(This is a post about the 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt, which happened this weekend. Puzzles and solutions can currently be found here, though I’m not sure if they’re accessible yet without a log-in. This post will include some mild spoilers.)

Usually the one time of year you can expect a detailed and comprehensive post on this blog is shortly after Mystery Hunt. This year will be an exception, through no fault of Cardinality. [Added later: Once I started writing, I wrote a lot, so it may invalidate this previous statement.]

For those who don’t know, my wife and I have been dealing with some chronic health issues that cropped up out of nowhere; I’ve had mostly-throat cold symptoms and on-and-off laryngitis. That’s annoying, and it might make teaching difficult if it doesn’t improve. But more significantly, Jackie has had sudden debilitating fatigue (at the end of a year where she was in terrific shape and running 5Ks and a 10K). These have both been going on for about a month. None of this was helped by the mass shooting that occurred at my workplace shortly after our illnesses began and went unsolved for almost a week. Frankly, December sucked more than almost any month in my life, though I should certainly be thankful that I wasn’t on campus on the 13th.

With help from my mother-in-law, I was able to attend Hunt this weekend, but I spent a lot of the time worried about Jackie and our son at home, so it was hard to be fully engaged. (I also had to take off mid-afternoon on Sunday, about 30 minutes before the coin-find was announced.) But I want to get some summary thoughts down as quickly as I can, since the longer I wait to post, the more likely it is that I end up posting nothing for long periods of time (see my post about metapuzzles that still hasn’t materialized). This Hunt was very different than last year in terms of feel, but I thought it was still a very strong Hunt, though I had some opinions (positive and negative) that are not unlike what I’ve said about the last few Hunts.

PRO: Really high-quality puzzles (maybe the highest average quality in some time). There were a lot of creative ideas with lovely presentation, and I can’t think of any individual non-metapuzzles that I worked on where I was dissatisfied with how they turned out. I think this likely owes a lot to the testing and editing process, and it’s even more impressive given the anecdote from wrap-up about losing Atlas of Mosaics progress late in the design window.

PRO: I also really appreciated how many puzzles lent themselves to collaboration; there were a lot of puzzles with parallel mini-ahas that lots of people could pick at. As an example, when someone didn’t know what to work on, you could set them loose on the Charts gallery and they could likely find at least one little connection to feel good about. The shared state of the Atlas of Mosaics was also collaboration-friendly, though after D&M’s trying to move the Hunt more toward an in-person experience, this round felt more like a quality-of-life improvement for people staring at screens, regardless of whether they were in a room on campus.

PRO: Very creative round structures. I used to think that Mystery Hunt was the only venue where you could use particularly ambitious structures due to its size. That’s been proven wrong in recent years by teams like Galactic, Teammate, and ECs of /r/picturegame (related: how do I consistently end up being the team member who does most of the hyperbolic space stuff?). Interestingly Cardinality’s online hunts have mostly been pretty straightforward from a structural perspective, and it’s clear they were holding back some bananas ideas. All of them were clever and well-executed, but it also seemed like they wedged in all of them. Which means…

CON: Hunt. Is. Too. Long. I know that every year (since 2021, and to a slightly lesser extent 2020), I’ve whined that the Hunt is too long, and as I get older I may be more and more in the minority opinion about that. For the record, I don’t think the Hunt should be targeted at 40+ alums (much less 40+ white male alums). But I still think it’s weird that less than a decade ago, my team won Hunt twice in three years, and this year on Sunday at 3pm we hadn’t opened two of the rounds.

I thought the Teammate Mystery Hunt would have been the right size without the AI rounds, and I thought last year’s Hunt would have been right with one round less. This year I think the sweet spot would have been about two Dimensions less, so scopewise it felt like we took a step backward. Looking at the Terminus solutions, the round structure is really neat, but it opened after I left campus, so I never would have had enough time to figure out how it worked. I feel bad about how many teams likely didn’t get to see it from a solving perspective given the work involved in creating it. So my point isn’t that any of the Dimensions were bad… but I would have loved to see one or two of them in a different setting (or future Mystery Hunt?) where they had room to breathe.

CON: Hinting continues to be really aggressive. I don’t think this is bad at all for the early rounds and especially for non-competitive teams (which maybe includes us now); there is a long tradition of visiting and hinting small student teams in person. But I was alarmed that we became eligible for a Dimension meta hint on Saturday. We generally don’t take hints until we really feel like we need them to advance past a blockage, because we’d rather complete a puzzle ourselves than have our hands held. It’s becoming increasingly clear that that philosophy is not consistent (at least for a non-gigantic team) with finishing Hunt, and that if you want to win, it is in your best interest to extract as much hint information as possible as soon as it’s offered. But in that mode, it doesn’t feel like the goal is to solve puzzles as much as it is to talk your way to the right information.

I think of this trend as starting in 2011, partially because the Hunt was open to remote teams and thus much larger, and partially because the online hunts had exploded and thus teams writing Hunt were more likely to have run week-long online hunts where hinting was traditionally more pervasive. (Back in the 2000s, meta hinting was incredibly rare since meta solving would ultimately determine the Hunt winner, and metas that were not solvable by more than one or a few teams without hints were considered extremely flawed.) I understand that there are teams that don’t mind taking hints like candy, and if they enjoy that, more power to them. But I feel like people will look at this year’s Hunt and say, “See, fifteen teams finished, good Hunt length,” and I’d much rather that teams aim for a Hunt that fifteen teams finish entirely or mostly on their own.

CON: I didn’t find the theme and story to be cohesive. The Kingdom level felt very consistent and fully realized (and this is coming from someone with no interest in Pokemon), but the first time we opened up a new Dimension, even if we watched the intro video, the round didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Pokemon world we’d been immersed in. In this sense, the Dimensions reminded me structurally of the third phase of the Puzzle Factory Hunt; the constructors had a bunch of ideas (very good ones for the most part) for cool rounds, and they used an alternate-dimensions plot twist to justify attaching anything they wanted. From my perspective, this turned this into a collection of seven puzzlehunts rather than a puzzlehunt with seven rounds. I feel like with some different storytelling choices, these alternative worlds could have been made part of a Pokehunt rather than parallel to it.

PRO: I think the Research Point system had some minor drawbacks in terms of complexity (at least initially as you tried to process how navigation was going to work), but I particularly liked how it effectively distributed the “scavenger hunt” throughout the Hunt. The scavenger hunt tasks are something certain team members really enjoy (and others probably don’t care about) and formulating it as a single puzzle makes it hard to organize from a solving perspective and hard to judge efficiently from a constructing perspective. Filling the whole Hunt with micro-scavenger-tasks that didn’t substitute for puzzle solving but were necessary in addition to puzzle solving for progress was a good middle ground.

CON: I still haven’t gotten around to my essay on the evolution of metapuzzles, but I thought some of the Dimension metas in particular were unnecessarily complicated gates at the end of rounds that were satisfying enough to complete on their own, and then anticlimactic if you got stuck on the meta. The first two dimensions in particular seemed like they had natural goals (to unlock as many letters as possible, and to “solve” the inaccessible puzzles) but after doing that you were presented with yet another hurdle.

As I alluded to earlier, I did the lion’s share of work for our team on Hyperbolic Space (including backsolving fifteen puzzles from the round structure, three of which actually existed). Saturday night I went back to my hotel and ended up solving the meta remotely, which I mostly enjoyed. But since the meta didn’t even unlock until you had enough solves that you probably had the entire letter layout, it felt less like it was confirming you’d solved enough of the round and more like you were forced to do an extra thing that couldn’t be bypassed. (That lack of bypass is my main problem with modern metas; almost all puzzles in a puzzlehunt can be individually skipped if you can manage be effective enough at solving other things; meta solves are required, and so a meta should be different enough from a full puzzle that that’s not an issue.) We couldn’t solve The Alphabet without a hint, and after managing to reveal 26 puzzles bit by bit, being forced to also carry out a vaguely clued programming task was anticlimactic.

