Open Wardrobes

I had a rather unique experience this last Saturday, as I participated in my first ever large-scale puzzle quest. The event was under the umbrella of Minnesota Zero who in the past year or so have now run a total of five such events. This event was largely constructed by my friend Dave Pisa (of Walking Shadow Theatre) who has been creating puzzles for about as long as I've known him, including Walking Shadow's 2006 Fringe puzzle show 1926 Pleasant (which if you missed you can find a complete walkthrough on their website). As I said, this my my first experience participating in such an event, and together with my wife Kelly and friends Nathan and Windy we made up Team Three Lit Geeks and a Physicist (guess which of us was the physicist...).

The event took place in downtown Minneapolis in a variety of locations, but all close enough to walk to. The general format was that each location had a puzzle (often comprising of several steps) which when solved would yield the name of the next location. For example, the first puzzle came with a library card and the clue read "Third Floor Conference Room" which led us to the big downtown library on Hennepin. These hunts usually have some sort of theme, and this one's was the Matrix, and so at the library the next puzzle started with a series of numbers running Matrix-like down a computer screen. These turned out to be Library of Congress numbers and look up the titles and authors of those led us the next step at the library, and so on. The puzzles were fairly challenging, although hints were available, and once you hit upon the solution it was fairly obvious that that was the solution. (Although the location "House of Balls" gave us some difficulty as we didn't know it was an actual place and instead interpreted it metaphorically, trying first the new Twins stadium, then the Target Center...) The puzzles all differed, but there are certain types that tend to recur in different puzzle hunts. For example, you can be fairly certain there will be multiple puzzles involving various codes, such as Morse code, binary, a standard letter substitution (i.e. A=1, B=2, etc), and so on. Also, many puzzles involve some sort of unscrambling (the final solution may involve rearranging a random set of letters, for example) or otherwise finding the clue that tells you what order something should be in (often as simple as alphabetizing).

While challenging and sometimes frustrating (such as wandering around downtown trying to figure out what "House of Balls" means), there is something satisfying about getting that jolt of inspiration when you realize what to do next. One step in the library puzzle led us to a book with the title of "The Password is Courage." We weren't quite sure what to do first, until it hit me that the library card we had been given probably came with an online library account. You can probably guess the password associated with that account. So while we were by no means in the lead, we didn't come in last either, and it was quite an exciting and enjoyable experience. I'm glad that Dave was in charge of this one, as I wouldn't have known about it otherwise, but now that I do know about it I look forward to the next one (as they've done 5 now in less than a year and a half, hopefully it won't be too long). I can imagine that after you've done a couple you have a better sense of how people set them up and how to be thinking about the puzzles. So if this sort of thing interests you then check out Minnesota Zero's website where you can look through some of the past hunts and keep an eye out for future ones.