BAPHL 7

5 Successes

• Thoroughly testing our puzzles. Besides internal testing of our puzzles, we had 3 teams of remote solvers and one team of in-person solvers of varying skill levels testing the puzzles. By the time we printed all the puzzles, all of the kinks had been worked out.
• Making supplemental material fun and helpful. We took a lot of time to make sure that the flavortext included with the puzzles fit with the theme, and hinted at what needed to be done without giving too much away or pointing solvers in the wrong direction.
• Getting a diversity of puzzles, both in terms of types of puzzles (logic, gridded word, identifying items such as candy), and in terms of difficulty

5 Problems

• Communication across sites to better identify teams that were struggling and to alert each other of when to expect groups of solvers
• Making puzzles that could be easily adapted to non-expert teams (I think allowing teams, especially on the normal track, to access the Internet helps with that A LOT)
• Realizing how labor-intensive puzzles with a lot of parts can be both to put together and to deal with in an open-air environment. We spent hours setting up the candy puzzle, and I know some teams had challenges with keeping track of all the pieces of the Ikea puzzle.
• We wanted to do more location-specific puzzles than we ended up doing.