Puzzle and Riddle Hunts
This will be a big combo-post discussing something I have been doing, and something I plan to do soon. Well, a little less soon than the US Puzzle Championship I have covered recently, but I should start in chronological order. And this is way way waaaay long, and I can't possibly summarize it all here, so read the tags and whenever you are ready you can read the whole thing behind this cut.

One type of puzzle which I do occasionally is what is sometimes referred to as a riddle contest or riddle hunt. There are other names as well, and some people just don't know what to call them, but they share two distinguishing features: They generally are linear, so you have to solve each puzzle or riddle or whatever before moving on to the next one, and the individual puzzles are generally not crosswords or other such familiar puzzle types, but instead they are riddles, or odd encodings or words, sets of clues leading to some word, and the like. Wikipedia rather lamely lists them in the topic List of online puzzles. I distinguish them from puzzle hunts, a term I apply to other types of games which are sometimes not much different, but generally are more oriented to traditional puzzles or variations on them.

There are quite a number of these, as the Wikipedia entry shows, and I have participated in several of them. I am not going to try to list my status in the numerous ones I have started and not finished, or even the few I am kinda-sorta still trying to work on. Instead I am going to shift topics...

An online game I have been playing for about two years is the Kingdom of Loathing. A strange name, for a strange game. The whole thing is a sort of parody of traditional hack-and-slash role playing games, and the parody branches out into other areas as you get into the game, much as Discworld, at some point in the series, stops being a parody of traditional fantasy and starts being a parody of everything else in the world, one major subject area per volume.

The first thing you'll notice upon entering the kingdom is "Hey, the graphics really suck! They are all black and white line drawings with stick figure characters!" This is all part of the fun, of course. You play a character in one of six classes with weird names like "pastamancer" and "disco bandit". You fight weird monsters, collect weird items, and advance in levels, occasionally getting quests from the town council or other characters.

About a year ago, the nature of the game changed radically when a long-awaited feature called ascension was implemented. What this means is that after advancing several levels, you get to fight the naughty sorceress who has subjected the kingdom to all the monsters you have been fighting (think final boss), and then you get to ascend, only to return to the kingdom as a fresh level 1 character to do it all over again. So why would you want to play it again? Well, there are six different classes, and every time you ascend you get to keep one of the skills you learned, which becomes a permanent skill, so you can gradually build up a sort of multi-classed character. And Jick, the guy behind it all, periodically adds new content -- just often enough to keep me going, I guess.

If that is not enough, there are also player-run events, like the L33t Insanity riddle contest I am currently involved in. Yes, it is a riddle contest, specifically for and run by players of the game. There are prizes of in-game objects, with the grand prize worth more than all the wealth I have accumulated in two years of play (though that is expected to be split among a team of up to 8 players). And it is actually two riddle contests in one, a "L33t" one written by a player who goes by the name of L33t1fy and the "Insane" one by Insane Steve. I am solving these with some people from the Badde Manors clan. (Badde Manors was another game that doesn't exist any more which I never played, but I did play the Pyroto Mountain game that preceded and inspired it together with some of these same people. It was a trivia game with some other stuff bolted on; in Pyroto's case there was a fantasy theme with spellcasting.) We finished the L33t side in a couple days, but the Insane side is getting everybody stuck. One team finished in a little over a week (that was 10 days ago) and other teams are still working for the second and third place prizes.

But enough about riddle contests, and more about puzzle hunts! As I said, these events are more based on traditional puzzle types rather than riddles, though there is some overlap and blurring of the line. They vary in size and length, and often the puzzles are not released all at once, but more than one at a time, and solving puzzles may or may not get you immediate access to more puzzles. Often they are based on a concept called the metapuzzle. The metapuzzle is a puzzle which combines the (usually one-word or short phrase) final answers from the earlier puzzles and makes another puzzle for you to solve with them.

Because of the need for the puzzles to give short answers for the metapuzzles, there is almost always some slight variation from standard puzzle types. For instance, in some of the more mundane variety of puzzle hunts, you might have a standard American-style crossword puzzle with some shaded squares which spell out the final answer. In a more difficult puzzle hunt, you might have a crossword puzzle that has certain places in the grid where there are 2x2 blocks of the same letter, and the letters in these blocks spell out the answer. (And are you worried you wouldn't notice the blocks? Well when this puzzle actually appeared in the MIT Mystery Hunt a few years ago, one of the letters in the answer was I, and when you fill in a crossing of Pompeii, Hawaiian, skiing, and Boyz II Men in a crossword puzzle, let me tell you, you notice it.)

The MIT Mystery Hunt was not the first, and not the most well-attended (though it might have a claim for the most well-attended in person, as opposed to solving online), but it is one of the best known, and perhaps the largest in terms of the number of puzzles in one event, lately numbering over 100, of difficulty similar to the above and often harder -- and these are solved in a single weekend, by gigantic teams where 30 people is considered by some to be a minimum. The huge number of puzzles are broken up into several rounds, each with its own metapuzzle, and with solution of all the metapuzzles -- a feat only achieved by a few top teams -- leading to a final metapuzzle and/or a trail of final puzzles ending in a hunt around the campus by something akin to a treasure map, to find some token object (originally a coin, and still called The Coin though it has been many years since it was actually a coin). Lately, as both the number of puzzles and depth of theme has increased, these elusive final stages have developed into highly scripted events, and even the metapuzzle solutions are starting to have scripted events in development of a plot line associated with them.

The more common variety of puzzle hunt usually has around eight to fifteen puzzles leading to a single metapuzzle. I also refer to these by the name of puzzle extravaganza, a name borrowed from the climactic Saturday evening event of the National Puzzlers' League convention, which is usually but not always an event of this type. These also appear regularly as the "special section" in Games: World of Puzzles magazine, and in other places. There is also a road rally version of these, where groups of people in vans travel from place to place, solving puzzles that each lead them to the next place. In this case there might not be a metapuzzle at the end, but rather a puzzle that simply takes you to the finish line and victory party. I know this best as the Stanford game, though it did not originate there and many of the games take place far from there and indeed, all of the ones of these I have participated in live (as opposed to rare phone-a-friend moments) have been on the east coast.

Last October, I saw a new entry into this field, a mammoth puzzle hunt of Mystery Hunt quantity (over 90 puzzles), but somewhat easier difficulty level. It did have the multi-metapuzzle concept I know best from the Mystery Hunt, but was intended for individuals and small teams to solve. This was The Puzzle Boat. The puzzle creator Greg Brume lives in my area and I attended a party which was, in part, a pre-release party for Puzzle Boat where we got to solve a few of these puzzles in groups of 3 or 4. The rest I solved after it was released, solo, using evenings, weekends, time on the train to and from work, and even the occasional slow moment at work, over two weeks. Seeing such a huge effort produced primarily by one very prolific puzzle author I only half-jokingly asked when the book was coming out. While these puzzles remain free on the web for all to solve, Greg did indeed decide to start selling his puzzles with a bimonthly e-mag called Panda Magazine (or is that PandA, or P&A?)

And this finally brings me to the future event. Over on the Grey Labyrinth, a puzzle-oriented web bulletin board, they are now advertising another massive puzzle hunt. This event promises about 50 Mystery Hunt style puzzles, intended for teams of up to seven. I expect to play on a team with some group or other of my friends, perhaps the ones I am now working on L33t Insanity with (and might still be working on it when this new event starts, July 7, though I hope not).