Jack Lance died on May 1st, 2023. He was an absolutely brilliant man with an uncanny ability to just pull out puzzles from nowhere. I look up to him and admire him and he was taken from us too soon.
I wrote a riddle. It wasn’t meant to be a tribute riddle - it’s not really about Jack itself - but I cannot deny the effect that he had on me while writing it. While I have solved lots of letter webs before, I was always really intimidated by doing the coding and the connections. I have lots of great riddle ideas, but creating letter webs was always a weak point in my skills. But his RT3 Search reminded me that letter webs don’t necessarily need to follow the ridiculousness of riddle letter webs - sometimes a plain-stock web can still have wonderful solving moments.
So I made this letter web. It is a plain-stock web about an event that we both enjoyed - the Harvard Riddle Search. While it’s not actually a tribute to Jack - I’m sure that he’s looking down and smiling at what he’s inspired. This was super fun and I’m sure that you’ll see more letter webs out of me - maybe even with more shenanigans.
Harvard Letter Web
List of clues (because I am bad at coding and don’t know how to make the clues wrap):
- 2023: This theme was about adventures in computer technology and where it would lead us, although it also shed light on human-ai relations.
- 2022: A campus building disappeared and hunters had to travel to a library-adjacent place that contains all of the appropriate media.
- 2021: A professor on campus created something brand-new, but this item is causing problems and people are bouncing around trying to fix it.
- 2020: This theme was about taking something old and revamping it so that everyone could enjoy it. The US currency reference helped.
- 2019: This was the 100th anniversary of The Great Molasses Flood. The theme involved molasses flooding a place where, if the walls came down, the residents would fight each other.
- 2018: This theme was about an animated movie that personifies things within the body. These things help the body with a particular struggle.
- 2017: This theme was about a fantasy role-playing game.
- 2016: This theme (which was blatantly stolen from a previous BAPHL) was about a piece of media where someone traveling in a constructed reality could go places previously thought impossible.
- 2015: This theme had solvers building a special ship and then traveling to a place few humans have gone before.
- 2014: This theme was based off of a piece of media where the actions of the titular character (who shares a name with Mr. Cooper) cause a string of unlikely events that become a classic story.
- 2013: In this theme, solvers recruited six people underneath them for a technically illegal explanation.
- 2012: In this theme, solvers put on bad shows to raise money.
- 2011: In this theme, solvers help two famous Nintendo characters go through a legally-binding process.
- 2010: In this theme, an item travels through time. History is changed which causes an alternate timeline which the solvers must fix.
- 2009: This theme transported solvers to a brand new location that didn’t exist in the 90s. Solvers had to collect resources from where they were so they could explore further.
- 2008: This theme had teams asking questions of a dead guy to find where he hid the final item.
- 2007: This theme had solvers traveling to the afterlife.
- 2006: In this theme, solvers contacted well-dressed but strange characters from a second world hidden in ours.
- 2005: During this time, strange things fell from the sky, causing problems for the infrastructure.
- 2004: This theme involved a lot of characters that were smaller than the average human.
- 2003: This theme involved people in trenchcoats working against each other.
- 2002: This theme was based on a popular game where you obtain property and try to improve it in the hopes of getting more money when other people arrive.
- 2001: This year, each of the things solvers needed to solve could be associated with a card in a special type of deck, which helped solvers in the final room.
- 2000: This theme involved munchkins.