Crow Facts
Let me tell you a story about a MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle. The year is 2014. The round is Humpty Dumpty. A new puzzle unlocks with instructions to text a phone number. I take charge and start texting, not knowing that I was about to create a lifelong meme. This is the story of Crow Facts.
For those who are not familiar with the puzzle, here is the brief rundown of the solution. You started texting a phone number who would respond with weird facts about crows, each of which were numbered. The phone number required you to do various tasks to get the facts, such as searching up a specific crow video on YouTube and looking up trivia about different types of crows. Once you had accomplished all of these tasks, you were left with 10 weird facts about crows. Each of the facts was actually from Game of Thrones - you had to identify the speaker of each quote and index by the fact number.
But I’m not here to talk about the puzzle. I’m here to talk about what happened afterwards.
My account at the time was still relatively new, so I didn’t have a lot on it. I had the Twitter account since 2011, but I only really started using it in 2013. I decided that I was going to try to use it a lot more during this Hunt, and boy did I tweet. There were some pre-Hunt tweets showcasing my excitement:
Make sure you’re following isithuntyet.info! Otherwise how will you know if the #MysteryHunt has started yet?
Then, during the Hunt, I had some vague updates:
It’s 11:00 and I feel like I’m on a roll. Let’s see how well this holds up into the night. #mysteryhunt
I promised myself I would actually get some sleep at the #mysteryhunt this year. Time to hold myself to that…
Good god this meta event is hard… #mysteryhunt
I also decided to add things to the traditional Mystery Hunt List?
Have you tried: Looking in the box of girl scout cookies you bought earlier in the weekend for the answer? #mysteryhunt
Have you tried: dissecting the fake lobster you got at an event? #MysteryHunt
Have you tried: raising your fist in the air, yelling at the puzzle answers Stephen Colbert-style? #mysteryhunt
Have you tried: getting your entire team to solve one puzzle? #mysteryhunt
That last one is actually pretty interesting, so let’s stop and talk about it now.
Saturday Night
On Saturday night, there were some serious frustrations. At this point, we had solved every round except for the Red and White Knights, but we had a problem. We had just a few puzzles open, and we were stuck. It wasn’t that we didn’t know what to do on the meta – we understood what the meta was doing with only a couple answers and we were just waiting for more so we could figure out what was going on. The problem is that we knew that there were going to be 16 answers in the round, but we only had about half of them available. Most of the puzzles we had available were solved, whereas about three of them were open. We were super bottlenecked.
This brings forward one subtle difference in this Hunt that hadn’t been true since 2009, and this talks about the difference between . The issue was that solving puzzles in a round only unlocked puzzles in that round. If you already had all the puzzles in, say, the Humpty Dumpty round unlocked, solving more puzzles wouldn’t unlock more stuff for you to do. The did help with this, but they only unlocked new rounds for you, not later puzzles in those rounds. The problem is, solving metapuzzles also did that. If you were solving metapuzzles at a reasonable pace, then the train tickets didn’t do a ton, and solving puzzles in a round only affected that round. Herein lies the problem. The puzzles that we had in Red and White Knights no one really wanted to tackle, so we solved other problems. When we had solved those other rounds, those puzzles were staring back at us. Thus started a significant period where our large team only had two or three puzzles open at a time. We were super .
we got past that block, but at that point we would be in a loop of “unlock 2 puzzles, solve those 2 puzzle, unlock 2 new puzzles, solve those 2 new puzzles”. Because the unlocks were in batches of 2, there would be times where everyone who was still solving would be working on the same puzzle because that’s all we had. One by one people starting going to sleep, until we had a little less than 20ish people in the room. We were in the throes of the night shift.
