Dance Party (MIT Mystery Hunt 2020)

Dance Party
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020
Yesterdayland
Author(s)Yar Woo, Daniel Egnor, and Nina Hinrichs
AnswerClick to revealGROOVY
Statistics
No. solves33
No. total guesses58
Links
PuzzleLink
SolutionLink

Dance Party is a Physical Puzzle from the Yesterdayland round of the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt.

Puzzle Elements[edit | edit source]

Physical Puzzle - The puzzle asks solvers to visit HQ with a code to obtain a number of paper prints. One is covered in letters and numbers; the remainder are images with white areas meant to be cut out.

 

Identification (Popular Music) - The images in question are album covers. Their artists can be identified...

Just Like the Others - ...and each one has a direction included within their name.

Obscuring the Unnecessary - After cutting out the white areas as instructed, each album cover becomes a Cardan grille; rotating each cover to match the artist's direction and overlaying all of them on the lettered paper reveals the words COVER SONG.

Intermediate Submission - This is accepted as a partial answer, which reveals...

Interaction - ...that the puzzle also requires an interaction. Teams were to send 2-3 people with their puzzle material to a room on the MIT campus to play a DDR-like minigame.

Obscuring the Unnecessary - Completing three rounds of the minigame causes a turntable in the room to spin and a strobe light on the turntable to turn on. Putting the lettered paper on the turntable reveals a few letters that appear to remain stationary under the stroboscopic effect; these spell out the answer.