Meta Menagerie
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The Meta Menagerie is a particular puzzle type where the solver is presented with a list of answers, possibly in conjunction with some shell, to be used as feeders for a metapuzzle. Often, this type is combined with meta-matching, where the correspondence between feeder answers and meta is not given, with the solver needing to determine the correspondence as part of the solving process.
Background[edit | edit source]
Some hunts and hunt puzzles are more meta focused, often featuring multiple layers of metas or other intricate structures. This usually leads to having a large number of feeder answers, which could become unwieldy to have to write a feeder puzzle for each answer. Therefore, one alternative strategy is to simply give out the list of answers without having to solve for the answers. (Contrast with the Mini-Meta, which require solvers to solve minipuzzles in order to acquire feeder answers.)
One of the first Meta Menageries was the MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 puzzle Meta testing!. The puzzle was created in part due to writing team members having more metapuzzle and round structure ideas than the hunt could support, so many of these ideas were instead repurposed for this puzzle.
The name Meta Menagerie was first coined by Nathan Curtis. Other terms used to describe these kinds of puzzles include "metaganza" (coined by Eric Berlin), a portmanteau of metapuzzle and extravaganza (a jargon used by the National Puzzlers' League to denote a puzzle hunt, such as in NPL Extravaganza).
Notable Examples[edit | edit source]
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