Try These Liquids (MITMH2025 Debrief)

Try These Liquids 

Expectation Setting

So this is gonna be a pretty rambly post and its gonna contain a lot of thoughts about a lot of things. What its not going to contain (at least not intentionally) is any sort of like... trying to say how anything (from the hunt construction side) *should* be. This is about how things *were* this year, how I felt about them, and how I think I'm going to take what I learned into how to approach solving next year and beyond, because boy howdy did I learn a lot. This is all opinion stuff, don't take anything I say as an imperative or me telling you what to do, rather just ideas and thoughts being thrown out for fun. 

Also, there may be some spoilers in this. I'm going to try my best to mark them where applicable, but for consistency and your own knowledge, the following may be mentioned without warning: Puzzle and round names, broad structure (not individual round structures), and in person interaction/physical things which are, to my knowledge, not likely to be replicable in D&M's archive, though maybe I'll be proven wrong.

Anyways, this was my first mystery hunt on campus! My third mystery hunt overall (2020, 2024, and now 2025), and my favorite one yet (no shade to '20 and '24, but being in person really was just incredible). I got to meet a lot of cool people and got to do and see a lot of cool things. More on some of those cool things later. The really big cool thing I got to do though was this absolutely incredible hunt. D&M did an absolutely fantastic job in my opinion, and while I got to say as much to a few of them, I hope my excitement and happiness surrounding this event comes through.

My team this year, Math + Vehem (pronounced "vayhem"), was a combination of multiple teams! My normal team, Vehemence, and The Mathemagicians. And we managed to finish, just barely!! More on that later. Our team was about 25-30ish people onsite, and 70ish people solving remotely. While I frankly didn't get much opportunity to even *read* a lot of the solving going on in Discord, everyone on site was a joy to work with and made this experience great. Thank you to any of y'all reading :). Having our team split to this degree presented some interesting challenges though, and that's the bulk of what I want to talk about. But first, I want to gush a bit more and this is my post so you can't stop me!

Just talking about stuff I liked

The Gala concept was just amazing. It tied everything together, it made things feel like we were in something *real*. Being able to see the running team made things feel alive, being able to interact and get into character made things fun, and being able to be camped out in the Gala during the last few hours before it closed made me feel like even though we were all on our own teams, we were also all on one big team all making a final push. There was real energy in the air, I loved it

The characters were great too! Having them walking around was excellent, getting to have the occasional unplanned interaction or brief exchange. Specifically, I was on a mission to find one Ferdinand Carter, because I had a hunch. The kickoff that I attended had the intro skit featuring Mr. Carter discussing his fondness for patisseries, and refusing to shut the hell up about it. This gave me an idea: what if we gave him some dessert? Seems like a sensible idea, maybe something fun happens. So we did, or at least we tried. For the remainder of Friday, and the majority of Saturday, Mr. Carter was nowhere to be found! We asked at the bar, and they did their best to locate him, checking backstage or seeing if someone else was in a "real" interaction with him, but until about 7 or 8pm on Saturday, we could not track him down. When we finally did, and presented him with our fresh, gourmet Hostess™ cupcakes, we were delighted with a fun conversation riddled with puns and winks. So no *mechanical* easter egg, but we had some good fun, and came away happy. That was, until we got to the puzzle "Half Baked" (Spoilers ahead for the answer, but not mechanics, of "Half Baked"). We reached the physical interaction phrase of this puzzle at around 6pm on Sunday, which instructed us to "give some dough", and provide the bar with a baked good. Hang on a moment, we already did that, we think?? Sure enough, the bartenders were happy to accept the fact that we had given Mr. Carter some cupcakes the previous day, and away we went with our answer. I had so much fun from that, it felt organic, and I feel like it really was proof of how willing the bartenders, characters, and press were to play along with trying to get into things without prompting.

