While the RECON team was preparing to run the conference, Neil Patrick Harris was busy releasing the Wondercade Whodunit Challenge, an approachable, free puzzle hunt available on Wondercade and in their corresponding newsletter.
Now, Lisa and I badly wanted to solve this, but we were busy running RECON last week (and thank you to Neil for opening the event!) So our plan was to take a crack at it when we got home… but then there was a plot twist.
On our way home from running the event we stopped at my parents house for a night, and immediately upon entering my childhood home around midnight, my mom – who had never seen a puzzle hunt in her life – exuberantly dropped a stack of puzzles and notes on the table, and began explaining to me all of the things that she had solved, and the few things that she was still working through. She had started dabbling in puzzles over the pandemic, mostly through New York Times dailies… but she had never explored the wonderful world of puzzle hunts, and frankly it had never occurred to me to suggest it.
The stack of puzzles were printouts of the Wondercade Whodunit Challenge. Yesterday, instead of solving the hunt myself, I sat down with my mom as she talked me through her progress, and together we finished the hunt.
It’s a lovely creation, written by Ange Strom-Weber and Jen McTeague of Apocute.
If you’re in the mood for an approachable and clever puzzle hunt, give this one a whirl… and thank you to Ange, Jen, and Neil for pushing my mom into the puzzling deep end.
I think that I’m going to have to get her Colby’s Curious Cookoff next.
