I solved Huntinality 3 with the Eggplant Parms at the start of December. Every time I write one of these posts and the time since the hunt ended stretches on and on, I become acutely aware that their relevance drops off kind of exponentially with each passing day. But I recently read a blogpost from someone whom I admire very much that’s made me decide that writing with the pure intent of utility is boring, so here this post is. So if you somehow still derive utility from these month-plus-late posts, you have them to thank.
Okay, with the digression over, restarting: last month (this sounds better than “last year”), I solved Huntinality 3 with the Eggplant Parms, or at least most of them—unfortunately, lovemathboy was out for a programming competition for the weekend, Mistrals was busy with finals, and moo had forgotten which weekend the hunt was on and double-booked himself into a trip. In a vague attempt to remedy this, we managed to convince Amaranth (who long-time readers might remember from my GPH 2022 post!) to join us on our exciting misadventure. Did you notice I incorrectly used “who” instead of “whom” in that last sentence?
Anyway, Huntinality seems to have gotten on board with the trend of kicking off in the evening for the US east coast, which means at some early morning hour for me. This is an excellent turn of events, since surely the hunt is straightforward enough that we will be able to finish it in a day and then I will have my whole Sunday free. Right? Even without lovemathboy? Surely?
So, I wake up at hunt start and hop into the voice channel to find that exactly one other person is available, and my optimism for a quick hunt slowly begins to wane—Eggplant Parms’ two main comparative advantages are burning through easier puzzles quickly and saying an insane amount of stupid shit in the voice channel (mostly me), neither of which is particularly feasible on a low team size. But it’s fine, I shift gears away from speedrun mode into art appreciation mode and we’re off to the races gallery. Soon afterwards, rf and later DF and talkingtree pop into the call and we are pinging along chirpily, and Amaranth joined a few puzzles into Round 2.
As far as I could tell, we were doing pretty okay early in the hunt and into the start of Round 2, but I think lovemathboy’s absence began to be felt pretty strongly as the puzzles became harder and we had trouble scaling to the difficulty, and also as the Americans began to pop off to bed and we felt the lack of personpower more acutely. (Also, there was no one who wanted to go stare at the cool but intimidating forest puzzle.) Unfortunately, the desire for the thrill of speed is baked deep into my bones, so in combination with my skill issue at figuring out extractions it was inevitable that I would get tilted at some point or another. We eventually wrapped up the hunt on Sunday afternoon on a high note, though, and despite the hiccups on our solve-executive end I don’t think there’s any doubt in my mind that this was a great hunt.
Puzzles
Into the Woods: Whenever I get stuck in a puzzle, I get kind of information-theoretic about the puzzle and the following paths (not actual information theory, but it’s the easiest way to summarize what I mean). Like, surely this can’t be right because this would cause this information to go unused or be suspiciously underconstrained, or this structure implies something about the underlying dataset, etc etc. Naturally, the same thing happened here: surely the blanks are not filled with phrases directly from the song, as that would barely use the answers, be theoretically enumeration-matchable from zero feeders, and not use the order given by the lyrics at all. There’s no way that’s the correct path forward. For zero points, guess what the correct path forward was.
Weaving: As soon as I saw cryptics there was no pulling me away from this one. Cryptics in hunts are a treat, cryptics with gimmicked clues are a delicacy, and cryptics with gimmicked clues where the directions are something other than just Across and Down are ambrosia. I was cruising through this puzzle until the last few weaved clues, which turned out surprisingly hard to identify despite how few options there were. Nice meaty puzzle to kick off Round 2.
⚫: We were one of the teams which got the solved state of the board (and reported it like good responsible hunters complete with screenshots!!) (…although now that I think about it we were pretty late getting there so they had probably heard about it by then), but even then we managed to get stuck by somehow never performing the action of importing the solved grid. I think this is an accurate representation of how bad the team is at logic puzzles without lovemathboy around.
🔄: As is protocol, we sat on this one until we were able to hint it, at which point I was advised to try to break in on the Masyu portion. In what is becoming a worrying trend in recent hunts, I actually managed to solve the it (despite it being a logic puzzle!!), by which I mean I got far enough to unleash Noq to brute force the remaining possibilities. On one hand, I’m a little sad that we collectively forgot that the loudspeaker emoji existed and hence broke our vow of silence, but on the other hand I’m just glad that it was accepted because I think if we had gotten a rejection on that submission we would have just collectively gone insane and tried progressively worse puns for the next hour.
