Puzzle Potluck 4 Wrap-Up

Congratulations to the 263 teams that successfully planned the parade (and cleared up some other issues that might have come up along the way)! Special congratulations to ① LOWERCASE PITFALL SEED for being the first team to finish, on Saturday 8/21 at 1:27pm PDT, about 4.5 hours after the hunt started. 42 other teams finished within the first day (24 hours) of the hunt!

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in Puzzle Potluck 4. It’s awesome for us to see so many familiar teams returning from past Potlucks as well as new teams trying it out for the first time!

We were really happy to see that there were 714 teams that signed up, 420 teams that solved at least one puzzle, 343 teams that reported a body, and 263 teams that finished the entire hunt (and 129 teams that found the post-credits scene!). We didn't expect that the turnout would be on par with Puzzle Potluck 3 because of the timing of the pandemic, so thank you everyone :)

The next few sections of the page will cover our decisions while writing the hunt and some reflection now that it’s over. You can also find some interesting commentary in the author’s notes in the solutions. Feel free to jump straight to the fun stats and stories at the bottom if you’d like!

Goals

Puzzle Potluck continues to have the goal of providing a hunt that would be fun for all puzzlers, regardless of their experience level. We think we’ve found a sweet spot for a hunt that can be finished by a good percentage of teams, but still provides interesting puzzles and challenge for the best teams. Thus, we aimed to keep the length and puzzle difficulty of the hunt roughly the same as previous Puzzle Potlucks.

The unique twist and structure of Puzzle Potluck 3 was well received, so we wanted to continue experimenting with interesting hunt structures in Puzzle Potluck 4.

We also received a lot of great feedback on how fun the collaborative and interactive puzzles last year were, especially in pandemic times. With the awesome interactive games and puzzles from Teammate Hunt 2020, and MIT Mystery Hunts in 2020 and 2021, we wanted to incorporate a few “Teamwork Time” style puzzles into our hunt.

In the past, our metapuzzle writing was more focused on being thematic. As a result, they had less interesting mechanics and did not meaningfully rely on the feeder answers. This time, we wanted to write a metapuzzle with a memorable and interesting mechanic. We feel pretty good about what we came up with in “Bulletin Board.”

Potluck 3 also suffered from having less memorable puzzles because of the constraints of the hunt structure. We wanted to also have more interesting and stand-out individual puzzles this year, but we found it hard to do so because of the hunt structure again, and think we can still do better on this front.

Finally, we wanted to continue presenting a broader variety of puzzles. With all but one exception, we hope that you found the puzzles to be generally accessible without requiring too much research or niche knowledge. Last year, we missed out on writing a logic puzzle. This year, after a lot of surveys explicitly asked for more logic puzzles, we wrote a short logic puzzle that wasn’t quite a standard logic puzzle. Next time we’ll definitely write a full-fledged logic puzzle (maybe)!

Format

During our early brainstorming, Among Us stood out as a theme that could lend itself to an interesting hunt structure and potentially cool mechanics (multi-part tasks, discussions, sabotages, randomly assigning some teams to be impostors???). Our initial thought was to use Among Us as the sole theme for the entire hunt, but we were worried that not all teams would be excited about it, so we decided to weave it in with Animal Crossing, which we hoped would have a broader appeal. This mashup ended up working really well, and allowed us to add another shocking mid-hunt twist that hopefully lived up to the one in Puzzle Potluck 3.

In our last wrapup we said that even though we had some puzzles outside of the main round, the single-round soul of Puzzle Potluck remained. Puzzle Potluck 4 ended up being similar, as it started with the main round of 9 task puzzles and 1 metapuzzle but interspersed an extra mini-round along the way. We realized that releasing essentially 19 puzzles right at the start could feel overwhelming and considered starting with a smaller set, but we thought that would take away too much from the challenge of pairing the puzzles, which was a core aspect of the hunt. We tried to somewhat mitigate that issue by having Isabelle suggest a pairing to help teams that may have felt overwhelmed and not sure where to start.

The biggest format change this year was the addition of the multiplayer teamwork-based puzzles! When we were brainstorming the Among Us theme, we thought that type of puzzle would work really well as “discussions.” As you know if you completed the hunt, our good friends Isabelle, Timmy and Tommy, and Blathers were all ambushed by the Chimpostor after you solved 3, 5, and 7 task puzzles respectively. We were also excited to write a teamwork-based metapuzzle because we hadn’t seen that done before — unfortunately we found it very hard to incorporate the feeder puzzle answers into the teamwork game itself, but we still tried to make the mechanic of the game feel “meta.”

