I solved Mystery Hunt this year with ⛎ UNICODE EQUIVALENCE. Wow, can you believe it’s almost March? (Editor’s note: I spent so long trying to come up with a name for this post that it’s already March in some timezones. Oops. (EDIT: omg I’ve been betrayed by my own site, the url is /03/01 mannnnn)) I would say that I was waiting for the hunt site to come back up, except for the fact that that would be a complete lie. It is convenient that it’s back now, though.
UE, or at least its Mystery Hunt team, grew slightly this year, adding a few new members who I was glad to see and excited to solve alongside. I suppose if the team is trying to work towards at some point winning and writing Hunt, more members are pretty much necessary; still, it feels like at some point the team will lose its small-team feeling, which is something I’ve really enjoyed about it. I’m a little at odds about how to feel about this: I want to solve with a small but powerful group of friends. I want to win Hunt. I want to write Hunt, even. But I strongly doubt that these three wishes can coexist, at least not with the current scale and state UE’s at.
Anyway, to the hunt itself: this year being my first time doing Mystery Hunt while having a job, I very cleverly took the Monday after Hunt weekend off to be able to recover after probably depriving myself of sufficient rest over the weekend. Surely that’ll be enough time to recover, right? 🙂
…yeah, about that. I guess the thing about the hunt that ended up being most notable in the public discourse about it is that it ended up pretty long, which is a bit of an unfortunate thing for people to remember your hunt by. I wasn’t bothered so much by this, mostly because I had Monday off anyway and also had the good fortune of being on a team strong enough to complete the hunt regardless, but it’s certainly preferable for me to be done with the hunt by Monday so I can spend that day recovering instead of continuing to solve—I’ve noticed that by Monday my solve effectiveness tends to be pretty low, anyway, which is probably a natural result of busting your brains for 2 days straight.
One thing I noticed, rather than the strict length of the hunt itself, was that the hunt theme ended up feeling much more homogenous than usual. I kinda sorta get the appeal of a road trip around America for theming, but travelling to 13 places with approximately equal “footing” in the round hierarchy didn’t feel like much movement compared to last year’s rounds. I guess this was amplified in my non-American perspective, because now the theme is just a bunch of places I may or may not have heard of and probably know nothing about.
That said, I definitely appreciated how TTBNL eased into the free answer phase pretty nicely this year: free answers that are forcibly consumed (or lost) after meta solves are a pretty good way to ensure a slow and continuous injection of free answers to speed up Hunt while not having solvers feel like they should use them to blow up entire rounds at once. It felt like the free answers started showing up reasonably early, too, which was probably good for spreading out the process. It also had the side effect that we ended up with far fewer puzzles in the state of having had a few person-hours sunk into them but being too much for anyone to want to go back and dig through them!
“Friday”
As always, this year’s Mystery Hunt starts with kickoff at 1am my Saturday morning, which is kind of Friday in spirit, so good enough. Usually I’d stay up and solve with the team until the intro round is done, but after another year of aging I decided that the smart move was actually to watch kickoff and then immediately go to sleep after that, taking advantage of the inevitable downtime between kickoff and puzzle release to reduce the amount of hunting time I lost out on on Friday night. This ended up working a bit better than anticipated due to the extra downtime, which is definitely unfortunate for everyone waiting for puzzles but a plus point for my strategy. But hey, at least someone benefited from it!
The natural flaw in this plan is that kickoff might get me too excited about hunt to actually get any sleep. I didn’t want to miss kickoff, because I definitely didn’t want to wake up on Saturday morning with absolutely no bearing of what was going on in the hunt theme-wise, so instead I managed to convince my brain to be pretty blasé about the whole event, which actually worked out pretty well—it’s probably some combination of being tired from work (unlike previous years) and my commitment to not elevate my heart rate, but I ended up having a pretty peaceful night of sleep; I slept all the way until my alarm woke me at around 8:30am the next morning. Actually, it worked too well, because it turns out it’s harder to get amped up about Hunt while it’s progressing, so I ended up not being as into things as usual. One year I’ll solve this problem.
Anyway, yeah, kickoff! The segue into mythology was very welcomed, because while the galaxy is cool and all I’m not the biggest sci-fi fan (unless it comes with a projection device), and mythology is infinitely cooler to me. I almost expected a link to Hades the game and briefly got my hopes up for a roguelike Hunt, but then I remembered I was supposed to be unexcited or I wouldn’t get to sleep. So I watched the rest of the kickoff like 😐, and the Hunt turned out not to be a roguelike. (It also turned out not to really feature the mythology particularly strongly, but I’ve already filled my complaint quota on that front.) Maybe I demanifested it. My bad!
