Jack Lance and the Harvard Riddle Search
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.
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.