Hunt Wrap-Up

22 teams (15 full ranking and 7 partial ranking) comprising 128 solvers took part in SGPH2024, solving 277 puzzles in total. 9 teams (including 1 partial ranking) completed the SGPH2024 quest. Their party of heroes overcame the odds to defeat Sylas and stopped the latest Awakening, restoring peace back to Square Grid! Great job!

Top props to Eggplant Parms, who came out of the gate strong and unlocked the meta by 7.02pm, but got held up there for some time there before being the first team to finish the hunt at 9.54pm. White Maria and Hee-ho followed closely behind, finishing the hunt second and third at 10.05pm and 10.29pm respectively. Huge congrats too to the other teams who finished - Yuki, Jing Lin & Shi, McGriddles Fan Club, ._., Phoenix, and SIMOWO. All of them for the first time, other than McGriddles Fan Club. A few other teams came close to finishing as well, and the number of puzzles solved each team increased in general. So a big well done and thank you to all our teams and solvers for being part of SGPH2024.

Below is the interactive team solve progress chart. You can select/deselect the teams to be shown from the legend, and also choose the time period to zoom in on for the x-axis, using the sliders at the top of the chart.

Chocobo Feather (First correct and fastest answer submission) - By Eggplant Parms for Hidden Nest on Sat 1:14pm

Phoenix Down (Answer submissions that almost didn't made it) - Metaverse solved and submitted the correct answer for Drafty Dome just before the hunt closed on Sun 11:55pm. This was the last correct answer submission in the hunt. ._., Phoenix, and SIMOWO solved their metas in the last 30 minutes before hunt closed.

Gunblade (Sniper award for highest submission accuracy) - McGriddles Fan Club solved 19 puzzles with 11 incorrect submissions. White Maria was similarly accurate solving 19 puzzles, with 12 incorrect submissions.

Rename Card (Funniest incorrect answer submission that would have been a scary Guardian spell) - TWITTERBLAST by Jing Lin & Shi

Remedy (Most common incorrect answer attempts) - SUGAR for Ruins by 9 teams, and FRONTPAGE for Secret Garden by 7 teams.

Echo Screen (Most repeated submission attempt by a team) - Solve@NUS submitted the extracted phrase for Drafty Dome 14 times in succession (the auto-responder did say "Keep going!")

Megalixir (Commendations for Saturday overnight solvers) - As usual, a number of teams continued solving the puzzles overnight Saturday. Most notably, SIMOWO solved Jagged Crags at 12.16am, Ruins at 2.56am, Sparkling Summit at 2.59am, Overlooking Outcrop at 3.56am, and Rimy Ravine at 5:15am! Phoenix also solved Overlooking Outcrop at 12.22am, Hippocampi Reef at 1.22am, Sparkling Summit at 3.06am, at Abaddon Abyss at 3.19am. Yuki solved Starry Valley at 12.02am, Isolated Islands at 12.33am, then cracked the meta at 2.25am. McGriddles Fan Club also solved Mountain Pass at 1.26am, Abaddon Abyss at 1.51am, and Hippocampi Reef at 2.35am. Many other teams were active too and had overnight solves. Kudos for the dedication and great solving by everyone!

Omega Badge (Finisher award for partial ranking team) - SIMOWO, who only signed up for the hunt around Fri 4pm, was one of the nine teams who completed the hunt. Well done!

Fireworks (Most entertaining hint requests) - A few teams sent in humorous hint requests with "desperate" pleas and appeals to "please send help". This often included links to their spreadsheet, inviting us to watch "live entertainment as we struggle", or to watch them "panic" and "struggle live" while solving a particular puzzle. The most entertaining part though, was watching live the moment of the aha and realization when the team members eventually cracked the puzzle, and celebrated their solve.

Eye Drops (Easiest hint request response) - Solve@NUS sent a hint request for Drafty Dome, sharing basically their correct theory on the next three steps to solve the puzzle. Except that even searching the right way, they couldn't spot the answers they were looking out for! So all we had to do was to confirm they were doing the right thing.