Saturday
I swear hopping into puzzles after waking up is actually the hardest part of Hunt. There’s like a million open puzzles, most with partial work, and you kind of have to guess which one you’d like to work on. Usually it takes me a bit of bouncing around before I actually get into the groove. That’s why this year, I was fortunate enough to wake up just before my team unlocked the first of the road trip rounds! I awoke to very few open puzzles and news that we’re on a runaround after completing the early set of rounds, and I was like, oh goody, perfect timing!
Then it turned out that we had rejected the offer to unlock the new puzzles while waiting for the runarounders to finish runarounding, so instead we were all kind of just sitting there. (Contrary to popular belief, Jackbox did not get pulled out, even at this juncture.) I was kind of put off by the wait killing our momentum, but hey, I didn’t spend a significant chunk of money to fly over and lodge and take part in Hunt, and if I had I’d probably be pretty miffed if my team started doing puzzles while I was stuck in a cutscene, so in the interest of keeping the peace I set an alarm for a while later and turned over and went back to sleep. (I know, so magnanimous of me.) This was the second of my amazing sleep-related decisions this Hunt, because we ended up taking a good while longer on the runaround anyway, and boy did I need the sleep.
Anyway, one minor timeskip later, we open up the first of our road trip rounds and get… roading? Get tripping. There has to be some kind of pun that works as a metaphor here, man. We get going and I commence the bounce-around until I successfully land on something that seems nice.
This Space Intentionally Left… Well, You Know: Oh no, the blank puzzles are becoming self-aware! Can’t wait until they eventually start referencing each other. I hopped onto this puzzle because blank puzzles are usually codesheet-heavy, which is something I know I can actually contribute on, and I wasn’t disappointed. I was really glad that the puzzle revolved around formatting instead of different weird space characters of different widths, because I’m kind of over having to perform tedious find-replace or coloring operations just to see anything in a puzzle. (Yes, the irony of a UE member complaining about weird characters is not lost on me.)
Turing Tar-pit: I do this thing where I pretend to like things that are kind of related to fun programming, so this puzzle seemed like a nice fit. Actually esolangs are pretty fun, so I didn’t have to pretend all that hard. I got a chance to show off my absolute programming genius in this puzzle, by which I mean I transcribed/copied out the Chef, Shakespeare, and Rockstar code and ran them through online compilers.
The 10,000 Commit Git Repository: Yet another puzzle in which I get to show off my absolute programming genius, by which I mean I wrote a little bit of code to parse the input and we figured out what to do, after which some onsiters did all the actual executional work of running the hashes and stuff. We ran into trouble pretty quickly, but it turned out that it was caused by mbingo’s machine not handling echo commands from scripts in the expected way, a great example of what we call a “mac L” (technical term). This was still less of a puzzle than actually figuring out how to use Git properly in real life.
Retro Chess Puzzle: While people were doing the actual hashing on the Git puzzle, I looked around at other sheets, noticed that this one was having trouble wof-ing an extraction, and popped in to tell them what the cluephrase was. It turned out that there was then a significant amount of nontrivial chess puzzling to do after that, which scared me away, but from the little gist of the puzzle that I got this seemed really cool.
Inaugural Funky Stickperson Contest: All the way back in 2021 I watched the rock climbing events at the Olympics with some friends, and despite knowing nothing about rock climbing it was really absorbing, so after Googling the puzzle’s initials and figuring out what was going on I was pretty keen to work on this puzzle. This was until I realized what had to be done in order to work on this puzzle, at which point the keenness turned to dread and I abandoned the puzzle to go work on something else. I came back later to almost all of the routes having been identified, proceeded to absolutely gouge UE’s accuracy by making like four incorrect wofs, and then saw later that someone had solved the puzzle by making the slightly more thematic wof that I had missed out on. Truly an all-timer showing from me on this one.
Hell: I missed this entire round while working on something else (I can’t even remember what I was looking at now). I heard a ton of great things about the round, especially Text Adventure, and I think actively participating in this round probably would have greatly improved my experience with this hunt, but oh well, I guess that’s no one’s fault (except maybe mine for not getting a bit more aggressively involved).
