Advice To The Puzzlers

A few scattered thoughts on putting together a Mystery Hunt, for the 2023 constructing team and anybody else who aspires to do this.

Put on the best Hunt you can and don’t worry about expectations

It is often debated, particularly in the weeks immediately following the event, whether or not the MIT Mystery Hunt has grown too large. It absolutely has. I don’t mean for the solvers; I mean for the constructors. Each team that takes on the responsibility feels an urge to match or exceed what came before. There is only so far this can go before it is simply not possible to put together the Hunt in one year’s time, and I think we might be nudging that limit right now. For a number of people on Palindrome, the 2022 Hunt became a full-time job on top of their actual full-time jobs. I do not recommend this. A constructing team should carefully judge what they can accomplish in the time allowed, given their resources and keeping in mind that a year is barely sufficient to put together a Hunt of the size people have grown to expect. If you need to pull back to a mere 125 or so puzzles, no one in the Hunt community will say boo.

Life finds a way…

…of messing with your plans, and you would do well to keep that in mind from the start. When Palindrome put together the structure of its Hunt near the start of 2021, our team mailing list was 117 members strong. But as aspirations turned into responsibilities, some people drifted away. Others intended to stay but were sidelined by the usual travails of life — medical emergencies, legal emergencies, family emergencies, work emergencies. What we planned to accomplish with 100+ people was in fact accomplished with 50-60 people. If we’d had 50-60 people at the start, our plans might have been a little different.

There are going to be small teams and there are going to be large teams

I like to think Palindrome did a few things right this year, but nothing in my mind was righter than having different tiers of accomplishment — only nine teams reached the Hunt’s grand finale, but sixty teams successfully thwarted the Voracious Bookwyrm, earning the midpoint token. Another 48 teams on top of that solved the opening meta. There is a lot to be said for allowing every team, large or small, to succeed at something significant.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

Sixty teams conquered the Voracious Bookwyrm, but it would have been an even larger number if Palindrome had been clearer that there was a midpoint reward to be earned. We wanted it to be a nice surprise, which may have seemed reasonable, but it left some teams out in the cold — they moved on to the Pen Station rounds without completing The Ministry, and so they missed out on the midpoint token. The Hunt has room for surprises, but what the teams are trying to accomplish should perhaps not be one of them.

Similarly, we were unclear when communicating with teams about when our HQ would shut down, and what exactly that meant. So you had some teams thinking the door to the Hunt would be slammed shut entirely at 6:00 p.m. on Sunday evening, when in fact we thought teams would keep solving — it was only that hints and interactions with Palindrome would end at that time. This caused some confusion here and there. I fully shoulder the blame for that. Sorry.

And that’s only talking about outward communication, toward the solving teams. I could go on at length about internal communication, with the fellow members of your construction team over the course of the year. As team captain, I sent out weekly updates about how we were faring as our deadlines zoomed toward us — but there were elements of our Hunt, including the unlocking structure, that were not as well communicated, and that caused avoidable problems late in the year.

Do as I say, not as we did

Our set of prologue puzzles, the “Star Rats” round, was a big hit. I’m glad we were able to do it. But future constructing teams should feel NO OBLIGATION WHATSOEVER to make a prologue set part of their responsibilities. The Hunt is hard enough to put together without layering on even more, optional puzzles. Seriously, I hope a prologue round DOESN’T catch on.

Believe the testsolvers

I almost certainly do not need to tell you the importance of testsolving. Nearly every puzzle constructor has learned that how they think solvers will interact with a given puzzle, and how solvers will actually interact with it, are frequently two different things. Testsolving reveals all: Oh look, your clever joke in the flavortext sends solvers down a completely unforeseen rabbit hole. Gee, the aha moment you thought might be too blatant is in fact utterly invisible. Golly, solvers are failing to recognize which of the many possible solving paths is the correct one.

On Palindrome, the testsolve sessions were almost always set up and attended by the author, and in my opinion that is 100% the way to go. Handing off a puzzle to be tested out of the author’s sight is not nearly as valuable — that might do the trick for something like a newspaper crossword, but not for a many-layered experience like a Mystery Hunt puzzle.

