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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jlhorner1974" data-source="post: 1988487" data-attributes="member: 8628">I don't know exactly how many puzzles there will be yet, but I suspect that it will be closer to the lower end of 25-50 than the upper end.  For the MIT Mystery Hunt, the variety of puzzle material is enormous -- and the winner of the hunt gets no prize other then being able to host the next hunt.  When I get the puzzles to my group, they solved some of the easier ones in as few as 10 minutes.  Some of the tough ones took closer to an hour, with an average of about 20-30 minutes per puzzle.  With a decent-sized team of very smart individuals, 30 puzzles could take as little as 10 hours, especially if everyone is in the same place and working together well.  Part of what I have to do to prepare for this is to get an idea of how difficult the puzzles are to solve and how long it will take.  I did a 9 puzzle mini version for my group a few months ago, and it took them about 4 hours.But BFG's point is important -- the idea is that it will likely take a fair amount of time.  It won't be like a 2-4 hour event.    I hope to have enough material for it to take at least 10 hours, and I want very much for the contest to be finished no later than about early Sunday afternoon.  Since I am pretty much writing all the puzzles myself, I can make it about as long as I want.  If many people say they can only commit to a one day (all day) contest, I can work within that timeframe.  We'll see.  That's part of the reason for this, to figure out how much interest there is and what amount of time people can commit.To give people a pre-preview of what a puzzle is like, all the puzzles have a title, and many have what the MIT group calls "flavortext" at the beginning.  Both set the mood of the puzzle, but in most cases, the title and/or flavortext provide cryptic hints on what you need to do to solve the puzzle.  For example, a puzzle titled "You've Got Mail" may hint that the puzzle is about armor.   For this contest, all of the puzzles will relate to D&D in some way, so it should make things easier, since there is really a finite amount of material to draw from.  But, the people who write the puzzles are very clever and many of the puzzles have a twist to prevent things from being too easy.  Some of the worst MIT puzzles consisted of a title and one gigantic number (no joke) -- but I won't be quite that cruel.  In almost all cases, the answer to the puzzle is a single word or a short phrase.  In traditional MIT fashion, if the contest extends longer than anticipated, then hints are provided to the teams every so often until the contest is won.  It sounds very tough, but you would be surprised how well you can adapt to this kind of mental activity.I was planning on posting a sample puzzle soon (to give people a feel for what they are getting into) and also posting the puzzles and answers somewhere after the contest is over.  Perhaps if the good people here at ENWorld will let me upload the files to their download area, then people could get to it easily.</blockquote>

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