This post is about an idea I had this October while procrastinating on applications, which blossomed into a one-of-a-kind puzzle hunt party experience that might be my favorite thing I've ever created. That's not an exaggeration!
But I worry you won't believe me if I tell you myself how awesome it was. So here are two participant testimonials:
“thank you so much for putting together the puzzle hunt!!!!! this was the most fun i’ve had all year (we’re only two months in but whatever) … i had so much fun and i loved all the chaos” —Audrey, event guest “Got excited and had to solve this afternoon. The family ended up piling in with me and we had a great time going through it together. Thanks for the hunt!” —Steve Mossberg, New York Times-published puzzle constructor and solver of the online adaptation
I spent a very long time writing this post — it sets the new length record on this blog, crushing that Taylor Swift one — and it initially appeared as a three-part series on my other website Puzzles for Progress. If it feels less intimidating, I suggest you start by reading Part 1 over there! It stands on its own and has some of the best content.
But if you're ready for the full glorious experience here, without further ado, I present:
3/2/24, around 5:00pm
When Yapa walks up to me — holding a scrap of paper with the letter C and the phrase “we’ve chromatized the conflux” — and asks whether his team wins, I’m baffled.
I didn’t think any of the teams were close to winning! And certainly not his: I’ve just spoken with his two teammates, and they’ve been sinking the last thirty minutes into a red herring involving a fountain and the number 75. So how is Yapa about to win on their behalf?
Then I remember: he’s been illicitly solving the puzzles out of order. But I technically forgot to ban that in my kickoff presentation, so…gotta be consistent, I guess it’s not cheating. Plus, he was given the “Cheater /hj” secret role (earning him a style point for every two people who genuinely accused him of cheating), so it’s pretty funny. But that doesn’t mean I want to give him the win.
(What I don’t realize at the time, though, is that his strategy was much simpler: he’d found an uncut sheet of Jacob Facts — which reveal the way to claim victory — lying around the room. A massive oversight by me, leaving such a critical piece of paper unattended.)
Luckily, I realize that Yapa’s made a typo — he should’ve written “chromaticized” instead of “chromatized.” So I tell him no, he hasn’t successfully claimed victory.
He changes something unrelated about the paper and asks again. I tell him no again. But I’m worried that any moment, he’ll find the mistake and swindle a win.
I leave the room to check on other teams, and soon receive multiple phone calls from him — which I ignore. I even get a phone call from another player. “Yapa’s looking for you,” she says.
“I know,” I respond. “I don’t want him to find me.”
I can’t run forever, and sooner or later he’s presenting me with the piece of paper again, typo fixed. But I think back to what the Jacob Facts said. “To claim victory, give Jacob a piece of paper with your team key and the words ‘we’ve chromaticized the conflux.’”
I can decline to accept his piece of paper! How could he be said to “give” it to me if I haven’t officially accepted it? Okay, maybe this is dubious, but so are his tactics. Magnanimously, I offer a deal relating to absolution of a favor owed, but he declines.
Maybe I’ll accept the paper in the future, if their team makes more progress, or maybe I won’t and some other team will beat them. I’m running this event, after all.
But soon he hands me a folded Caltrain schedule with a note and a bow on it. “Lucia’s present for you!” It is, so like a fool, I accept it, because I’m managing a gazillion things.
Of course, inside it, Yapa has placed a scrap of paper with the letter C and the phrase “we’ve chromaticized the conflux.” And just like that, he’s given the piece of paper to me, and trickery or not, Team C becomes the first team to claim victory in [insert puzzle hunt party here]!
Let’s go backward a few hours.
3/2/24, around 2:00pm
As they walk in, the guests know there will be puzzles. They know there will be inside and outside components, even though it might rain, and that the scheduled programming is supposed to conclude around 6 or 6:30. They know I’ve been planning this for months, the Jacob Cohen special to end all Jacob Cohen specials, and they’ve (mostly) filled out an Interest Form and Chaos Form. They know it’s called [insert puzzle hunt party here]; “iphph” for short, officially pronounced “iph and only iph.”
They don’t yet know that the event will start with everyone trying to predict what will happen—
…hey, wait, why not try your hand at the same prediction — now retrodiction — form? It’s pretty quick, just fourteen yes/no propositions. And I’m curious how well y’all will do, with your vastly different context! I suggest you don’t read any more before filling it out…
—and they don’t yet know that the event will end with a mini game show.
They don’t yet know that they’ll each be assigned a secret role.
They don’t yet know that they’ll be attempting to amass “Jacob Facts,” small colored pieces of paper with true facts about myself (from “Over the years, I composed a cycle of songs in all 12 major keys. One of my favorites is titled ‘An Exercise in Humility in A.’” to “I put shaving cream on the back of my neck this morning. I’m doing great.”)
They don’t yet know that there will be twelve puzzles, which they’ll solve in teams of 2-4 people: five “Evergreen Events,” which will be self-contained and which they’ll have about an hour to focus on at the beginning, and seven “Cyclic Conundrums,” which will lead them, scavenger hunt-style, around the area where the event is happening … actually, there’ll be only six, because of a snafu at the library.
They don’t yet know that they can earn a penny in Jacob dollars if they find a typo.
They’re enjoying chatting, and I’ve been scrambling to get everything set up, so it’s past 2:30 when I give a presentation — including editing a slide in real time — explaining how everything will work.
And then the teams start solving puzzles. Hey, don’t you want to solve some puzzles too?
In this precious now, whenever “now” is for you
As I just mentioned, there were twelve (well, really eleven) puzzles in the actual event. Some of these make no sense outside the context of the event, or are infeasible to solve if you don’t know me personally. But I curated and adapted five puzzles, all enjoyed by live solvers, for my website Puzzles for Progress (currently home to 120 issues of 3ish original puzzles).