Medusa’s Lair: The trouble with being on UE is that people swarm metas so stupidly fast that usually the best I can do is wof answers. I said GORGON and people said things until someone said GORGON TRAIL. Average meta solving experience.
Proof It!: I found that someone had filled out this entire crossword and left it alone, seemingly stuck on extraction, after which I then proceeded to figure out extraction and solve the puzzle within like 10 minutes (with help from boboquack because I couldn’t think of a fifth mathy word—kind of a weird extraction, but oh well). Thank you to whoever it was who left this dopamine bomb lying around for making me feel useful.
Isle of Misfit Puzzles: I’m pretty neutral about minimetas, but the puzzles in this one felt more disconnected than usual, like it was just a bunch of puzzle ideas that didn’t go anywhere else getting slapped together. Okay, actually, now that I’m typing out this sentence and reading the title of the puzzle again, everything is beginning to make sense. I don’t know if the self-awareness is a plus.
Anyway, I sunk a bunch of time into this puzzle and made a bunch of progress but got stuck on like three different extractions, and repeated the puzzle structure to literally anyone who would listen before some friends showed up later and dug me out of extraction hell together. Honestly not gonna lie those Toy Story chimeras are kinda spooky lol
The Hermit Crab: This was probably my favorite puzzle in the entire hunt. It just so happened to scratch all the right itches: previous hunts, metas, using structures in unexpected ways. The hermit crab theming around shell reuse was very cute, but the river theming in the feeders and final meta, on top of this puzzle being in the Mississippi round, really cements the vibe of the puzzle and ties it together so, so well. One of the new all-time greats.
The Other Scottish Play: It seems the main difficulty in this puzzle is reading enough about Sleep No More to figure out what’s going on without getting too into it and going down various rabbit holes and really almost concerningly detailed Tumblr posts about the play. Anyway, a couple hours of back-and-forth later, it turned out the puzzle was nowhere near as involved and hardly used information from the real stagings of the play, which was kind of annoying in terms of time lost reading Reddit reviews but in retrospect makes sense given how prone the dataset would be to change, how many edge cases really do exist in the actual staging, and I guess the fact that the puzzle kind of gates half the round so they really had to make it solvable.
Amykos’ Briefs: It was like ass o’clock when we unlocked this, and I like oh man a puzzle that references old puzzles!! Sweet!! And then the more I read on the less I knew what was going on and the more I regretted opening this puzzle instead of just going to go find a nice crossword or something to settle in on (Mausolea was the parallel unlock with this). In a violent act of drive-by mercy, someone mentioned the actual Onion amicus brief in the text channel and from there the puzzle was essentially solved.
Sumantle: I threw a bunch of words at this. None were close. All as expected.
Sunday
Augmented Raility: As I mentioned previously, picking a puzzle to jump into after waking up is pretty difficult, but the presence of Pokémon content makes this problem much easier!!! …the Pokémon clue is from one of the three games in the entire series I haven’t played.
Model Scientists: I hopped into this after a lot of identification had already been done, and SoftFro explained to me his theory that the first letters of the clues were probably going to be useful since they were evidently written kind of awkwardly, which usually means something along those lines. Despite my misgivings about the first letters looking kind of bad, I eventually massaged the ordering into a cluephrase and got us to the second step, from which I promptly disappeared to go work on Befouled Spellings or something like that. I popped back in just to snipe a wof of the final cluephrase. Hooray for helping on puzzle things without really interacting with the puzzle content!
Musical Scores: When SoftFro got lured away by the siren call of a musical puzzle, I followed him and wound up here. Despite having never heard of almost every musical in this puzzle, I enjoyed it a lot—particularly I thought it was just the right length for the idea it was exploring and I liked that it didn’t try to tack on any further datasets. Nice palate cleanser in the mid-late stages of hunt.
Befouled Spellings: I’m actually kind of surprised that a Spelling Bee + spelling bee puzzle hasn’t shown up before (or maybe it has and I just missed it). I think this dataset is great because it’s a beautiful example of real-life power creep. The idea that what was deemed a “hard word” went from, like, incisor and luge to appoggiatura (??) and Ursprache (are proper nouns even legal???) in 20 years is hilarious to me… then again, clock semaphore went from being the hot in thing in puzzles to getting clowned on by Ian Tullis in like 3 years so that’s whatever. Also, the losing words are so much harder than the winning words, spelling bees are luck-based RNG fests, insane.
