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VeheMusical Wrapup!

Hello, hello!

First things first, a huge thank you to all the teams who participated in the VeheMusical! In total, 415 teams signed up for the hunt, 284 solved at least one puzzle, and an incredible 142 teams finished the hunt!

Additionally, an extra-special standing ovation to our top five finishers:

We’d also like to give a shoutout to:

Please note that the rest of the wrap-up will contain answers! You’ve been warned!

Story and Theme Summary

The hunt was themed as a cabaret-style night of Broadway musical performances, and was billed as a “short and sweet mini-hunt” with “10 puzzles and a meta.” Teams sat down to enjoy the show, but quickly found that each performance was more puzzling than they had expected. To make matters worse, after solving enough puzzles, teams realized they had only seen nine of the ten performances that were promised. Indeed, it seemed that the show’s final performer, Jean Valjean, was missing! Luckily, thanks to some help from the stage manager, teams remembered that LES IS MORE and went ahead with the performance anyway. In the end, Jean did return, though it wasn’t until the show had finished – and he had a mysterious limp to boot. Where’d he go? Perhaps we’ll find out one day


Writing Process

This was not our first attempt at writing a hunt. Inspired by Huntinality 2.0, and driven by the naivety that only a pre-teen garage band would understand, we set out to start writing Vehemhunt on June 29, 2022. We had originally planned to make a full, three round hunt complete with a story, art, and a theme paying homage to ARGs. Over the ensuing years, we planned rounds and even built a couple puzzles out that we still really like! Eventually, motivation waned and it became clear that we didn’t have the experience to fulfill our ambition. The original Vehemhunt idea was abandoned on January 17, 2024.

This date is not arbitrary, however. On January 16, Eshton proposed a month-long puzzle potluck called Vehembruary. A dozen or so of us wrote two puzzles each and as a group, we released one puzzle per day in February. We initially planned on releasing these puzzles as a set (without metas) before we attempted to spaghetti together some metas and release it as a hunt. While not technically abandoned, energy and motivation waned again, putting this on indefinite hiatus. It was, however, great motivation to see what we’re capable of as writers, giving us the confidence that we could, in fact, write a good hunt.

Work on the VeheMusical began in late May 2024. After solving the excellent Puzzle Rojak, we found ourselves inspired, and the desire to write a puzzlehunt of our own bubbled up again. This time, though, there was one key difference – we decided very quickly that we would write a one-round, ten-puzzle hunt, in order to make sure the scope didn’t creep out of our control.

The musical theme came rather quickly. Everyone on the writing team is a big musical nerd, and Noah had been throwing around the idea of a musical-themed meta matching puzzle recently, but it wasn’t coming together save for one really good idea about Jean Valjean and zip codes. The meta-match was scrapped, and the Les Mis idea became our new meta.

From there, we just needed a good pun. Since we swore to ourselves that we wouldn’t go past ten feeders, we were looking for 10 letter answers that could be pun-ified. Chris suggested the answer, and Andria ran with it:

Thus, the meta-story of the missing puzzle was born! This led to a fun little note in the channel we had labeled “Puzzle 10”:

Work on the meta began almost immediately, by nearly the whole team. We all hopped on a Google sheet and started looking for acceptable answers in the right zip codes. On its own, the idea wasn’t incredibly constrained, but we made it tougher for ourselves by doing the following:

  1. Looking for answers that weren’t immediately obvious as locations (so things like “[x] Mountain” were out), barring a couple exceptions (CAMDEN YARDS, FORD’S THEATER,etc.) to give the meta some nice break-ins
  2. Looking for answers that had some sort of thematic connection to musicals we thought would be fun to write puzzles about
  3. Looking for answers that would come up with a Google search, no matter where you lived

The third constraint proved especially challenging, since in our searching Google tended to pick up on that we were strangely interested in obscure locations across the United States. There were several times where we “confirmed” an answer by having someone who hadn’t been frantically Googling zip codes look it up; Noah even roped some of his (very confused) non-puzzle friends into doing so. Eventually, satisfying all three constraints proved to be tricky, so we compromised with the state titles and script sections in order to give additional nudges towards the correct locations.

There were also several locations we considered, but didn’t end up using for the final puzzle:

From there, writing began. The small size and rapid start of the hunt meant that we weren’t incredibly organized; rather than using a tool like Puzzlord or Puzzup, we just made a few Discord channels and went for it! Answers and state-initial-titles could be claimed by authors and were given out on a first come, first served basis. We didn’t even have an editor at first; Noah sort of ended up becoming editor because (A) it was his summer break from college, so he had tons of time to kill making puzzles, and (B) he was the one who wrote the meta, so everyone else tended to come to him to make sure their answers and titles would work. This sort of just progressed overtime into him being the main editor. A similar story happened with the non-writing roles; though Knifey claimed the role of art lead very early, Chris just sort of emerged as the leader (and only member) of the tech team. (More on that later.) We consider it very lucky that we managed to pull this off without organizing better beforehand – it’s very fortunate that it all worked out!

There were very few outright restrictions on what authors could write (other than “it has to work with the meta,” of course), though the general consensus was to focus on two things:

  1. Variety – with so few puzzles, we all kind of agreed that it made sense that no two puzzles should get too close to each other in content. (Despite this, we did end up having a lot of image identification in the hunt!)
  2. Theming – this one was a huge focus, though it was never something we really discussed; it sprung up naturally from (A) us being huge musical fans and (B) our answer choices being musical-themed. Every author went into their writing process with a strong idea of their theming, and in many cases this helped influence the puzzle.

Feedback on the puzzles was very positive, especially related to the depth of the theming, so we’re really proud of what we accomplished!