Sp here’s a link to the first one, an iphph-themed Capsules (Suguru) logic puzzle:
Now, you may be asking, “Where are the other four? What are they?”
To which I respond: that certainly might be an issue…
(Okay, fine, I’ll say this: they include a Building Blocks puzzle and a cacklingly chaotic crossword. Regardless, it’s your task to find them! Beware, the third puzzle is probably the hardest, but I believe in you.)
Enjoy! If you reach the treasure at the end, there may be some bonus content.
In the next part, I’ll release the answer key and maybe some hints...if I’m feeling generous, mwahaha. I will also tell the rest of the story of the event: my process as I came up with everything, how it all unfolded, and my latest thoughts about puzzles and progress. It’s an incredible story. Scroll down when you’re ready!
Until then, may your life be pleasantly puzzling.
3/2/24, 2:09pm
“Welcome! I’m so glad you made it,” I say as you walk in. “I hope you made it through the time vortex okay. Only nine minutes late? That’s pretty good!”
“[insert puzzle hunt party here]? I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” you respond. “I read all about it in Part 1 of your blog post. I had so much fun solving the online adaptation, and I loved hearing about Yapa’s questionable tactics, and your nails looked resplendent” — Lucia, eavesdropping, smiles at the compliment of her handiwork — “and it’s never been more obvious that the author of the post is supremely handsome and charming—”
“I’m so sorry to cut you off,” I say. “But I have to change into this slightly ridiculous borrowed purple shirt, and do a million more things after that, I won’t really have time to chat until the afterparty. You should do the warmup puzzles on the table, or the predictions form!”
“Of course! It said in Part 1 that you were ‘scrambling to get everything set up,’ so I understand completely… and did you mean the retrodictions form?”
But before I can clarify the intricacies of internet-blog-post-induced time vortices — it’s your first one, so you don’t fully understand — I’m already off.
So maybe you look around the room and introduce yourself: perhaps to Andrew, my long-term co-conspirator and inspiration, who’s helping manage the event; or to Yapa the trickster; or to Zahara the ephemeral. You notice people dropping off their ballots for the California primary in the background. You pick up a map of the area lying on the table, and orient yourself.
Before you realize it, you see me return to the room and start fiddling with a projector, and the last of the predictions forms are submitted.
2:36pm
The slide changes from “[insert puzzle hunt party hype]” to “[insert puzzle hunt party here],” and again to “WHY WE’RE HERE” in big gray letters. And again: now it says “[jacob says something grandiose and sappy and very heartfelt].”
I begin with “Okay, so, I’ve, you know, been around for a long— some amount of time,” and proceed to impromptu ramble for 44 seconds. It’s grandiose, sappy, and somewhat heartfelt, but…as you can tell, I’ve impromptu rambled better.
I wrap up with a sardonic “okay whatever” and continue through my presentation. At some point, I find myself explaining how that puzzle hunt thing is actually going to work, and there’s this slide.
(As it happens, the slide says “3 people” when I move to it, but I change it to “3ish people” on the fly, which elicits a laugh from the audience.)
There is some discussion of the details, such as the hint policy (ten minutes are added to a team’s official time for each hint they request, but the official time means very little). There is a slide titled “Strategies and Herrings” and another one called “Pennies for Typos.” The section headings are different colors (gray, then golden, then blue, then purple, then gray again) and you wonder if they mean anything, but I explain that some parts of this puzzle hunt party are meticulously planned and some parts were thrown together last night.
around 2:50pm
And now it’s time for you to join a team and start solving some evergreen events! You end up on team A, also known as the blue team. (Every team has both a key of the chromatic scale and a characteristic color. Whenever you pick Jacob Facts, they’ll be blue.)
Here are the five evergreen events, which your team is permitted to solve in any order — though most teams opt for something similar to the printed order:
The first three will ultimately make their way into the Puzzles for Progress adaptation, so you’ve solved them before you entered the time vortex. You opt not to spoil them for your teammates. (There are a few modifications from your version: Trivial Trivia is a “scantron exam,” some of the crossword clues are different, and the puzzles don’t lead anywhere — you just raise your hand when you solve them. My favorite part of the online adaptation that wasn’t in the actual event, by the way, is how to get from the crossword to the next puzzle. Ask me about this if you didn’t experience the online adaptation!)
The fourth Evergreen Event, The Poetkaihau Express, is a dubious portmanteau reference to a challenge in the phenomenal YouTube series Jet Lag: The Game, and it also involves memorization and recitation: this time of a poem that I’ve written. Unlike the infamous namesake Jet Lag challenge, I allow teams to divide up the lines, and to pass with two or fewer mistakes.
Here’s the sonnet that your team ultimately delivers, in proper iambic pentameter:
Young Love in Featherstonehaugh, 1937
1 The storm, the waters, ebon, ebbing, teal,
2 A breath, a wreath, a great glass house of stone,
3 Modesto sands, they shift: but it is real,
4 A storefront with its green grass freshly mown.
5 One house inside one house, both red, both blue,
6 White crimson crimes of turquoise slander gray
7 Of tailored august salt from mountains true,
8 And suddenly the worm has missed its day.
9 Their secret tryst was locked inside a box.
10 For they had never seen a doomsday coax
11 This fiery icy joy of torment — nox —
12 Their fresh-squeezed juice squeezed fresh inside the hoax.
13 Like stormy weather, heather scarlet blurred,
14 A single feather cannot break the bird.
(Just so you don’t go crazy trying to figure out the true meaning of this poem, I want to clarify that it’s literally meaningless. But I love the way the words interact; the last sentence is probably my favorite of all the non sequiturs in the poem.)