Now for those of you who , allow me to explain it to you. The average age of the participants on Palindrome is… slightly older than many of your standard MIT Mystery Hunt teams. This is, in general, not a bad thing, but it did mean that there were less people to do the overnight shift than you might find on other teams. This is the reason that for the longest time, Palindrome be competitive for the lead at the beginning of the Hunt, but then once the night section would hit we would lose a lot of people and . This was a particularly bad instance of that. Most of the veteran solvers had gone to sleep or had left for whatever reason, and it was mostly the 20-year olds and the 30-year olds left. Also, we were incredibly sleep deprived, and we were feeling rather punchy. The barrier between our brains and our mouths was lessened, we were joking a lot, and we reduced before we called it in. This led to quite a lot of phonecalls with HQ, who seemed to also appreciate the late night entertainment, so we kept doing it. For me, I decided that this was a great time to mess around on Twitter. I joked with the organizers about how they had clearly cyberstalked me to figure out what team I was on, I complained about the difficulty of the meta, and I eventually tweeted this:
Crow Fact #21: Crows were originally used for duck konundrums, but they would always kill the puzzlers… #CrowFacts #MysteryHunt
By the way, this hashtag has now been signed up for #CrowFacts. Congratulations! #MysteryHunt
Crow Fact #47: Crows aren’t afraid of scarecrows - they just pretend to be because they find them hilarious. #CrowFacts #MysteryHunt
At this point Ben and I started tweeting Crow Facts regularly throughout that Hunt. We pretended that a was tweeting them and that we were just retweeting them, and we posted them throughout the rest of the weekend. At one point, when Palindrome was going through the endgame of the Hunt, I even stepped out of the room and started doing Crow Facts on my tablet to avoid a problem on one puzzle.
Now you might be asking, “Hey Cute Mage. Shouldn’t you not be spoiling a late round puzzle on Twitter?” Well, I have a couple answers to that question. First – I would argue that I wasn’t spoiling anything except the existence of the puzzle – none of our facts were Game of Thrones quotes, so the main aha was still intact. Second – at the time we were less concerned about spoilers on social media, and the team who was running it didn’t tell us to stop despite clearly having seen them. Third – I liked causing chaos on Twitter.
All of this made Crow Facts one of my favorite puzzles ever. It was just silly, good fun. But the story doesn’t end there.
The Continuation of Crow Facts
Making up fake facts about crows was funny, and there was no way that I was going to confine it to just that weekend. Every so often, I would come up with a new batch of Crow Facts and post them on Facebook. This would happen at most once a year, soon after my brain started going for that year. It got to the point where other Hunt-related people would send me the occasional article about Crows, or funny facts about Crows, or art that depicted them as horrible killers. It was fun.
In addition, throughout this time I was talking a lot with Ben Smith. Occasionally we would pass puzzle ideas to each other that we were saving for when Palindrome would win Mystery Hunt. One that we would joke about a lot was a sequel to Crow Facts. We’d do it when Palindrome won, and that would happen ?
The 2022 Hunt
In the January/February phase there was lots of excitement about writing Hunt, and there were definitely people who were excited about writing puzzles, but we couldn’t actually write puzzles yet. For those who haven’t written a Mystery Hunt, first you need to come up with the theme and story, then you need to come up with the metapuzzles, THEN you have the answers that you can write the puzzles for. Sure, there are sometimes puzzles that can solve to any answer, but the vast majority of puzzles are constructed around a specific answer. However, we were encouraged to still brainstorm individual puzzles that we wanted to write. After all, it wasn’t like there wouldn’t be answers at all – we just didn’t know them yet.
Ben contacted me during this time about the Crow Facts sequel. See, . Ben is a huge fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. He was really excited about the new series that had just recently been made and had made a cosplay of the main non-puppet character. In MST3K, one of the puppets is named Crow T. Robot. What if, instead of the Crow Facts sequel being about the bird crows, it was about Crow T. Robot? Ben even had the perfect hook into the show that we should use – in the very first episode, Jonah performs a rap about different mythical monsters and what countries they come from. Since the original puzzle made crows seem like scary monsters, this seemed appropriate. However, we still weren’t done. After all, we didn’t just want to remake Crow Facts with a different endgame – we wanted to put our own spin on it.
After thinking for a bit, we realized that the way we would really make it our own was to add something involving Twitter. After all, we didn’t just enjoy the puzzle, we also enjoyed the Twitter shenanigans afterwards. For a little while, I was experimenting with a puzzle that was posted to #MysteryHunt. The idea would be that if you solved the puzzle, you would be encouraged to post something that also fit the category to Twitter, which would give you the answer, and also make the puzzle easier for teams that came after you. However, after much deliberation, we came up with the “sort the tweets” structure that worked great. It was one of our favorite puzzles, but remade with a touch of us in it.