I know I’m exposing myself as an old fuddy-duddy (breaking news), but I think it’s fascinating to compare the scope of any recent Mystery Hunt with, say, the first Hunt I wrote for in 2000. What qualified as a puzzle back then would barely take most teams ten minutes in 2026; for example, one of my puzzles was basically a nonogram that you read in Braille, and that was it. Another involved sorting a bunch of five-letter strings as if they were poker hands and reading the resulting acrostic. Yet a Hunt with less than fifty of those “puzzles” took teams until Saturday night, and this year a Hunt with 200+ exponentially more involved only took a team about 40% longer.

So what’s changed? Have solvers just seen more puzzle content? Are individual solvers smarter? Are teams bigger? (Yes.) Do we utilize and lean on more powerful technology? (Google Sheets is great, but I genuinely hope that top teams aren’t AI-buzzsawing through everything.) More recently, are teams using hints to minimize puzzle resistance? Clearly some of these things are having an effect. Likely all of them are having an effect. And the answer to Setec’s recent tendency not to finish is likely to be more like the teams that do. But it’s frustrating that the approach we have now shifted from “enough to come in first” to “not enough to come in at all” in such a short period of time.

I am excited to see what Providence does with Hunt next year, as they’ve had a really nice rise to prominence (found letter change) in the past few years, and members of the team have written some terrific puzzlehunts, including the three Brown Puzzle Hunts, CRUMS, and the recent second Advent Hunt, which was one of the highlights of an otherwise awful December. I also consider them my spriritual grandchild, since the team was started when I got a bunch of Brown grad students psyched about puzzlehunting and then encouraged them to form their own Mystery Hunt team. In 2017, Setec traded off the role of Mystereo Cantos for the (many) endgames we ran, and since I insisted on being Providence’s Mystereo, I got to see them finish Hunt for the first time. Fingers crossed that we can see an endgame next year with the roles reversed.

Teammate Hunt

In my last post, in addition to the puzzle content I included a helpful life lesson (“Don’t get shingles”) motivated by personal misfortune. If you enjoyed that, you’ll love the one that shows up in the next few paragraphs.

Teammate Hunt was scheduled to start during the last weekend of my spring break, and I was eager to participate but initially had trouble finding an appropriate team; there wasn’t enough interest from Mystik Spiral to form a large enough team to be competitive, and there were some communication issues trying to merge with our Setec friends on TruFact. I eventually got onto a “Have You Tried” team with friends from ATTORNEY and was looking forward to a long Friday night of focused puzzling. But before that, I was looking forward to another spring break treat for myself, a long drive to Revere to pick up the best soft pretzels I’ve found in New England and the best Italian sub I’ve found in New England (which are a few blocks away from each other at New Deal Fruit and Philly Pretzel Factory). This doesn’t seem like it should have any bearing on the hunt experience, and it wouldn’t have if, halfway to Revere, my dashboard hadn’t lit up with a “WATER TEMP HOT” warning.

Now, if you are a competent driver, you probably reacted to the previous sentence by thinking, “I hope he found a safe place to pull over as soon as possible.” But I am not a competent driver and for some reason didn’t immediately connect this phrase to the idea that my engine was overheating. I was alarmed but the message went away after about thirty seconds, so I figured it was not an urgent problem. Then a minute later the message came on again and stayed on. It was accompanied by a red light on the dash, and the life lesson I have to share is that in general red dashboard lights mean “Stop driving, you idiot.” At this point I decided that continuing to Revere was not the best idea and tried to find a way to turn around, with the intention of getting my car to the mechanic near my house, since I didn’t want to be stranded far from home. After turning around, another warning came on, something about checking emissions, and I realized I was going to need to stop the car somewhere. I was on 95, so I intended to take the next exit, but most of the exits were onto other highways. But the car started feeling like it wasn’t handling as intended, so I exited onto 495. Shortly after that exit a warning came up to check some kind of acronym (I didn’t know what that was) and then another to check power steering (well, crap, I knew what that was), so I pulled over onto a large shoulder area and had AAA tow my car to the aforementioned mechanic. Hours later, I got the call that my engine was “toast.” That would probably have been the case if I hadn’t kept driving for 15-20 minutes on an overheating engine, so please learn from me, and I cannot stress this enough, that RED DASHBOARD LIGHTS ARE BAD PULL OVER YOU IDIOT.

We had already been talking about replacing said car (a 2012 Civic) within the next few years anyway, and we’re financially secure enough that e could afford to do so, but it’s very different to think about replacing the car soonish and realizing that if you don’t replace it within a few days you won’t have a way to get to work next week. We did some frenzied research, decided that if we wanted a slightly larger car but not an SUV, an Accord was probably the move, and we drove out to a dealership, test-drove one, and liked it. This dealership only had white Accords (I told Jackie beforehand that any color seemed fine, but then I saw the white and thought, any color but that, actually), and their prices seemed higher for a new model than at other dealerships. When we asked why, the salesman incorrectly told us it was based on the options, but then we figured out it was that white is actually a premium color, and I definitely wasn’t going to pay hundreds of dollars extra specifically for a color I didn’t want. So we came home to get Simon and went to dinner and to another dealership where they had the color we wanted, did the miserable haggling thing just to get the price I’d been quoted over the phone, and then waited another hour for the financing person to be available (“it should just be five more minutes” on a loop) before giving up and saying we’d return the next morning, given that it was already way past my son’s bedtime.

The point of this is that instead of being at home raring to go when Teammate got started, I showed up more than an hour late and attempted to get acclimated. Teammate had suggested small-ish teams for this event, but I think both Galactic and Teammate have a tendency to underestimate hunt difficulty and so I take those recommendations from them with a grain of salt. But they also noted teams would want to solve together to better follow the narrative, and I did take that warning seriously. As it turned out, the hunt structure was a comic book with branching timelines, slightly reminiscent of but different from the “time loop” employed in the 2022 Galactic hunt. (Continuing my theme of “we almost did something like this in a Mystery Hunt but not nearly as well,” my early pitch for what became the 2005 Normalville Mystery Hunt was a Batman hunt in which solving puzzles would reveal/alter comic book panels and the metapuzzles would use the comic art; we abandoned this due to concerns about producing said art.) Some puzzles had multiple answers and the choice of which answer to call in influenced the narrative, with the first instance of this leading to an early death and rewind that forced you to directly engage with what was going on.

Being present for this early twist would have been a very natural and immersive introduction to the hunt mechanic if you were solving when it occurred, but instead I was still a hostage at Grieco Honda at that point. So instead I got the recap from my teammates, which gave me the gist, but I never really lost the feeling of being on the outside looking in. I don’t blame Teammate at all for that; as I said, they warned us in advance that we’d have a richer experience solving as a close-knit team, and as I also said, the plot onboarded solvers into how this hunt would be unusually structured. I also thought they learned from the Galactic time loop, which had a variable “team state” that made sense plotwise but was sometimes frustrating from a solving perspective, and the site interface provided a robust if intimidating way to access previous save states. If my car hadn’t exploded and I’d been involved from the beginning, I think I would have felt much more engaged, but this was not a good event in which to hit the ground running.

As noted, we had to go back to the dealership the next day to secure the car (which I like a lot, so there’s that), so while I already didn’t expect to do much daytime solving with Simon at home and a Revs game on the schedule, it turned out I did even less. I definitely solved and enjoyed some puzzles, over Discord on Friday night and on spreadsheets occasionally Saturday, but the dynamic nature of the website makes it hard for me to remember what I worked on and what I liked. Once Simon went to bed Saturday, I logged in and was ready for a distractionless evening of intense solving, only to find out that my team had finished the hunt about twenty minutes earlier. So in my quest to make sure I was on a team strong enough to see everything, they ended up seeing everything mostly without me. Sorry I can’t give a more detailed review of this hunt as a result, but (a) it seemed pretty neat, and (b) remember, seriously, red dashboard lights.