Missing Members: I completely misunderstood this puzzle at first and somehow didn’t notice that all the trails were, in fact, trails, which led to me very confidently asserting that there was no point finding trails. Shortly after, I finally understood what my teammates had been pointing out, and the puzzle went pretty smoothly after that. I was surprised at how interesting the actual execution of the solve ended up being even after all the ahas were gotten; it was kind of nice combining the different sets to nail down the letter permutation used.
Long Cube: I enjoy nice crosswords on nonstandard grids, so this was nice. (It was also very satisfying seeing a nice long list of 4-letter entries get filled out.) lovemathboy, who had testsolved this puzzle, later mentioned that he had expected the team to unlock it and immediately close out of it due to its dimensionality, but I think he underestimated just how much I like crosswords and just how tired we were getting of the puzzles we were stuck on.
Creatures: I opened this puzzle and I was like “hey this is just Azelf!” but no one on my team really cared. On the bright side, at least this meant that for once we knew how to solve the meta without first suffering through 2 hours of rabbit holes.
Fruit Math: This was a nice construction, but sadly we did not get to experience it in its entirety because as soon as we encountered the first set of brackets someone said “wait, is this a Suika game puzzle?” and then we were off to the races. By the races I mean the kinda slow ones that they have in local schools to make the kids feel better about themselves. But hey! We felt better about ourselves, so it worked.
How Many Reps?: When we unlocked this I was like “oh cool, a meta-matching puzzle, we are usually pretty good at this genre so this should be pretty straightforward”, and then a couple of hours in I realized that all the meta-matching puzzles I had previously done were just easy puzzles and it had nothing to do with my or the team’s skill at meta-matching puzzles. I mean, I should have known, given how bad we are with metas in general. The other funny part of this puzzle was that, due to the time at which we unlocked it, the only people on our team who worked on this puzzle were all non-Americans. I was very proud to get the pun and figure out the meta despite this.
Bird Conundrum: We unlocked this at like half past 3 in the morning for me, so I went to sleep and obviously missed the entire solve, but I really really like this puzzle. I don’t really know why. I didn’t even postsolve it or anything—the idea of it just scratches my brain in exactly the right way. I’m a big fan of puzzles that approach classic genres (or, at least, the appearance of a classic genre) by twisting them in a way that the solve path is completely different and the insights involved are very orthogonal to those involved in the original genre.
The Transmutation Station: I feel like I’ve seen this exact flavor of meta many times—answers, semantic transformations, numbered blanks—so at first I was expecting a pleasant but pretty standard affair. I think what really made this meta stand out was the second step and the really impressive double-transformations, though; the WRONG/RIGHT/LEFT, AIM/AOL/AMERICA, and KILO/NOVEMBER/FEBRUARY transformations were particularly inspired. I also kind of liked the fact that this was locked behind the other two metas (as far as I could tell?), meaning that it was the last meta we experienced and we got to end the hunt on this high note. I think the two months spent writing this meta really showed.
Parting thoughts
I’m sorry to the Huntinality team for delaying this post until its release has ended up being basically right after Mystery Hunt, which is perhaps the worst possible time to post something about any other hunt; my December ended up being too busy for me to really feel like sitting down and putting this post together. It was objectively a well-written and well-edited hunt with many puzzles I loved and which will certainly remain in my memory for years to come—Missing Members, Bird Conundrum, and The Transmutation Station are the first to come to mind—but the circumstances our team hunted under kind of took away from my personal enjoyment of the hunt, which is really no one’s fault. (I guess in that sense the unfortunate timing of this post is somewhat fitting.)
A personal thought: I guess there’s something to be said about the subjectivity of the hunt experience, then. The fact that it’s so impossible to predict how a solver will experience a hunt, even given a track record and historical data, feels like it should signal the futility of writing for the sake of others. I suppose it’s also a reminder to do things for themselves more, rather than depending on an external metric for validation, or, well, with the pure intent of utility. Wow, this post really is a microcosm of my hunt experience.
help how do i puzzle 