Babel Systems (Fall 2011)
The CMU Weathermen (Fall 2012)

The Great Library (Spring 2012)

Inspiration: Myst (1993 computer puzzle game), "Who is Josh Wander?" a politial campaign slogan for a local Pittsburgh politician which was a topic of speculation for CMU students

Plot: Adventurers in teams of 2-4 find themselves in a strange building called The Great Library. This library has collected various portals to other worlds which look like books. The Librarians (Hunt Staff) are curators of the portal books and wish to help the teams to locate the book portal to Earth. Unfortunately some of its pages have been torn out, rendering it useless. The Librarians agree to help the adventurers find the lost pages which have been misplaced in other worlds. In return, the adventurers must help out the various worlds they visit, each of which is broken in some way.

The adventurers solve puzzles to discover where in The Great Library these portal books to broken worlds are. They visit four such worlds:
  • a world with two warring tribes: Tribe Farandole communicates only by dancing; Tribe Marimba, only with percussive clapping
  • a world where natural and mechanical forces are at odds
  • an unsettling beaurocratic society that has collected pages from other worlds into a Frankenstein's monster of portal books
  • a world where pirates are terrorizing local aristocrats
After aiding these four worlds, the winning team is sent on a runaround to complete one final task. They must collect numbers from around campus to free Josh Wander (the lost librarian) from his bike lock imprisonment. Josh Wander delivers the final page to the team and they are successfully transported back to Earth.

My Role: Fara, tribal leader of Farandole, a community which only communicates through dancing; one of The Librarians

My Puzzles: 
Musical Snowmen
File Size: 20 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File
Marimba & Farandole (Music/Dance Interactive)
File Size: 106 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File
Posters:
A screenshot from the point-and-click puzzle-game Myst. The shot is a wooden boardwalk with ocean on the right, a stone building on the left, and a winding path up to a large gear in front. Dark red text above reads
These two posters feature graphics from Myst. I put both posters together using GIMP.

​Sponsorship: This was the first year that Puzzle Hunt received sponsorship from a company instead of KGB, a social organization at Carnegie Mellon with a limited budget. I helped to secure money for food/drinks from Facebook in return for a bit of advertising.



























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