Finally, I gotta talk about a couple puzzles. 2 specifically, though every single puzzle I solved was a blast, and I have MANY to look through in the coming days and weeks because I was so focused on physical and on-site puzzles. Those being "Kindred Spirits" and "The Shell Game" (spoilers ahead for "Kindred Spirits" and "The Shell Game". Obviously). 

Kindred Spirits started out as another puzzle I saw in the queue and thought "wow! that looks like fun and my kind of thing, but I need to go run and find something, I guess I'll solve it after the hunt". But after our remote solvers managed to crack it during the overnight, and I came in the following morning, I discovered I would in fact be solving it now, as there were now 6 bottles of liquid in our room. I like cooking and would like to hope my palate is at least decent, lets do this. What followed was... a lot more involved than it needed to be. Just about everyone in our onsite crew tried the liquids at some point, and "hey, try these liquids" became the standard greeting for anyone entering our HQ (including the press). Once we did eventually get it, I tried all 6 mixed together, and to be honest, it wasn't that bad. My teammates disagreed.

The Shell Game was the final puzzle in the Paper Trail round, and it just felt like a masterwork of construction. The whole round did. Finding the linked graph of shell corporations feeding into each other, mapping out the letters on the edges, it all clicked together in such a fun way. It also got my favorite hint we received from the press, when I suggested an idea while getting our connectivity graph error checked and was told "That sure would have been a real mean and weird thing to do". Really impressive stuff

Anyways, now I'm done gushing about stuff I really extra especially enjoyed, onto the thoughts about how things went!

Managing the room

Leading up to the hunt, we did some preparations about who was bringing what, and since I would be taking the train, I ended up bringing a fairly significant chunk of our supplies, including a printer. I was sort of anticipating the printer might not actually be that useful, any puzzle where printing would be necessary would be physical and handed to us, or solvable remotely, right? However, it actually ended up being the savior on both "The Killer" and "Chinatown", and we were so glad we had it. However, bringing so much of the supplies and being inexperienced with regards to what's okay to leave in the room posed two problems: packing everything, and hauling it to the hotel and back each night. It was all in a roller suitcase, so it could have been worse, but I'm going to be looking into better solutions for this. Larger wheels, what can be left in the room, and the idea I'm most enthused by, building out a suitcase with a printer, power strip, and other supplies installed more permanently, with the idea being that all you need to do is unzip the suitcase and plug it in to be all set to hunt for the day. Is this worth the effort? Probably not! Do I still want to try? Yes.

Upon arrival, setting up the board with persistently useful info ended up being a great use of time. The first hour or so of puzzles always end up being really swarmy and hard to follow on a large team, so instead of attempting to solve stuff which is going to fall quickly anyways, I organized our board. Important phone numbers, event information, and some basic navigation info all went up, and this ended up being tremendously useful, particularly the event info.

Along with that info, I initially intended and attempted to organize meals for the team. The idea was that I would pick out 2-3 places, and a time, and people could sign up for whichever option they wanted and go grab food as a group. This would provide advantages in not having to go alone, knowing where places were, not swarming a place with 20 people all at once, and not leaving campus with no solvers during lunchtime. However, this did not work. Things were just too hectic to hit mealtimes on a schedule like that, picking out places at the end of a day of puzzling was too much to think about, and people were often just asking others to grab them something when they went out, myself included. Ultimately, it seems like catering would be the move, but that may strain whatever campus rules regarding food in the classrooms is, and requires substantially more awareness of your team size than we had nailed down. Oh well, it was worth a shot.