Transylvanian Math: We figured out that this was about Sesame Street pretty early on, but it took a random 2003 post by a Britney Spears fan on muppetcentral dot com to get things really going. To me, that’s Mystery Hunt.
Anyway, let’s get cracking! I started doing some ID work and firetruck (Spotify Premium haver) valiantly offered to taint his Spotify recommendations so that he could go through the entire album in one place, but then he had to go. Nonetheless, I continued the collection work by somehow managing to find 12 year old videos on YouTube. Hm, that’s strange. Why did this video stop loading? Why did I drop from the Discord VC? Why is my computer offline?
So… turns out the modem in my house died (autopsy pending (lie)), and after a while of going through options to get the house back online, it turns out that apparently we couldn’t actually buy a replacement or something? So I was left hotspotting the rest of the weekend on mobile data. Fortunately, I had like 53 GB of data to spare, so even Zoom interactions could still be on the table. I grabbed a milk pudding to console myself and returned to puzzling.
ENNEAGRAM: Apparently this got unlocked while I was figuring out internet things! As the current OCTOGRAM 100% speedrun WR holder (2:49.94), naturally I had to get in on the action. It was a lot of fun tackling this in a pretty sizeable group of the Asia/Australia timezone solvers, because it basically amounted to mostly silence, people calling out the solutions to some of the clues that we’d been stuck on for a while, and a fair amount of groaning. The puzzle was really solid and fun throughout right up until we got hard walled on extraction for hours, mostly because everyone forgot the Enneagram was a thing. I guess it didn’t help that we only had like 3 of the actual Enneagram answers?
Jigsaw Slitherlink: The entirety of my interaction with this puzzle was solving ENNEAGRAM in the same VC as the Jigsaw Slitherlinkers and hearing TGE, boboquack, and lovemathboy get progressively more amused/bemused/confused/distressed in voice chat as they discovered the unstated rules and the horrifying fractal structures of this puzzle. Despite never actually interacting with it in a solving way, I thought this puzzle was absolutely stunning—beautiful, intricate, and just straight up difficult. Watching the solve approach the point where all the fractional and irrational clues began to make sense was hilarious.
Transylvanian Math, revisited: After flailing around on the ENNEAGRAM extraction for a good while, I looked closer on the extractions we had and realized the simple fact that some sequences extracted more than one letter. This seemed like a pretty odd editorial decision, but nonetheless the puzzle fell quickly after, proving that a simple dropped net is not enough to stop me. (This is not an invitation to the whims of the universe to do something worse) (please)
Flower Power: I really enjoy tough variety crosswords on fun grids, so this was right up my alley, at least in theory—I like how they induce a really satisfying solve “arc” where you struggle to find an in at first, and then pick up the pace as you get more crossers and confirmation, in a more pronounced way than most regular crosswords. Anyway, I spent a solid few hours actively solving this puzzle, and then just stared at the funny grids until I got the extraction, so I guess I liked it in practice as well as in theory. I think it’s really amusing that despite this being “just” a couple of crosswords on paper, no team solved this in under 6 hours.
A Radical Fishing Trip: This was a cool puzzle, but honestly the main thing I remember about it is that we spent half the puzzle trying to figure out if it was based on Chinese or Japanese because so many of the character constructions were basically the same in both languages. (It was Japanese, so my Chinese knowledge has yet to come in handy on a Mystery Hunt puzzle—phooey, but also on the bright side Sp3000’s Japanese knowledge got to come in handy, so realistically exactly one of us was going to walk away satisfied.)
Machines: So it was almost 3am when we unlocked this and my brain was definitely halfway through its shutdown process, but to be honest if I made having a functional brain a prerequisite to jumping in on a puzzle I’d never get anything done. I mostly sat in a kind of stoned stupor throughout most of the solve, which went pretty quick anyway, and managed to rally from the grave to help out with the final extract after some conditional formatting attempts failed. I’m glad this puzzle brought attention to how absolutely bizarre the “color” option on the CELL function is, because why does that even exist??? Anyway, in triumph we extracted our final answer only to realize it was a submission instruction, which ticked me off enough that I just went to bed immediately.
Monday
Duet: I woke up to find this meta lying around with not a ton of work on it and BOHEMIAN RHAPSODIES NUTS inexplicably called in on it. I was immediately blamed for this despite actually being innocent this time. Ridiculous.