Brown Puzzle Hunt

After my third year participating in the Brown Puzzle Hunt in person (and finishing first, though as a studentless team we were ineligible to “win,” which is entirely reasonable), I continue to be floored by the depth and quality of the event. When I arrived at Brown as a graduate student, there was no obvious puzzling community, and I had to convince fellow grad students to participate in puzzlehunts with me, which indirectly led to the creation of the Providence Mystery Hunt team, now on a two-year streak of coming second in that event. There were a few years of word puzzle enthusiasm as a bunch of Brown undergrads (many now household names, if your household is crosswordy, like Natan Last and Aimee Lucido) got into crossword construction, but the Brown Puzzle Club ebbed and flowed over time. Recently the boom of online hunts caught the attention of enough high school students that eventually went to Brown that they showed up wanting an event to happen, and now there seems to be a pretty thriving undergrad puzzle community, which warms my aged heart.

BPH has been a hybrid on-site/remote site since it started, but I appreciated their move to separate this year’s local and online versions into two separate weekends to highlight the importance of holding events like this in person. There were a bunch of physical artifacts featured that you could optionally order by mail for remote solving. My favorite prop was offered at kickoff… since the theme was movies, I optimistically wondered if there would be popcorn. Happily, there was (they rented a machine!) but I was not expecting to be asked if I wanted edible popcorn or non-edible popcorn. My brain wanted non-edible since I knew it would be puzzle content, but my stomach wanted popcorn because popcorn. We got both. The non-edible popcorn was a bag of styrofoam packing peanuts that turned out to be a puzzle about Peanuts characters, which is a great example of marrying puzzle form and function.

My least favorite prop was a set of skinny balloons (the type you make into balloon animals), handed over with a confirmation of, “You’ll be able to blow these up yourself, right?” We assured them we would and failed in our attempts to do so, including my giving myself a massive headache trying to aggressively exhale. Then we checked YouTube for advice from a professional balloon guy, who said you should never try to blow up this kind of balloon by mouth, and that it could cause brain injury. Terrific! We solved the balloon meta using uninflated balloons.

The structure of the hunt was occasionally tricky to follow, as there were some puzzles that were “nested” into sequences of related puzzles with “sequence metapuzzles,” and while the UI did a good job explaining what metapuzzles used what feeders, it wasn’t immediately clear how the sequence metapuzzles engaged with the round structure. Eventually when we had one round left to solve (the appropriately titled Horror round), we realized that it was effectively a round full of the sequence metapuzzles, so even though the rounds didn’t have an inherent order, this one was almost certain to be the final boss. That meta, incidentally includes a set of six simple words that have THREE natural orderings, which is an incredible construction that has to be seen to be believed.

We got a bit stuck on our last few metas because the puzzles were placed on a map, but it was much easier to access them from the alternative list format on the website. However, it turned out that map placement was relevant for a few metapuzzles in terms of grouping and ordering, which is an issue that has come up in multiple hunts over the years; puzzle access shortcuts often bypass website info that might be relevant to solving (or to the story, as I discussed above vis-a-vis this year’s Mystery Hunt). BPH handled this well with an image placed on the Adventure meta that initially meant little to us but eventually reminded me that there was an isometric view elsewhere on the website. The Horror meta also required the map and didn’t include such a hint, but once one meta had redirected us to the map, it was easy to remember it was on the table, so I felt the constructors provided the perfect amount of information in the Hunt presentation, which is really savvy for a group only producing their third event.

The event is intended to run on Saturday and Sunday, and as in previous years, our team had a significant number of people who wouldn’t be staying overnight and couldn’t easily return Sunday, so our goal was always to finish on Saturday night. Last year we had a race against time on the final multi-location runaround to accomplish that task. This year, the “endgame” was a very nice parallel set of production assistant tasks mostly set in one location, including a logic puzzle to figure out the producer’s coffee order and a video overdubbing task that Wil Zambole and I had a lot of fun with. Wil and I also took on the one task that involved leaving the room, taking a selfie in front of three Thayer Street murals. Given that I get lunch on Thayer Street four days a week, you would think I would know where those murals are. You would be wrong! We basically searched the west side of the street moving north and then the east side coming back, and it turns out one mural was alllll the way at the north end of the west side, and the others were near the south end of the east side, meaning that we covered almost the entire street (under a one-hour time limit for the full set of tasks) before finding two-thirds of the targets. It was definitely exciting, but kind of frustrating, and I’m curious what would have happened if we’d failed to meet the time limit. I think we made it by only a few minutes.

I also want to call out a really slick BPH puzzle, Plagiarism, that I didn’t see during the hunt (I think it was probably only in the remote version) but happened upon while scanning the solutions just now. The puzzle just links to a puzzle from the CMU Hunt from the previous week, A Local Knowledge Puzzle, which consists of some suspiciously vague letter-yielding clues about CMU culture and architecture. It turns out those clues can be equivalently applied to Brown to yield different letters and a different answer. It’s a simple idea, but a satisfying one that required some coordination, so props to the authors from both schools for pulling off this stunt.

I apparently have a lot to say about this hunt, because events! Event puzzles at puzzlehunts are great for social interaction, but I sometimes find the content to be a bit slapdash… which is okay, because as a hardcore solver, one could argue that events are Not For Me(TM). But given that we’re a small team and the first event asked for people who could perform and think on their feet, I ended up going to both of the first two events, and I enjoyed them both more than expected. The first one involved reading sides for auditions, in which the auditioner would likely be rejected on their first try, and the group would have to figure out how they should adjust their performance based on hinty feedback in order to get the part. I was given the action script, which had two characters (a spy and supervillain), and I wasn’t told which to read. According to the wrapup, the requirement was that “the action script had to be read in a manner where the two characters were distinct in personality/mannerisms.” If you know me and don’t think I did that unprompted on the first try, you don’t actually know me. So I got the part (as did the second person who went) and we didn’t really know for sure why. But eventually we all had to read together as expected, so I just did the same thing as the first time, and it checked the boxes.

The second event asked us to write a ten-step set of instructions to recreate a movie poster by hand (sometimes with restrictions, as my group could only use one-syllable words), putting two instructions each on one slip. I predicted groups would then be given one slip from every poster, just to see what happened when the elements were combined. But instead, each poster was legitimately recreated, just with one group working on each slip, so that five groups separately created the poster exquisite-corpse-style. This was less chaotic but a much better idea, as some of the recreations were surprisingly faithful! I’m still not sure how our Anatomy of a Fall instructions led to a poster with four people on it instead of two, but these things happen. Like last year, we missed the third event because we were on the verge of completing the hunt and it seemed more productive to solve rather than earn a delayed free answer. From the well-written event wrap-up, it looks like it was equally clever and delightful.

Microsoft Puzzlehunt 24

Attending the Microsoft Puzzlehunt has been a bucket list item of mine for many years (as was attending a Shinteki Decathlon, which is now impossible because those don’t exist anymore). My excuse most of the time was that teams were small and half-Microsoft, and thus it was hard to get a spot, but Philip Loh did offer me a legit invite one year, so now I can only blame myself. As it stands, it’s unlikely I’ll ever go in person since some of the recent iterations have been remote-friendly, and even when it’s not I usually have the opportunity to help test-solve. My experience with MSPH is that while the stories and structures aren’t always particularly innovative, the puzzles are usually pretty high-quality, and I enjoy what I get a chance to work on.

