Wrap-Up

Congratulations to the 76 teams that finished the hunt, to the 308 teams that solved Eye Chart, and to the 623 teams that solved at least one puzzle! Our top three teams were This Site’s Bloody Illegible (finishing in a blazingly fast 25 hours!), Cardinality, and Anchovy Pear Tree.

This year was the largest Galactic Puzzle Hunt to date! By the numbers we had:

This wrap-up will describe the construction of Galactic Puzzle Hunt: 20/20 Vision and some of our reflections. If you don't want to read all that, feel free to skip directly to the fun stuff!

Plot Summary

The hunt started on March 13, 2020 with a search for your glasses—you need them to do puzzles, after all. The first round (the “intro round”, internally) explored this by blurring the puzzles for the first hour, while your eyes took time to adjust. Eventually, at the end of that round, you discovered that you had left yourself hints to your glasses’ location at other sights around your house, because FORESIGHT IS 2020.

You then went to the “four sights” around your house and searched for clues at your Night Vision Goggles, your Periscope, your Microscope and your Binoculars. Once you found all those clues, you learned that you needed to visit more sights (actually, four sites) to finally deduce the location of your glasses.

Visiting the sights, you found pieces of a telescope hidden in them. Putting the telescope together and pointing it into space, you saw one final puzzle, and upon solving it you realized that you needed to WAKE UP. You’d dreamed the whole thing! And somehow slept through an entire year and missed GPH 2020. Well, hopefully you’ll be well-rested for 2022.

image/svg+xml You are unsure whether Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2020 ever occurred.But you are now awake, your vision is clear, and you are in firm possession of your glasses.

Writing the Hunt

Theme

We started planning and brainstorming for Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2020 in September 2019. At the end of the month, three theme proposals made it to the final proposal stage, with 20/20 Vision coming out on top. One of the alternate proposals was eventually developed into the ⊥IW.nano round in the 2021 MIT Mystery Hunt; we won’t discuss the remaining proposal in case it returns.

Selling points of 20/20 Vision included the once-in-a-forever pun on the year, a comically understated premise of looking for your glasses, and relative freedom to write interesting round structures. The idea of a low-stakes puzzle hunt about losing your glasses has been floating around the ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ for many years (with the target year 2020 in mind).

On Hiatus

In January 2020, we were prepared to announce the hunt, which would have run starting the weekend of 3/14/2020. However, since the ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ won the 2020 Mystery Hunt and were responsible for writing the 2021 hunt, we decided to put the Galactic Puzzle Hunt on hold. We considered running a pared-down version of GPH 2020 in 2020 to take advantage of the theming, but ultimately decided against it because almost all of the GPH writing team was on the Mystery Hunt writing team, and we thought a pared-down hunt wouldn’t fully do justice to the round concepts.

In February of 2021, after we had a few weeks to relax and cool down from the Mystery Hunt, we met and decided on a timeline to run GPH 2020. We put up the website, made an announcement, and went back into hibernation for a few more months. We picked up where we left off in May 2021, with a bunch of extra team members who joined from the Mystery Hunt writing team.

Writing Process and Content

Metas

The structure of the hunt basically followed the “foresight”/“four sights”/“four sites” triple pun, with the intro meta/main metas/metameta each introducing the next layer of the pun. Metas were themed around kinds of vision contraptions and had an answer constrained by the metameta—we tried our best to make the answers thematic under these restrictions. As of January 1, 2020, the five metapuzzles (Eye Chart and the four sights) had been written and four of the five had been finalized with answers starting to be assigned; the last was in testing. Some other round ideas we tossed around were 3-D Glasses, Diving Mask, Rose-Colored Glasses, and Beer Goggles.

One of our writing goals was to explore interesting round structures and unlocking mechanics. This manifested as the Periscope, Microscope, and Binoculars rounds, which each had some sort of gimmick: the Periscope round had a complex structure where you had to use the puzzles you solved to unlock new ones, the Microscope round consisted of a single image whose pixels were filled in real-time, and the Binoculars round had “left” and “right” versions of each puzzle. This was the reason for the lack of an “all puzzles” page this year. During our full hunt testsolve, we noticed that our testers were exclusively using the “all puzzles” page to access the puzzles and never saw the round pages, missing significant information about the meta puzzles and making Periscope's unlock structure even more confusing!

