pictures or it didn't happen - mit mystery hunt

Just a few images from the MIT Mystery Hunt that ended officially today. The first team "found the coin" which is the official end of the hunt at 2:10 this morning. However, the people who made the puzzle [The Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb at Midnight - Dan Katz is a co-captain] decided to let everyone who wanted to continue playing keep playing. They kept answering the phone and confirming answers until three this afternoon. The official wrap up was at 5:30 where we learned that Doctor Awkward had won the game. We also learned that Doctor Awkward had two of the crossword geniuses from Wordplay -- Tyler and Trip -- which is cool especially because the winners of this year's puzzle create the puzzle for next year.

I was a bit of help to the team but I have to admit, not much. I'm good with trivia and librarian culture stuff. In this case, being able to identify TV show screenshots and magazines by looking at one letter (part of a ransom note) were helpful but not crucial. I'm also better at on the fly anagrams than the average puzzler, which surprised me but seems to be true. Where I really shone though was in organizing stuff. I was the "puzzle devil" from 2 am to 10 am which means I was in charge of making sure people stayed on task, that everyone had a puzzle and that every puzzle had a person. I updated the team wiki which has all of our puzzles and solutions and links to the jabber chatroom and the Google spreadsheets for puzzles that required them. I also scanned and uploaded all the ephmera that we got. In this case, every winning round netted a certificate and usually a DVD that was its own puzzle. I got these or helped get these copied and on the wiki and this, in addition to my general cleanup and put-away and stay up late skills seemed to have the most direct team benefit.

The biggest fun of the whole event was just getting to meet a ton of neat new people who were, to a T, smart and interesting and usually really funny. I went in knowing a few of the organizers but not much of the team since I'd only puzzled remotely for this team in the past. Getting to be onsite and stay up late and eat pizza and scribble on chalkboards with a bunch of other smartie math, science and computer geeks is something I don't get to do very often and it was a start to finish joy.

A few more pictures at Flickr, as usual. Puzzles are now up in archived format. Seriously, look at these things. My favorite puzzle? This one.