For this year’s MSPH, which was open to remote teams, I reached out to TruFact again, which resulted in my joining the Natural 20s. (Sean Molley is usually in charge of Nat20s, but he had an incident that’s his to share and rivals my car story above, so Mike Selinker stepped in as captain.) Like Brown’s event, this one started early on Saturday and was advertised to take place on Saturday and Sunday, which a caveat that some teams might finish in one day. I solved for a few hours at launch and then Jackie and I returned after Simon’s bedtime, and I stayed up until around 2am ET when we did in fact cross the finish line.

In my last post I [re]shared my theory that a puzzlehunt story can only afford to have a handful of “beats” if you want everyone solving to keep up, and you could make the same argument about a puzzlehunt structure. Some of the most interesting hunt structures turn the tables on the solvers multiple times, and that can lead to a richer experience, but it also increases the chances that someone loses the plot, as I did for Teammate due to external circumstances. As a medium-length event, I think MSPH did a really nice job opening up complexity with enough scaffolding not to throw teams off. After a traditionally hand-holdy intro round, the next layer of the hunt had five metapuzzles, and puzzles clearly associated with the metas based on icons. (Well, I say clearly, but I had to point this out to teammates that hadn’t noticed. Most importantly, the icons appeared on the puzzle list solvers would be using to click through to content, so it was difficult for that data to be overlooked for too long.) A pre-meta instruction said that we should “enter a single diagnostic code from each associated task. Only one diagnostic code from each pair of codes will be used in this protocol.” A “pair of codes” was a puzzle answer, which were two-word phrases of fairly non-dictionary nature. One word of each phrase was a meta feeder, which was a nice way to make the metapuzzles harder to solve with fewer answers without inherently making the metas too difficult, since we knew which phrases associated with the meta but not which word in each phrase.

Once those were done, the next layer revealed a set of additional metapuzzles but no additional feeders… naturally, we needed to use the other unused words of the previous phrases. But this time the feeders were not grouped by metas, so we had to “match” them a la Puzzle Boat or the 2019 Mystery Hunt. And since we had solved many of the first-stage metas without their feeders, backsolving wasn’t very helpful here since even if we figured out the missing feeder, the other word in the answer phrase might be totally unrelated. This sent us back to some of the puzzles we’d discarded but now needed to complete, and while this was initially a little annoying (when you skip a puzzle it’s frequently for a reason), there were some puzzles I hadn’t engaged with that turned out to be worth our time. All in all, if the metas on the first tier had used one of two words from each puzzle AND had not been grouped, the matching process probably would have been much too difficult. But employing the one-word-or-the-other mechanism on one tier and then an ungrouped-feeders mechanism on the second fit together really nicely, and each provided a satisfying but reasonable challenge.

The association of the puzzles to wacky task names on a spacecraft made this feel like an homage to either Among Us or Spaceteam, and it wasn’t entirely clear which it was until the endgame where it became abundantly clear which it was. In the online hunt era, I’m pretty accustomed to website chicanery in areas where you don’t expect puzzle content, but the last act of MSPH 24 included a pretty amusing gimmick that I’ll remember for a while. I haven’t really commented on one more element of the event, which was a series of creative tasks that were assigned to specific team members and could be used to earn hint tokens. I would usually prefer to solve puzzles then to spend time making a thing (I do like making creative things but not while the puzzle clock is ticking), and I generally hope to complete puzzlehunts without hints, so this was not my cup of tea. But it did give individual team members something special to do if they wanted to, and I think it’s good for hunts to try to get everyone involved, even if it was through something that wasn’t for me.

Hunts I Missed (or Missed a Lot Of)

I mentioned the CMU Hunt above when talking about Brown, and I generally try to participate in CMU, usually by registering a casual solo team. But when I try to half-ass a puzzlehunt, it’s inevitably bigger than I expect it to be, and I rarely finish CMU on time when I just try to speed-run it in my off hours. This year I had an excuse to miss it since Brown’s on-site hunt was the same weekend, but I still haven’t gone back to it. Princeton’s first puzzlehunt (I believe?) was another event that interested me but didn’t fit my schedule. I give a disproportionate amount of attention to Brown’s and MIT’s puzzlehunts here, partially because they’re my alma maters and partially because I play them in person, but I have a lot of respect for the students making events happen at other schools, as your work enriches the community. I hope all of these events continue to run as long as higher education still continues to exist in the United States, though that’s looking fucking grim at the moment.

I did get a Mystik Spiral team together for Huntingale, but we didn’t get very far, only solving seven puzzles and never making it to the second half. We only had a few people look at it for an extended period of time, and the errata and flavortext revisions left us a little wary of putting more time into it, so other things took over. And rewinding back to earlier in the season, I was intrigued by The Team To Be Named Et Cetera’s release of some of their extra 2024 Mystery Hunt puzzles as a self-contained epilogue hunt, though the description of one of the puzzles as a “round-sized” puzzle was fairly daunting, especially given that I thought 2024 was guilty of the Mystery Hunt scope trend. After not getting much interest from fellow Setec members in forming a team, this was another hunt I foolishly tried to solo in my spare time, and again I did not get far. I did like A Safe Car and Transfers (the latter despite its theme), and while I never finished Ohh, My Fee!, I was having fun with what I did get through.

A running theme of this blog is my own transition from being a student with flexible weekends to a parent who needs to devote time to family, which has occurred almost simultaneously with the explosion of online hunts, making it feel like the number of hours it would take to solve all of the available puzzlehunts is inversely proportional to the number of spare hours I have each year. It would be very cool if Simon turns out to love puzzle solving and some of these events can be a family activity (we wanted to bring him to BAPHL or DASH this year but I have conflicts with both BAPHLs and we were waitlisted for DASH), but I’m certainly not going to force him into it, and I hope he finds things he loves doing even if they’re not what I’m into. For now the kid’s developing some pretty solid jigsaw skills, and he crushes find-the-differences, so that’s something.

Hunts Yet To Come

I just mentioned BAPHL and DASH, which are walkaround hunts coming respectively to Boston on August 9 and all over the place on September 13. I am psyched as always for the Galactic Hunt starting on August 22 (my recurring Christmas and birthday present requests from Jackie have become the ability to set aside weekends for Mystery Hunt solving and for Galactic solving). Before that, Edric’s Truzzle Hunt (which has a slick new website!) kicks off July 12, and the second Silph Hunt starts July 25. You can find events like this without my nudging on the Puzzle Hunt Calendar, which is a far superior strategy if you want to know about them more often than I update this blog (i.e. twice in two days and then probably not for months). Enjoy, and hope to see you at something.

One risk of crafting a very large essay in your head over a long period of time is that it becomes more and more intimidating to put all the pieces together… that and the various pulls of work and parenting have kept me from sitting down to write the third part of my recap of Mystery Hunt, an event that’s now more than five months old. I expected that the beginning of summer (and thus a break from teaching) would open up a lot of time to write, but there’s still a lot of fall prep to chip away at if I don’t want August to suck, and of course there are a million other leisure things I’ve been waiting to have time for, puzzly and otherwise, that are competing for my attention. If I was going to post again, it was probably going to require some external force to make me sit in my house for long periods of time.

As luck would have it (luck for an eager reader, not for me), I developed back, chest, and stomach pain during a vacation last week, and after a visit to the ER provided no explanation, a few days later a torso rash arrived and I had it diagnosed as shingles. I won’t go into the grisly details (though if we’re acquainted on a more private social media platform, you can find them there), but at the moment it’s uncomfortable but not nearly as painful as reports suggest. That might mean I have a mild case, it might mean the antivirals and steroids I’m on are doing their jobs, or it might mean it’s progressing slowly and the worst is yet to come. At the moment, the anticipation is worse than the present experience, especially with a couple more trips planned in the next few weeks.