Chef's Knife (Best effort task submissions) - For Mobile Cafe, teams had to come up with and submit a creative 3-course menu themed after each of the heroes (a few teams misinterpreted this as their team members, which we accepted). In a way, it was also an opportunity to write a mini-puzzle with the menu descriptions cluing the three courses. We really enjoyed many of your efforts and innovative creations. We did try to guess your actual courses from the descriptions, but in the interest of time during the hunt mainly provided the answer clue in our responses, instead of verifying the food items.
._. far exceeded our expectations by submitting a menu that looked like it came from an actual high-end restaurant. Other pun courses that we liked included:
tehcpingsiewdai's Mori's Nori - Delicate macroalgae to initiate your meal with nutrition. Bursting with umami from freshly harvested shio
The Irregulars' Kramer's Fighter Crunch - Crispy buttermilk fried poultry smothered in a sweet, spicy, and sticky sauce with an addictively crunchy exterior
Solve@NUS' Tamas Soil Nutrients: A dark, sweet and rich baked dough topped with freshly picked spherical offsprings from the fruit trees

King of Jump Rope (Skip hacks by teams) - For Mountain Pass, some teams (including Quest 3.14 and The Poos) converted the hieroglpyh symbols in the grid to their Unicodes, and noticed the intended groupings from there. Because this Unicode block is assigned/numbered based on the Gardiner classifications too. For the list of level unlocks, some teams also noticed the unintended pattern that those for cutscenes alternated with the ones for Guardian locations, which prompted them to level their heroes in a manner to avoid the cutscene unlocks.

Work on SGPH2024 started right after the last postponed hunt ended in Oct, which is considered late, since there is less than the usual 12 months to prepare. This being the 10th year of SGPH, I was keen to explore a more ambitious and fun theme and structure. I am a Dungeons & Dragons(D&D) and role-playing game(RPG) fan, and was highly inspired by MIT Mystery Hunt 2017, which had such a theme, with a party of fantasy characters, and the players eventually joining them. However, that hunt used the characters as rounds, which I felt was a missed opportunity in terms of the characteristic levelling-up aspect of an RPG. So I came up with an original idea to allow teams to not just help their fantasy party by solving puzzles, but to also play the RPG by exploring the map and levelling up their characters (and deciding whom to level up themselves). This is something unique that has not been done in a puzzle hunt before, so the challenge was coming up with the implementation plan. Fortunately, there were matching concepts in the puzzle hunt context which made sense - the puzzles would be locations on a world map that teams could explore and reveal more hidden locations, and levelling up of characters would be rewarded with puzzle unlocks and video cutscenes. My initial idea was even allowing attribute points allocation after levelling up, but this was scrapped as it involved too much custom website tech. The setting was originally a D&D/Lord of the Rings journey, played through a Final Fantasy(FF)-style RPG video game. But eventually, the theme evolved more into FF, which I am also a big fan of.

First of all, I fully understand that the majority of solvers are solely focused on the puzzles, and are quite incurious about everything else during a hunt :) However, some hunts like the MIT Mystery Hunt are always accompanied by meaningful overarching stories that immerse and bring solvers more into the hunt's puzzle world and their puzzle journey. This helps to tie together the hunt beyond being just an exercise of solving through the set of puzzles. The story thematically explains why teams are solving the puzzles, and making solvers vested in their effort by highlighting the story outcome and rewards when they succeed in their solving. SGPH is one such hunt, since I actively model it after the MIT Mystery Hunt. The outcomes of enjoying solving puzzles and enjoying the process/story of the hunt are not mutually exclusive, and in fact complement each other. It only takes solvers a few minutes away from the solving, which could be a welcome and useful break as well.

