Mystery Hunt 2013
So a number of us from various TVT-related sites are getting together in a team to participate in the 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt. I'd like to invite y'all to join us!
What's Mystery Hunt? It's basically a crapton of puzzles. You solve each puzzle by working with the clues to get a word/phrase/string-of-letters as the solution.
Mystery Hunt 2013 will take place on 18~21 January 2013.
How the Hunt works: Mystery Hunt begins at noon on the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day (a U.S. holiday), with an introductory skit held on campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (which is usually webcast). Then us teams are directed to a special puzzle server, where we each login with our team's username and password. The hunt lasts until a team finds the coin (the ultimate objective of the Hunt, which few teams ever reach), usually sometime on Sunday, but the past few hunts have seen the organizers have usually let the hunt continue until Sunday afternoon, when there's a wrap-up held on campus where the organizers discuss the hunt, which is webcast for remote solvers.
(FYI, the prize for being the first team to recover the coin? Your team gets to write next year's Mystery Hunt. :P)
You don't have to be available all weekend long to participate--you can pop in and out anytime! All I ask is that you register your name if you even think you might want to play, because we need a forum and we're not allowed (by Hunt rules) to keep it public, so we can get you on board before the Hunt starts. You're allowed to join anytime during the Hunt, too. So bring your friends!
Examples of Mystery Hunt puzzles (click the solution/answer link on each puzzle's page to see the solutions):
One of the more fun puzzles.
A more challenging puzzle.
A recognition puzzle.
A biology puzzle.
For more examples of puzzles, check out the Hunt Archives, or just take a quick glance at the TVT page on the Mystery Hunt. If anything looks stupidly confusing, don't worry--it looks that way even to those of us who've been doing this for years. No experience necessary--in fact, the more random knowledge you know, the better!
The solutions to puzzles like these are themselves clues in a metapuzzle, and multiple metapuzzles' solutions are clues to a supermeta. Metapuzzles and supermetas usually follow a certain theme; in 2012 it was musical theater; 2011, it was video games; in 2010, it was a celebration of the Hunt's 30th anniversary.
Interested? Request an account here (and I'll speedily approve it): http://ducksoup.vbprog.zonexus.net/ . If you're on IRC, you can find us at #ducksoup on Espernet.
What's Mystery Hunt? It's basically a crapton of puzzles. You solve each puzzle by working with the clues to get a word/phrase/string-of-letters as the solution.
Mystery Hunt 2013 will take place on 18~21 January 2013.
How the Hunt works: Mystery Hunt begins at noon on the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day (a U.S. holiday), with an introductory skit held on campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (which is usually webcast). Then us teams are directed to a special puzzle server, where we each login with our team's username and password. The hunt lasts until a team finds the coin (the ultimate objective of the Hunt, which few teams ever reach), usually sometime on Sunday, but the past few hunts have seen the organizers have usually let the hunt continue until Sunday afternoon, when there's a wrap-up held on campus where the organizers discuss the hunt, which is webcast for remote solvers.
(FYI, the prize for being the first team to recover the coin? Your team gets to write next year's Mystery Hunt. :P)
You don't have to be available all weekend long to participate--you can pop in and out anytime! All I ask is that you register your name if you even think you might want to play, because we need a forum and we're not allowed (by Hunt rules) to keep it public, so we can get you on board before the Hunt starts. You're allowed to join anytime during the Hunt, too. So bring your friends!
Examples of Mystery Hunt puzzles (click the solution/answer link on each puzzle's page to see the solutions):
One of the more fun puzzles.
A more challenging puzzle.
A recognition puzzle.
A biology puzzle.
For more examples of puzzles, check out the Hunt Archives, or just take a quick glance at the TVT page on the Mystery Hunt. If anything looks stupidly confusing, don't worry--it looks that way even to those of us who've been doing this for years. No experience necessary--in fact, the more random knowledge you know, the better!
The solutions to puzzles like these are themselves clues in a metapuzzle, and multiple metapuzzles' solutions are clues to a supermeta. Metapuzzles and supermetas usually follow a certain theme; in 2012 it was musical theater; 2011, it was video games; in 2010, it was a celebration of the Hunt's 30th anniversary.
Interested? Request an account here (and I'll speedily approve it): http://ducksoup.vbprog.zonexus.net/ . If you're on IRC, you can find us at #ducksoup on Espernet.
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Actually, they're doing the kick-off now, so it's a good time to get set up, so you'll be ready when the puzzle server URL is announced.
Join our IRC channel very easily by going to http://webchat.esper.net/ , entering your choice of username, and entering #ducksoup into the Channels box, then clicking Connect.
Also hop onto our forum, and click "sign in" and then "create one" to create an account. I'll approve it speedily.