One last small change to mention is that we switched from progressive hints to keyword-based hints that could be revealed in any order. We initially decided this because we thought teams might want to reveal the puzzle-specific hints before the “task part” and “task pairing” hints, but we ended up being very happy with the new hint format overall and we hope you liked it too!

Process

We started working on Puzzle Potluck 4 in mid-August 2020. Unlike last year, we went in without a theme in mind, so a good portion of the first few months was spent deciding on a theme. By the end of November, we had settled on the theme, hunt structure, and a working version of the final Meta.

Our goal was to finish all puzzles completed for full hunt test-solves by April, and run the hunt in June. As we got close to March, it was clear we weren’t going to finish everything in time, so we decided to push the hunt to August and run the full hunt test-solves in June and July.

It’s always fun for us to look back on some of the early puzzle drafts and funny moments over the past year, so we compiled some of them in this short presentation:

Story

Summary

The setting of the hunt is based on Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where players live on an island and tend to day-to-day tasks such as crafting furniture, growing flowers, and participating in an underground art exchange. Our story opens on everyone’s favorite administrative-assistant-who-is-also-a-dog, Isabelle the Shih Tzu! Fans of the series will be aware that she’s endlessly delightful and helpful and chipper, and she’s no different here. Your island is hosting a parade — what could be better than that?

Scattered around the island are various tasks for solvers to complete. You may need to take fabric from Able Sisters and make tents out of it, or you may need to take flowers from the garden and use them to decorate the airport. All in all, a very charming and pleasant way to spend your day.

Until, that is, you find a dead body. And then two more. And then another one. What initially began as a jovial romp around an Animal Crossing island has become a wild hunt to find a ruthless killer, a la Among Us.

While continuing to complete tasks around the island, teams started to look for evidence that would lead them to suspicious-looking visitors. Teams uncovered terrible secrets about six visitors, only to discover that none of these suspects was the actual killer. As it turns out, the murder spree was perpetuated by a Chimpostor.

Even after teams identified and ejected the Chimpostor, they weren’t done yet. From there, they had to identify the several acts of sabotage done to various island locations. By figuring out the two pieces of sabotage done to each puzzle answer, teams were able to determine the best way to cap off the day’s strange events: with an animal-style double-double! Something like that, anyway.

Lindsey's Notes

Major thanks to the team, especially Julz and Rajeev. Julz for bringing all the characters and settings to life through her art (everything aside from Steph’s amazing dollhouse); and Jeev for running the show again.

Last year, I said “At this rate, Potluck 4 is going to start with a game of Monopoly and each of the railroads will be a separate game of Ticket to Ride. And Electric Company is Power Grid.” This ended up being untrue, as you probably saw. Instead, we brought Puzzle Potluck back to the realm of video games. This was our pandemic hunt, and if there’s one thing I did during the pandemic, it was play Animal Crossing and Among Us. What’s that you say? That’s two things? Hmm.

Initially, when we were kicking around the Among Us idea, we thought about having short tasks, long tasks, and two-part tasks (as in Among Us). That idea quickly turned into every task being a two-part task, with the added challenge for the solvers to pair up puzzles. The Animal Crossing tie-in might have been a less-than-serious suggestion at first, but I latched onto it as a really fun way to hide an Among Us surprise. “What if the solvers are playing Among Us, but they don’t know it’s Among Us yet?” The Animal Crossing theming also allowed me to have actual characters with some recognition and personality, which made writing story and dialogue much easier. Apologies if the murders of beloved characters was shocking!

Tom Nook, Copper, and Booker were very fun to write. RIP to Isabelle, Timmy, Tommy, and Blathers. Did you meet Celeste?

Art

Hunters who have done previous Potlucks will notice that this hunt deviated from the usual minimal black and white style that I (Julz) enjoy, all because we needed to be able to distinguish a grapefruit from an orange in the Garden. That, multiplying the amount of art by ten, and having to hide things like eggs that could turn into an exit sign in a non suspicious way was a fun (albeit quite large) challenge.

Some fun easter eggs:

• the calendar in the Airport is a reference to the time machine space puzzle from Puzzle Potluck 3
• the pink hat in the top row of Able Sister's shop is also a throwback to "snapback to reality" from Puzzle Potluck 3
• the avengers in Your House were from Puzzle Potluck 3
• the front of the map in Guidebook is of the same island
• one of my favorite things I drew was the plant in Your House so I... put it up as wall art in Your House as well
• the easter eggs in Your House

Things that caused me the most grief:

• responsitivity (lots of variables in css)
• drawing dead animals :'( against my will
• the food transformation in Your House was hard to depict in the straight-on view

Future

We’ve had a blast running all four Puzzle Potlucks so far, so it feels bittersweet to announce that Puzzle Potluck will be going on an indefinite (maybe forever…) hiatus after this one. The main reason for this is that ~~we don’t know how to fix our server load issues~~ we’ve been feeling pretty burned out after doing four of these in a row, and we’re also all getting older and have to deal with other less fun responsibilities.

