On the evening of Saturday 16th May and the morning of Sunday 17th, I took part with my team in Midnight Madness London. Things kicked off at 1815 ish, and I was at home asleep by 0930.

London is very atmospheric in the early morning, around dawn when nobody is around!

Route

Camden Town Hall -> a gaming arcade near Camden Lock Market -> a pub in Holborn -> an event space near the Globe -> 2 Temple Place -> Lumiere London’s Embassy -> The Lookout (Bishopsgate, 50th floor).

Best physical space

2 Temple Place is magnificent, a really beautiful location. The view from The Lookout is also outstanding.

Favourite puzzles

I enjoyed the one about testing out Alexander Graham Bell’s new invention, relaying bits of information about pictures that half the team could see.

There was a cute little escape room kind of thing which culminated in stepping through a simulation of where guards were in a space, so that you could perform a heist; this was much easier than it would ideally have been (half the time-steps were trivial), but I liked the concept.

The magic show was good - an actual card trick, which I wasn’t expecting!

Favourite thing that was not a puzzle but nevertheless granted points

One-fifth of the points available for the plague-themed area was simply “do some improv games”: the instructions game where you get someone to do something purely by saying yes and no to them, and then a couple of short-form improvised scenes. This was clearly not a puzzle, and it took way too long to justify the points allocated to it, but it was great fun. (Hot tip: set up some reason you have a banana, then deep-throat it. This is an absolute classic and you can use it in almost any situation where you need a quick laugh.)

Favourite invention

Louis’s contraption with a bunch of levers to make what was basically a much longer pair of tongs.

Most physically odd puzzle

Probably the one that was spotting-things-from-a-roller-coaster.

Strangest zone theme

The one at the Embassy was notionally themed around Regency balls, or something like that, but the puzzle theme was “NP-hard problems”, with a sudoku variant and a knapsack problem. (There was also “translate this sentence into Latin”, “play Articulate”, “dance a quadrille”, and “work out the patterns governing this table layout, and lay out an analogous table with different place-cards”.) Maybe that’s not actually an “NP-hard problems” theme, but it really felt like it at the time.

Lessons

• Write down everything please! There was simply no need for us to sing “Livin’ on a Prayer” twice; someone could simply have been scribing the first time, as soon as it became obvious what we were writing. (Naturally the singers could not scribe, otherwise I’d have done it.)
• Be even more eager to report that you’re blocked on something procedural. The winning team got 7 points more than were even available in the first zone - that’s about 3% of their total points - presumably as reimbursement for something that went wrong for them.
• The interchange from the Northern line at Euston to the Metropolitan line at Euston Square takes ten minutes minimum unless you’re running.