Puzzle Hunt

While the pounding beats and flashing lights of Wheelwright Whiteout brought hoards of students to Grainger auditorium, nearly two hundred students huddled around Harkness tables to solve puzzles in the Academy Building.

This year, Exeter hosted its first puzzle hunt competition, created by uppers Qi Qi Ren, Richard Chen, Matt Hambacher, Yannick Yao,  Eric Tang and lower Vinjai Vale. The event, which first started out as a simple idea, developed into a roaring success, after many months of trial and error.

The event lasted for three days and boasted five “metas,” each having a complicated set of problems to solve. The puzzles ranged from a clever parody of “Call Me Maybe” (named “Call Me Perhaps”) embedded with sounds and clips, in which the main character in six different stories traces the paths of Exonians to find the answer.

“The creativity and thinking-outside-the-box mindset needed to solve the puzzles are fun.”

“We had a lot of good feedback from the hunt,” Rich, one of the masterminds behind the event, said. “We were so touched when we saw many teams dedicated to the completion of the event.” Around 29 teams with seven or eight people competed.

Many students praised the social and interactive aspect of the puzzle hunting event. “The mutual struggle of not understanding any of the puzzles made it such a fun weekend,” prep Isadora Kron recalls.

Currently, many of the social activities on campus are dances, and it’s easy to see how Back in Black and the recent Wheelwright Whiteout might attract a fair share of attendees. However, many think that there should be more community events that don’t involve strobe lights.

“The creativity and thinking-outside-the-box mindset needed to solve the puzzles are fun, so I feel that events such as these would be awesome to have as a break from all the dances that we host,” Rich said.

Although there is currently no “Puzzle Club” on campus yet, Puzzle Hunt committee is considering the formation of one such club to help plan the next PEA puzzle hunt.