Testsolving only works if you believe the testers’ experience will be typical, and if you believe what the testers say in their feedback. (Have a way for testers to give feedback!) It will be tempting, now and again, to say “Well, the testers went down this particular false road, but that was a freak occurrence that real solvers will be unlikely to duplicate.” No. Your puzzle has a flaw, and the testsolvers were good enough to reveal it to you. Figure out how to fix it.

We tried very hard to allow a puzzle into the Hunt only after two clean testsolves. One is not sufficient. I had a puzzle in the 2022 Hunt called The Messy Room. It was a variant on a standard type called the dropquote, in which letters above a grid drop down into that grid to spell a quote reading left to right row by row. In my version of the puzzle, letters could drop down into one grid or rise up into another — and also the words in the quote were presented out of order. This was hard enough, but in the original version, words in the puzzle’s seven quotes were intermixed — some words from quote A could be found in quote B, and words from quote B fell into quote C, and so on. The first group of testsolvers to tackle this… knocked it clear out of the park. They weren’t stopped for a moment. They solved the puzzle in a little over 75 minutes. It was perfect. I organized a second testsolve largely to set a good example — surely it wasn’t necessary. And you have already jumped ahead to the punchline: The second test was a disaster. My testers couldn’t make sense of any damn thing. I cut our misery short after 45 minutes and sent the puzzle back to the drawing board.

There exist puzzlemakers who will give extra weight to the good test over the bad. Don’t be one of them. I try not to lean toward pessimism in general, but when it comes puzzle testing, it’s definitely the way to go. Assume your puzzle’s worst test is what every group of solvers will experience, if you don’t do something about it.

Post-production: Oh, right, this is important

Palindrome was so focused on getting its 200 or so puzzles over the conveyor belt, we didn’t start preparing the puzzles for the website until late November. This caused quite a crunch throughout December. Get your website going earlier and you will be a happier team for it. Plus this will let you get in one more testsolve after the puzzle is theoretically absolutely final — errors can and will creep in at this stage.

But wait, there’s more

Scriptwriting. Costumes and props. Logistics. Creating and editing videos. Making sure everything is as accessible as possible. Getting permission from MIT for this, that, or something else. Dealing with the forms MIT insists on having signed by every solving team. It’s easy to overlook or underemphasize these things when there are so many puzzles to create. The non-puzzle elements will demand to be dealt with, so best to have a plan from the start.

Maybe it is time to retire the scavenger hunt

I don’t speak for my team on this point, but I believe it nonetheless. Particularly if the Hunt continues to be virtual, which inflates the number of participating teams, give serious consideration to whether or not to include a scavenger hunt. Administering the results has become a brutal time sink. This year we received submissions from 168 teams, and each resulted in a process that took approximately one hour to complete. You do the math.

Yes, the scavenger hunt can be fun, and yes, it’s a good way of making sure you’re in contact at least once with every team. But there are other fun ideas out there, and other ways of making sure every team gets contacted.

Don’t underestimate the personal toll

Winning the Mystery Hunt is exciting! Getting started on the next year is also exciting! Anything and everything is possible. But it won’t be long before reality seeps in. Decisions will get made that not everybody agrees with. Some people will find it difficult to find a place for themselves in the construction process. Pressure will mount, and that pressure will be handled by different people in different ways. Personal relationships could become strained. Following in ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈’s footsteps (that’s where the apostrophe S goes, right?), Palindrome had an ombudsperson who specifically fielded concerns from the construction team and relayed them to the organizers, and several course corrections were made over the year as a result of this.

The most important part of constructing the Mystery Hunt, in my opinion, is not pleasing the Hunt community with the result (that’s a close second), but coming out of the experience healthy and with all the same friendships (if not more) that you had at the start. Take a breather if you have to. Sit down with the person you’re butting heads with, assume you are both working in good faith, and talk out the problem. The Mystery Hunt is work, yes, but it should also be fun. Keeping it fun, however, may take a little effort. Time spent on that effort will be time well spent.