Hi!
As some may have read, i wanted to go in chronological order. But, as time went on and motivation ran out, it just never came through. So, let’s instead look at the latest event that i partook in and hope that i can keep this train rolling into the MysteryHuntmas and beyond. Also, as a sort of a disclaimer, Yes, there will in fact be spoilers for the puzzles. And tangents. I will try to dance around the first (Except for the tangent, which will have ample spoilers for How Many Reps?), but the second is gonna get unleashed in full 🙂
Prelude : Out of the woods
So, Huntinality.
SMH and me in particular have a fun history with this event series. Huntinality 1 featured two teams off the back of me recruiting a bunch of friends (mostly spyparty people) and was the first hunt we actually finished! For Huntinality 2 there were a lot fewer people, but i remember some fun things coming out of it, even if it ended in burnout.
For the third event we presented a roughly 2,75~ish people of solving power, with dpad joining for the ride, citing his home team stuck on puzzleboat as the reason to go for a spin in the hovercraft. I initially yoinked him after a slow but pleasant time solving FG together, and he will make return appearances throughout the blog probably.
Act 1 : Running Start
I work nights.
Couple it with the fact that i work the night into saturday and west coast is 11 hours away from me, and you got a captain who can’t attend to the first 6~ish hours of the event. When i showed up home, i found dpad STUG on the meta and two unsolved puzzles. After snapping off the aha on Characters, we spent quite a few minutes throwing things at the wall, some of them stuck, but not enough to squint for the answer. Dpad eventually got tired and left, while i gave up on the meta, solved the last open feeder, and gone to sleep.
By the time i hath awoken, Verdruss seamlessly barged through the meta into the forest before disappearing back into real life and we dug into the creatures, shrooms and other silly things discussed later. I spend some time on Twisty Path, which was absolutely pleasant, Cala locks onto the cryptic for a day or so, dpad says he’s not awake and immediately proceeds to solve enough clues of Front and Center for me to squint out an answer. The two of us then proceed to spend the rest of the evening scrapping with Around The World : him fervently googling, sorting the sheet, noticing the ahas and regexing the last few things out of wikipedia, me picking them out of the regex output, doing the obligatory step in these puzzles, getting confused by the output and writing the hint request, a sorta sequel to the one i wrote for «Binary Choice» last year (which is definitely a reference that no one but me got, but hey, i gotta flaunt my hubris somewhere)
While tidying our sheet for the visiting delegation, i spotted a solution to our roadblock. Alas, the request was sent by that point and, tbf, we did need that confirmed explicitly.
Act 2 : Silent Storm
No points for guessing what was the first weird thing we noticed about this round.
Anyway, i ended up solving this puzzle. For a rather particular meaning of «solving». I got the checkmark. Stop staring at me like that.
*Sigh*
Yes, we did not get the aha.
This round was a bit of a comedy of errors all around. Another puzzle features a grid of things you can click on and make light up? Obviously, the goal is to make all the things light up! None of us got bored of anything else enough to bash past that idea, and because we knew that the solution is just a solid bash away, i kinda skipped past it when trying to figure out what to HR.
In the meantime, we have elongated the cuboid (I finally got to get an extraction from this kind of puzzle without having to resort to the offline domain!), i fail to speedrun Heroes (and cause an errata in the process, a first for SMH), snipe extraction on Weaving from Calamay (sorry!), solve the latest unlock in the round and proceed to get STUG on yet another meta.
Asleep dpad shows up with a few more key insights and we are off to the races. While he is looking at it, i increase the number of feeder answers we have to 5/6 and that is enough for him to do the first part of the puzzle, after which i snap off the second. Our 6th was skipped and it took us 6 different attempts at a backsolve call before we noticed the disambiguation we needed. On a feeder that we knew with about 90% certainty. SMH.
