Haystack Fever

Over the weekend, I participated in a Manhattan runaround called the Haystack. This was my first time, teaming up with fellow NPLers Coach, Toonhead!, Ucaoimhu, and Hathor on a team Have Answers Will Travel.

As with most puzzle hunts and extravaganzas, there were certainly puzzles to solve...in fact there were too many. The designers of the Haystack opted for an experimental approach where teams needed to strategically pick and choose which puzzles to solve, as each puzzle earned you a card to be used in a game of New York Rummy.

Our team came in fourth, mostly because we didn't think about the New York Rummy game, and instead, buoyed with confidence after completing all five puzzles in the first round, thought we really could finish them all. As a result, we failed to complete the Ten of Roaches card, a highly valuable card that allowed players to flip their score (from 19 to 91, or 109 to 901, the winning team's final score). According to organizers, they wanted to make a game that used puzzle, not puzzle with a game theme, and I feel that they very much succeeded.

The puzzles made excellent use of Manhattan...not always big, easily recognizable landmarks, but minor details most of us would overlook. The puzzles themselves were mostly interesting variants on existing puzzles: an acrostic with a devious twist, a su doku with a devious twist, a Pledge of Allegiance with a devious twist, etc. Our team eventually would solve 14 puzzles out of 25, a respectable number. Time and geography prevented us from finishing a frustrating poetry puzzle, and we completing ignored a task that involved us cajoling strangers into singing a broadway tune.

The organizers also did a great job dealing with adversity... a depleted stock of maps at one location and unspecified difficulty with another location forced organizers to give out certain solutions. One organizer had a fever early on, but managed to persevere all the way to the end.

Will I go back next year? Hell yeah! Am I already thinking of ways we could do this in Boston? Hell yeah!