Just realized I forgot to mention this: I really like how the interactive handled the Bonus Objective, i.e. if the player is thinking along the right lines their character automatically makes the in-universe sensible/optimal decision for them (which means you can set up a fair Bonus Objective for players who don't live in that universe and so don't have all the context).

 Notes on my performance:

. . . huh! I was really expecting to either take first place for being the only player putting serious effort into the right core mechanics, or take last place for being the only player putting serious effort into the wrong core mechanics; getting the main idea wrong but doing everything else well enough for silver was not on my bingo card. (I'm also pleasantly surprised to note that I figured out which goblin I could purge with least collateral damage: I can leave Room 7 empty without changing my position on the leaderboard.)

There were only three likely hypotheses based on the problem statement: A) adventurers scout one room ahead, B) adventurers take optimal path(s), and C) adventurers hit every room so all that matters is the order. Early efforts ruled out C, and the Bonus Objective being fully achievable under A but not B made A a lot more plausible; however, further investigations^[1] made it seem like that might be a fakeout^[2], so I (narrowly) chose to max-min instead of max-max; even in retrospect, I'm not 100% sure that was a bad decision.

Notes on the scenario:

I have strongly ambivalent feelings about almost every facet of this game.

The central concept was solid gold but could have been handled better. In particular, I think puzzling out the premise could have been a lot more fun if we hadn't known the entry and exit squares going in.

The writing was as fun and funny as usual - if not more so! - but seemed less . . . pointed?/ambitious?/thematically-coherent? than I've come to expect.

The difficulty curve was perfect early but annoying late. A lot of our scenarios commit the minor sin of making initial headway hard to make, discouraging casual players and giving negligible or negative reward for initial investigations; this one emphatically doesn't, since pairing high-traffic rooms with high-challenge creatures was an easy(-ish) way to get better-than-random EV. However, the central mechanics of "dungeoneers scout one room ahead" and "loud fights alert" interfered in ways that made it hard to pin either of them down: more rows and columns might have made this smoother (imo a 4x4 or 5x5 dungeon would probably have been easier than the 3x3, especially for reliably distinguishing between hypotheses A and B), as would having more simple and easily-discoverable rules to use as a firm foundation ("When given a choice, Adventurers will always choose rooms with Sirens, and never choose rooms with Tar Pits"?).

The timespan was a very good choice for the season (and I'm absolutely doing things this way next time I run an end-of-year game) but paired badly with the premise. Your last Christmas scenario was, in retrospect, a really good match, because (possible spoiler for any reader who might want to play it)

but this one was kind of the opposite.

There was one aspect about which I have unreservedly positive feelings: the chrono effects, the hag poem and the varying numbers of adventurers were all excellent red herrings, seeming like they might hint towards subtle opportunities for performance improvement (and/or a secret Bonus Bonus Objective) but being quickly dismissable as fingertraps. (Yay verisimilitude!)

In summary, I think I'd put this one at about a 3/3 for Quality and Complexity . . . though I suspect others might have radically different opinions depending on how all the above happened to hit for them.

1. ^{^}

   I found a row where Adventurers were clearly choosing an easy path starting with Orcs over a hard path starting with Boulders, and took this to mean "adventurers take perfect paths under at least some circumstances" instead of "there's some predictable condition for which Orcs<Boulders". Whoops!

2. ^{^}

   "You tried to play the GM instead of the game? Doom! Doom for you!" <- what I thought you might be thinking

Enemy HP: 72/104 

Fractionalist cast Reduce-4!

It succeeded!

Enemy HP: 18/26

I've procrastinated and prevaricated for the entire funding period, because, well . . . on the one hand . . .

• Lightcone runs LW, runs Lighthaven, and does miscellaneous Community Things. I've never visited Lighthaven, don't plan to, and (afaik) have never directly benefited from its existence; I have similar sentiments regarding the Community Things. Which means that, from my point of view, ~$2M/yr is being raised to run a web forum. This strikes me as unsustainable, unscaleable, and unreasonable.
• The graphs here say the number of monthly users is ~4000. If you disqualify the ~half of those who are students, lurkers, drive-by posters, third-worlders, or people who just forgot their wallet . . . that implies ~$1000, per person, per year, to run a web forum. (Contrast the Something Awful forums, which famously sustain themselves with a one-time entry fee of $10-$25 per person (plus some ads shown to the people who only paid $10).)
• I suspect Rationality is one of those things you get less of as you add more money; relatedly, frugality is one of the more reliable defenses against Chapman-style capital-S Sociopaths, and Zvi-style capital-M Mazes.

But on the other hand . . .

• It's a really good web forum; very plausibly the best that exists. This walled garden is impeccably managed and curated, and has an outsized impact on the rest of the world.
• If just a handful of the mundane UI innovations prototyped here caught on in the wider internet, that could justify every penny being asked for and then some (I'm thinking particularly of multidimensional voting and the associated ability to distinguish "this comment is Good" from "this comment is Right").
• LW has had a non-negligible and almost-certainly-net-positive impact on my personal and professional lives, and I think that should be rewarded.

I've decided to square this circle by giving $200 but being super tsundere about it. Hopefully the fact that this is about a fifth of what's implicitly being asked for, while being about five times what I'd consider sensible for any other site, serves to underline everything I've said above.

Typo in title: prioritize, not priorities.

Here's Claude's take on a diagram to make this less confusing.

The diagram did not make things less confusing, and in fact did the opposite. A table would be more practical imo.

10 chat sessions

As in, for each possible config, and each possible channel, run ten times from scratch? For a total of 360 actual sessions? This isn't clear to me.

Regardless: a small useful falsifiable practical result, with no egregious errors in the parts of the methodology I understand. Upvoted.

Oh, and as for

if I'm continuing with my current paradigm I'd guess it has something to do with

possibly such that

but

and

Built a treebased model; trialled a few solutions; got radically different answers which I'm choosing to trust.

The machines seem to think that the best solution I can offer is

and I've

so I'm making that my answer for now.

Did some more tinkering with this scenario. It is remarkably difficult to be 100% confident when determining the basic mechanics of this scenario, i.e.

And I'm beginning to suspect that

( . . . and IQ tests, and exam papers, and probably some other things that are too obvious for me to call to mind . . . )

You might want to look into tests given to job applicants. (Human intelligence evaluation is an entire industry already!)