So there are two takeaways at the moment. First, shingles sucks. There is a widely available vaccine for it (Shingrix), though it’s generally only offered to folks over 50 and the immunocompromised, which wasn’t in time to help me. The internet tells me that about 1 in 3 adults get it eventually, which makes it one of those maladies that lots of us know about but don’t talk about. So I’m talking about it, and saying get the vaccine when you can, rather than learning about this the unpleasant way. (There is a lot to learn… Did I know shingles was a terrible rash? Yes! Did I know it happens when the dormant chicken pox virus decides to party in a particular spinal nerve of its choice, which is why it only shows up one side of your body? No!)

The second is that while I’m still unprepared for the big idea essay I have stewing, lots of puzzle events have happened since Mystery Hunt, and I’ve participated in them to various extents with memories that are slowly fading. So I’m going to make like Judge John Hodgman and clear the docket with an assorted-thoughts post. If this ends up disorganized, poorly edited, and stream-of-consciousness, I encourage you to blame the virus and ignore the fact that all my posts have those same issues.

MIT Mystery Hunt

What would have been part three of my Mystery Hunt post, if it ever materializes, will likely be about metapuzzle scope creep, so let me comment on a few big-picture Hunt things that I don’t think I’ve otherwise gotten to.

* The Radio: It was great! Fun fact: I was actually on a team over a decade ago that considered a Hunt theme where we were going to give every team a radio-like device, but I don’t think we were planning to have it be nearly as functional. (It would likely have been a lot closer to the boxes we were given in WarTron Boston, which had their issues.) When they announced we were getting radios, I thought they might play music throughout, occasionally fire off announcements, and maybe get used in a puzzle at some point, but instead it’s clear that Death and Mayhem [sorry that this post initially referred to them as Death From Above, I’m old] recognized that if they were going to put a ton of effort into these devices, they should never seem like an afterthought.

I do echo what D&M said at wrap-up, stressing that not every positive aspect of this Hunt should automatically be incorporated into every Hunt. The radio was extremely cool but also extremely thematic… it added a lot of depth to this experience, but it might have felt awkward if wedged into, say, the Mythology Hunt. An ideal puzzlehunt has a story, puzzle structure, and gimmicks (if any) that are cohesive and enhance each other. The radio was a memorable artifact central to this Hunt, and its success shouldn’t cause future construction teams to add “the radio” to their checklist.

* The Gala: On the other hand, should they all add “the gala” to their checklist? Maybe in some ways, but probably not in others. The Gala was also great! The feel of the Gala was very thematic, and as with the radio, I appreciated that D&M found multiple ways to make it interact with the puzzles and story throughout. Those interactions might have fallen flat if the theme and story didn’t revolve around an event with a logical place to hang out, and so like the radio, I think this was an excellent element of this Hunt that might not be so excellent if stapled onto another Hunt.

Having said that, while I do think some aspects of Mystery Hunt hinting have gotten out of control (particularly for top-level teams and especially for metas), the concept of having walk-in “office hours” that teams can bring in-person hint requests to is a surprisingly novel and potentially universal one for construction teams to consider. D&M is a very very large team, and I don’t think Mystery Hunt should be an event that can only be won or staffed by very very large teams, so I don’t want to imply that every team should be expected to create a space like the Gala and staff it. But if a construction team can spare two or three members at a time in a classroom to staff a “hint lobby,” that might be a helpful tradition, especially for less experienced team. In my running experience, we often allot that number of people to visit team HQs, and so this would be a matter of having more teams come to HQ rather than the other way around. There are pros and cons to both, and it would be interesting to know whether teams would prefer to have constructors come to them at unpredictable times, or to have the ability to go to the constructors whenever they wanted (within reason, of course).

* The Story: While story should fit the theme of a puzzlehunt, and a noir theme implies a story with twists and turns, there are disadvantages to having a puzzlehunt story with too many shifts to keep track of. I’m on the record that a good Mystery Hunt plot can only afford a few key “beats” before the participants, who are spending most of their time staring at puzzles, are likely to lose track of what’s happening. As a result, the story of this year’s Hunt didn’t work for me as much as did for others. I appreciate that the designers encouraged us to track the story through the conspiracy map on the front page and the online team interactions when significant events occurred. But I wasn’t always in the room when the interactions happened, and I found the front page difficult to parse (in the rare times I saw it, since puzzles were more easily accessible through other links).

All of this made it tough for me to follow what was happening between rounds. What I did find immersive was what happened within rounds. The necessity of solving escape-room-style puzzles to unlock puzzles in The Illegal Search made the structure and goals of the round (both for us as puzzle solvers and for the in-story characters) clear without having to do any homework. The Stakeout and The Paper Trail similarly got the local story across through puzzle placement and round UI; these are things solvers will be more likely to, if not forced to, interact with, and that’s more likely to lead to immersion. I think the story elements of recent Hunts have often been walled off so that solvers can choose to pursue or ignore them as preferred. I would personally like to see more story woven into the elements that will be encountered while solving, and while the overall plot this year was a miss for me due to complexity, there were individual pieces of immersive storytelling that I greatly admired.

* The Scope: It is no surprise to anyone who reads my repetitive ranting regularly (sorry if I sound like Captain Turbot, my son is very into Paw Patrol right now) that I continue to think Mystery Hunt has become and has continued to be too long. But I also acknowledge that there has always been a have/have-not divide between teams that can realistically complete the Hunt in a weekend and teams that can’t, and my perspective may be shaded by being on a team that has switched sides in a very short period of time. But I’m not the only one who thinks more teams should be able to complete the Hunt without hints (or a significant number of free answers), and that has undeniably been a low number in recent years.

I expected D&M to make an effort toward this goal, and I think they did aim for it, but I don’t think they got there. The number of puzzles/rounds felt more reasonable to me than in the last few years, though I understand some of the “fish” puzzles were counted as half-puzzles, which feels like a dangerous way to convince yourself a long Hunt is short. But the bigger issue this year, in my opinion, was the complexity of the metapuzzles. James Douberley’s recent(ish) appearance on the Room Escape Artist podcast is worth listening to, and he talks about how D&M’s taste is for very involved metapuzzles. I don’t think it’s bad for metapuzzles to be involved, but I think the role they play in puzzlehunts has been changing in a non-solver-friendly way, and that may have peaked this year. But as I said before, meta scope creep is a big subject for another post.

I’ve already started writing about the other events that have happened since Mystery Hunt, but I’m realizing that with those included, this post is much too long and should be split in two, so this seems like the natural place to do it. Which means that my post that was replacing Part 3 of my Mystery Hunt report turned out to be… Part 3 of my Mystery Hunt report. It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife. More soon.

(This is a post about the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt, which happened this month. Puzzles and solutions can currently be found here. This post will include some puzzle spoilers and answers.)

I have some more pressing big-picture things to say about key design choices in this year’s Mystery Hunt, but I’m remembering that last year I posted my macro take, intended to write about individual puzzles, and never got around to it. So given that I know I want to post about the big things, I’m forcing myself to write about the little things first to give myself permission to do that.

With that in mind, here are some comments on puzzles I found memorable for one reason or another. (Many puzzles are not listed here, and that shouldn’t be read as a statement on their value; Hunt weekend is often a blur, and there are many puzzles I didn’t see, along with many puzzles I did see that didn’t stick with me.) Puzzles are alphabetized with metapuzzles last, spoilers abound.

Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt

In recent years, I’ve tried to go to bed early each night so I can be around for the extra-early shift when campus reopens. I’ve been somewhat diligent about doing this on Friday, but on Saturday I’m often scared to go to sleep in case I miss the end of Hunt. Since that has clearly not been a thing recently, and Saturday I was [gestures to last post] I went back to my hotel room at a decent hour Saturday night. I thought it would be nice to wind down by solving something remotely, and so I jumped on to help a large group with Beyond A Shadow of a Doubt.