The fifth Evergreen Event is an open-ended challenge called Entertainment, which has two parts:
To write three questions in an online form for the crowdsourced mini game show that will occur after the puzzle hunt! Potential question topics include things that happened during this event (I Literally Just Told You-style), Jacob trivia, or anything else that you think is a really good game show question. This is how a Jacob Fact is obtained.
An open-ended contest to entertain me (mwahaha).
Team F submits a strong entry, but the winner here is from Team G, combining excellent sketching ability, (heartfelt?) flattery, and Maria’s great “Oh, uh, yeah, I’ll put my name on this,” which is what clinches it for me. (As I write this post and reread the directions, I realize that I never gave them a prize. Oops. Their prize was happiness.)
As you solve these challenges you raise your hand, I check them, and I provide you with a Jacob Fact… until your team solves their third Evergreen Event. See, there are only ten Jacob Facts (not twelve), and seven of them are “in the field” with the Cyclic Conundrums, so only three of the facts can be allocated to the Evergreen Events. (This was largely a decision I made because I knew the crossword was quite difficult in testing, so I didn’t want to force teams to solve everything.) This produces some grumbling — solving puzzles that don’t help you win?
But I make a fiat decision, because I’m running this show: The two teams that advance to the mini game show won’t necessarily be the first two teams to claim victory. On the other hand, it’ll be the first team to claim victory plus the first team to fullsolve (which requires actually finishing the crossword).
around 3:10pm
In the midst of the Evergreen Events, Andrew (my long-term co-conspirator and inspiration) hands out the roles. Here is yours:
You immediately achieve your secret goal (...riiiiiight? what if I need a kidney someday????) and, bored, locate an uncut sheet of secret roles lying on the table. Another uncut sheet! Combined with Yapa’s “cheating,” the security at this event is rather underwhelming, you think. Still, you enjoy taking a peek:
(No one was ever actually a Vampire, because we never figured out how this one would work. But the other eight roles are all used, lurking about.)
around 4:11pm
Role in pocket, Evergreen Events mostly dispensed with (the crossword proves tricky) you begin tackling the Cyclic Conundrums! (Though you’re allowed to keep working on the Evergreen Events.)
The Cyclic Conundrums correspond to the letters / musical keys A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. (The Evergreen Events loosely represent the black keys of the scale.) Since you’re team A, you’re starting with puzzle A! Almost as if nothing was cyclic at all.
I hand you Puzzle A, Formal Chaos:
You recognize it as a reference to a question on the notorious Chaos Form! This had been emailed to you and asked many questions, including about your familiarity with various topic areas. The one that’s missing, you realize, is Public transit.
So you brave the rain and embark on a journey to the nearby train station. (One of your team members gets cut by an extremely uncooperative umbrella and has to go back to get first aid.) There, hidden behind a fan is Puzzle B, Plaque Extraction.
(You find it easily, but one team gets stuck for like 30 minutes on this! Their first problem was that they didn’t re-read the instructions and didn’t realize they were looking for a fan. Their second problem was that the person holding the instructions went with another team member to a local 7-Eleven to, like, “hang out.” BUT THEY HAD FUN SO IT’S FINE)
Here are the instructions to Plaque Extraction:
When I was concepting this event, I stumbled across this national treasure of a guy on the internet: Chris “The Architect” Waters, whose literal job is making unique “Constructed Adventures” for people.
In his “best practices” YouTube video on using this cipher, which he strongly recommended, he suggested explaining the instructions clearly. But I decided y’all should use the internet! Yet to decode this puzzle, you must understand the book.
Your team finds the ConstructedAdventures video alluded to, titled “Using a book cipher: Best practices.” When the narrator mentions how the book cipher was used in the movie National Treasure — a phrase which was in the first sentence of my blurb — you feel additional confirmation that you’re in the right place.
You know that the book cipher is supposed to be used to decode a plaque, and you think you understand it, but your team spends like 30 minutes decoding a plaque that you’ve walked past on the way instead of the plaque that is right next to the fan where the clue was decoded. Partially this is Andrew’s fault, because he gives you a misleading hint. However, in his defense, he didn’t actually know the solution to the puzzle at the time he was giving a hint. So maybe it is your team’s fault.
But you succeed in the end and move onto Puzzle C, the notorious Number Puzzle.
Ah, Number Puzzle, glorious Number Puzzle, renamed Treasurer in the online adaptation. People during the hunt get so many wrong ideas about this puzzle. However, you’ve already read the anecdotes from this puzzle in the congratulations page once you solved the online adaptation, so there’s simply no point in recounting all the red herrings here!
So you reach Puzzle D, How Well Do You Know Me?
This puzzle contains seven sections full of checkboxes, and you’re prompted to “Color in the squares that correspond to true statements about me.” Indeed, the checkboxes match up with statements, like “I was born in California” (true) and “I’m technically a vampire” (false. why would it be true??).
Once you’ve solved a critical mass of these, the mystery becomes how to decode them. For one team, this mystery lasts for quite a long time.
Suddenly you realize that the pattern of the true and false statements can be interpreted as Morse code. You’re allowed to look up Morse code, but you don’t need to, because your teammate Audrey knows it! Translating the dots and dashes leads your team back into the rented room, where you’ve been asked to “locate an edible exploration of the mathematics of mathematics.”
You find it lying around near the snacks: it’s Eugenia Cheng’s excellent book How To Bake Pi. Within it is Puzzle E, How To Bake Tau.
It’s an austere sheet of paper, and all it says is “There’s another volume, much like this one… that’s where the next puzzle is.”
So you head to the library and look for How To Bake Pi. You find it on a display case, but there’s no puzzle inside. You’re confused.
