This year, I hunted in a team of two (with occasional support from friends) under the name kwargers. The hunt was about a day long, so we didn’t have sufficient time or manpower needed to finish the hunt. Despite this, we ended up finishing two of the three rounds before the final meta.

Initial thoughts

This hunt was great! A shame the hunt window was so short, but I understand since there was an on-site component + it was a student-led effort. The theme of the hunt this time set us in the shoes of a rookie detective, solving small cases in the form of puzzles that connected to larger, more organised evildoings. Definitely a huge step up story-wise from the previous Brown hunt. The UI/UX was overall very immersive, but I sorely miss the Copy to clipboard button that was curiously absent from all of the puzzles in this hunt.

A few of the puzzles I thought could’ve used a bit more polishing (lack of enum for final solution for Red Thread, extraction from whole clip in Data instead of that specific line of dialogue) but puzzle quality was overall high.

I’ll go through 3 of my favourite puzzles from the one’s I attempted. Here’s the list of puzzles I took part in solving, whether mostly as a team or solo:

Puzzle	Team or Solo
The Case of Red Thread (META)	Team
Whaling Ships	Team
Whelp	Solo
Birbs at Brown	Solo
A Penny for Dreadful News	Solo
The Obituary	Team
Connections?	Team
Letter Troxd	Solo
Still at the Restaurant	Solo
Ocean Waves Blue	Solo
The Day He Died	Team
The God of The Labyrinth	Solo
The Case of Data (META)	Team
Steve’s College App	Solo
Lockbox	Solo

Letter Troxd

This was a NYT Games Letterboxd-esque puzzle, where each letter could only be used a certain amount of times. When I took over this puzzle, the first two rounds were already solved, but the third round was left untouched.

Round 1	Round 2	Round 3

I surmised that this puzzle had a very specific solution, or the search space would be too big. I wasn’t going to be able to come up with the solution through sheer willpower, so I modified a letterboxd solver to generate all possible words that I could use for the final pentagon.

While doing so, I ran into issues with the letter M (notice how M appears twice in the grid), which told me this puzzle was asking for a specific word that contained MM. Also, the starting point is set at the letter F, which was equally curious. Looking through the wordlist I generated (only 6607 words long) for words that start with F (not that many), and trying starting words like FEMINIST and FOTHERING, I eventually tried FLAMINGO. When looking at the list of words starting with O (again, not that many), right on the top of the list was OSTRICH, and I knew instantly that I was on the right track.

Solution: KINGFISHER

The God of The Labyrinth

This is a murder mystery where the solution presented by the detective at the end is not the correct one, and it is up to the reader to come up with a new, more logical interpretation of the murderer’s movements.

I loved the flavour of this puzzle. As a fan of Jorge Luis Borges’ works, and of murder mysteries in general.

There were several clues in the book that pointed the reader to the actual solution:

1. When R and Watson leave the building, the front door was unlocked despite the Prefect locking it upon entry.
2. In the Library, one of the guns had a still-hot barrel despite its handle being cool to the touch.
3. There are two secret rooms in the to-do list not visited by R and Watson: the Atelier and the Cellar.
4. R says “That makes three connections between the lower and upper floors” while Watson and the readers are only aware of two: Conservatory to Kitchen and the Stairway.
5. After the murder, no one saw anything suspicious in both the Storeroom and the Bedchamber.
6. There were footsteps from the Salon to the Conservatory and down the hatch to the Kitchen.
7. There were footsteps from the Kitchen to the Storeroom.

We can thus deduce three things:

• Clue 1: The murderer has managed to escape the labyrinth.
• Clue 2: The murderer was the automaton. The murder weapon was deposited in the Library after the murder.
• Clue 3, 4, 5: The Atelier and the Cellar are connected to each other, one being on the top floor and the other on the bottom. Since the murder happened in the Drawing Room, and the only two rooms abutting it are the Storeroom and Bedchamber, the Cellar / Atelier must be connected to the Drawing Room, and the murderer must’ve escaped through there.

Using these deductions and our remaining clues, we can reconstruct the murderer’s path after the crime was committed, from the Drawing Room to the Stairway (the exit):

Drawing Room -> Atelier -> Cellar -> Cloakroom -> Library -> Cloakroom -> Salon -> Conservatory -> Kitchen -> Storeroom -> Kitchen -> Storeroom -> Drawing Room -> Bedchamber -> Stairway

Now we can index into these rooms using the book code 651532411255468 to get the solution.

Solution: NICK BLOCKTHEWAY

A Penny for Dreadful News

This was a crossword puzzle. After filling in enough of the grid, we can spell out DRAW ST CLUES.

This grid was accompanied by two other diagrams:

and a map of Providence (shown later).

The 4x4 grid was obviously a reference to the centre of the main crossword grid, so the street we’re looking for is STAR ST. But what about the cause of the crime? The enumeration is (6) ACCIDENT.

Looking at the crossword clues, we can see that some of them are oddly phrased. Comparing it to the map, we can see similar names pop up, and we realise that some of the clues include street names on the map, e.g. Court call when the game's heading South -> SOUTH COURT ST. Retrieving all the street names and drawing them on the map as per DRAW ST CLUES, we get the image of a sleigh:

Solution: SLEIGH ACCIDENT ON STAR ST