BAPHL 10

Put on by For Immoral Use Only.

5 Successes

1. First time attendee discount. We had 11 of 41 teams sign up as first-time attendees. I think this was a great way to introduce people to group puzzle solving and get them interested in the hobby. It could be considered a failure as we almost lost money on the printing costs, but to me (Amy), it was worth it.
2. Solving milestones. Like Alice Shrugged in the 2014 Mystery Hunt, we had a goal of making sure that teams of all ability levels got to feel like they made significant progress. We had 17 of 32 Varsity teams and 2 of 9 IM teams finish the endgame, but more importantly, 29 Varsity teams and 5 IM teams solved at least one city meta. I (Nathan) would have liked the IM numbers to be even higher, but considering how many IM teams were first-timers, I think we did a pretty good job.
3. Pulling off a complex structure. We didn't plan to have such a complex (for BAPHL) structure from the outset; it just happened that way. Our earliest sketches had a two-part meta for the endgame, and when someone suggested dividing the hunt into cities, we decided to have mini-metas and...all of a sudden we had 5 metapuzzles. But we made it work, and the structure helped us reach success number 2 above.
4. "Local" flavor. We wanted each city to have its own flavor, which was reflected to varying extents in both the metapuzzles and the individual puzzles. All the Seattle answers had a connection to Seattle, and most of the Las Vegas puzzles had a tie-in to gambling. Fort Worth was less consistent about this, though.

5 Problems

1. Solution Writeups. Ideally, we should have had constructors provide solution writeups with their puzzle drafts, for a variety of reasons. In practice, when we started missing deadlines, we focused more on getting the puzzles ready, punting solutions until who knows when. Team members generally understood how to do the puzzles that they had testsolved, but Nathan had to throw together a summary of all the solutions the day before BAPHL. Also, the post-BAPHL website update was delayed because we didn't have solutions ready.
2. Briefing location staffers We put together packets telling our location staffers what to do the day before BAPHL, and as a result we left out some details. Chief among them was outlining a plan for keeping teams moving from one location to the next, and when/how to close locations and move teams to the endgame. As a result, we were making some frantic calls to location staff around 5 PM on the day of BAPHL, and when we couldn't reach staff at one location, that location closed significantly later than the others.
3. Diversity/Difficulty. Overall, we got a decent variety of puzzle types and difficulty levels, but on a per-location basis, things were a bit unbalanced. All the Seattle puzzles were very wordplay-oriented, but more crucially, the hardest and longest puzzles went into Fort Worth. This hadn't even occurred to us until ClueKeeper informed us that teams were making much more progress in Seattle and Las Vegas than they were in Fort Worth, at which point there was little that could be done.