Puzzle Potluck has been such an awesome experience for us — it’s felt very gratifying to create something that people enjoyed, and it’s also been super fun to interact with all of you through emails, the feedback form / wrap-up, and Discord. We hope we will be back someday, but until then there are plenty of other great puzzlehunts out there! All of the past Puzzle Potlucks will still be available in archived form as well.

Thanks for joining us for Puzzle Potluck 4 and for all the support over the years — we really appreciate it!

Credits

Puzzle Crew: Bradley Wu, Curtis Liu, Darren Yin, Julz Huang, Lindsey Shi, Rajeev Nayak, Stephanie Chang

Editor Crew: Rajeev Nayak

Story Crew: Lindsey Shi

Artwork Crew: Julz Huang

Test-solving Crew: Amy Li, Clare Zhang, Cyril Lan, Dabin Choe, David Wong, Dillon Zhang, Jason Chan, Kenny Yan, Landon Carter, Lee-kai Wang, Norman Cao, Or Oppenheimer, Stephanie Yu, Tal Oppenheimer, Victor Hung, Yaning Zhang, Yanping Chen

Website Crew: Curtis Liu, Julz Huang, Rajeev Nayak (and a little help from Victor Hung)

Fun Stuff

Leaderboard Race

Here's a graph of the top 20 teams' effective puzzle solves over time. Each puzzle counts for one puzzle solve, except solving Bulletin Board jumps a team to 14 effective puzzle solves.

Guess Log

For your enjoyment and amusement, here is the full guess log for the entire hunt.

Fun Tidbits

• There were various subtle hints foreshadowing the Among Us twist:
  • Having to perform “tasks” with multiple parts spanning multiple locations
  • The yellow outlines around the objects you had to click on to perform tasks
  • The layout and coloring of the “Tasks Completed” list in Resident Services somewhat resembles the list of tasks in Among Us
• The main reason that Isabelle had to die first was to ensure that teams found her body, since they had to go to Resident Services to submit answers
  • Also we were initially thinking answer submission could be directly on the homepage, so one of the reasons Resident Services was created in the first place was to hide Isabelle’s body
• There was one small easter egg after each death:
  • After Isabelle dies, if you go back to the Welcome page, you’ll just see her dead body and you can also report it from there
  • After Timmy and Tommy die, Tom Nook’s dialogue in Bulletin Board slightly changes:
    
    • Before:
    • After:
  • After Blathers dies, the Gallery flavortext changes:
    • Before: Blathers approaches you as you enter the gallery. “I'm happy to explain any of the pieces before, during, and after your visit.”
    • After: Blathers is gone, but you can't help but feel that if he were here, he would say: “I'm happy to explain any of the pieces before, during, and after your visit.”

Present(ation)s

We had a lot of fun with the “sacrifice” submission in Puzzle Potluck 3, so we decided to include another submission this year where teams had to make a business-style presentation based on a video or audio clip. We were a little worried about how it would turn out because it was a much tougher and more time-consuming challenge than last time, but you all really delivered! We received a great variety of presentations, but we did notice that there was some source material that was quite popular: Blade Runner, The Room, Rick Astley, Mean Girls, The Matrix, Network, 300, The Shawshank Redemption, Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean, Glengarry Glen Ross, Independence Day, The Big Lebowski, The Princess Bride, and American Psycho.

Here are some of our favorite submissions (we highly recommend watching them alongside the original video clips, which we have included below when necessary):

• Business Proposition, by Needlessly Eating Spaghetti Squash (accompanying clip)
• A critique of windmills, by Give Us A Klewi (accompanying clip)
• Becoming Your True Self and Overcoming False Claims, by ☙ UNKNOWN PIECE OF FURNITURE INDICATOR
• On the Identity of the Self, by ① LOWERCASE PITFALL SEED
• Declaration of War, by 🌮🌮taquito
• On the Comparison of the Industrial Revolution to Puppies, by what about "what about just "what about"" (accompanying clip)
• Shiny Happy Miners by rous (accompanying clip)
• Applied Tactics Training for Thunnini, by BIRD GANG (accompanying clip)
• Practice, by Egginality (accompanying clip)
• Last-Minute Present Presentation, by Bruce Caboose (accompanying clip)
• puzzle potluck puzzle solution, by JELICle 😼s
• My Understanding, by Puzzkill (accompanying clip)
• Six Present(ation)s, by us (The Puzzle Potluck Crew)
• And finally, an ASCII presentation by The Most Serene Republic of Dan Marino:

    _______________
    | Me = Batman |
    ---------------
  

Discussion Stats

We pulled some interesting stats related to the Report Body discussion puzzles. Great job to the teams that made this list!

