A bunch of friends and I spent the weekend doing Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 11.0. It involved 71 teams of geeks, each working on solving a bunch of puzzles before the other teams did. It also involved large amounts of food and very small amounts of sleep.

It was way cool.

Our team - BoxFort Brigands - came 24th out of 71 teams, with which we were very pleased; many of us were first-timers and we treated it somewhat casually (most of us actually slept!). We solved 55 out of 70-something puzzles and even had the fastest solve time on three or four of them.

The whole thing was set up with a Tron theme. At the opening ceremony we were all kidnapped and trapped inside a computer by the evil AI Outermage. He forced us to solve puzzles to break into systems to allow Outermage to take over the world. Meantime, NORT, an anti-virus AI, sent us puzzles to solve (without Outermage's knowledge) to strengthen us in the final battle against Outermage (in a mech simulation game; each puzzle you solved gave your mech a powerup). Although our team didn't finish, 14 teams did defeat Outermage, so thankfully we were released from the computer on Sunday night.

The puzzles involved everything - crytograms, braille, morse code, semaphore flags, sudoku, text adventures, cryptic crosswords, anagrams, chess, and Monopoly. There was also a real-life choose-your-own-adventure game in the car park, and a huge maze in a cavernous building that you traversed on scooters.

Each puzzle gave a word or short phrase as the answer. Here's an example puzzle (a reasonably easy one):


Nuclear Wasteland
Our hero has been de-rezzed and scrambled at the atomic level. His constituent elements have undergone substitution and re-arrangement. Please find our hero’s basic elements below in order to restore him to his original form.

BPST
FPPS
BPQSS
BHPSZ
BEPQSZ
EJPSTTX
EEJKNTZ
BEKNNRST
BFGHPPST

Good luck :-)