Night Vision Goggles was a “normal” round. However, we swapped the Night Vision Goggles meta answer and half of the mechanic after returning to the hunt in 2021. The original idea overlapped with a metapuzzle from Foggy Brume’s Puzzle Boat 7, which ran during our hiatus; see our Author’s Notes for spoiler-y details.

The final Telescope puzzle was initially a round idea of its own, with an interesting unlocking mechanism based on pointing your telescope into space and looking for puzzles.

Puzzles

In the lead-up to writing the hunt, we decided to write a new piece of software to help us manage puzzles, in place of Puzzletron which we had used previously. Brian Chen writes about developing that software, Puzzlord, in his Mystery Hunt blog post. A few features were also added while writing, perhaps most notably the ability to emote react to comments.

We set a goal of having a smooth and easy writing process after a stressful Mystery Hunt. We wound up falling behind our puzzle writing schedule, but we certainly had a relatively stress-free writing process, especially compared with Mystery Hunt 2021 or the past couple GPH’s. Some things that helped with this were:

  1. We had a lot of writers, so most of our stress was in pushing existing ideas to be written and revised, as opposed to having unassigned answers for which puzzles needed to be written from scratch.
  2. The website/art team was consistently on top of things.
  3. We had more well-defined roles and responsibilities, including a “whip” (Lillian) who kept track of required tasks and made sure things got done, and a testsolving coordinator (Rob) who organized tons of group tests.
  4. We planned a full-hunt testsolve a week before the hunt, and every puzzle had to be finished before it. This gave us important buffer time for the couple of puzzles that fell through the cracks.

Some things still ended up being left until the last minute (most notably, significant rewrites to the final Telescope puzzle and Word Salad revisions) but production was smoother than 2019 by a significant margin, so we’d say our writing goal was mostly met.

Factchecking

We always factcheck all our puzzles before they’re considered finished. This year, as we were behind schedule on puzzle writing and working to catch up, we fell even further behind on our factchecking schedule. One week before the hunt, over 80% of our puzzles still needed to be checked. While all the puzzles were checked over the course of the week (thanks to Chris for organizing factchecks and Colin and Yannick for handling a lot of them!), some didn’t get the level of scrutiny we aim for. We ended up with a few errata over the course of the hunt, but luckily they were minor and there were fewer than in previous years. This is definitely something we’ll want to improve on for potential future hunts.

Hunt Operations

The process of answering hint requests was much smoother than previous years, thanks to improvements to the online hint-giving interface largely by Alan and Brian. We had a system where a Discord bot would post in a channel whenever a new hint request came in, and anyone could click on the link to claim the hint (upon which the post would automatically be edited to reflect the claimer) and answer it. The online interface for answering hints had easy access to previous hints given, both by puzzle and by team, which made the hint-giving process much nicer, even compared to the system we used for Mystery Hunt.


Legendary hint answerer Amon Ge topped our internal leaderboard

One of the biggest and most helpful additions, the “follow-up hint” system, was actually implemented by Alan during the week in response to the large number of email follow-ups we were answering! All of these hinting changes have also been added to gph-site if you want to use them in your own hunts (shameless plug).

Many facets of our hint system were finalized at the last minute, including the decision to give intro round-only hints over the first weekend of the hunt (which was made the day before hunt), and the decision to increase how many hints were given out in the final weekend (which was made only a couple of days prior). We apologize to any teams who were confused by the last-minute changes.

We also kept track of general team progress throughout the hunt and tuned unlock and hint timings as needed to try to make the hunt more fun for everyone. More teams than we expected slowed down significantly after the intro round, so we moved the automatic unlocks for all four post-intro rounds earlier than we originally planned.

We had an unfortunate bug where the entire Microscope image showed up to all teams that automatically unlocked the round, instead of being revealed gradually to teams. We hope to avoid issues like this in the future with more thorough testing of unusual round mechanics.

Reflections on the hunt

Difficulty/length

Coming off of Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2019, in which 30 teams finished the hunt and the first finish was late Monday, we wanted more teams to experience the entirety of Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2020. To this end, we aimed to make the puzzles a bit easier on average, and avoid a large time-consuming component like the 2019 conlang. Our overall sense of the difficulty of the hunt is that it was closer to 2018 than to 2019, though the intro round was still fairly difficult. The average length of a puzzle was also higher as we had a lot of medium-length puzzles.