I wrote an original story and characters for the hunt, as I wanted an original concept, and felt that referencing a specific FF game or FF too much would make the theme too niche/obscure. So instead, I drew inspiration from and made references to some of the broader iconic recurring FF story themes, that even casual gamers would be able to recognize and appreciate. These include amnesia, and heroes coming together and uprising against an evil foe. Through the cutscene videos, I also used the FF story-telling style of shifting the focus onto the personal lives of each character, highlighting their passions, self-doubt, internal struggles, and self-sacrifice. This also helped to make the heroes feel more real, and for teams to feel more invested in them and their journey. I explored in some ways the central story theme of memories as well - both in the traditional context, and what meaning it held for each of the heroes. For Alessia, memories represented amongst other things the childhood and life she shared with her fellow companions, and from her heart she felt a need to preserve and protect them. For Luka, he harbored tragic memories of his lost brother after the last Awakening, and for a long time actually actively sought to forget them. For Tamas, his life experiences and memories stretch far longer than the others, which have given him a pragmatic outlook, and an acceptance that not all of them may return from this dangerous quest. Despite these differences, the heroes share a common bond of friendship. The hunt story (and team's experience) parallels the classic "hero's journey". We see Luka's growth and development in overcoming their setback, as he allowed himself to let go of his self-doubt, and stepped up to pursue his desires, which was to complete the quest in honor of his friend. For those who followed the story, there is also an Easter egg hidden at the end, which you can email to let us know if you spotted it.

Shorter/easier hunt - SGPH2024 continued the change from SGPH2023, going again for a hunt with a larger number of shorter/easier puzzles, to improve the overall solver experience. This approach was more aligned with our solver profile and hunt duration, and allowed teams the satisfaction of having more solves, and even completing the hunt. The results are clear. SGPH2024 had nine finishers, three of which were within the planned initial 8-9 hours. This is more than the total number of finishers from the past nine years of the hunt. On average, 12.6 puzzles were solved by each team, almost double the average in past years. There could therefore be some inevitable trade-off in terms of puzzle complexity and variety with this direction, which some solvers might have felt. This situation is not ideal in my view either, but it is challenging to have the best of both worlds. Unless teams have more active and/or experienced solvers over the hunt weekend, such that puzzle length/difficulty are less of a writing consideration. Teams only had an average of 5.8 solvers, while finisher teams had an average of 6.3 solvers (7.0 solvers for the finisher teams after Saturday). So filling up the team rosters (whether with other friends who are puzzle enthusiasts or merging with existing teams) and blocking out everyone's time for more of the weekend would help teams solve more puzzles and reach the end, and faster. Then the longer/more complex puzzles may become more viable for inclusion into SGPH again. Rest assured though that SGPH puzzles will continue to be substantive and varied as much as possible, while also being thematic, interesting and fun for solvers.

Single round/meta - Another change this year is the hunt structure having a single round with a single meta, which was only tried once before in SGPH2020. While SGPH had generally used two-round structures, with the first meta being an easier achievement point for less experienced teams, it has become clear that the meta served more as a bottleneck/roadblock. On average, teams took around two hours to solve metas (even factoring in hint support), including for SGPH2024 as well. So a first round meta often became a self-fulfilling prophecy and team graveyard timing-wise. Having only a single round made it more possible for teams to progress further, to actually reach and solve the final meta, as demonstrated by the number of SGPH2024 finishers. As an alternative, the six Guardian puzzles in SGPH2024, which are unlocks, served as proxy milestones for teams in terms of hunt progress (also because solving all six was needed to unlock the final meta).

Initial unlocks - This year, we also chose to have a large number of unlocked/open puzzles from the start, and generally throughout the hunt, only tapering off towards the end. This approach provided more choices to teams to pick puzzles which they could solve or were inclined towards solving. Having more open puzzles also trains teams to triage puzzles for difficulty, and to manage their team members' experience and skills effectively. E.g. Beginners could contribute with solving easier word clues, while experienced solvers are freed up to value-add in lending eyes on ahas and extraction steps across puzzles. Feedback on this change has been largely positive.

Copyable puzzle spreadsheets - Another significant change is the provision of copyable puzzle spreadsheets for teams, which were expectedly well-received. The main advantage is the time-savings, which is helpful for our relatively short hunt duration. The reason we did not include these previously is a practical one. The formatting of the spreadsheets is largely manual, which means double the effort with each puzzle, for a small organizing team. There are also risks in maintaining puzzle accuracy/consistency with this duplication, especially through rounds of changes from test-solving. With ready spreadsheets, solvers also tend to refer less to the actual puzzle formatting and images, and may miss out on crucial details for solving. So while we will endeavor to continue to provide these spreadsheets moving forward, teams should also not take these for granted, and be aware of the potential drawbacks.