Isabelle

• Total games played: 2243
• Fewest attempts: 26 teams finished in 1 attempt
• Fastest win: Forty Two in 218.87 seconds (also shoutout to dddeupbbbap for finding a way to type freely and finish in 30.36 seconds!)

Timmy and Tommy

• Total games played: 3386
• Fewest attempts: 6 teams finished in 2 attempts
• Fewest clicks: 11 teams finished in 26 clicks

Blathers Group 1

• Total games played: 3056
• Fewest attempts: 11 teams finished in 1 attempt
• Fastest speed: Evening Cicadas of /r/PictureGame finished on 2x speed

Blathers Group 2

• Total games played: 3850
• Fewest attempts: 7 teams finished in 2 attempts
• Fastest speed: sorry i need to use the toilet HRRNNNGG ok im back finished on 1.2x speed

Funny Stories

We compiled our favorite stories from teams (and ourselves) from the hunt. Here they are, with occasional commentary from us in italics:

3) Team Backsolving (via discord)

Probably the best way to discover Isabelle's death!

Puzzle Potluck Crew

A very insightful observation we saw on discord!

Completely unintentional, completely mind-blowing to us as well

Evening Cicadas of /r/PictureGame

A message from basically right when the hunt started

You got us :)

Amaranth

I incorrectly WoF'd "ACHIMPOSTERAMONGUS" then spent two hours and one hint email figuring out the last bits to find out it was literally that but with the other spelling of the word

Donk

I, like an idiot, typed in chimpostEr instead of chimpostor. So our team spent hours agonising over the answer before someone noticed the spelling mistake. That was pretty funny and sad.

EnGnE

Yelling the answer has to be "A Chimpanzee among us.. what else could work?!?!" from having the string: achimpAAAAAAmongus.. as well as solving the final meta with the string: AitAaAAnAmAlAAuAlAAAAsAinA and only one incorrect guess ("Ritual animal double crossing") I felt really good about that one.

This happened to many teams... including all our internal test solves :P

Timmy and Tommy

After Isabelle's untimely demise, I fearfully checked Nook's Cranny after every solve. We were very sad to die (Timmy especially a second time). We looked at all the survivors with jealousy and suspicion (especially Orville).

Not sure when you asked us to help with account info that you might have noticed some ~foreshadowing~

We were also amused by your post-hunt survey response

weeklies.enigmatics.org

Seeing Isabelle death was really surprising. I didnt expect it. It was amazing.

Nut Tree Matic

Please, finding Isabelle is the funnest story of all. Poor Isabelle!

MysteryFunHouse

Finding Isabelle's dead body was unimaginably funny

Dubbas

The first body discovery was straight up comedy gold. I had just typed in an answer to a puzzle when my mate started yelling at me to look at the resident service page. Thank you for that one.

Apparently almost everyone finding Isabelle dead was hilarious to them. Y'all are terrible people. Except for Pepsimen: "waking up to see my teammates post an amogus isabelle was like a jumpscare from a movie"
and for The Puzzledome:

-StriketeamB-

Some time into report body 3, somebody in our chat posted this picture. In the end, we all became super weenie Jr's.

Puzzle Potluck Crew

Yet another message we saw on discord!

We really really hope this just means... you REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY loved the hunt.

☙ UNKNOWN PIECE OF FURNITURE INDICATOR

Already submitted the form, but just wanted to share: Oops! Looks like we couldn't find any evidence for the second suspect... looks like you'll just have to get by without it

Took about 50 restarts because a lot of lists (pixar movies/most if not all of your sports teams/elements/months of the year/amino acids) have fewer than 4 non-CARPART letters.

We didn't think we would really have teams that hit this edge case but we're glad we caught it!

Puzzle Potluck Crew

Another discord finding!

Good question... we didn't plan it... or did we??

praytrick

Just needed to shuffle things around a bit!

Kwargers

(🐝🐝) || !(🐝🐝)

I was quite proud of our meta pairing sheet. This is a snapshot of it mid-solve:

woah.