This was a great puzzle! I loved that the dropquotes scaled up in difficulty gradually, and early on it wasn’t clear exactly what the gimmick was, but the quotes themselves and the types of movement eventually revealed the chess theme. The last dropquote or two were very challenging and satisfying, and I was the first to come up with the correct extraction, which was not what I expected but was in fact better. After spending a lot of late Saturday in a foul mood, this puzzle cheered me up and probably helped me sleep more soundly.

Downright Backwards

The very first puzzle I worked on! I correctly proposed how the clue answers should interlock right away based on the coordinates and numbers of clues, though I’m embarrassed how long it took me to realize that we could just form five disjoint word squares before assembling further. (I was trying to do nonsense like tabulating second letters and trying to anagram the second letters into five words, all of which was overkill.) Finding the ZAXIS to order the layers was a wonderful aha, and overall this was a very solid approachable (for Hunt) word puzzle.

Drunkens and Flagons

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I gave this puzzle to Jackie because she is the resident “solve Foggy’s logic puzzle with fourteen items in each category” of our two-person P&A team. She got slogged down, so I jumped in to help, and eventually we found the message to go interact with the gala. That was my first gala visit, and three bartenders seemed sadistically gleeful in making me beg for mercy (looking at you, Chris Lyon). It was neat to see the receipt printer actually print our tab (I wasn’t in the group that would later get receipt-spammed for another puzzle) and on the way back I noticed that the words on the receipt matched the numbers of drinks ordered and could form alliterative full drink names. Clearly almost done!

Except then we got stalled for a long time. No obvious indexing worked, and we noticed that a few words could be wordplay-transformed in different ways, but there was no consistent thing that worked, and we dismissed anything that was just a single data point. What we needed to do, and didn’t feel motivated to do, is to look back at the original script. In fact, when we realized the dialogue was cluing the transformations, it wasn’t from a valid clue; we wanted to reverse the Sorcerer word and I found “put back” in a Sorcerer line, but that’s not even the bit that’s cluing reversal! But eventually we found the pattern of where the clues should be, and got the intended phrase.

But at that point, we got stalled again because the final clue was hard to parse. Multiple people even came across SLEIGHT OF HAND as a good (7 2 4) phrase, but because “ANSWER CHECK” felt like a phrase, and we had a CHECK in our hands to analyze, the clue was just very difficult to interpret. By the time we finished, it was more of a relief than a triumph.

I like both stages of this puzzle, and the mid-puzzle interaction is very fun, especially when you’re already going to have a bar for other purposes. But our solve felt like it had multiple “we should be done” stages where we were gated by an aha unrelated to the tasks we’d had to do. What I took away from this as a constructor is that the later in the solving process an aha falls, the more you should err on the side of overcluing it.

Good Fences Make Good Otherwise Incompatible Neighbors

Jackie and I solved most of this, with Clint (and maybe someone else) pitching in on additional grids. I proposed we parallelize grids, and Jackie initially thought this would likely be impossible since we’d need the sheep/wolf movement to disambiguate. I agreed this was possible but that we should at least see how much fencing you could work out without that information, and the answer was pretty much all of it.

We found all of the movements between the first three grids, but then ran into some sticking points with the last ones. While Jackie tried to logic this out, I grabbed a spare grid and came up with movements that would work with the last sets of fences while (a) making letters, and (b) not crashing into each other. I got a solid run of five or six letters in a row, and managed to Wheel of Fortune out an answer without ever proving the last movements.

This was a delightful little Denis Auroux puzzle that is destined to live in the shadow of an extraordinary Denis Auroux puzzle that I’ll talk about later on.

The InSpectre

We did not come remotely close to solving this forwards. I want to bring it up for two fun moments; one was being there when we first dumped out the pieces, saying, “How are we going to keep track of which pieces are which?” and then saying, “Oh.” The other was working on Paper Trail determining that PENROSE must be the answer to something (not knowing yet that it could be another meta), confidently calling it in for the mathematical tiling puzzle, and being flabbergasted when it was wrong.

I will say, having read the solution, that this is another puzzle where we might in theory have done a lot of work assembling the puzzle and then got totally stuck on the extraction, not necessarily because the math was hard, but because we might not have known what to do. (The solution says, “The ‘exactness’ tells you you should find the exact lengths of these lines, but in terms of what units?” I’m not convinced I would have ever answered that question for myself. Echoing my note above from Drunkens and Flagons, if a puzzle asks the solver to do a time-consuming task, and then takes a sharp turn, do everything you can to make the next steps clear. No one wants to feel like they’ve done enough and receive no reward.

O, Woe is Me

“Oooh, is that a cryptic?” “Yes, but it’s a British cryptic.” “What does that mean?” “Try to solve it.” Despite spending a month or two printing out Listener/Magpie cryptics and aspiring to be the type of person who solves British cryptics, I still personally define them as “cryptics that don’t follow the rules necessary to be good puzzles.” (Yeah, you heard me, Brits. Come fight me. We’ll probably just hit you back with 200% tariffs because our president is an ignorant childish narcissist who knows even less about economics than he knows about the dangers of allowing one of the only people potentially more powerful than the President to waltz through cybersecurity.) Anyway, I thought the clues were as clunky as I’d expect, but I did appreciate the challenge and satisfaction of gradually reasoning out the unclued entries, and the connection between them was a truly strange reference to build a puzzle around, which I respect.

I did not understand the title, and so I have just consulted the solution, and yeah, no. But the puzzle was good.

Recipe Substitutions

I only jumped in on the tail of this, when most of the fun transformations were already solved, and helped wrap it up. This is very reminiscent of Would Not Make Again from 2019, but that puzzle was great, and so is this one. I appreciate that the earlier puzzle was a satire on people making so many subsitutions in the comments that at some point they were just ignoring the recipe, and this puzzle commented on the issue that modern website recipes make you read 1500 words of context before they TELL YOU THE F***ING RECIPE.

This is Just A Test

Earlier I said I went to bed early Friday, and also that I’d be talking about a terrific Denis Auroux puzzle later. Let’s bring both of those narrative threads in for a landing.

On Friday, when it was approaching the time I’d promised myself I’d turn in, Hunt attempted to stop me from doing that by throwing a big stack of number-based abstract logic puzzles. This is unequivocably my jam, and while a bunch of us were trying to solve these in parallel, I chainsawed through about three of them in a shortish window of time. When I said I had to decide between solving more and getting sleep, I joked that maybe I could solve one more on the way to the hotel, and then I decided that wasn’t a joke and grabbed a clipboard and the Japanese Sums/Products. I solved about two-thirds of it on the way down the Infinite and over to the Marriott, during which I was remarkably not hit by any cars, and then sat in the Marriott lobby to finish it out. Once I got an answer, I put my letter in the spreadsheet, looked at the partial string, typed “REDO BASE 12???” and headed upstairs.

But oh, what a bad time to try to sleep, because that put thoughts in my head. “Those puzzles all solved so elegantly in base ten; there’s no way they would also be unique in base 12, would they? How is the fillomino going to work if the numbers were all bigger and the ones we had could barely fit? Oh wait, those 12’s are going to be able to reach each other now. But that 840 would be a 1200 now, and you can’t make that as a product with unique digits. Oh wait, you can because ’10’ is a digit now…” All of this is happening in my brain without the puzzles in front of me, and I’m just unable to focus on anything other than how this impossible construction apparently existed in real life. Between that and general Hunt excitement, I don’t think I actually fell asleep for 90 minutes, partially defeating the purpose of leaving early. I probably should have just solved a few base 12 puzzles and gotten it out of my system. I likely would have gotten the same amount of sleep while still being more productive.

The solve was still not complete when I got up in the morning, and after finishing most of the remaining puzzles, we did unfortunately call in a few wrong answers as I interpreted the final answer as a clue phrase (how was “NAUGHTY NINETIES” wrong?). If I knew more at the time about how Illegal Search answers worked, I probably would have been able to narrow things down more confidently. In any case, amazing puzzle! It proves that Denis is a witch and now we have to throw him in a river or something, but it was worth it.