On the shelves you find Puzzle G, Building Blocks, folded up like a paper airplane.
There’s confusion in this here library; the hunt is not running as intended; your team sends me a phone call. I explain that there’s been a snafu in the library, that Puzzle F has disappeared, and that your team gets a 5-minute bonus (or was it a 10-minus bonus)?
Also, continuing the theme of injuries on the blue team, Audrey gets a paper cut and she screams, but only out of surprise, not pain (she claims).
5:58pm
Before long, your team is in the room, you’ve put the Jacob Facts together, but you’re not handing me a piece of paper with your team key and the words “we’ve chromaticized the conflux.” Why? Because I’m not in the room.
The time to beat is 5:48; amid Yapa’s trickery and my evasive strategizing (detailed in Part 1), Team C claimed victory at 5:38. But since their team received 1 hint, and a hint incurs a 10-minute penalty, that’s 5:48. Your team is trying to declare victory at 5:58, and you remember that I gave you a 10-minute bonus. Seems like it’s potentially down to the wire?
I don’t know what to do, and the library closes at 6pm, so I’m scrambling to take all of the puzzles out of the library before then, and I’m also grabbing the wet puzzle envelopes from the train station. I can sense fatigue in some of the teams. We have to eat dinner.
I’m on the phone with Andrew, and our ultimate verdict that we decide upon is that your team has not been the first team to claim victory; that honor belongs to Team C. But you still harbor hopes of being the first team to fullsolve.
Meanwhile, there’s a third contender you have to worry about.
5:32pm
Jonny of Team Ab (that's A flat — I just think the flat Unicode symbol ♭ is ugly) starts calling me. He wants a hint.
He has the Thief role, and has amassed a large quantity of style points by stealing an item from every team. He’s also stolen roles and puzzles. He doesn’t know why his team hasn’t won yet. I tell him it’s because he hasn’t claimed victory.
“Can we have a hint?” he asks.
“Does your whole team agree that you want a hint?”
His whole team does not agree. And therein lies the problem.
Team Ab is a two-person team, and the other member is Josh, whose brother is the creator of Puzzles for Progress. Josh has been hoarding the team’s Jacob Facts, and is pretty sure that they’re just for fun. In fact, I specifically told him that.
Josh, as it happens, is a Jigsaw Skeptic. And he’s doing an excellent job.
Jonny calls me a total of four times within a ten-minute span, and I do my best to rebuff his efforts for a hint, because I think it’s hilarious. But eventually, at 5:52, their team fullsolves. (Even if they hadn’t, there’s a strong case to be made that Josh would advance to the game show on his own.)
6:24pm
I’ve declared the hunt over. Most people are eating dinner, reminiscing about the hunt. But some teams are still at work, and I decide not to stop them.
The only thing standing in between Team Ab and a fullsolve, giving them a chance to compete against Team C in the game show, is the crossword. It’s a difficult crossword, but because of this, I announced that hints would only have a cost of 1 minute. So they simply ask for a hint for every single answer. And because Andrew ends up doing their hints instead of me, his hints simply are the answers. They’re able to finish at 6:25, for an adjusted time of 6:46.
So that’s your team’s time to beat. With only the crossword standing in your way, you manage to complete it with only a single hint and an official time of 6:42. (Your teammate Allison also catches a mistake in a crossword clue — embarrassing for me, because I even remember double-checking it — making her the only recipient of the Pennies for Typos program.)
6:52pm
Well, this definitely meets the criterion for “unclear which team won.” So I decide to invite all three competitive teams (C, Ab, and A) into the game show, which I’ve just thrown together from the participant-submitted questions.
There’s a brief awards ceremony — Team B, consisting of Emerson and Sierra, gets a shoutout for having the most fun (they recorded several vlogs! They also were hard at work on a fanfic for Entertainment but failed to submit it before it was due) — and then I announce that the mini game show, which will have a pretty standard format, is about to start.
But before it begins, you notice something happening to your soul. It feels like it’s fraying. You start to worry.
“I would love to join the game show,” you say. “But I have to run. I think my time vortex is about to expire.”
“I’m so happy you were able to come!!! I have something for you. A prize of one million—” but I get cut off as your essence flickers away. There’s just no way to know what I would have said.
Even without your help, your team prevails in the game show! I present the other team members with a handwritten check for their prize money: Mr Stone’s number of Jacob dollars. (Mr Stone’s number is defined as “Uncountable infinity, but just enough subtracted from it so it becomes finite. Right there at the edge. That's my number. So if you add only a little bit, it would become infinity, which would fail.” What I love about this number is I still don’t know whether Mr Stone was trolling when he defined it.)
But as we take the photo, I realize I’ve forgotten something crucial. This ridiculous question-mark cloak Lucia found for me to buy on Amazon! I’d meant to wear it at the start of the game show, to inject some extra drama. But I haven’t forgotten it, so I quickly put it on, and we retake the photo, everyone illuminated with questions by the projector light. (That photo becomes the Part 2 thumbnail. I dare you to try to read the trivia questions in these excellent-resolution photos.)
And with that, the party’s over.
Now
For you, since your time vortex expired, it’s the present moment. So before I go, three little administrative comments:
I did promise last part that I’d publish answers and maybe hints for the puzzles (the first of which is available in pdf format or online). So here’s the official Answer Key PDF! You can scroll through it to simulate hints, but perhaps I’ll write some official hints for Part 3. (Yes, there will be a Part 3 next week!) We’ll see. This whole “iphph writeup” project is undergoing classic planning fallacy and scope creep. But I have most of Part 3 written.