Testsolving

For our first hunt, one of our team’s priorities was presenting a very clean set of puzzles. One of the benefits of a manageably-sized hunt was a plethora of time and energy to make sure our ten puzzles were well-tested and provided a smooth solving experience.

We put our puzzles through several rounds of testing. Our alpha testing was internal to the running team. Once we were sure that each puzzle was solvable and in a fairly presentable condition, we began testing the hunt as a whole. First, we beta tested with the members of Vehemence who were not on the running team, and then with external guests in our server. These rounds of testing were done mostly before our website was built out and focused intensely on flavor text and solve path tweaks. We did find some larger issues, mainly that one of our puzzles just wasn’t working and had to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. Once we rebuilt our final puzzle and tested it internally we moved onto our third round of testing, which focused on testing playthroughs with a functional website. This round of testing was done mostly with external testers. Even after so much testing we ended up finding a potentially large issue with our meta which, though not puzzle breaking, forced us to make a tough decision on its solve path. Originally, this round of testing was meant to be our last. However, with the meta issue identified, we decided to open the hunt to a fourth testing round to determine which meta solve path to use. Although this round was added pretty late in the game, the extra testing helped us to really catch and polish any smaller puzzle issues. The result was not only a confident meta decision, but also helped us produce an errata-free hunt (minus one copyable sheet that had a small inconsistency compared to the website).

Reflections

Successes

We tend to view puzzlehunts the same way we view escape rooms. In an escape room, we feel there needs to be some sort of “wow” factor to justify coming out to a room; if we just wanted to solve puzzles, we could stay home, download a mediocre escape room app or pull up a sudoku, and save a lot of money. For puzzlehunts, it’s the same thing. What justifies doing [x] hunt, rather than just solving a bunch of unrelated puzzles? For us, it’s absolutely theming, and we’re so very proud of how the theming for the hunt was done (and received)! Even little stuff like the Spotify playlist the team put together, or the Playbills sent to teams who completed the hunt while it was live (see below) went a long way, in our opinion, to creating a feeling of excitement and uniqueness.

During the hunt, finishing teams were sent this Playbill in an email - signed by every “actor” in the show!

Room for Improvement

As mentioned above, there wasn’t a lot of emphasis on organization going into this hunt. It was sort of a free-for-all that happened to come together fairly well. Nonetheless, there were plenty of scenarios where more organization (and a bigger team) would have alleviated a lot of stress; Chris, for example, was not only responsible for two (incredible) puzzles but also the entire website, a situation we’re eager to not repeat next time (even if it did spawn this incredible meme:)

I love the Princess Bride.

Wait, go back. What was that about “next time”?

Oh, yeah. VehemHunt will return. “When,” you ask? Who knows! But we had a wonderful time writing and hosting our first hunt, and we’re overflowing with ideas for another. Mark our words – this has yet to be the final curtain!

And hey, while the section headers are asking questions


Q&A

All questions come from the hunt’s feedback form.

Credits

Puzzle Authors: Andria Lewis, Chris Lohmann, Eshton Yang, Max Koppel, Nicolas Caspen, Noah Steele, Eric Shacklett

Editor-in-Chief: Noah Steele

Artwork: Knifey, John Lewis, Chris Lohmann

Web Design: Chris Lohmann

Vehemence Testsolvers: BuzzBee, Cassie Lamonde (skozam), exhaustrovert, Joe, Latent, Monsoon, robotticelli, Zomperzon, ASCII-T, Team Bluefish, Spencer Beebe

Guest Testsolvers: Edric Haleen, Tim/Soni, Matthew Stern, Lope, djack, Dan Egnor and Ana Ulin, boboquack, Kfcruan, Max Woghiren, Thomas Gordon, Michael Andersen, noneuclidean, Rainy

Appendix/Fun Stuff

Cool Stats

Here are some cool stats, and here is the big graph!

Mooving Speeches

During the hunt, 236 brave and passionate teams spoke up to save Milky White from being sold. Here were some of the speeches that mooved us the most.

Give a
 What Now?

We also received many alternate suggestions for what Jack should do to save Milky White. Here are some of our favorites:

Favorite Team Names

Fun Hunt Stories

A1Z5: “After finishing the hunt with A1Z5, I was spectating đŸ“âžĄïžđŸą (my usual small-hunt team), and I have to share this moment with you from this morning.

Procyon, *immediately* upon opening Jean Val-gone: “Why do they call it *Les* Miserables when metas make me *more* miserable?”

It took a lot of willpower not to say anything until after they finished, seven hours later. :)”

Em Cee of /r/PictureGame: (SPOILERS for ECPH 2 - highlight to reveal, at your own risk!)

“The story goes like this:

The whole thing was a coincidentally perfect setup!”

Beetlejuice Phantom Cabaret: “We had a lot of fun browsing for bulls and/or cows related to Marketplace Disaster. We spent a while perusing a bull semen sale website (https://selectsiresbeef.com/bull/angus/pvf-marvel-9185/) after finding cows with names relevant to the puzzle. It made for quite a good time :)”

Fish and the Monkeys: “For the longest time, I had transcribed the title of Fast Lane into my sheet as Fast Car (somehow that just ended up playing in my head when the puzzle unlocked) - luckily I spotted it before the state abbreviations came into play or I would've been rather confused about where King of Blades was supposed to be!”

Where’s Jean?

In the feedback form, we asked responders where they thought Jean ended up. Here are some of our favorite answers:

Vehemusical Fan Art

Em Cee of /r/PictureGame made this incredible pixel art for their Google Sheet!

Cornchak made an amazing shadow box of the VeheMusical art for their friend to commemorate their first puzzle hunt!

Final Thoughts

Thank you all SO, so much for puzzling with us. Even with its ups and downs, we couldn’t have asked for a better first experience running a hunt. We can’t wait for the next one!