Mystery Hunt 2013 - join our team!

I'm putting together a team to participate in the 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt, and you're all invited! If you've participated before, come join us again!

What's the MIT 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.

Traditionally, Mystery Hunt begins at noon on the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day (a U.S. holiday), with an introductory skit held in Lobby 7 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.

(The prize for being the first team to recover the coin is to be blessed with suck: your team gets to write next year's Mystery Hunt. :P)

To complete the Hunt, your team must have an on-campus delegation, as certain events/activities and a small minority of puzzles require live presence. However, we won't get anywhere near that, and for the first time, this year, the Mystery Hunt is allowing fully-remote teams to register!

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 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.

Here are some examples of Mystery Hunt puzzles. You can click the solutions links on each puzzle's page to see the solutions for each:

One of the more fun puzzles.

One of the more difficult puzzles. (At least, in my opinion.)

A recognition-based puzzle.

A biology puzzle.

The solutions to puzzles like these are themselves clues in a metapuzzle, and multiple metapuzzles' solutions are clues to a supermeta. For an example of a metapuzzle (well, this is actually a supermeta), check this out.

You may want to check out the whole 2011 Hunt, which is one of my favorites in recent memory. It illustrates the metapuzzle and supermeta structure rather clearly—the Mario "world" has a set of rounds, whose solutions are combined into a metapuzzle, and the three metas' solutions are used in the world's supermeta. The Mega Man world has a set of rounds, whose solutions are combined to produce each robot master's weapon (or metapuzzle's solution), and those are combined to solve the supermeta. (The Zelda, Katamari, and Civ worlds have more unusual meta/supermeta structures.)

Each year's hunt has a different theme. In 2011 it was video games. In 2012 it was musical theater. The theme might inform the puzzle titles, but usually has nothing to do with each individual puzzle itself.

Interested? Request an account here: http://ducksoup.vbprog.zonexus.net/

Just 5 more days before it starts, so if you wanna take part, it'd be a good idea to do so now!

Two and a half days until the Hunt starts!

Thank you for the reminder!

Mystery Hunt 2013 starts NOW!

Though they aren't livecasting the kick-off skit, which is usually about half an hour long. So take the moment to sign onto our IRC channel, #ducksoup on Espernet, and stop by our forum, http://ducksoup.vbprog.zonexus.net/ !

Easiest ways to participate?

• go to http://webchat.esper.net/ , enter your choice of username, and enter #ducksoup into the Channels box, then click Connect. That's our team's chat room.
• go to http://ducksoup.vbprog.zonexus.net/ , and create an account by clicking "sign in", then "create one", and filling that out. I'll go and quickly approve your request.

edited 18th Jan '13 9:14:56 AM by GlennMagusHarvey