Once we figured out what answer we were getting, that isn’t to say that the puzzle came together perfectly right away. , , , , and . It turns out that having your puzzle connect to an exterior site makes it harder to write. But that being said, I loved the excuse to write a ton of Crow Facts. For me, it was the right mix of humor and puzzle that I knew it would be a good time for solvers.
Wrapping it Up
Crow Facts is still one of my favorite puzzles, despite the fact that it is a bit easier than a traditional Mystery Hunt puzzle (even at the time). It’s a nice example of how your goal for puzzle writing should be to make sure that whoever solves your puzzle is having fun.
Oh, and you didn’t think I was going to end this without writing some more Crow Facts, did you?
Whoops, we have to make a new puzzle for a different round in the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. You go dash up your crows and I’ll get Crow. After all, he is doting on me. But what’s special about my crow?
- Crow Fact #1: Crow doesn’t trust all this fancy wiring, so when he buys a new house, he replaces all the wiring with copper wires.
- Crow Fact #2: Crow has a dream of lightning striking his house like a mad scientist, which is why he insists on metal roofing.
- Crow Fact #3: Crow has found that when it comes to cleaning off dried blood, there is nothing better than paint removers.
- Crow Fact #4: Crow insists that his car doesn’t contain power steering, has AC that can bring the car down to -10 F in the winter, and only half of the wheels have radial tires.
- Crow Fact #5: Crow is now banned from magicians’ performances in Kansas after he stole one magician’s power foggers.
- Crow Fact #6: Crow showed up to the fishing trip with football players and crochet materials. He was asked to bring hooks and tackle.
- Crow Fact #7: Crow will add strong liquor to water. I don’t think he understands the concept of water proofing.
- Crow Fact #8: Crows always win in rock-paper-scissors. People always throw paper against them, and they throw paper cutters.
- Crow Fact #9: Crows are very coordinated, and they like to show this off by installing shower rods.
- Crow Fact #10: Crows are very refined. They eat soup with spoons and ladles.
- Crow Fact #11: Crows are vicious at outdoor events. They break down awnings, shred umbrellas, and collapse folding tables.
- Crow Fact #12: Crows have been known to dispose of their kills in trash compactors.
- Crow Fact #13: Crows have been known to make cute little masks out of masking tape.
- Crow Fact #14: Crows like picking off meter men, so they like to hide around water meters.
- Crow Fact #15: Crows sometimes have pet gerbils because it turns out that crows are good gerbil feeders.
- Crow Fact #16: Humans learned that crows learned how to use tools when they saw a bunch assembling a piece of furniture with Allen wrenches.
- Crow Fact #17: In Venice, there is a restaurant operated by all sorts of birds. The crows operate the waffle irons.
- Crow Fact #18: It is better to have curtains or blinds. Crows will perch and wait on window louvres.
- Crow Fact #19: My Crow buys asbestos for his house. It kills the humans he has trapped there, and keeps him warm since he doesn’t need to breathe. It’s multi-purpose insulation.
- Crow Fact #20: My Crow has a very particular diet. This means that his kitchen is filled with juice extractors.
- Crow Fact #21: My Crow has some fascinating and disturbing uses for grout and spackle.
- Crow Fact #22: My Crow knows how to satisfy his fans.
- Crow Fact #23: My Crow prefers the challenge of killing his prey with bb pellets.
- Crow Fact #24: The crows’ preferred form of communication for talking to other crows are walkie-talkies.
- Crow Fact #25: The last time Crow bought mustard gas, he said that it was just pesticides for fumigation.
- Crow Fact #26: Until their first kill, baby crows aren’t allowed to carry anything more deadly than rubber mallets.
- Crow Fact #27: When a baby crow gets its first kill, its parents hang it up on the wall with picture hangers.
- Crow Fact #28: When playing hide and seek, Crow pretends to be a set of kitchen faucets.
- Crow Fact #29: You know you’re in for a hard time when a murder of crows appears wearing safety goggles.
Merry Christmas!
– Cute Mage