Why Kan’t We Be Friends, Too?

This is the end of the “solved in a hotel” trilogy; on Sunday night, after I went back to the hotel and was watching the NFL playoffs, somebody mentioned in our Slack that everybody should look at Why Kan’t We Be Friends, Too?, which we’d solved Stakeout without but had recently opened for fun. I got the reference immediately from the very funny video, and somebody else had already collected all the relevant data. I noticed the total number of directions was the same as the number of strides mentioned (VERY nice confirmer, compliments to the constructor) and pulled out an answer right away. I like hard puzzles, but puzzles don’t have to be hard to be good.

Interview at the Boardwalk

I’m going to have a lot to say about the metapuzzles in this Hunt in my next post, but this was the most “traditional” meta solve I had all weekend. Chris Morse walked over to me and said that the Boardwalk meta flavortext clued Monopoly, and that he’d noticed that a bunch of the answers were locations in specialized Monopoly boards. (If you weren’t around in 2002, Chris has spent some time thinking about Monopoly.) I looked at the text and said, okay, we should print out a Monopoly board, write the answers around, and look for matching letters. So we did that, and we got an answer, and we did a high five.

This is how metapuzzles used to work… You found the connection between the answers, and that was the majority of the meta. If that didn’t get you right to an answer, the connection was also likely going to guide you to the theme-appropriate extraction. More recent Hunt metas expect you to solve the equivalent of a full Hunt puzzle even if you have all of the inputs. I think this turned out to be one of the biggest weaknesses of an otherwise strong Hunt, but as noted, more on that to come.

Chinatown

I participated very little in the solving of this meta, but I wanted to share this story: one of the first photographed locations our team visited had what appeared to be a no-longer-active Ethernet drop. We were very confident that this was a “dead drop,” and that these would be the theme of the meta. They were not, and I’m still a little sad about it (even though I can’t imagine there would have been enough examples for this to be a feasible construction).

The Paper Trail

I’ll probably say more about this meta in the next post (but not as much as I’ll say about Background Check!). I do think this was too complex for its own good, but I also want to note that the ideas of having metas that input the answers to other metas, having metas that input the answers to each other’s metas, having metas that input the same meta answer twice, and having metas that input their OWN answers… all of this is cuckoo bananas and I respect the hell out of it, even if I think the implementation was waaaaaaaaaay too hard in practice.

In conclusion, this post should check all the boxes to let me write my big-picture post next. But for now, it’s after midnight, and I’m recovering from bronchitis, so I need to put some puzzle titles in boldface and go to sleep. Hopefully actually sleep and not lying awake in bed with base-twelve constructions dancing in front of my eyes.

This has not been one of my better Mystery Hunt recovery periods. Idiosyncrasies of the Brown academic schedule mean that sometimes the spring semester begins two days after Martin Luther King Day and sometimes nine days. Those nine-day windows are the good ones; I refer to those as “buffer weeks.” I had buffer weeks for the last two years, but I don’t this year and won’t this year. On top of that, I got sick almost immediately after returning home from Cambridge, and my son picked up the flu from day care (spiking a fever during Hunt, which is why I headed home early and missed wrap-up for the first time in decades). Between the illnesses and the beginning of my classes, free time has been at a premium, and I’ve been trying to spend as much of that free time unconscious as I can get away with.

My too-long-didn’t-read review of this year’s Mystery Hunt is that (a) it was very good, and (b) it was still too long, though less too long than the other post-COVID Hunts, so that’s something. I’m becoming aware that my objection to Hunt length has some very personal elements, though it’s still an objection some others share. I may talk about it here later, depending on how much I want to use the internet for crowd-sourced therapy.

But while I don’t have time to crank out a full Hunt analysis, I did set a record for personal shout-outs in the wrap-up of a Hunt written by another team–though I think it was always just as “Dan,” which was probably inscrutable to 80% of the audience. Since Death and Mayhem very generously fed my ego multiple times, let me address the three places I popped up in wrap-up and how much I knew about this Hunt in advance (spoiler: none).

Keys

So I recently wrote this long essay (maybe you’ve read it?) about the pros and cons of letting teams choose the order of their unlocks, and then the next major puzzlehunt centered on a mechanism of, well, letting trams choose the order of their unlocks. Multiple people asked me during the weekend if I had any inside information about the Hunt structure. Nope. As I said in the intro to that post, my wanting to talk about blind choice was motivated by multiple puzzlehunt mechanics: some recent, some older, and some hypothetical. I did decide that if I was going to talk about the previous Death & Mayhem Hunt, I should get my post up before the next Death & Mayhem Hunt. I didn’t know they were going to lean even farther (arguably) into choose your own adventure as a mechanic. And incidentally, if my post seemed prescient, let’s talk about this past year’s Brown Puzzle Hunt, which included per-puzzle choice mechanics AND a noir theme. They’re the psychics here.

So given how much I had to say about the dangers of blind choice, how did I feel about D&M’s implementation? Pretty good, actually. Allowing choice in individual puzzle order rather than round order (like in 2018) meant the choices had less consequence, and a “bad” choice was more easily rectified. The consistent width of puzzle availability also made it harder for teams to back themselves into a bottleneck through their choices. I also thought the puzzle descriptions were generally very well written and did a good job motivating puzzle choices without spoiling ahas. (One description nitpick: Rallyes, like Cahfee Regulah, are not konundrums. Though it’s pretty hard to avoid the temptation of calling something “Dunk konundrum.”)

My big concern about choice mechanics, especially in Mystery Hunt where coming in first is significant, are how they affect competition, and it’s hard to tell whether that happened without seeing the order in which teams in contention (and especially the top two that broke away from the pack). While the puzzle choice mechanic let teams decide whether they should unlock a ton of stuff in one round or work on all rounds in parallel, if teams chose the former they could still make the “wrong” choice and put all their eggs in one basket with a very hard meta (and this Hunt had very very hard metas). I look forward to poking my nose into the data, and I’d be interested to see if Cardinality’s key use was a factor in their victory. But in any case, if you’re set on giving solvers per-puzzle agency, I think D&M did virtually everything right in their implementation.

On The Corner

(This section includes spoilers for the puzzle On The Corner.)

When I wrote a mini-puzzlehunt for MIT Alumni News’ Puzzle Corner this year, I briefly thought that it was a shame I wasn’t on the construction team this year and therefore couldn’t embed content for the real Mystery Hunt. Oh well, opportunity missed.

At one point early in the Hunt, some members of my team were looking at On The Corner, and I forget what caused me to join them. (I think someone said it was a bunch of mini-puzzles, and that sounded fun.) From the “MHx” format of the puzzle numbers and the cartoon of a Tech Review cover, I immediately pointed out that this was the format of Puzzle Corner. I then asked what was going on with the four puzzles at the top that were mostly obfuscated, and someone said, “Aren’t those yours?”

My mind was totally blown by this, because my Puzzle Corner was released about three weeks before the Hunt (with minimal advance fanfare), so I had no idea how my puzzles had wound up in an actual Mystery Hunt puzzle that quickly. I was even more surprised when I saw that the instructions said to use the answers to all of the puzzles, so mine weren’t just there for Puzzle Corner flavor; the authors had written an extraction that included my four answers (which had been chosen for a totally different extraction).

The first time I stopped by the Gala, I ran into James and he immediately commented on my previous Puzzlvaria post. (“We’ll show you the nine-page white paper later.”) The second time, I saw James again and asked, “I have a question about On The Corner. What the fuck?!” Apparently, one of the editors at Tech Review is on D&M and they were able to get advance information about my column without my knowing. He also noted that they included me as an author on the puzzle, which explains how I wiggled my way into the fourth row of the long list of puzzle authors at wrap-up. In any case, I’m really glad they didn’t warn me, because in more than 25 years of Mystery Hunt, this was an all-timer in terms of memorable moments.

