It's a book about Stephen Sondheim, focusing on his puzzles and games
rather than on the stuff he's most famous for, theater. Of course, it's
the puzzle-y and game-y parts that I'm interested in, because I played
The Game,
a variety of
puzzle hunt
in which teams drive around from puzzle to puzzle over the course of a weekend.
Thanks to Scott "Puzzalot" Royer,
I'd learned a bit about The Game's history—and Stephen Sondheim's name
kept popping up.
I even buckled down and used a microfiche reader at the library
to read (and transcribe) a
1969 London Times article about Sondheim's puzzle hunts and
games.
Matching Minds with Sondheim sums it up:
An exploration of all the vastly different, creative offshoots
of Sondheim's Murder Game can seem to go on forever. … the
Los Angeles
moviegoer who watched
[The Last of] Sheila in 1973,
was inspired to design his own multicity scavenger hunt, which inspired
Disney's 1980 film Midnight Madness,
which
inspired one of its moviegoers
to create a similar game, which he eventually took
to Microsoft, …
Everything I found out hinted that there was plenty more to know:
Sondheim ran puzzly treasure hunts at friends' parties; he ran public
treasure hunts for charities, he brought british-style cryptic crosswords
to the US, he… Anyhow, this book gets into a lot of that.
I'm glad I read it.
It was slow going for me. I think this book expected to be the
second Sondheim bio read by a Sondheim fan, not necessarily
knowledgable about games or puzzles.
E.g., here's how
Oscar Hammerstein
is introduced in the book: "Hammerstein".
I read that and thought "Oh, right, uh, I think he worked on Oklahoma!
and some other stuff important enough that I'm going to
smack my forehead that it slipped my mind over the years."
On the other hand, noted board game expert
Sid Sackson
gets two pages of introduction. In a gathering of nerds, I'm probably
not the biggest board game fan, but even I know about Sid Sackson.
But if you expect your reader to be already-knowledgable about
Sondheim's theater-stuff but new to gnarly games, allotting two pages
for Sackson's introduction makes sense, as does assuming that the reader
already knows Hammerstein mentored Sondheim and worked on
The Sound of Music, how could you forget that? 😳
This book delivers the goods. E.g., there's a version
of Sondheim's Murder Game puzzle as presented in Games Magazine.
There are snippets of puzzles from later Sondheim hunts, albeit maybe
just enough to get the flavor. Like, I tried solving a rebus and
got nonsense—only to read on and find out the book just showed
the top â…“ of the puzzle. I, avid puzzler, was miffed: why
only show the top bit? But this was probably sensible for the audience;
most folks probably weren't trying to solve the puzzles they encountered
in the book.
No, really. I was kinda surprised to find an
erratum
in the fourth printing of the book, especially in a puzzle;
shouldn't eagle-eyed puzzlers already have spotted+reported all of those?
But of course, it makes sense if most readers aren't slowing down
to solve the puzzles.
(Also, that puzzle was a reprint of a cryptic crossword by Mark sHalpin;
so you can bet that the truly serious puzzle-nerds probably chuckled
"ah yes, I remember solving this delightful trifle back when it first
appeared," instead of, like me, struggling through with nice-but-not-amazing
cryptic crossword skills.)
It's kind of weird the way that celebrities keep popping up, but I guess
it makes sense. If I wanted a puzzlehunt to involve a fax machine clue,
I'd ask my friends to find out who had a fax machine they could
loan out for the weekend. Same with Sondheim, except in his case, the
friend was Stephen Fry‽ So random.
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On January 16 2026, I played in the MIT Mystery Hunt with
team Left Out.
In Minneapolis, federal law enforcement agents were so
bad at their jobs that they drove the crime rate up.
In Cambridge, nerds
gathered to solve puzzles, including about ½ of Left Out.
A ways down the San Francisco peninsula, about another â…“
of Left Out gathered at a big house. I instead was home
in my San Francisco apartment.
I'd stocked my fridge with pizza and was getting ready
to solve "remote," i.e. not with one of the big Left Out gatherings,
for the first time.
I hadn't participated in Mystery Hunt since COVID-19 hit the USA.
(I was on the running team in 2020 when COVID-19 was
news of a new bad SARS variant in China.)
I enjoyed getting together with my teammates, but a fresh
wave of COVID seemed to hit the SF Bay Area annually around
mid-January. Each year, I'd sign up on the team as a "maybe"
participant; but then would back off to a "no" when I saw
high COVID numbers.
Instead of solving with the team, I stayed home
kibbitzing on the team chat.
Then for a couple of years COVID
seemed to calm down—but then the local COVID reporting
statistics paused each January (perhaps when some
health-data-scientist academic went on vacation?).
For a couple of years I again stayed home and kibbitzed… and
then grumbled when the stats refreshed some days later and I saw
that gathering around SF would have been pretty safe after all.
As of 2026, California had changed its health stats reporting to
auto-update. And, as of early January, the COVID numbers were low!
I once again signed up as a "maybe," but in my head it was "this time
for sure."
A few days later, my laptop broke. By the time a replacement showed
up, I knew I wouldn't have time to set it up for hunt. So, new plan:
I would solve "remote" at home instead of gathering with my teammates.
I wasn't super-pleased to solve at home.
I probably enjoy gathering with teammates more than I enjoy
solving puzzles. But after sitting on the "sidelines"
for a few years and thinking this year I'd get to play again,
I was bound and determined.