By the way, I’ve loved hearing your kind words about the puzzles! Continue telling me about how your solves have been going, and let me know if you’re stuck and want a personalized hint (email puzzlesforprogress@waiter.com or Discord @chromaticconflux work great).
At first I was indignant that Taylor Swift counterscheduled her new album The Tortured Poets Department with the Puzzles for Progress release of this blog post. (The audacity…) It’s getting mixed reviews, including from some Swifties, but I actually find it very beautiful, especially the anthology version, so I forgive Taylor.
See you shortly for Part 3: the ultimate part, replete with my anecdotes and reflections from planning this monstrous undertaking, and the inside stories you might’ve heard if your time vortex didn’t expire. Of all the parts, this one will take you deepest into my mind.
Be excited! And scroll down when you’re ready.
Here in Part 3, I cover my process as I created the event! To do so, we must embark on a journey back in time. C’mon in!
10/29/23, midday
It’s Sunday, and I should be working on my college applications. The UC ones are due in a few days, and I’m not yet satisfied with my responses. But my mind wants to escape from the world of zero-sum self-promotion and create something.
I’ve thought about forcing my friends to solve a puzzle hunt for my birthday before. But suddenly I want to pull out all the stops, roll all my event ideas into one, do something for the community around me that I’ve been so fortunate to exist in and that I’ve worked so hard to cultivate through my life so far. I’ve run nerdy parties before (most notably, two 7-person “presentation parties” where guests delivered slideshow presentations on topics they’re passionate about) but this one will be bigger: somewhere between birthday party, graduation party, and immersive puzzle-hunt experience.
So I write down some ideas, like having a social deduction game in the background, or creating a me-themed trivia game (“Jacob Jeopardy”?), or writing another chaotically-clued crossword like these. I imagine the location (probably my house?) and the potential guests. I imagine there being an event playlist — ooh, what if that also contained a puzzle? What if I made people estimate probabilities of things that will occur during the event? Or what if there was a puzzle inspired by The Mysterious Benedict Society?
Crap. Have I really wasted an hour like this? Well, that’s been very self-indulgent of me. Those college essays won’t write themselves.
And so, over the next two months, I get back to work advertising myself to universities. But when I have a spare moment, I think about the puzzle hunt party. I ask close friends about their availability. I ask on puzzle Discord servers for advice about running hunts (they link me lots of helpful content).
Every night, I lie in bed, and so my brain finally gives myself permission to think about something other than the urgent: school and college apps and whatever else is right then.
And my thoughts often find themselves inexorably drifting toward the puzzle hunt party. Aided by the whiteboard next to my bed, a great deal of the initial planning of iphph occurs in my mind as I nominally attempt slumber.
12/16/23, 3:11pm
It’s a month and a half later and I’m sending out an official email!
It’s stylized in lowercase and somewhat cryptic, including a confusing reference to BöpGil. However, the main significance of the email is to emphasize the date (March 2nd, 2024) and for respondents to complete two forms.
One is the Interest Form (which requires people to estimate their probability of attending, but also to select their favorite vegetable from among “avocado,” “tomato,” and “pineapple” — I just do this to create controversy). It turns out that people tend to overestimate their attendance on the Interest Form — particularly bad is the 98% category, which included four people, one of whom won’t end up making it and one of whom almost won’t — so it very nearly ended up as a 50% actual rate. (Just for fun, here’s a calibration graph below. Congrats to the 90% category for being the only group not to overestimate!)
The other is the optional Chaos Form, whose questions (appearing in a random order) include:
What do you view as the ideal size when solving puzzle hunts? (Most people put around 3-4, which is helpful.)
What is a fact about me, Jacob, that you find interesting, funny, or notable? (I’m hoping to adapt these to create Jacob Facts, but ultimately it turns out that I’m better at coming up with interesting facts about myself than the form submitters.)
Rate your familiarity with the following topics. (The topics are things like “Word puzzles (e.g. crosswords, Spelling Bee)”, “Public transit,” and “Graph theory.”)
What is something you think would be entertaining if it happened at this event? (User-submitted answers include “flamingos” (Lucia), “Jacob gave me an acovado snack to mucnh on” (Sophia from sophialiao.com), “Ball pit” (Andrew), “orgy” (anonymous), and “A murder” (Zahara). None of these would ultimately happen, in part because Sophia would be lame and not attend the event in order to do the “important” “time-sensitive” “knowledge work” of finishing her PRIMES reading report, whose deadline would shortly afterward be extended by 11 days. This would be a victory for karma and a loss for the aforementioned Chaotic Evil capricious mathematician, who much like last time fully authorized the publication of this anecdote.)
What’s your second-favorite ice-cream flavor? (The first six submissions included two rocky road and two matcha, which surprised me. Mint chip ultimately overtakes them in popularity, with three submissions.)
What’s your favorite color of the alphabet? (I’m pretty happy with the answers, among them “yes” (Yapa), “🅾️” (Emerson), “q cuz it’s a mix of purple and red” (Lucia), and “E (color in hex by implicitly converting to 0x00000E)” (Peter).)
What was the secret message in the email? (It was “good practice,” which is spelled out by the randomly bolded letters. A certain person replies all to the email and writes “why are letters randomly bolded,” which I find hilarious.)
