Mohonk (Wonderful World of Words)

I planned this current U.S. trip mostly to coincide with Thanksgiving and seeing family, but as long as I was coming here in November, I made sure to come in time for Mohonk.

(Pictured: Driving up to Mohonk from the NYC area.)

"Mohonk" is how my parents refer to the word puzzles weekend they attend every year, but more properly it's the name of the place where the event takes place: Mohonk Mountain House, an enormous old hotel nestled by a mountain lake in the Catskills.

On this particular weekend in November, crossword puzzlers and word games nerds from all over the country descend on Mohonk for an event called the "Wonderful World of Words," hosted by Will Shortz – yes, that Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword editor and NPR puzzle master.

I knew I'd found my people when I walked into the main downstairs lounge the first evening to find it full of nerd types already at work on the weekend's packet of puzzles, in front of windows onto a panoramic view of the lake outside. And there were chocolate cookies. Is this heaven?

From Friday evening to Sunday midday, there are speakers and games and puzzles, not to mention decadent meals, and ambles along the beautiful paths outside. Then there's the highlight of it all: a several-hour "Puzzle Hunt" that has everyone racing around the enormous hotel, trying to decipher clues hidden in framed photographs and behind fire extinguishers.

Highlights for me included:

– Our team winning the highest scoring single word in Scrabble Scramble (in which teams draw giant letters and compete to make the best word they can) with a word ("PREFILL") that later turned out not actually to be a word – but no one challenged us during the round, so we got to keep it. Audacity pays off!

– One of the weekend's speakers, a professional magician, learning the game Set from a friend of his and muttering, "That's crazy awesome," in response to my speedy Set playing.

– Putting a friendly face to Will Shortz's famous radio voice.

– The speakers, including a writing professor who developed an interest in lost and disappearing alphabets when he started carving phrases in obscure languages into wood, and another who gave a whiz-bang talk on the lyrics of the Beatles and how they developed over the course of their career.

– The Puzzle Hunt! I'd go every year just for this. Here's how it worked: Greg, who designs the hunt each year, gave us a speech about the history of the Mohonk site, then handed out a sheet of paper that was purportedly a "real" puzzle played back in the days when Mohonk was a small country inn.

(My family Puzzle Hunt team.)

Solving the four puzzles on the paper yielded the words "FIND FOUR TIME PASSAGES," suggesting the next clues would be somehow related to time. A search of the clocks on the ground floor of the hotel produced a paper with clues; the missing words could be found somewhere on the clocks, for example in the date shown on one clock or the name of the company that made another.

(I think I was the first person to pop into the pool room and ask if there was a clock in there, because the group playing pool – unrelated to the puzzle weekenders – was baffled by the question. Later in the night, I saw they'd put up a "No Clocks" sign to stop people coming in and bothering them!)

Plugging the words found on the clocks into the clues yielded letters that spelled "dining room" – where the place cards on each table, bearing numbers and flower names, turned out to correspond to letters which, when rearranged, spelled "laundry room." And then the laundry room (where I was helpfully led by a member of the desk staff, who wouldn't answer clues, but would direct you to any location in the hotel if asked) finally contained the final step of this particular "time passage": one quarter of a crossword puzzle that could be filled in with clues relating to this and other parts of the hunt.

The other three passages were similarly complex (including a mocked-up fake "TIME" magazine, a visit to a purported retirement party for someone named "Tim E.," a search for clues hidden in photographs from days past when Mohonk was a boys' school, a hunt for supposed alien visitors from the future, who looked an awful lot like the floral pattern in a certain tapestry...)

All together, it took us three or four hours, and my team (which was just me and my aunt by the end, after my parents called it a night) managed to finish third out of quite a numbers of players. We actually found the solution without solving all four "passages," then went back afterward and followed the trails we'd missed, so that we had all four pieces complete.

 

The Wonderful World of Words at Mohonk. Good place to be for a word nerd!