#Cryptext hunt first two puzzles full

The cryptic crossword was fine, especially since it was advertised in the rules that puzzle hunters would need to do one. I also didn’t like that even though the puzzle censors out an F bomb, you still ultimately need to punch it into Google to solve the puzzle, which might be awkward for parents playing along with younger solvers. I appreciate the opportunity to learn about a new puzzle tool, but the bulk of “solving” this puzzle is transcribing many, many characters and pasting them into an online tool to see what it spits out, which isn’t a very enjoyable experience. This Wordle Is Messing with Everyone’s Heads Just like last year, I’m rank ordering the puzzles in the hunt from my least favorite to favorite, listing the key points of why I ranked each the way I did. It also prevented less experienced teams from missing out on puzzles due to running into a wall. For one or two screen puzzles like the ones this year, this worked well since the assorted puzzles lend well to divide & conquer tactics for teams willing to get creative. The final five non-meta puzzles were released simultaneously, compared to last year when the final sequence of puzzles needed to be completed in a sequential order. There were still plenty of puzzles and a lot of great moments along the way.

The amount of work that went into last year’s hunt was staggering, with over a dozen fully illustrated text adventure games, so I don’t blame the team for dialing it down a notch this year.

The hunt was much simpler this year than last, but still enjoyable.

#Cryptext hunt first two puzzles full

Still, I had a lot of fun- there’s something special about racing to the finish, and I personally prefer hunts where my team can be in contention without sacrificing a full weekend or more. We had been so close! We had been on the correct path very early but ruled out that path when it looked like it was returning garbage, and there were a lot of other deep rabbit holes for us to dive into featuring various combinations of Caesar shifts, letter indexing, and binary. I thought back to a design quirk from last year’s Cryptex Hunt and used that as inspiration, and lo and behold, it panned out! By that point we had fallen to 67 th place, but it was still nice to finish before the deadline. I went to dog training class and saw the new Batman movie, and while the Riddler’s games got me in the mood to figure out the final puzzle, I still didn’t have any luck picking apart the final puzzle before heading to bed.Īfter sleeping on it, I found my way to the right path in the morning. After getting stuck for a little while, the team disbanded for the day. We were really excited! Then the wheels fell off.