Disclaimer
This text contains disclaimers, if preambles make you amble away, don’t read this section.
The thoughts are mine and mine alone, nobody in cardinality has read this, and never will, I’m blacklisting them from the website.
(TODO: figure out what a blacklist is)
This is not a puzzle, I don’t condone puzzles, they are a trick by the devil to make you think you think, but thoughts you think you thought thoughtful thinkers thought before, don’t fall for it.
Spoilers ahead, I wont give any further warnings as a fun surprise for spoiler aficionados.
Things in this article have been affected by the hazy fog we call memory, if I got anything wrong, feel free to hop on to my reality, the grass is greener over here.
The end (of Huntinality 2)
After Huntinality 2 ended I had a conversation with Melissa about future Huntinality plans.
I was asked what I would improve in a future hunt, I said I would prefer more shenanigans and wackier rounds, my hope for Huntinality was a hunt as wacky as galactic but without being a punch in the gut in terms of difficulty. This section isn’t foreshadowing, I don’t even know what a forwards shadow is.
Later on I explained I had a puzzle idea brewing and suggested they could help with it (which never came to fruition,) this idea eventually turned into the bakery, and was already fairly set in stone at that point.
I eventually gathered a list of goals for this puzzle
1. Make my friends do it.
in Huntinality 2 my friends ran out of steam at just the wrong time and never did my puzzles, I vowed for revenge and orchestrated an easy puzzle right at the start of the hunt
2. Don’t let Dan in on it
Dan has been a primary contact for my time in cardinality, we knew each other before joining, joined together, and discussed puzzle stuff all the time. Dan had a hand in all my previous ventures and I wanted to prove myself capable in a Danless environment.
I also acquired an additional goal of writing 2 puzzles for the hunt, this could not go wrong, I mean how can a shadow be forward, is there a backward shadow? How are we counting this?
The Bakery
After having the idea for the puzzle around the end of Huntinality 2 I spent the time between the hunts hunting for sets that fit the requirements. They aren’t exactly easy to find but I slowly built a mental and eventually physical list of sets that worked. They didn’t all make it in, for you bakery fans here’s a little extra puzzle just for you.
Warning: I just threw this in here from my notes, the sets are rougher, the clues are worse, and for those reasons and a few more, none of these made it into the puzzle. This is not bakery quality, this is day old jimmy john’s bread quality.
Added part
Classic 1v1 board game
The #1 Pokemon
Piggybacker
Mistakenly seduce
Time of first known flowering plants
Deconstructor
Age of Fishes
Separation
Sum Sum Sums
Spreading
Second period of the Paleozoic
Round rather than square, curly, or angled
Rounds making marine vehicle
It began about 300 million years ago
Little spurt
Less than water
What keeps your sandwiches in one piece
When dinosaurs appeared
Our system says that what you need to do is to message a lead and get them to verify the puzzle before you make it, so after ignoring it and making the puzzle testsolvable I decided to finally message a lead. The only lead online is Dan, so Dan becomes the first testsolve… and then helps me construct the puzzle, and write clues, and comes up with the reindeer set.
Curse you Dan.
Actually this reminds me
A Dangent
The leads for Huntinality 2 were burned out, busy, and looking for new blood, this meant the leads for Huntinality 3 were entirely different, one of them being Dan.
Dan’s approach to things seems to always be “Can I do this?” as the first question, which meant that whenever Dan encountered a problem, rather than delegate, Dan just did it. This might work well when lower down the chain, but as a lead this meant Dan did everything. Writing, whipping, editing, managing, verifying, mentoring, maybe dev work I dunno I’m not a dev, not art Dan cant do art, for reference I made Dan draw a Spheal:
(This was done during the hunt, so if your hint request took a while, it could be because of this. I’m not sorry)
This situation was exasperated by the two other leads being busy early on, leaving Dan to pretty much do everything. By the end Dan’s name is on 15 of the 36 puzzles, and that’s only the puzzles that made it into the hunt.
Please take a break Dan.
The Silence Round
Early on in the hunt’s life we were discussing round ideas, I didn’t want to own a round, that sounded like a bunch of effort, so I just nudged people along and encouraged wackier ideas, this was until R.T.3 SEARCH. The hunt (which I loved) ends in a blog post filled with opinions about hunt standards, which I would post here but accessing it requires a secret phrase which is acquired at the end of the hunt to keep out the puzzling raffle, which I of course was not a part of as I asked Dan to send me the answer.
The blog post advocated for changes, most of which I agreed with, with my root in video games I have always hoped for more interaction, and my earlier foreshadowing made me hope for more wackiness. Jack was speaking to me. I was inflamed.
So I concocted a plan, Jack’s points on metas and feeders made me want no answer checkers, so I needed to find a way to block that, plus I wanted to encourage more unconventional puzzles, I’m tired of endless word puzzles, and lastly it had to somehow fit thematically as a curse. All this combined into the silence round, I pitched it, and it was well received, enough so that it was added to the hunt and oh no.
