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Epilogue

Besides being a summary of the behind-the-scenes aspects of the hunt, I also hope that such sharing provide helpful glimpses into some of the considerations and planning processes as part of writing a hunt or hunt puzzle.

1) Summary

As usual, many thanks to all our SGPH teams and solvers for participating and making this hunt possible. It is always good to meet and interact with our returning solvers, as well as the new ones. Though we hope to see more of you during the other online hunts throughout the year too! This year, it was especially encouraging to see a number of teams very motivated and still working on and solving puzzles way into the extended hunt hours. A total of four teams solved the meta before wrap-up, with ROUS being the first team to finish also the runaround and complete the hunt/race at 11.12pm. Congrats again!

I also want to acknowledge, thank and show appreciation for the other members of the Puzzlesmiths team Celestine and Hong Jhun, who helped to put this year's hunt together, amidst other real-life priorities. They also ran almost all the team interaction puzzles, as well as manned the hint support for teams all the way (even though officially, we announced that support would only be limited after 8pm).

Part of the intent of SGPH is to help our local solvers learn and improve, and teams deserve massive props for the enthusiasm with which they approached the hunt. For teams that requested minimal or even no hints, they should not be too discouraged by the number of puzzles they did not solve by wrap-up, especially relative to other teams. Conversely, teams should also not be lulled into the false belief that the low solve rates of puzzles and by all teams (recurring characteristics of SGPH) mean there must be errors or issues in the hunt or puzzles. The puzzles have been test-solved and the hunt has also been completed within the projected time limit of 6-8 hours.

Unique to SGPH, the hunt size and number of solvable puzzles is always constraint by 3 major factors - hunt duration, team size and average team experience. While it helped that we extended hunt duration till wrap-up this year (and some solvers are even okay with a weekend-long hunt), we know only a limited number of solvers actually did continue solving into the night. That is less ideal too, as the hunt is intended to be a team collaboration. In terms of team size, most other hunts allow for larger teams of 6-10 solvers instead. Hunt experience-wise, the majority of solvers are relatively new to puzzle hunts, and almost all do not take part regularly in other online hunts. So unless we up these variables, it would be quite difficult to see shifts in the solve rates for SGPH.

2) Wrap-up Addendum

I forgot to share for learning purposes during the wrap-up, some sub-optimal team strategies to avoid, which might have hampered teams' progress and fun:

a) Not reading the race rules - Some teams did not realize Route Markers are no longer needed once the meta is unlocked. For those who did, it is also better strategy to focus on unlocking the meta first, so that you can starting thinking about it, observing or guessing patterns for feeder answers etc.

b) Solving parallelizable puzzles alone - Many individual solvers found it tedious when they solved puzzles like New York, Istanbul and Singapore alone (or even in pairs), and made mistakes which were hard to spot and correct by themselves. SGPH puzzles are generally written to be parallelizable for a team to work on together to shorten the effort and solve time, and to help double-check each other's work.

c) Not strategizing to target and solve specific puzzles together - All of the puzzles (except for Hanoi) are intended to be solved as a team, and it's more fun to share the joy of solving together a puzzle with the team. We often had 2-3 team members asking for hints on different puzzles they are working on separately, rather than discuss and try to help each other solve a puzzle together. Besides the pitfall of making mistakes which would be hard to spot and correct, it is also much harder to figure out an aha alone without the benefit of discussion and bouncing off observations and ideas.

3) Hunt Theme

The hunt theme this year was again something stowed in the idea folder for a number of years, before the right time came to execute it now. The Jules Verne source literature is an iconic one, that importantly also provided inherent plot progression for a short single round hunt. There was also the opportunity to base puzzles off different geographical locales, which provided plenty of interesting thematic content possibilities. But what sealed the theme this year are the international travel restrictions and even home quarantines during the ongoing global pandemic. So this "Around the World" theme is a way which we hoped could take our solvers out of wherever you are solving online from, to somewhere else totally, through the puzzles. We hope teams enjoyed this.

4) Hunt Length and Difficulty

Earlier I shared about the 3 SGPH constraints. From the past few SGPH, we know roughly that most teams could likely only solve a certain number of puzzles within the 6 to 8-hour official hunt duration. So the critical path of the puzzles to solve in order to complete the hunt was set to be within this number. This sort of precluded the option for a 2-round hunt with a short easy intro round. We had tried this structure in previous years, but the number of puzzles made it difficult for SGPH teams to complete. Hence we ended up with a unique hunt structure this year that not all the variety Route Marker puzzles would be required to complete the hunt - you only needed to solve 3 of these to unlock the meta, or possibly just the Fast Forward. However, for completeness, we did write an optional meta that uses all the Route Marker puzzles, unlocked as a bonus for those who have completed the hunt. This year, being an online hunt, we also extended answer submissions till hunt wrap-up, which allowed teams to continue solving more puzzles and for more teams to complete the hunt. We will likely revisit having a short easy intro round structure again for next year's hunt. Although one consideration is to make sure that some teams would be able to complete the hunt within reasonable time as well.

