Sightseeing (MIT Mystery Hunt 2020)
| Sightseeing | |
|---|---|
| MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 | |
| Creative Pictures Studios | |
| Author(s) | Mark Gottlieb |
| Answer | Click to reveal🦚 |
| Statistics | |
| No. solves | 14 |
| No. total guesses | 60 |
| Links | |
| Puzzle | Link |
| Solution | Link |
The perfect activity for 2020.
Sightseeing is a word puzzle from the Creative Pictures Studios round of the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt.
Puzzle Elements[edit | edit source]
Crossword Clues - The puzzle is a list of words or phrases, each one spelled out in letters of different font sizes.
Intentional Ambiguity - Every clue is either one word or a short phrase, making them hard to answer uniquely. However...
Knowledge Required (Medicine, Ophthalmology) - ...between the font choice, the differently-sized letters, and the hints in the title and flavortext (referring to 20/20 sight, just like a different puzzle in the same round), the solvers should realize the puzzle is about visual acuity charts—and more specifically, the Snellen chart. While a Snellen chart could be any chart featuring blocky letters of different sizes, the puzzle uses the most common version on the internet, which starts E/FP/TOZ. Knowing that this Snellen chart only uses nine letters (CDEFLOPTZ), solvers can now answer each clue with a word using only these nine letters.
Connect-The-Dots - Each letter on this Snellen chart is uniquely determined by font size and letter type. The font size of each letter in the clue should be combined with the answer to each clue; hints toward this step include the fact that each clue is the same length as its answer and that the largest font size tends to match the location of an E in the answer. Connecting the determined letters in this way draws out a letterform for each clue.
Final Clue Phrase - The result is the phrase KONBAUNG DYNASTY FLAG, a white flag prominently charged with a design featuring the answer.
