Tag Archives: mezzacotta

Puzzle hunts and puzzle competitions right about now

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Here Comes The Sun! ...from a T-shirt credited to "Pablo Bustos aka Wirdou"
That rather fun image (adapted, without permission, from this shirt credited to “Pablo Bustos aka Wirdou”) sets the tone for some of the things happening at the moment which may be of interest.

It’s Labor Day, without the u, in the United States today. As he has previously done for nine of the ten previous Labor Days, Mark Halpin has posted an extravaganza: a hunt-like collection of puzzles to solve at home. They are principally word and picture puzzles; Mark has a glorious reputation for setting devious cryptic crossword variants. E-mail individual puzzle answers to Mark for verification; one team who solves within the first two and a half weeks, chosen at random, will win a $25 gift certificate prize. (Alternatively, e-mail Mark for hints and tips.) The theme for this year’s hunt inspires the title of this article.

If this hunt doesn’t fit into your schedule, or if you want a hunt designed for a larger team and with possibly a slightly broader style of puzzles, then a good option is the mezzacotta puzzle competition taking place from Monday 10 October, 2016 onwards. This is the direct descendent of the CiSRA puzzle hunt which gave a great deal of fun to many people over the years. The format is expected to be very similar to the CiSRA hunt, as well as the MUMS and SUMS puzzle hunts of the mathematics societies of Australian universities; many people are looking forward to seeing the precise specifics of the form to be taken by this year’s hunt.

Alternatively, there are some competitions which test the ability of a solver – or a team – to set puzzles, as well as to solve them. This post comes too late to feature timely details of Iron Puzzler of Southern California, just over a week ago, but Germany will be hosting the Puzzle Decathlon competition in Wuppertal (just east of Dusseldorf, so not far from the Dutch border) in November. Some rounds feature puzzles to solve; other rounds see you set puzzles for your fellow competitors!

Hunting for news

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"Puzzle Hunt" and a basket of plastic eggsTime for a round-up of puzzle hunts and related events, both in-person and online:

  • Which to start with, in-person or online? How about both! Breakout Manchester recently posted on their Twitter account that they will be giving away free games at some point in the next day or two to locals who can follow the clues that they post and, presumably, hot-foot it to the clued location. The hashtag #BreakoutBounty may also tell more. Exciting times, especially if you’re in town!
  • Firmly in person, London sees An Appetite for Murder by A Door In A Wall run through October and its shoulders. Several of the sessions are sold out already, particularly at weekends, and many of the others cannot have far to go. This site had the good fortune to get to meet the company’s founder Tom Williams at Now Play This recently and talk hunts and now is even more excited about ADIAW‘s work. If you get the chance to get to play their The Long and the Short of it trading game, it’s highly recommended.
  • Elsewhere in London, Treasure Hunts in London have games coming up as usual, with the next game on the roster being a Trick or Treat hunt around the British Museum. This happens on Hallowe’en weekend, as the name suggests; there are two runs of a version suitable for teenagers on Friday 30th October and the main event on the afternoon of Saturday 31st.
  • Over in France, escapegame.paris points to a “giant live escape” in Paris, a free event being run eight times between Wednesday 23rd October and Saturday 26th October. It’s being run by Team Break, which has rooms in Paris, Lille and Lyon where your team is sent by an agency to combat supervillains. Cool!
  • Online, thanks to escaping.sg for pointing out that while the CiSRA puzzle hunt is sadly no more, some of the people behind will be continuing to run online hunts in the first half of the year, starting from 2016, associated with the mezzacotta web comics. Looking forward to it in the fullness of time.
  • If you can’t wait that long for an online puzzle hunt, online quiz site Sporcle have just started running the Sporcle Intelligence Agency puzzle hunt, running over the next fortnight or so. This isn’t the first they’ve run; their first one was a couple of years ago.

Phew… and those are just the ones that the site can definitely talk about, too!