Managing the room talking to everyone away from the room

This is the section which made me particularly want to write this, and its a tough problem to solve. As The Case of the Shadow Diamond was more physical and interactive than certainly any Mystery Hunt I've ever seen, and by the sounds of it, than has been seen for a good while, this was a challenge to navigate for a team with 70% ish of its solvers remote. I think this hunt was fantastic with all its physical components and would remain as such even without the effort they're going through to archive and provide home versions of as much of it as possible (though, I got to see it through the in person lens, so take that with a grain of salt). Through talking with some people far more experienced in both puzzles and MITMH specifically, I reached the personal conclusion that its far more useful to think about the unique challenges of each particular hunt and adapt team strategy accordingly and drastically if necessary, rather than seeing those challenges as a deviation from what we (and certainly I) have gotten used to over the past few years with how much online hunts have thrived. Teams may need to pivot and reprioritize their goals and strategies depending on what suits them, and the challenges available. This is mostly just to say that I think it ends up being more fun to take the difficulty of online solving a heavily physical hunt as a challenge, and figure out how you want to solve that problem for your team, both if you're remote and if you *can* make it on site. So here's how we tried to solve that problem, and what worked and what didn't!

By far our biggest success was one which wasn't explicitly planned: streams. We had a couple people, but one in particular, who were excited and diligent about filming and livestreaming our physical shenanigans to our discord server, especially the interactions and character confrontations. We heard from multiple remote solvers just how much this helped them feel connected and involved, and like there was much less disparity between remote and onsite experiences. Highly recommend, 10/10. Maybe we'll want to bring more of an actual rig next time, with a handle or mic, or something to make the stream itself a bit smoother (unsure if anything could be done there, it did cut out sometimes without much we could do about it)

The biggest *planned* idea was to project a discord window onto one of the walls, to provide a very direct text window for remote solvers to converse with the room and get our attention. This didn't really work for a couple reasons. First, we didn't plan quiiiite far enough, and didn't have a device to actually plug *in* to the projector. Nobody wanted to permanently constrain their laptop in a particular place, and while a couple people were willing to set their phone down, turns out phones sometimes don't have settings to keep the screen on ad infinitum. Oops. Second, it didn't turn out all that useful because everyone was staring at their screens nearly constantly anyways. If our attention was needed, we had an onsite role to ping and we all saw it quickly anyways. Oh well, it was a neat idea, and I think it has some legs and merit, but will need a bit more tinkering to make a functioning and useful piece of hunting strategy.

Here's where we get into the unanticipated friction and difficulties, and I'd like to be clear that these are in no way criticisms of my teammates or individual behaviors, but rather a failure of systems. In a team as large as this, things are bound to go less than perfectly, so we build systems to prevent complete calamity, and so here's my thoughts on making those systems better!

We had a system to vote on which puzzles to unlock next. My understanding was this was engaging and fun to get a say on progression for some remote solvers, but honestly I did not pay attention to it or care what puzzles we were going to be unlocking next for the entire hunt, and I think the rest of the on-site crew and some off-site were the same way. To us, this simply added confusion and noise in the LOTS of chatter and discussion that was already being had, and ultimately I'm skeptical of the benefit it really caused. For a smaller team, I 100% see the appeal, you want to pick and choose your battles so you can complete as much as you can. However, we were anticipating being able to unlock every puzzle eventually though, and the order didn't seem especially important at the pace we moved to be able to get through that many unlocks.

Relatedly, we had a shift system where a particular person was in charge of a few things: running unlock votes, creating and linking new spreadsheets with our discord bot management system, writing up summaries to describe the current state of the hunt and what things needed prioritizing, giving the go ahead to send hints, etc. These shifts changed every 3 hours, but we ended up often having people duck out and pass along much quicker than that. Managing all of those hats was very very intensive, especially for the first 24 hours or so when unlocks were moving so quick. It was nearly impossible to actually get to solve something during those times, even for remote shift captains, much less those of us onsite. My takeaway from this was that someone on their home computer, with a mouse, their normal keyboard and desk setup, and potentially additional monitors, is much better suited to handling administration work like that than someone onsite on a laptop, having now done those kinds of tasks from both sides over the past 2 hunts. Being onsite is juggling lots of things and hectic on its own. Be gentle with the workload on your onsite folks, someone could walk in the door with something important at any moment :)

