Solution - Haddock Walk

by Joseph DeVincentis

Answer: Click here to reveal

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.