Celestine as usual is our tech chief, without whom the hunt website would not have been possible. The website this year required some additional customizations to support the level-based unlock mechanics and an extra "Party" page. The character's levels were implemented as "Attributes" which could take numeric values. Celestine originally wanted to build a system where puzzles could be unlocked based on attributes as well as the regular mechanisms such as number of other puzzles solved, but decided to implement the unlocking logic using a custom function instead due to the nonstandard use of these attributes (e.g. Alessia could not count towards level requirements after she reached level 6 due to being dead). The attribute system does open up new possibilities and we look forward to possibly making use of it in future hunts.

This year, we answered a total of 82 hints, significantly lower than the 130 from last year. This could be partly because the puzzles were easier and cleaner - all the puzzles had at least 6 solves without hints, with Encounter puzzles averaging 14.4 solves without hints. Notably too, I observed that even in a number of the hint requests, teams were able to demonstrate an understanding of how the puzzle and its subsequent steps likely worked, and were just missing an insight or the intermediate aha. That was very heartening, because thinking ahead about how the overall puzzle and latter steps could work, is also a helpful strategy for good solvers. This is often part of processing the information available in a puzzle, and figuring out what each could be used for (possibly later). Or similarly, for standard steps like extraction and reordering (if needed), what information could be used for each those steps. This allows a solver to roughly narrow down to the unused information, which aids in figuring out how to use them. In many cases, figuring out the latter steps first could help avoid the need to solve all the clues and/or fill an entire grid. As usual in my hint responses, I try to share any relevant tips or common hunt puzzle conventions, to help teams in tackling similar conundrums in future puzzles they encounter. You can also read this puzzle hunt guide for more of these conventions and solving tips.

Do follow up the momentum and take part in other upcoming online puzzle hunts this year together with your team, as the solving experience really helps! Join us at the SG Puzzlers Discord group (and the SG Puzzlers Facebook group) to keep in touch, be informed of good upcoming hunts, and find members for your hunt team. We look forward to seeing you all there, and hopefully at other online puzzle hunts too.

Another recommendation is to go solve some past puzzle hunts (ideally with others in your team) for fun and practice! There is a good supply of archived hunts with ready puzzles available online, so you don't need to write them or wait for new puzzles. I'd strongly encourage trying puzzles from past MIT Mystery Hunts, which generally have well-tested puzzles that follow standard hunt puzzle conventions. These allow you to solve in an intuitive and logical manner, giving you a better hunt puzzle foundation and reinforcing your solving skills. Recent Mystery Hunts usually have an initial round with many puzzles that cater to solvers of various experience levels. There are also many other archived puzzle hunts out there you could practice solving, including past Singapore Puzzle Hunts.

I'm also planning to run a hunt puzzle solving and writing workshop in the coming months, as part of continuing to help grow and give back to our local puzzle hunt community. More details will be shared in the Discord group when finalized, so remember to set your message notifications for the server if you are not a frequent Discord user.

We are also opening for limited applications to join the Puzzlesmiths team to help organize the annual SGPH. If you have a strong interest in writing puzzles, and are interested to contribute, and improve through a proper puzzle and hunt writing process, email and tell us a bit about yourself! We are also looking for those with skills in art/graphics, web design, tech, video production, music, and/or performance. If you would like to volunteer in these areas, let us know too. Involvement in these areas are open to those not into puzzles as well, so if you know of anyone with such skills who don't mind collaborating with SGPH, can put us in contact with them too.

Feel free to post any other questions or discussions on SGPH in the Discord channel. Stay tuned for SGPH 2025!

Hunt Editor
Ong Kah Kien
on behalf of Celestine Lau and Sim Hong Jhun (Puzzlesmiths)