Finally, my favorite question: iphph values community and diversity, and encourages guests to engage in respectful conversations that can expand their perspectives and challenge their ideas and beliefs. As a prospective member of this event, reflect on how your lived experiences will impact the conversations you have while solving puzzles, between puzzles, and while eating dinner. What lessons have you learned in life so far? What will other guests learn from you? In short, how will your lived experiences help you contribute positively to the diversity of iphph? (500 characters maximum) (I quite like Caden’s response, which is “In life, I've learned to always seek challenges, especially ones like finishing this form. From me, the other guests will learn that the square root of 2 (approximately 1.4142) is a positive real number that, when multiplied by itself, equals the number 2. My lived experiences will contribute to the diversity by demonstrating just how much I hate puzzles, which will be unlike anyone else who goes there.” Kaden, on the other hand, writes “AHHHHHHHHHHH IM GETTING FLASHBACKS PLEASE LORD JACOB HAVE MERCY.” However, probably my favorite answer comes from my long-term co-conspirator and inspiration, Andrew: “In my lived experiences, I've been to loads of events. Many of them have totally sucked or been very lame. However due to my analytical and penetrating mind I have deduced the cause of errors that lead to the failure of previous events and if I noticed potential disaster at yours I'd let it happen and then loudly mock you for it and be generally unhelpful. In that way I would positively increase diversity.”)
Overall, reading everyone’s responses to the Chaos Form is a big highlight for me, and I highly recommend making your friends fill out silly forms.
1/24/24, 2:35am
Sending out invitations far in advance, as I did, is also recommended. But one side effect is that people sometimes don’t hear about the event for a while and start asking you things like “Jacob, is your ‘puzzle hunt party’ really happening?” So it feels like high time now to send out another email, with more logistics. As it goes out, it’s the exact midpoint time between the first email and the planned event.
Instead of my house, I announce that the event will actually be at a rented room in a nearby park! This is a great location because there’s also a train station, library, pool, etc. very close by, and it feels well worth the complications involved in acquiring it.
More people fill out my forms, and more hype is made. I place an order on Amazon for a cloak with a bunch of question marks on it, and an order from The Pencil Guy Shop for 150 purple custom promotional Puzzles for Progress pencils to give out as party favors (and for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament coming up in April, and for giving out to everyone who will take one because I ordered 150). And I continue on with daily life.
2/19/24, 10:52am
At some point it hits me that I told people I was running this puzzle hunt party thing in only a few weeks and I have not written nearly enough puzzles yet. (Yes, even for the things dearest to my heart, my procrastination manifests.)
I mean, I have ideas. They just don’t currently cohere into a puzzle hunt. And how can I write the puzzles when I don’t know the structure of the hunt?
First, the most important thing: I get a test run on the calendar. So now I just have three days — until Thursday the 22nd — to write a bunch of puzzles; that’s the deadline in my mind, so my procrastinator brain activates.
Alright, here’s what I’ve been thinking so far: the event should have some scavenger-hunt-iness, where teams walk around the area, and one puzzle physically leads to the next.
However, one classic problem with scavenger hunts is that whenever the first team figures out the actual puzzle, the rest of the teams can just follow that team, and suddenly they have a very strong sense of where to go.
My innovation is that the puzzles could take the form of a cycle, where different teams (this could support up to twelve) start at different points so they can’t as easily follow the other teams.
I do have to figure out how to label the twelve points in the cycle. When I asked on a puzzle Discord if there were sets of twelve things which (like the zodiac, which I didn’t feel like using) have a canonical order but no first element, there were two excellent suggestions: colors and notes of the chromatic scale. Ooh, perhaps I could name my event the Chromatic Conflux Hunt!
(Making this graphic in my iphph planning spreadsheet (what, you didn’t think I had a spreadsheet? Of course I have a spreadsheet) made me realize why symmetrically spaced colors on the RGB scale aren’t more widely used: they don’t look symmetrical to the human eye at all. This is probably related to the weird responsivity spectra of cones in the eye.)
Except…twelve feels like a lot. I’m worried that teams will lose steam. Also, what if it rains? Additionally, as I think about my puzzle ideas, there are many where I’m not sure how it will lead to the next puzzle. I go to the location and make a new plan (a few things are redacted because they spoil parts of the online adaptation):
Although this doesn’t enable me to name the hunt Chromatic Conflux Hunt, and although it makes the musical notes a bit of an awkward relic, it will remain as the structure of the two phases that would make it into the hunt, although they would be renamed. After solving each puzzle, each team would earn a Jacob Fact, and the Jacob Facts would form a jigsaw puzzle which reveals the instructions for how to win. My dream is actually to make it so when you put the Jacob Facts jigsaw all together, the words get rebracketed or reinterpreted to reveal a rhyming poem explaining how to win.
But look at that spreadsheet! That’s a worryingly small amount of green in the Puzzle Status column. This Jacob Facts revamp does not seem like the priority. After a brief interlude the next day publishing my Manifold Politics post and going to an evening event, I channel all my free time into going to the park where the event would be and making these puzzles the best that they can be for Thursday.
2/22/24, around 2:22pm
My frantic days writing puzzles culminate in a frantic morning writing the large blocks of text that make up Trivial Trivia, printing, cutting, and envelope-ing, which led to a frantic early afternoon arranging things around the park and asking the librarians for a favor.
I haven’t finished the Capsules that was intended to be an Evergreen Event (it’s fine, I say to myself; it’s self-contained), nor have I fleshed out the secret roles I want or the way the game show’s gonna work, and suddenly it’s time for the test run!
It’s a sunny day, and three fearless live test-solvers have gathered to partake in my nonsense!
So I have them fill out predictions, give them roles (which I write on the fly), and start them off by giving them the Chaos Crossword, the first of the self-contained Evergreen Events.
Good news: the team gives the crossword positive reviews when they’re done! Bad news: it takes them around an hour… and I worry that, in the real thing, teams who can’t crack the crossword will lose morale for the cyclic puzzles.
Instead of giving the testers the next Evergreen Event, I decide to proceed into the Cyclic Conundrums. Hmm, what’s a good one to start with?
Oh wait, I realize. I forgot to keep extra copies of the Cyclic Conundrums in my backpack. Well, another lesson to write down for the real thing.
