I updated the public Octothorpean source code. It said something like "This is the source code to the Google App Engine .go program behind 'Octothorpean'," though that's been wrong for a year. I copi...
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Octothorpean is Back
Octothorpean is back up and running, hooray! The next time you're talking with someone about your puzzlehunting activities and they sputter "How would you even get started learning how to do that?" t...
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octothorpean.org will shut down around June 30, 2020. It had a good run. Teams are still playing—there's about one new team per day. In May, three teams solved the big scary metapuzzle. So wh...
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If you like puzzles and/or beer & are free this Tuesday evening, maybe you want to do Puzzled Pint. In a bold departure from making puzzles about the # typographic symbol, I drafted some puzzles ...
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Team Hobgoblin has earned the "Postcard" badge on the Octothorpean online puzzle hunt site, the second team to do so. It's been a little over three years since the first team earned that badge. Maybe...
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Urban Morphology is Everywhere, even San Francisco's Mission District
We built this city on rock and roll; I built puzzles on this city. Tonight I made a rare journey out to the Mission District to meet friends and listen to shoegazy music. But on the way over, I stopp...
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One Year of Octothorpean
The Octothorpean online puzzle-hunt launched a year ago today. How have things gone since then? Pretty well, I think. On the other hand, for the goals I had… They're not so easy to measure. S...
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Book Report: Shady Characters
Thursday afternoon, talk at work turned to punctuation. Since work uses a lot of @s and #s, this should not surprise you. Someone hazily remembered that Shakespeare had invented “modern quotati...
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Suppose octothorpean.org had photos of you and/or other puzzle nerd teams at various puzzle-y places. Where would be a good place for those photos? Soon-ish, Octothorpean will reward you for sending...
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Some folks are playing @octothorpean during #mysteryhunt and that's OK. Puzzle Hunts are everwhere and, between them, welcome folks of all puzzling experience levels. When Octothorpean opened up a co...
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Starting to send out emails to Octothorpean teams letting them know about new puzzles, puzzles they've missed, etc. In small batches at first: partly so that the earliest recipients can let me know i...
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I added a puzzle to Octothorpean this weekend. It took longer to figure out where to put the puzzle than it did to write the puzzle itself. I wanted to add a puzzle close to the beginning of Octothor...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere even if I was just in my apartment
This was the opening weekend for The Octothorpean Order game. It felt good! 60 teams solved the start-puzzle; 28 already made it as far as solving the big scary meta. Wow, that was fast; I think it's...
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Figured out why a location-based puzzle was broken: a misspelled mural. I'm doing more of a "workaround" than a "fix" for that one. ...
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This isn't Even my Final Form
In last week's SnoutCast, DeeAnn mused on the recent "save the date" announcement for the Octothorpean Order Opening Day (November 16!): "It's going to be very interesting to see it in its—I ...
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Of course the main thing that will strike you about this mural photograph is the total lack of octothorpes: For a while, this wall had an Octothorpe and an Octothorpean puzzle. The excellent Bonel...
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This happy chart illustrates a web server not falling over as twenty-something teams pile on to play Lumber Party: That's requests-per-second. The spike shows the time around 10:30am, when everyone...
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Link: Puzzle Pile interview about Lumber Party
In which we find out that The Octothorpean Order is partly about puzzles but also partly about instructional design, human cognition, and the limited power of written instruction to inspire action. T...
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Lumber Party: a Quick Online Puzzle Hunt
If you enjoy puzzles, you might set aside some time on the 21st (a Sunday) for Lumber Party. It'll be a chance to solve a self-contained arc of puzzles from the Octothorpean Order (which continues to...
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OMG you guys, one of Leon's neighbors in "Midnight Madness" is Wally THORPE. If I can just find seven more Thorpes in Puzzlehunt-related media, I'll be well on my way to creating a thematic octothorp...
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Playtesting continues apace. A small subset of the DRT (Demonic Robot Tyrannosaurs) tore through many, many puzzles, as you might expect. Of course, it was tricky figuring out how to transform their...
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Want to Playtest the Octothorpean Game puzzlehunt 5/25, 5/26, 5/27 or 6/2?
Update: OK, that's enough responses to keep me busy for now. Thank you! (If you're from out of town, and June 2 was going to be a rare chance for you to do bay area stuff, then you should still talk...
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I asked the nice lady at the Preservation Society if she knew about any buildings that had # as a prominent design element. She laughed. Even when my puzzles don't come together, I still bring mirt...
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Taking Shape (where the shape is #)
Months ago, excellent partly-puzzlehunt-naive team Drop_Table was the (brave!) first playtest team of the Octothorpean Game. It took a long time to incorporate their feedback. The game has many, many...
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Another San Francisco Octothorpean Puzzle Ahead of Opening Day
[Update: Don't play this puzzle; playtesting reveals that it wasn't actually fun.] I'm revealing another San Francisco puzzle from the Octothorpean Order online puzzlehunt: Bunny. No, the Octothorpe...
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One San Francisco Octothorpean Puzzle Ahead of Opening Day
I'm not a super-duper expert about location-based puzzles. I don't know exactly when the world is going to change and thusly mess up a puzzle. But I know that it happens. This weekend, I found a nice...
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RFP: Request for Location-Based Puzzles from Your Hometown
I encourage you to send me a location-based puzzle from your hometown. Or a few, even. The online-puzzle-trail-in-the-making Order of the Octothorpe now has some location-based puzzles... but they...
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Resources for nerds who want in to MIT #MysteryHunt ?
I'm working on an online puzzle trail for newbs. Along the way, I try to point the newbs at, y'know, real puzzlehunts where they can put their new-found knowledge of Morse code to use. I'd like a pag...
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Couldn't think of a good graphic for a Playtester "merit badge". So that page shows an broken-image graphic. That might be more appropriate than any actual graphic could ever be. ...
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Variation on the Newbie Game RFP
I'm working on this game that's like a bootcamp for newbie puzzlehunters. Ideally, if a team finishes one or two, e.g., Shinteki-style puzzles, they'd get some kind of a notice "Wow, you're doing gre...
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Newbie Game RFP
There's this sketch of an online puzzlehunt that's aimed at puzzlehunt newbies—it doesn't expect teams to be able to recognize, e.g., semaphore flags. This game would stick around—if, yea...
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Wanted: Wanna-Be Puzzlehunters near SF
You've had this conversation. They ask you what you did last weekend. You say you puzzlehunted. They say OMG that sounds amazing, I wanna play. You encourage them to look at some MIT Mystery Hunt puz...
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