Good Company: I figured I could make myself useful by just sitting down and slowly getting through some identification/matching work, and after a few people joined in we managed to assemble an entire data table of information, the next place to look very obviously being the phone numbers and number of items in each ad, which were the two pieces of information we hadn’t used yet. This meant that absolutely no one was looking at the place we were supposed to be looking, which in our defense is pretty reasonable because random diagonalization on a non-square string set while other data points sit there untouched is kinda mean.
Anyway, I got kind of tired of staring at (what we thought was) the final extraction, but in the mean time people had solved the associated meta! We were free!! Wow, there’s another meta but it doesn’t mention this puzzle, so that must mean it’s not used!!! Oh, that’s an errata.
Either way, the meta got solved without this answer, which at the time felt like a shame because we thought we had put in most of the required work. Looking back and seeing the rest of the puzzle makes me realize this was not the case, so I’m kind of glad we stopped there instead of grinding through the next three steps, each of which sounds quite independently sticky.
At some point around this time, while we were discussing which puzzles to use this meta’s free answer on, mbingo told me that an “anonymous fan from TTBNL” in the room said hi. Hi!!! This aside is half me shouting you out and half me bragging that I have a nonzero amount of fans, I think.
Intelligence Collection: We had looked over this one a few times and somehow never spotted anything, so we finally dropped a hint on it and did a big collective facepalm when we realized we had eaten the classic blunder of not reading first letters. The puzzle fell soon after (though not before a fair few minutes of confusedly saying “REDISGOL?????” out loud in VC).
Scheduling Conflicts: At this point, we were practically down to like three metas with a good number of feeders on each of them, so it was just a matter of bashing things until metas fell. After getting another feeder for this via Intelligence Collection, I figured I would just sit and bash and try wofs until something seemed decent. (Unfortunately, between starting with DEI and ending with PP, this might have been one of the most wof-unfriendly meta answers in this hunt…)
The data collection on this somehow ended up being kind of insane—there were a few letters where a few of us came up with different but plausible extracts, and of course there’s always the lingering paranoia that your source is wrong, or there’s some timezone issues, or that you have the wrong holiday entirely, or that you did your math wrong. Still, since we knew we had the right mechanic, success is guaranteed after sufficiently many person-hours of bashing, which fortunately happened to not be that large a number.
Appease the Minotaur: By the time we got over to Minotaur after pummelling Scheduling Conflicts to death, the group working on it had basically figured out what was going on, and just needed more feeders or a better wof, so I did some sheeting to put down all the possible wofs from what we had. I noticed that a few possibilities had the extraction ending in OED, which obviously was not the right path, so I didn’t expand on those as much as the rest. After a while, I took a break, jokingly saying “feel free to solve it while im away”… you can guess the two ironies that befell me within the next 10 minutes.
Aphrodite’s Plutonic Affection Connection: There is a stage of a puzzle where there’s a big data table, and everyone tries adding extra columns to it in the vain hope that one column will eventually be the right one and that an extraction will arrive like manna from heaven. This was our last meta, and we were approximately in this stage when I got here. Thankfully, pretty soon after it was announced that a team had completed the hunt (sans runaround), which allowed us to ask for hints on metas too. As we were writing up a hint request to send, zonotope joined the VC and immediately suggested the right idea.
Road Trip Redux: Fortunately, unlike last year we were not hurriedly scurrying around to solve this by some deadline, which I imagine would have wreaked havoc with us while trying to get the Shades in order. There’s not much to say here; I enjoy final puzzles that are just victory laps.
We finished at 7:07:27 pm MIT time: another year, another completed hunt in the books, this time with a podium finish to boot. I think generally speaking I felt less useful than usual this Hunt compared to past years, probably due to rolling into way more sticky dataset puzzles and way fewer word puzzles than usual, plus generally being more tired (I have not yet learnt the art of maintaining a proper sleep cycle). But like I’ve said in previous recaps, I think Hunt just has a thing about having high variance—both in writer styles as well as just which puzzles you happen to see within the hunt itself—which I suppose is a necessary price for the awe of its scale.
I usually try to end these posts with something that sounds kind of artful or beautiful in some way, but unfortunately I have nothing particularly poetic at hand presently. Instead, I’ll say: writing this post made me smile as I recalled parts of the weekend, and I think it’s wonderful that an event is able to have that effect. I hope to one day bless others’ January weekends in the same way.
help how do i puzzle 