Finally, we had an onsite role which was pingable to alert all of our solvers on campus. This worked great! We need to know when we have to go pick something up after all. However, the management of expectations for speed and thoroughness of communication was difficult. Things are happening all around, so something could pull an onsite solver away from their keyboard for a few seconds, but this isn't expected when comparing to talking with other remote solvers who have their sole focus on the computer. You can generally get a quick update, but it will be lacking in details, or you can get a thorough update, but it will take a bit and may be spread across a few messages. This is unfortunately just the nature of a split physical/remote team, I think. So, in future, I think it may be helpful to consider deciding ahead of time which is preferred. Quick and snappy, or a bit more delayed and thorough? I'm not sure which one would be more useful, and it probably depends on the team. Personally, I would probably want slower but thorough (gee, 3,000 words in and I'm just now coming to the conclusion I like communications to be thorough? Insight of the century right there), since details are important in this hobby. There's a worry I have about what this does to the remote solving experience, but ultimately I think with faith that yes, the update is coming or is still being typed, it will still prove a high quality communication and doorway into the hunt experience for remote participants.

Editing Buzz here, I thought of one more thing so I'm slipping it in at the last moment. Haha, you thought this post had a consistent chronology. Merch orders! If people offsite really want to get merch, figure out that logistics ahead of time. The wrap up room was really hectic, and many of our team left the auditorium with our own shirts, looked at our phones, and saw we had a bunch of pings asking for us to grab stuff. Whoops. I believe I heard things sold out quickly, so maybe its better we didn't anyways. We did still have the pins to contend with, which would've been a lot easier if we had been expecting them, and they've been consistent for a least a few years so we probably should've. Lucky for me, Vehemence was already doing team pins which I was distributing, so I already had that planning done for that half of the crew. Unlucky for everyone else, it meant I knew it was kind of a massive pain and shipping small quantities of pins internationally is super expensive. Just something to add to your pre-hunt planning checklist.

To summarize these last couple sections into "action items" that I'm intending to bring to the table when beginning to think about planning for next year:

• Be a bit more prepared/built up for physical equipment, in terms of knowing what to bring, and efficiently setting it up each day.
• Bring the remote solvers into the room persistently, somehow.
• Cater or otherwise plan group meals far earlier.
• Plan to be streaming, and bring supplies to do so effectively.
• Divide responsibilities more clearly and appropriately between remote and onsite. Some stuff can only be done onsite, some stuff can be done far more effectively remotely, and this experience has identified several of each.
• Make the call ahead of time of the expectations for text communication between modes.
• Plan ahead on who is intending on getting what merch, and how its getting back to them.

The part where it ends

That's kinda it! Or at least, that's it with respects to the thoughts that were just fighting to be put somewhere or that I think are maybe interesting enough to warrant talking about. I'm in no way an expert, I just had a cool weekend where a lot of stuff happened and so I wanted to talk about it :). Take all these thoughts with a grain of salt, they're just one person's opinions and as was proven with some of my ideas this year, I am, in fact, sometimes wrong (wow!). 

So anyways, now I'm gonna get a little personal and talk about the external world a bit, because as great as this weekend was, now that it's over, I can no longer be experiencing it in a vacuum. I wrote these far-too-many words on my train home. It got stuck outside New York for 2 hours. Yay Amtrak. Additionally, my ride ends at Washington D.C., where a very different event was happening on Monday, January 20th, 2025. For many of us, and all of us in the states, we entered this hunt from one world and are coming back out of it into a different one, one that I'll level with y'all, I'm pretty scared of. This hunt gave me an escape from it when I desperately needed it, and so do other hunts, and so does (attempting) writing puzzles. I hope to see a lot of cool stuff come out of this year, and I hope you all think stuff I make this year is cool too. I think we might need it. 

See you all during all the hunts this year, and at Mystery Hunt next year.