I walk with the team to their first puzzle (Number Puzzle, in this case). They have the perfect arc with it: confused at first, falling for the decoy answers, then realizing the trick!
They move to the next puzzle, which is currently titled “A Novel Puzzle.”
One side effect of me, personally, having written a lot of puzzles quickly is the descent into madness, and the growing sense in my mind that if you lampshade a bad concept enough, then maybe it’s okay. (Narrator: it’s still lazy.)
So, the concept relates to the phrase DIVERGENT SERIES, which can refer to two things: first, in math, an infinite summation of numbers (for example, the harmonic series, 1 + ½ + ⅓ + …) which doesn’t have a limit; i.e. it doesn’t “approach” any value. Second, the Divergent series of books, by Veronica Roth, which is what you need to find in the library.
I knew it was obscure, so I gave the puzzle’s text a lot of random hints that point in this direction. Four and Prior are character names in the book, the underlined text indicates DIVER + GENT + SERIES, the author’s name veronica roth does appear in gray in the passage (admittedly, a very dark gray). Also, a lot of the text is true as applied to one of the types of DIVERGENT SERIES.
However, for people to whom the idea of divergent series do not instantly jump out, the puzzle remains rather confusing. It feels like it was thrown together by me without much regard for the solver experience. Overall, I know I have to replace this puzzle — it has an interesting concept, but no concept is worth a bad solver experience.
But once I give enough hints to give away the puzzle, the testers find the Divergent series in the library, and are presented with an austere sheet of paper with this title:
Get An Airplane at the Library
However, it just so happens that I had already revealed this planned gambit to one of the testers. “Is this the puzzle where you’re supposed to interact with a customer service person?” he says. Indeed, one of my longstanding ideas (it’s represented as “Buy an onion” in the planning spreadsheet, if you scroll up) is that teams would have to realize they had to ask something ridiculous to an employee or customer service worker at some sort of establishment, and I’d selected the library. It’s another ConstructedAdventures Chris Waters premise: interacting with people from the outside world, who are assumed not to be involved, feels like magic.
So he asks the librarian for an airplane
—and it was a different librarian than the one I’d spoken to beforehand, so I was worried—
but she provides the next puzzle, folded into a paper airplane, enclosing a Jacob Fact, just as I’d hoped. Great, I thought. This library gambit really works.
Then Building Blocks, and then How Well Do You Know Me?, which both will wind up unchanged in the final hunt (other than their positions).
Next is a puzzle titled This Is Sort of Familiar. This is the one that relied on the Chaos Form, but instead of just a single fill-in-the-blank, it’s now a much more ambitious premise. Testers have to do a “sort of familiar” — sorting and ordering squares for terms like “College applications” and “The Idiot (novel),” which had been cut out, based on their average level of familiarity for the form. Then, the bolded letters spell “Go to the public transit stop behind the fan.”
Get it? The testers don’t. It’s also weird because even if you understand the premise, how are you supposed to know exactly what order the things ended up in? Another puzzle that will have to be substituted.
Then the Plaque Extraction (which is easier than it will be in the real hunt, because I had supplied a description of the cipher in an attached paper to the testers at the start), and the solvers are able to assemble the Jacob Facts jigsaw, and they find it satisfying.
Overall, the testers have enjoyed it, but there are definitely things to be done.
I take a break and head to Southern California for two days for the second time that month (this is a total coincidence), and then I get back to work.
3/1/24, evening
It’s the night before. The last few days before a big event always require doing more things than you think — like sending more emails with logistics, and getting the final determination of who is and isn’t planning to come — and I’ve been busy. I’ve gotten my nails painted, purple shirt borrowed, cloak ready. I’ve replaced the two puzzles that clearly needed fixing: swapping A Novel Puzzle for a simpler one that involved finding a different book in the library (How To Bake Pi), and changing the Chaos Form puzzle to be more straightforward.
I’m tired. I know I should get some rest. But there are still a few things that need to be done before tomorrow. Important things, too.
The secret roles. I’ve thought of a few — like Jigsaw Skeptic and Word Feeder — but I haven’t filled out enough for everyone, and I haven’t assigned who would get what.
The game show. I like the idea of having a game show with the top teams after the puzzles are solved, but I haven’t written any questions for it.
The Capsules puzzle. This is one of the Evergreen Events, and I know it’s not strictly necessary to have, but I think it would round out the set really well — something for the people who prefer logic puzzles to word puzzles, and I have a good layout.
This seems like quite a situation. So how do I get out of it?
Using my one skill I haven’t yet used: delegating!
I realize that my co-conspirator and inspiration Andrew knows the guests well and would do a great job at coming up with secret roles, and he accepts the undertaking.
I realize that the game show would be a fun thing to have written by the guests themselves! So I incorporate question-writing into an Evergreen Event: specifically the puzzle called Entertainment.
And with the free time afforded to me by the lifting of those responsibilities, I tinker with the Capsules until it works with the symmetry I want, which it mercifully does.
Then, in a shocking plot twist, I sleep well!
3/2/24, morning
The party’s in three hours, and I have to print so much paper. Five Evergreen Events, seven Cyclic Conundrums, one sheet of Jacob Facts, and a park map — all multiplied by the eight teams that I’m trying to support, plus a few for insurance. The printer in my home is not in color, so I’m at the house of a neighbor who has graciously volunteered their printer. However, there are some technical difficulties (I have to reformat all my files), so it takes a while, but I ultimately print all the paper that I want, and get it into the proper envelopes. (I receive some help for the cutting and sorting of the Jacob Facts.)
I wolf down lunch and head to the park.
