The Washington Post Hunt

A few friends and I participated in the Washington Post's excellent 2nd Annual Post Hunt this Sunday.

For those that don't know, the Post Hunt is puzzle-based adventure of sorts--teams of unlimited size march around downtown armed with the Post's Sunday magazine and a bag of goodies distributed at the starting line. From noon to 3pm, teams must find and solve 5 puzzles, the answer to each of which is a number. Each numerical answer corresponds to one of many cryptic phrases listed in the Sunday magazine, and at 3pm Hunt-founders Dave Berry, Tom Shroder, and Gene Weingarten reveal a final clue which, in theory at least, should allow teams to make sense of the phrases --- and then race to win the game.

None of the members of my team participated in last year's Hunt, but we'd heard enough to be pretty excited. One of our teammates had grown up playing the Miami Herald's related, and much longer running, Tropic Hunt, and in combination with the website for the 2008 Hunt, her stories had definitely whet our appetites.

And I'm happy to report that our self-christened "Team Awesome" performed incredibly well---for the first half of the game. We solved 4 of the 5 initial puzzles before 35 minutes had past, and the 5th puzzle took us longer only because it couldn't be solved locally (and it took us a while to give in to that possibility).

First up, for us at least, was a strange collection of monuments (embeded videos aren't working, so click-through to see a recap of the puzzle):

The pencil in our goody bag was a pretty big tip-off, so the vacuum cleaner immediately suggested Hoover to me. Other teammates quickly realized that the "Boo" and "Cannon" statutes represented one president (not two, as I was thinking), and that made Eyes-and-Hour pretty smooth sailing. Our team finished this puzzle in about the time it took us to walk the distance from the ghost statute to the hour glass and was feeling pretty good about our puzzle-solving prowess as we headed off to the next location.

The second puzzle we encountered might have been my favorite:

I actually hadn't bothered to read the rules closely (despite scouring other sections of the Sunday magazine and solving the crossword puzzle the night before on the off chance that it'd feature in the end game), so text-messaging was not, for me, an obvious avenue for arriving at a solution.

But my intrepid teammates were all over it and it didn't take us to long to get this one. We had one false start -- we actually first texted "No Accountability" to the number because the actors were repeatedly saying "there's no accountability in the text" when we arrived, and we took the phrase a little too literally -- but it didn't take us too long to try again with just "Accountability." (Interestingly, texting "no accountability" to the number also prompted a response: a text arrived telling us that 50% of respondents had voted "no" in the Post's Express poll.)

Our team was suspicious of the third puzzle:

This puzzle troubled us because we thought it was easy--too easy. We noticed the "in gold we trust" line right away and then spent the rest of the first half of the game worrying that reading 893 off the sign was too obvious. Nope.

The fourth puzzle was also a high-water mark:

Despite missing the rule about needing a text-messaging capable phone, I had noticed that there was something seriously odd about the clock-repairman's "First Person Singular" article. Our team had puzzled over the article at brunch, so we recognized the clock-man on sight and had little trouble with puzzle after receiving the clock-man's clue. A teammate spotted the missing "i" (which we especially liked, not knowing that "First Personal Singular" is regular feature of the Sunday magazine), I caught the "x," and someone else then piped up with the "s."

We got to the fifth puzzle around 12:30, and it stumped us for a good long while: We actually noticed the statues on the Hunt map pretty early on, and thought they could be important, but since every other puzzle could be solved locally, we spent a long time scratching our heads at the Old Post Office. We stared at the actors; tracked their movements and hand gestures; compared them to the statue of Ben Franklin also in the plaza; and scrutinized the facade of the building for any additional clues. We made a list of every synonym for "statue" we could think of, and wondered whether "Greek," "Roman," "Classic," or "Marble" could somehow be a cipher that would let us convert the phrases in the clue into numbers.

Ultimately, we marched back over to the spot on the map that showed the statue with the eagle on its head, in part because I hadn't seen a statute in that area when we'd walked past it earlier, and I thought that in-and-of-itself might be an additional clue: maybe something else would be waiting there for us?

Sort of. We discovered that I was totally wrong--the statues on the map did correlate to real-life statues--and were very relived to find a sandwich-board wearing man standing next to the eagle-pooping-out-the-earth. We then spent the last hour of the first phase of the game marching around downtown in search of a free-standing polyp and sledgehammer.

(For the record, the figure holding the sledgehammer in the final statue is definitely not a "girl." A hermaphrodite, maybe. Or a transgendered biological male, perhaps. But we were looking carefully for signs of "Alice" and the little package we found convinced us it wasn't a statue of her. Which, I'll add, did worry us a little.)

The team celebrated the end of phase I with a snack break, and then returned to the main stage eager to crack the "End Game" clue:

Sadly, though, I have to report that our team never even got out of the gate on this one.

We knew "it starts 5-3" was important. We thought we were probably looking for a phone number. We figured Dave Berry had just given us "the end." But I flipped E-I-E-I-O on its horizontal axis, declared "hey, it's symmetrical!" and then promptly started concocting all sorts of wild theories that lead absolutely nowhere.

The team associated the letters in E-I-E-I-O with their alphabetic values (5-9-5-9-15), flipped it around and tried 535-1959 x5. Wrong number. We tried it without flipping the E-I-E-I-O around. Wrong number. We associated the letters of E-I-E-I-O with their telephone key-pad values. Wrong number. Flipped around? Wrong number again. I then noticed the big number 2 on the map and said "hey, maybe 'it starts five-three' means 'it starts at five minus three = the big number two," and inspired the team to race off to the location marked by the big 2 on the map. Where we found only a bunch of similarly clueless dullards.

Bah! So close! So frustrating! How could I flip it one way, and then not try flipping it the other way?! Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Stupid, bordering on stoopid.

But still, intensely fun. And there's always next year.

Bonus? A team composed of law school friends that I hadn't talked to since 2003 won:

I pray this picture will be featured prominently in the next classnotes section of the Yale Law Report.

(Photos courtesy of "Zena.")