(no subject)

Hunt wrap-up was last night. Many of the teams won special awards consisting of leftover props. jmac's Birthday Party got a portable radio (used during the final runaround, which we never made it to) for having the most amusing call-ins (this was largely tahnan's doing). I received the prize for the team, and my teammates cheered me on by name, thus making to clear to everyone who hadn't yet caught on that, yes, jmac was actually a real person. "Happy Birthday!" shouted someone. Very nice.

So the whole structure of the hunt was revealed to us via PowerPoint, and it didn't do much to change my overall impression of how the hunt went: the product of many brilliant young minds, too young to have any real grasp of elegance. Before experience tells you otherwise, intuition informs you that more is always better, and any work of art you build should include every single good idea you have about it, because what can it hurt? And so we had a hunt with well over 100 puzzles, and though most were very clever, they were also too difficult or time-consuming for any team to reasonably solve in a single weekend; by Sunday night we didn't really have the manpower or willpower to watch a dozen movies or go geocaching, as some of the puzzles required. And the puzzles that didn't require hours and hours of work tended to be broken in other ways, usually because they were clearly based on one good, clever idea, and then the designer (or the designer's friends) had other clever ideas about it, which got soldered on, resulting in a barely solvable muddle.

Learned about the endgame puzzles last night. They were completely insane, I say in a half-admiring tone. Everyone's favorite (to hear about, anyway) seemed to be the one where you encountered a half-constructed circuit board, and had to figure out that you were expected to dismantle and then attach a bicycle blinky-light (handed to you earlier) to it; this would cause its LED to flash an MIT room number at you. That said, it's no surprise that the hosting team ended up giving the in-endgame teams the answer to each puzzle therein if they couldn't solve it in seven minutes. (At this point the hunt was half a day over schedule.)

Someone really does need to write a hunt HOWTO, as one member of jPB suggested.

Oh well. The winners were a group of veteran puzzlers, so I'm definitely looking forward to next year!