1:50pm
It’s raining and I’m still running around trying to place the last few clues, and trying to set up the room. I meant to be ready before now, but I’m not, because of course I’m not. I enter the library. All I have to do is talk to the library people again, and I see one of the same people who was here the previous week…
—I should have seen it coming that the librarian would say no; it’s not their job, so they can’t do the puzzle hunt thing at a higher scale. It’s a very respectable and reasonable choice, Chris Waters said it worked surprisingly well but his specialty is experiences for one person, I was just complacent since it went so well during the test run—
Somehow I’m not worried, though. I just place the paper-airplane Puzzle Gs very close to the Puzzle Fs. Later on the Puzzle Fs would (I think) get removed.
But yeah, one of the major conceits of the puzzle hunt party got removed and it doesn’t even feel like it matters.
2:08pm
I get to the room late, but the party is going well even before it starts. I’ve invited people who didn’t know each other beforehand, and they’re enjoying meeting each other. I change into my ridiculous purple shirt, and suddenly I’m giving the kickoff presentation, and the rest is history…
7:30pm
The room rental has expired. As I lead a walking delegation to my home for the afterparty, I finally get to hear everyone’s reactions. Between drinking soda, hanging out, and playing Taboo, we reflect on how the event went, and it becomes clear to me that I’d truly created an awesome, enjoyable, unforgettable experience. Suddenly it feels like, after the trials and tribulations of senior year, I have nothing left to prove.
4/5/24, around 11pm
Some weeks have passed. I’m at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Connecticut, at the wine-and-cheese reception. I really meant to get this post out before now, but they didn’t have a real deadline, and I wanted to do a good job.
I’m chatting with cruciverbalists, giving out my Puzzles for Progress pencils. Multiple people ask what the “progress” refers to, and I say something about how I’m fundraising for malaria nets, because it’s a cause area where we know the solution and even a bit of money helps, but I haven’t emphasized it in awhile. You’d be forgiven for forgetting that that’s one of the reasons I started this puzzling journey.
The truth is that I don’t know, anymore, what you should do with your money. I think malaria nets are efficient and effective — United To Beat Malaria saves lives! — but amid everything going on in the world, from war to AI to other existential risks, I really don’t know what organization can have the greatest positive impact with a few hundred dollars. Even within malaria nets, I learned that GiveWell rates the Against Malaria Foundation higher. Uncertainty isn’t a reason to give up, but I don’t want to post something on the internet if I’m not certain, so I’ve stopped talking about the charity aspect much, even though I care about charity.
But I think my puzzles have been making progress, in their own way. As I explore the tournament — from the crossword fashion to the dramatic whiteboard finals — I realize that puzzles (and games) are where nerds go to experience real-world magic: for the real-world difficulties of the world to go away and be replaced by order and beauty.
The progress that I feel most moved to make with my life these days is to create real-world magic, whatever form it takes. And as the saying goes, any sufficiently well-planned puzzle hunt is indistinguishable from magic.
There’s a quote I like which I’m pretty sure I first saw on Tumblr: “There is no reason to ever have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.” Apparently it’s from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, the iconic productivity book, where I’m sure the emphasis was on the first part. But I like the second part. There’s no reason I should keep thinking about how iphph went, except that I really like having that thought. I want to keep living within the idea of March 2nd, and I wanted to bring you inside that concept. I wanted to insert the puzzle hunt party here, and I—well, I did, didn’t I?!
Now
Again, you can begin the online adaptation of this puzzle hunt either via PDF or in an online interface, and access the answer key here.
I’m not sure where puzzles will take me next, but I’m excited to tell you about it.
Thanks to my parents, Peter, Matthew, Andrew, Amelia, Kodek, Autumn, bolgat, Gliperal, ConManAU, qwefty, and chrisj50 for testing parts or all of iphph. Thanks to my excellent wardrobe consultants Lucia, Kaden, and Maridel. Thanks to my parents (a ton), Andrew, Zane, Kathy, Jen, and the city for help with logistics. Thanks to Penpa, Ingrid, Crosshare, OneLook, Crossword Helper, Sets of Things, beta.vero.site, PC, CTC, Crosscord, ConstructedAdventures, and various other online resources that provided me ideas and technical help with the puzzles. Thanks to Andrew, Audrey, Allison, Lucia, Hunter, Emerson, Sierra, Zahara, Zane, Emmett, Yapa, Spencer, Caden, Nathaniel, Allie, Maria, Kaden, Ender, Jonny, and Josh for coming and making the event even more than what I could’ve imagined. Thanks to all the people I’m forgetting. Thanks to you, for reading to the end and maybe solving my puzzles; I hope you enjoyed experiencing iphph vicariously through it even if you couldn't come.
Thank you to everyone, for helping my dreams come true. Without you, it might not have occurred to me to dream this at all.
Best,
Jacob Meyer Cohen
(middle name reveal. it’s three five-letter names alternating consonants and vowels. I should’ve made this my brand much earlier)
PS: If you enjoy reading my writing and you’re not a subscriber, please add your email to subscribe to Chromatic Conflux! Since I don’t post regularly, it’s actually the best time — you won’t be spammed at all, and when I do email you next, it’ll probably be for something good. Similarly, if you like puzzles, check out and maybe subscribe to puzzlesforprogress.net! I recommend Issue #115 — it’s just a set of mini crosswords, so very approachable, but you’ll enjoy them on another level if you like puzzle hunt-style logic.
PPS: This post is releasing here on May 18th. The original email about the event was sent out on December 16th. The exact midpoint between those dates is — you guessed it — March 2nd, when the event occurred!
PPPS: I always feel bad when I write a blog post without using the thumbnail as an image somewhere so it feels like a more genuine component, so here it is:
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