We saw a lot more teams than we anticipated get stuck on the first few Night Vision Goggles puzzles (Dropcrypt, Entropy, and Not to Scale). Furthermore, the Periscope round ended up being more difficult than we expected (during our full-hunt test, it was the first of the four sights to be solved). The difficulty of the rounds we observed was, from easiest to hardest, Binoculars, Microscope, Night Vision Goggles, then Periscope. In response to the difficulty teams were having with our earlier rounds, and to give teams an opportunity to make progress in the round of their choice, we released the first few puzzles in each round earlier than we originally planned.

We wanted teams to see more rounds and round gimmicks, so each solve generally unlocked one new puzzle in the same round. Occasionally new rounds would unlock, which naturally increased the number of puzzles a team had unlocked. We had the most trouble tuning the puzzle unlock structure for the Periscope round, and at some points, teams would only have 3 (Periscope) puzzles to work on. This is one of the challenges of rounds with “gimmicked” structure: the unlock structure for those rounds is fixed and the hunt must be tuned around them.

At the top of the leaderboard, This Site’s Bloody Illegible finished the hunt in about 25 hours. We aimed for the first finish to take between 24 and 48 hours, so their finish time was on the faster end of that interval, but we’re generally satisfied with the first few finish times.

Puzzle balance

We’re happy with the general puzzle and subject balance. While we had more niche research-oriented puzzles this year than previous years, this is a result of a number of our authors wanting to write such puzzles rather than because of a directed effort. We try to let our puzzle authors write the types of puzzles they’re interested in, which leads to some variance from year to year. Overall, we thought there was a reasonable variety of wordplay, logic, and pop culture and other references. The Microscope round had quite a few “pure aha”-based puzzles, and no word puzzles, but that was somewhat unavoidable given the round gimmick.

We did have to declare some topics off-limits. One of these was Japanese/weeb-adjacent topics: we ended up with three puzzles that fell into this broad category (Virtual Family, The Seasons Change, and Thrifty/Thrifty), but we thought they were different enough that they could all be in the hunt. Other saturated topics included pop music (Mr. Worldwide and Intersections) and, perhaps more surprisingly, animals (at some point, there were two animal-related puzzles in the works and a third being proposed, but only #UnscienceAnAnimal ended up being written).

We had many interactive puzzles this year (Where To Next?, The Meta Meta Meta… Puzzle, Action Adventure, Make Your Own Math Quiz, Letter Boxing, Divide and Conquer, Mixed Message, Thrifty/Thrifty, So You Think You Can Spell, Periscope meta, and one of the Four Sights), maybe even more than in 2019. We’re very happy with this, and we hope to continue the trend in future GPHs!

The Future

It’s possible we will run another GPH sometime soon. Maybe even probable. But who can say for certain, we just found our glasses and we need a break.

There are lots of other puzzle hunts coming up soon! The Puzzle Hunt Calendar maintains the list of upcoming hunts. If you’re looking to do more puzzles in the next month, check out YukiHunt (an ongoing hunt aimed at beginners), Puzzle Potluck 4 (starts August 21st), QoDE (starts September 10th), and Teammate Hunt (starts October 1st). Happy puzzling!

Fun stuff

Teams sent us lots of fun stuff over the course of the hunt! We appreciate hearing about your experience solving our hunt, whether that’s the red herring that sidetracked you for days, the funny memes in your team chat, or a creative way you approached a puzzle. We’ve compiled those experiences into a couple documents.

Top moments

Here are some of our most memorable stories from the hunt.

The very first guess of the hunt was made by Team Arithmancy, and they almost used it to solve the Eye Chart meta 🤯:

We heard this story from Eye Candies of /r/PictureGame:

About an hour before hunt started, I dropped my glasses and the frame broke. As you may imagine, I found this to be a fairly bad omen for the hunt. Thankfully I was able to run to the dollar store, acquire some super glue, and repair the glasses before hunt started. In the end we didn’t do too badly.

Several teams sent us poetry while working on the puzzle Entropy. One team, Georg’s Endomorphism, got the cluephrase USE MMR IN AABA POEMS and sent us this [MMR = Measles, Mumps, Rubella vaccine]:

Last night an old man got the measles.
He thinks that he got it from weasels.
They slyly aligned
To bite his behind
While he was nodding off to the Beatles.
Our response:
This email responder and clerk
Doesn’t want to seem like such a jerk
But we were not fishin’
For email submission
We think you should recheck your work.

