practice round this Saturday at 6:15pm EST, using a past round that we've heard good things about. There are also hunts running from the 27th to the 31st of December, the 2nd to the 9th of January, and a really big one (the Mystery Hunt) from the 15th to the 18th of January. Drop us a line if you're interested in any of the above!

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