And thus at 09:00 Friday morning (12:00 Cambridge time), I sat
at home, watching a video in which Cardinality, the running
team, presented the start of the game's story. An hour after
that, I sat down and started to solve puzzles.
I gave a quick look at the web site that Cardinality had set
up to present their hunt. There was a web app, a Pokémon-like
game in which you could walk a character around a sprawling world
and talk to NPCs. That was probably plenty nostalgic for Left Out's
40-something-year-olds, but not so much for this 50-something-year-old.
I left main hunt web site to the young sprats and
went to Left Out's
Jolly Roger
server, where we kept track of puzzles that folks on the web site had
discovered. I picked a puzzle and went to work.
Here, "went to work" means reading over a puzzle, then switching to
look at a shared spreadsheet where other Left Out members and I would
enter bits of research, chat about next steps, carry out those next steps.
If a couple of people were on a streak, it could be tough to try to
follow what they were doing, let alone contribute. It was like watching
a school of cartoon pirahna devour a chicken. Often, a couple of
people were on a streak. Remember, several members of Left Out are
US National Team this or World Record that.
I'm not exaggerating. Before this year's Mystery Hunt when lots of Left
Out people were idling in a room in Cambridge, Tammy McLeod pressed a
few into service as witnesses as she attempted to break some world
record or other.
There were a few minutes when I was looking at a puzzle that wasn't
being cartoon-pirahna-devoured quite yet. I arrived at one puzzle with
just one other person working on it: Eric Prestemon was busy identifying
audio tracks of birdsong. That left me to answer some crossword-y clues.
Looking for a gimmick, I joked in chat, "Hey wouldn't it be funny if the
answer to this one was [SPOILER REDACTED]" and then realized: yes,
that joke-y idea was the gimmick. I started filling in answers.
The pirahna swarm arrived and the puzzle fell soon after.
I remember I was the first on the team to look at a puzzle titled
"Jumping to Conclusions." I got partway through looking up a bunch
of [SPOILER REDACTED]s on Wikipedia when the pirahna swarm
arrived; by the time I was done looking those things up, folks working
in other parts of the puzzle had solved them.
The folks running Hunt restricted us to having eight puzzles open at a time.
In hunts with a wider "beam," I might spend more time with a puzzle before
a pirahna swarm arrived. But in this hunt, effort
stayed intensely focused for those first few hours.
I over-focused.
At 14:00 (17:00 Cambridge time), I looked up from my laptop. I was
hunched over. How long had I been sitting hunched over? Not all
the time since 10:00; but too much of the time. My neck was sore, and
I was stiff. In past years, I'd remembered to stop and stretch occasionally.
Apparently in the intervening years I'd lost that useful habit.
I'd concentrated too hard on spreadsheets for too long.
I went out for a walk. That helped me unwind, but my muscles were still
pretty mad at me.
I came back home, looked at my laptop sitting on a chair…and left it
there. Maybe four hours was enough.
I stopped trying to solve puzzles; instead, I just kibbitzed on the team chat.
Saturday 03:00, I was back on the laptop. Left Out has a rule: if you play,
you have to do "chores." The usual way you do chores is by working a shift
at some team job. Since I was playing "remote," not in one of the team's
big gathering spots, there was just one job open to me: "Comm Czar," the
job formerly known as "Remote Czar." A remote player who has just woken
up from a refreshing nap, wanting to re-join the team effort but unsure
of a good puzzle to work on, can ask the Remote Czar. The Remote Czar, to
provide useful advice, can keep a weather eye on the currently-opened
puzzles; or consult with other "Czars" keeping track of
the currently-open puzzles. Since there aren't that many
remote players re-joining at any given time, the Comm Czar duties are
pretty light. While on duty, you can spend most of your time solving puzzles,
just taking an occasional break to answer a question.
At 03:00 (06:00 Cambridge time), I was pretty sleepy. I wasn't in a
state to solve puzzles.
On the other hand, I didn't just want to wander away from my laptop
to drowse: if I fell asleep, I might miss a question from a remote solver,
sending their morale into a spiral. So I kept myself awake by going over
the list of open puzzles and doing some gruntwork. Copy-pasting puzzle
content into shared spreadsheets; doing a first pass of internet research
on some citrus fruit; fixing some broken permissions. Nobody asked me
any questions; if I'd fallen asleep, I would have gotten away with it.
My shift ended. I drowsed. I got up; kibbitzed on the team chat,
went out, came back, took a nap, kibbitzed some more.
I was hanging out in the team chat when the puzzle
"Financial Literacy" came up, with a surprising
reference to Curtis Chen, kind of a
big deal in the SF Bay Area
puzzlehunt scene back in the 'aughts; that was before he moved up
to Portland, Oregon and co-founded
Puzzled Pint.
Probably just a coincidence
that he got a mention in Hunt, but it was delightful. Chat lit up
for a bit with folks getting caught up on Curtis' recent doings.
Saturday and Sunday I did errands, visited, read my socials;
in between I kept up with the team chat. The running team
started handing out hints; but not to us, we were still in
the running to win. A long time later, we were no longer in
the running to win, thus we could have hints.
Later still, we heard that Team Providence, from Brown University,
had won, had found the coin. Some Left Out team members kept
plugging away until early Monday; but even then, they didn't finish.
Things I want to remember:
- Playing "remote" was OK, actually. Yes, face-to-face is nice.
OtOH,
-
But I gotta remember to look up occasionally.
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