Later, team Spin My Hovercraft got even more into the spirit and opted to write their hint requests as poems. This one is for Letter Boxing:

We’ve reached the final test,
looking to get some rest,
preparing for the end
looking for the trend
takes more than what we’ve guessed

we are trying new words
letter connects occurred
still we are stuck
but with no luck
A hint request preferred

We’re missing something key
a way to start, set free
Help, to send
Please, be a friend
A happier team we’ll be
This one for the puzzle Entropy:
There once was a puzzlehunt team
Who were filled with hints to a brim
Figured out the extraction
Then committed inaction
What a lazy butt puzzlehunt team

The anagrams with one extra letter
That letter is all that would matter
“use MOR in a ABBA poems”
What is MOR, noone knows this
So i am writing yet more hinty chatter

We think that this MOR stands for morse
But this just made all this bit worse
Dash and dot is a good trick
But with that the limerick
Hint is dropped in the cluephrase just cause

And we keep coming back to the theme
What could poetry N even mean
With some big universes
And some more colored horses
Oh my god, what a wondrous theme

From normal sleep for a week i’m bereft
And stuck spinning in an air-cuishioned raft
Another solve i could see
So please help me, GT
Signed as “Yosh, from Spin My Hovercraft”

For the puzzle Crosswerd, Psyduck Confit made a thematic hint request:

Wee thinc wee half awl the werds fer the krosswerd philed in. (missspellt) Not shure how two extract...kant understand the klu #<#<#<#<#<#<#<#
Most of our hint responses for this puzzle had egregious spelling. For example our answer to this one was:
Nies werk! Arr therr eny entreys inn thu gridd ore klews thatt downt phit wyth thu risst? In particular, are there any that are spelled right?

We were extremely excited for Glasses are really versatile, etc to see the puzzle Virtual Family, especially given that their team member list contains several of the VTubers in the puzzle!

We didn’t request it, but we still received a few submissions of creative works made by teams. Not Enough Sight made a puzzlehunt-themed cover of “Hey There Delilah”, in the style of the puzzle Intersections. Nearsighted, Farsighted, Wherever You Aresighted made beautiful origami models for the puzzle Not to Scale:

While working on Four Sights, many, many teams were stuck in “Tinder hell”, meaning they could not find the Tinder account for @lightatorch. 🌮🌮 taquito remarks: “I am happily married, but now I have a tinder and match.com account so...thanks?”


Picture from Eye Candies of /r/PictureGame

A question from the post-hunt survey, Q: How bad is your collective eyesight?

A: Collectively we spend a lot of time in front of the computer. It’s quite bad.

Statistics

Here are some charts and tables to help visualize how teams solved the hunt.

The 11 teams that finished without using hints were:

Rage earns a special shout-out for continuing to solve all week long without using hints.

Teams with the fewest incorrect guesses (among hunt finishers):

Teams with the most incorrect guesses:

Credits

Editors: Abigail Caron, Alan Huang, Azalea Weisblat, Anderson Wang (🧩Puzzle Lord a.k.a. head editor), Ben Yang, Brian Chen (🧩Puzzle Lord), Chris Jones, Colin Lu, Danny Bulmash, Josh Alman, Lewis Chen, Nathan Pinsker, Patrick Xia (🧩Puzzle Lord), and Rahul Sridhar

Puzzle Authors: Abigail Caron, Alan Huang, Alex Pei, Amon Ge, Anderson Wang, Andy Hauge, Ashley Kim (🌟Superstar Testsolver), Azalea Weisblat, Ben Yang, Brian Chen, Charles Tam, Chris Jones, CJ Quines, Colin Lu, Dai Yang, Danny Bulmash, Josh Alman, Jon Schneider, Kevin Li, Lennart Jansson, Leo Marchand, Leon Zhou, Lewis Chen, Maddie Dawson, Mark Theng, Max Murin, Mitchell Lee, Nathan Pinsker, Patrick Xia, Rahul Sridhar, Robert Tunney, Seth Mulhall, and Yannick Yao

Additional Testsolvers: Adam Barber, Cami Ramirez-Arau, Herman Chau, Ian Osborne, Jack Chen, Jason Lam, Kat Fang, Lilly Chin, Patrick Yang, Phillip Ai, and Sam Kim (🌟Superstar Testsolver),

Website: Adam Barber, Alan Huang, Brian Chen(!), and Lennart Jansson (🎨Art)

Other Positions: Azalea Weisblat (Chair), Lillian McKinley (Whip), CJ Quines (Head Scribe), Seth Mulhall (Onboarding Leader), Robert Tunney (Testsolving Coordinator), Jon Schneider & Josh Alman (Narrative/Structure Committee)