So I own a round now, I didn’t plan for it, and now had to set a list of requirements, they were as such:
- No words, to be more specific, no human vocalization, numbers are allowed, emojis are allowed, music puzzles must not have lyrics, etc.
- No titles, at least not publicly facing, I didn’t want this to become the emoji round
- No answers or answer checkers, a puzzle is solved once you reach a solved state, which means every puzzle must have an interactive element to enable people to reach that state
- Meta will be created after the feeders and be based on their ideas rather than any set answer
Additionally I pitched “vow of loudness” as the meta answer, that and point 2 never made it though, but this is a collaborative effort and you have to give and take.
The meta specifically turned out to be a sticking point, I was confident that it was a risk worth taking, others didn’t like the position it put us in, now as future me I think it was the right decision and can formulate why better.
The best case for a post-feeder meta is clear, a perfect mix of all the mechanics turning into a final cherry on top. What it will look like on the other hand, there is no way of knowing. The worst case is more interesting, the way I visualize it is that each of the puzzles is a point on a graph and for the meta to work they must all interact, the best case is all the points being connected, but in actuality some puzzles might not mix, worst case is pairwise connections, which means you need half as many connections as you have puzzles, you can pair off the annoying puzzles the most convenient puzzles and add some rougher connections if need be, this meta, while not ideal, doesn’t sound too bad to me. And if the worst case isn’t too bad I don’t see a reason not to try.
Eventually we went with the cycle, one connection for each puzzle.
I say we, you see while I was mentally preparing myself to write a meta, Dan decided to pull a Dan, Dan was a lead and was already spoiled on or had a hand in every silence round feeder, I was not. Dan was also Dan, and I assume must have thought “oh this would be easier if I just get myself and Bryce, another lead, to make this puzzle” and wrote the entire meta while I wasn’t looking.
After all that worrying I didn’t even have to do anything, oh well.
Wait, I don’t have a second puzzle anymore… Whoops.
Whipping
Early on in the hunt we all volunteered for roles. I wanted to help more but dev and art are outside my capabilities, whipping however seemed doable, so I signed up and was let whip.
Part of the reason I thought I could do this is a hobby of mine is cold messaging people I don’t know with an endless barrage of unusual questions, I hoped this skill would transfer to cold messaging people about puzzles. Turns out it doesn’t. Unlike bothering people for fun, messaging people about puzzles has consequences, which means things can go wrong, which is just what my anxiety needed to sneak up on me.
By the end the combination of my anxiety, a mismatch in time-zones between me and most of the team, and some forgetfulness (sorry Ali) made me much less effective of a whip than I wanted to be.
Do I think I can overcome it next time? I dunno. The future will tell whether I will whip again, or move on to naenaeing.
Hinting
Eventually, after a panicked week (partly due to my procrastination, (sorry Ali, again)), the hunt releases to the sound of applause, at least I assume it did, it was 1 AM, I was asleep. Once I woke up I did my classic song and dance, realizing I only know half the puzzles (better than last time’s third!), not feeling confident to answer puzzles I didn’t write or solve, and not feeling confident in general that I’m hinting correctly and won’t cause later trouble, anxiety sure is a fun time.
In order to encourage new solvers to fall into the trap known as puzzle hunting we have casual teams, one of the perks of these teams is unlimited hints, which as we learned in Huntinality 2 is rife for abuse, teams will hint rather than think and clog up valuable time and make everyone upset in the process, including themselves.
To counter this we added a hint limit this hunt, 2 hints per hour, which sounded great on paper but it turns out some teams saw this as a goal, I mean you have the hints, why not use them? They then started hinting exactly twice every hour the get their money’s worth.
Next time I would personally restrict the casual teams’ hint total, maybe give them 30 upfront or give them hints in the same form as the expert teams, just more commonly and more of them, I dunno, its too early to say. If next hunt rolls around and this doesn’t happen, assume I was silenced for my views and thrown in the cellar rather than something like having changed my mind or getting outvoted.
In the end I tried to be there and help as much as I could, I spent my free time trying to be available to answer hints and getting bored and distracted immediately after. I answered every bakery hint I could get my hands on to pad my numbers, and eventually burned out and found an excuse to do something else, like writing a blog about Huntinality, perhaps even this paragraph right here. I definitely am not guessing how this ends, what are you talking about.
The start (of the future)
Look its referencing the thing, I did a start is end shtick, I’m such a writer.
Huntinality is always a great time, I really liked when after the hunt ended everyone was so sad that the president of the United States put the flag down to half mast (the flag of the Republic of the Rio Grande of course) and gave everyone who worked on it a free bar of gold.
I hope to write for more hunts, maybe do more, maybe do less, maybe hit my two puzzle goal a hunt late, who knows. If you want to find more of me and the things I do, I’ll call the cops, what are you some kind of stalker?
– Pichu
pichusuperlover.wordpress.com 