Another new thing incorporated this year was the puzzle difficulty rating that some of you had requested before. The main reason we added this was because of the theme and Fast Forward puzzle - as we needed a way to let teams know this was going to be a relatively much harder/longer puzzle, and hence there is that trade-off with attempting it. Eventually, I managed to also weave this element into the meta in a thematic manner. The difficulty ratings were definitely not always the most accurate - partly due to this constraint, and partly because we consciously tried to keep the length and difficulty of puzzles manageable due to the limited hunt duration. For example, the Moscow puzzle was not made more difficulty or longer just to try and match its constrained difficulty rating. Instead, I thought it could have been a minor hint about the inclusion of the difficulty levels. In any case, we are unlikely to have difficulty ratings for SGPH puzzles again. In terms of actual difficulty, the puzzles this year were relatively straightforward, and only two of them (Montmartre and Athens) had tricky ahas. But as usual for SGPH, the meta was intended to be solvable with just a smaller percentage of the feeder answers (about 5-6 Route Info answers this year), so those puzzles could likely be skipped for completion. Some puzzles like New York and Istanbul had longer solving steps as they were straightforward, but should be manageable when solved as a team.

5) Online Hunt and Discord

Going with a fully online hunt again this year was less than ideal from our organizing perspective. SGPH models after the MIT Mystery Hunt in being an onsite physical puzzle hunt for its first 5 years, unlike most other puzzle hunts which are fully online. This allowed for more personal interactions between hunt organizers and solvers, as well as better thematic immersion elements for a fun and memorable puzzle hunt. It meets one of our objectives to bring the local puzzle hunt community together annually, kind of like a convention.

Nonetheless, for the safety of everyone, this was for the better. And Mystery Hunt 2021 had shown that it was possible to still run an engaging hunt online. The built-in chat in our hunt interface was not so effective last year as teams did not check them often. So this year, we made use of Discord as a hunt communication platform that allowed us to conveniently interact with teams before the hunt, post announcement updates, check-in on teams if they need help, and to run interaction puzzles like the Speed Bump. Discord did fail us spectacularly during Hunt Kickoff though, and much apologies to everyone for the technical hiccup. While Discord voice channels had no user limit, there was a limit of 25 concurrent video users. However, it was not clear that this does not just limit the number of users who could share their videos in the voice channel to 25, but also makes that voice channel become limited to 25 users once someone shares video. Fortunately, we were able to quickly switch over to Google Meet for Kickoff (and Wrap-up), thanks for your patience during the changeover. I also only realized thereafter that the Bluetooth connection to my new headset was causing interference and my voice to become muffled during Kickoff, so that was another unexpected technical mishap to learn from.

6) Pre-Hunt Race Pack

Last SGPH, due to the rush of switching over to a fully online hunt and cancelling the venue booking, it was the only year we did not manage to prepare any thematic physical custom souvenirs for teams. This year, we are glad to have produced the thematic pre-hunt race pack, comprising custom boarding passes and postcards, in the iconic rip-tear envelope. It was quite a rush getting them printed out, shipped to Singapore and mailed out to all teams in time, as we could only confirm the numbers after closing registration. We hope that this complemented the set of thematic puzzles in this hunt that they solved, and provided a more fun and immersive experience to the hunt narrative and theme. From the feedback we received, we were glad that we took the effort to produce these, as the response was very good. On a related area, art did not feature as much this year due to the nature of the theme. However, we welcome anyone with a passion and talent for graphics/artwork to contact and join us for future hunts!

7) Variety Puzzles

Those familiar with SGPH will know that we intentionally introduce a few new puzzle elements every year to bring freshness and expose our local solvers to different kinds of hunt puzzles. This year, the Route Marker puzzles are easier variety puzzles based on the hunt theme. The more unique ones were the Speed Bump event interaction puzzle; the Roadblock puzzle, which is restricted to 1 solver per team; and the Intersection puzzle, which requires teams to pair up and solve together to get the aha. These are intended to be thematic and fun puzzles for solvers, and we were glad that the response to these 3 in particular were very good. We did some rehearsals on how to run the Speed Bump interactions smoothly, and it was great that all the teams managed to experience that puzzle, even after 8pm. We certainly enjoyed the interactions with the teams as well, and seeing all your creative drawings, some of which are showcased below. All 24 teams also attempted and solved the Roadblock. Some of the Route Markers ran on an honor system, so we didn't want it being too much of a factor in the hunt with teams only needing to solve 3. As mentioned earlier, this was also to shorten the critical path of the number of puzzles needed to complete the hunt. We hope that teams did get a chance to solve more of the Route Marker puzzles after completing the hunt, as there is also the bonus/optional Route Marker Meta which uses their answers.

9) Final Note

Do arrange a time to try solving together with your team the remaining puzzles which you have not cracked yet! There are some nice ones that not many got to try during the hunt yet, like Hanoi, Montmartre, Seoul, and the Route Marker Meta. You can use the answer checker on the Puzzles page to avoid the solution spoilers. I have also re-written some of the solutions like for Montmartre and the meta, and improved the flow based on the logical solving steps to make them clearer and more intuitive. So apologies if you were confused by an earlier solution, feel free to check back on these on the Puzzles page. You can also continue posting in the Discord channel for any discussion on the hunt or puzzles.

If you recall the 3 SGPH constraints mentioned at the start of this epilogue, the sure way to build hunt experience and ramp up your solve rate is to take part in other online puzzle hunts. We would really urge everyone to join us in the SG Puzzlers Discord server (this is different from the SGPH one) and Facebook group, and form larger teams to take part in other online hunts together! There are a good variety of both challenging as well as beginner-friendly hunts out there which we would recommend to solvers in the Discord channel. So if you enjoyed solving SGPH, joining the Discord channel is a great way to keep connected and to participate in other fun puzzle hunts. We look forward to seeing you all at SGPH 2022!

Hunt Editor
Ong Kah Kien