The clues in the puzzle page are meant to lead you to the School of Fish round from the 2015 hunt, and the pages in the copy of /dev/joe's Mystery Hunt Index web site which is linked from the puzzle. Examining the pages for those puzzles carefully, you will see that some of them have an extra keyword which does not make any sense for the puzzle, and is not present on the real site. Even if you fail to figure out these clues, it's possible to spider the real web site and the fake one determine the differences.
Eighteen puzzles are affected in this way. The one part of the
cluing on the puzzle page that you must figure out is that
the depth numbers of the fish puzzles are relevant. Fortunately,
the page in the web site (both versions) links to the page for the
puzzle in the archives, which shows this depth. All the depths are
three-digit numbers with three different digits, and you must use
them to extract three letters out of the bad keyword.
Puzzle | Depth | Keyword | Trigram |
Frequency Distribution Tank | 128 | "The West Wing" (TV show) | THW |
Headshots | 135 | Diplomacy (game) | DPO |
Moves | 163 | Angband (Rogue-like game) | ANG |
p1ctures | 178 | Laddergrams | LGR |
Tickle Me Pink | 178 | Swype keyboard | SEY |
Memory Lane | 187 | Lost Cities (game) | LIT |
Trivia Round | 198 | Wheel of Time (Robert Jordan series) | WIT |
Goldfish Memory | 235 | Pic-Tac-Toe | ICA |
Bookshelves | 247 | Aztec calendar | ZEA |
Not All There | 284 | cheat codes | HDA |
Be a Star! | 327 | Roman numerals | MOU |
Spittle Loon | 358 | Produce PLU codes | OUP |
Flat Containers | 365 | sentence diagrams | NNE |
The ____er of Men | 367 | Killian Court names | LAN |
Munchies | 378 | Hunt the Wumpus | NEW |
Back and Forth | 379 | port scanning | RAN |
Encephalon | 391 | David Bowie | VID |
Blocks | 148 | DuckTales (TV show) (new keyword) | DKE |
You must assemble the trigrams to form a clue. The numbers on the puzzle page give the enumeration of this clue and the enumeration of its answer. The clue is New Zealand political group with David Seymour and Kenneth Wang and its answer is ACT Party which is the final answer to this puzzle.