Act 3 : Puzzle Hut
In the resulting endorphin storm we solve Fruit Math skipping the clue for the aha and get stuck on Are You The One for the same reasons as the skip. It takes us a hint to get this solve, which paid off in a solve and a pair of groans. Most of the night is then spent fighting 🔲, which has been absolutely beautiful. After that we take our first crack at Fencing and Rimer for Nitting, both of which refuse to yield for now. After which…
c: Hintangent of the weak
This next part will contain spoilers.
Like, an amount of them.
If you have not solved How Many Reps?
please proceed to your nearest Huntinality website and give it a try.
https://www.huntinality.com/puzzles/how_many_reps
Is this enough to hide stuff below yet?
Anyway, if you continue on, you either do not want to bother or have solved it already.
And both are fine reasons, welcome!
The way i like to write hints is saying stuff on repeat
Before that i need to know what we have done to complete
We have some progress here and there, but nothing concrete
As for the meter to work with, meme song is how i proceed
You’ll see pretty fast here a flaw in my plan
It is all about how i want these parts to scan
A sick setup by Ryu is how i fail this exam
And even on later fixes, fail again and again
Let’s attempt, for a bit, to fix this line once more
I know this is silly, but i just can’t ignore
«Brain’s twenty percent mush, so eighty percent wrong
IRON auguments DONT to end up a GOLD RUSH«
Did it work? I mean, kind of, some canned hints we ate
Some parts got neatly solved, others gathered more hate
Another hint was needed to resolve in the end
Dpad sent me wheezing :»eels are back, tell a friend»
Rhymes aside, was this hint request useful?
Yes. I think i got to relay most of the things i needed to relay, and i think they got received.
Was this poem parody good?
Kinda. I can nitpick it for a while, the only part that really fits the original is Tak’s (love the contrast between the hint asking for help and him not doing that) and maybe the chorus, and even those i can dissect further.
Was this hint request good?
Yes! It was useful, so it was good. I also hope that whoever in HQ was subjected to this request against their will had some fun reading it and not just staring blankly trying to parse through the bars.
Act 4 : Axeoth of Choice
If you know that reference, i think i like your style. Go solve the relevantly named puzzle if you haven’t. It is pretty good.
My work starts on the night into tuesday, which spelled the end of our productive night streaks of activity. The partial progress was there, but apparently almost a solve only counts in the silence round. The lonely dot on the 4th-5th is 🤫, solved by dpad in a flash once he figured it out, we unlock the meta and finally «get the aha» on 🌳
On the next day, an eminem parody courtesy of my cosolver later we finally get How Many Reps? and then spent a really cathartic 50 minutes solving Sets. It was pretty much a perfect storm of me spotting things and dpad cutting off all the loose ends. Pretty weird finding myself in the position of a powersolver for a puzzle that took a reasonable amount of time, but i am so glad to have finally taken revenge on the subject matter. Oh, and getting to yoink solves from dpad on mtg puzzles is becoming a really silly trend. We unlock Bird Conundrum, look at it once, and get a set of useful ahas. Sadly, some assumptions were incorrect, and i left for work without seeing it through. Dan checks off Fencing, blasts past Three Parts, and retreats for the night.
To all things comes an end.
Annoyingly, our productivity is also a thing.
Next day, my PC decides to metaphorically blow up, leaving me out of commission for a few days. Dpad finally bashes through Candies and Stories, we hint Rimer for Nitting (and i become the rhymer for Rimer for Nitting), but never exit the jungle of not quite seeing the answer on this one.
I send off a hint for Bird Conundrum, maybe my third favourite of the hunt (and maybe my favourite response, fun-wise) A day after it is answered, we notice a major part of the puzzle that, in hindsight, makes most of our ahas a lot less impressive. I try solving it, get really close to the answer, but can’t fish it out of nutri and, while trying to solve the rest of the way, run into a fatal contradiction that i never recovered from. Hunt ends three days later, with nobody at the scene. We take a humble 198th place, with two metas and 28 solves.
——
So, yeah. I hope some of you enjoyed this attempt at a recap! Feedback is welcome.
Next post will probably be about MH, after which i think i might start slowly submerging into the past again.
And to all things comes a beginning.
A hedgehog adrift 