The Puzzle Corner mini-hunt has gotten a lot of positive feedback, and depending on what happens with the permanent editorship of Puzzle Corner, I may advocate for running a sequel next year. If so, this has given me an excellent story to tell in the intro.

Control Room

(This section includes spoilers for the puzzle Control Room, but I don’t think this puzzle can be post-solved, so don’t lose sleep over it.)

On Friday night not long before I was planning to head to the hotel (I have been on early-to-bed-early-to-rise shift for a few years, because Saturday morning when HQ is not crowded is one of the most peaceful times to solve), we unlocked Control Room, which asked us to send an escape room enthusiast to participate in person. I started to say I’d definitely be willing to do it if nobody else wanted to, and Tanis (who may or may not have been captain at the time) said she was about to nominate me anyway.

I headed to the designated location (a papered-up room on the 4th floor of Building 10) and overestimated travel time so I got there about ten minutes early. Someone came out of the room and I said I knew I was early so there was no hurry. They nodded, started to walk away, and then came back and said, “Are you still on 99?” I did not parse this at first–is 99 a team? I’m on Setec–and asked for a clarification. They said, “99 escape rooms?” and I answered “For now… I don’t know if this counts?” As they disappeared, I tried to figure out how anyone outside my inner circle would know this… Oh, right, I mentioned it in the last Puzzlvaria post. Wait, I talked about getting cake in that post. Wait, am I getting cake?!

The room itself was quite fun, although I ran into issues because I couldn’t always tell what action triggered what consequence; for example, I turned the pictures to the right positions early on but didn’t see anything happen as an immediate result, so whenever I got stuck, I kept tweaking the pictures to see if they’d do anything else. (Toward the end, I finally started explicitly asking the operators whether I’d already finished with certain room items, which helped a lot.) Screwing the skull into the lamp in place of the lightbulb (causing the skull to light up and show a message on the eyes) was a really clever mechanic that I haven’t seen before.

My teammates videotaped part of the puzzle so that I could see later what it looked like from their perspective, and they caught a funny sequence where they sent me the message “Dispose of the Body,” trying to convince me to hide the skeleton under a rug, and instead I carefully placed each skeleton piece into the wastebasket. The video missed what I am told was the funniest part, where my teammates told me I was supposed to stick a fork in an electrical outlet, and I dramatically flipped them off. I was in fact supposed to stick a fork in an electrical outlet.

As for the cake, when I opened the skeleton cabinet (you know, your traditional skeleton cabinet) there was a package of rugelach with a message on it saying “100!” Unfortunately I had to turn this gift down; it included one ingredient I couldn’t consume without supplemental medication, and another that is banned from our HQ due to a highly allergic team member, so I could neither eat it there nor take it with me. I felt horrible and ungrateful for having to leave it, but I want to publicly state that this was incredibly sweet and thoughtful, and I wasn’t trying to be a jerk by leaving it behind. (Someone from D&M told me on Discord, “Sorry, we wanted to make you a cake…” What are you talking about?! You didn’t have to make me anything and you have nothing whatsoever to apologize for!)

This story ends with the excellent video recap of Control Room at wrap-up. All the videos from wrap-up were excellent. Actually, wrap-up in general was excellent, and not just because they repeatedly mentioned me; they did a really good job keeping things moving and focusing on the stuff teams did that other teams wouldn’t get to see, along with a good big picture of overall Hunt creation that focused on the interesting bits (why choice? why gala? how TF did the radio work?) without dwelling on minutiae. Future construction teams should take note. Anyway, this montage ended with a congratulations to me on my 100th escape room. Again, by no means necessary, but incredibly sweet and generous. I feel seen.

Official Stats That Don’t Matter To Anyone But Me, But This Entire Post Already Very Egocentric So We’ll Let It Ride

Have I now officially written for nine Mystery Hunts? Of course not. I think my writing for eight is still a record for now (I can’t keep track of the young’uns these days), and nine would extend that record. But I didn’t do any additional work to make On The Corner happen, and I’m sure there have been previous Hunt puzzles that asked solvers to solve preexisting puzzle content. It’s very kind of D&M to give me an honorary author credit, but it’s more of a Cecil B. DeMille Award than an actual Golden Globe (which in turn is more of a Golden Globe than an actual Oscar, and on that subject Anora is great and you should all see it).

Have I now played 100 escape rooms? I was initially on the fence on this one, because while the room was quite fun, this was a solo experience and (I thought) not something I could list in my official spreadsheet as associated with an official escape room company. But at wrap-up, they rather publicly identified it as a 100th escape room, and more importantly, they let us know that it was created by a legit escape room company (Boxaroo, who I’d rank as the best company in New England, with Storyteller’s Secret being by far the best room in the area). If I needed a tiebreaking vote, I got one when I returned home from Hunt to see that Jackie had made this:

(The sprinkles can be attributed to Simon.) Who am I to argue with rugelach, cake, AND a caption on a video montage? 100 it is.

These Days

I said at the beginning of this post that maybe I’d go into my personal feelings about the arc of Mystery Hunt and my own life in a future post. But I feel like my blog rarely gets quite this narcissistic, so if I’m going to go deeply personal, now seems like the time.

My life has changed a lot in the last five years. Obviously everybody’s life changed during the COVID lockdown years, but we also had our son right around the end of that period, so I never really had “normal” times again, as we jumped right into being parents, a thing I’d never done before. Simon is absolutely adorable and sweet and smart. I’m proud of the multi-dimensional person that he’s becoming, and while I by no means assume he will be into puzzling, I can’t wait until he has the chance to try it. But like any dependent, raising him is time-consuming and challenging.

One of the advantages of an academic job (and before that extra years of school) has always been having a higher amount of free time and flexibility than the average working person. I almost certainly still have more free time and flexibility than the average parent in a two-job household, since I’m starting from a high baseline, but it’s still a significant change from that baseline that I’m used to. I had a lot of initial trouble coping with those changes, though therapy (real therapy, not TMI blogging) helped with the transition. Doing better doesn’t necessarily mean doing great.

One extremely first world problem that has overtaken me is that I used to have plenty of time to consume whatever media I most wanted to (puzzles, TV, movies, video games, etc.), and I find that the time needed to experience the things I would previously have classified as must-do now exceed my available time. And as dramatic as this sounds, that has made it more immediately clear that I will at some point run out of hours of my life before I get to experience all the things I want to experience. This makes every hour feel incredibly valuable, and I find myself super-anxious if I’m using time in a way that doesn’t feel productive, keeping in mind that enjoying the time counts as productive. I started playing Tears of the Kingdom recently, and while there’s a lot about it that intrigues me, as I’m playing I realize I’m not sure how long I want to spend manually assembling yet another sailboat. (My brother let me know there’s a mechanic later in the game that helps with this, so we’ll see if/when I get there.) This puts a possibly unfair amount of pressure on all leisure activities to deliver effectively. I have had this issue for a long time (I often start stressing about the end of summer vacation within the first two weeks, and Jackie frequently reminds me that at the beginning of our honeymoon I was worried that I wasn’t having enough fun doing Hawaii-specific things), but it’s definitely worse recently.

Recalling too late that this is a puzzlehunt blog and not Spring Health, how does this figure into Mystery Hunt? I have noticed that since roughly 2021 or 2022, somewhere around Saturday afternoon, I start having significantly less fun. This also happened in 2013, and a common thread in those experiences is realizing the Hunt ahead of me is probably too big to finish. I solve a lot of puzzles (and puzzlehunts) throughout the year, and so the idea of spending a weekend solving a bunch more without closure is not as appealing as it otherwise would be. To me the appeal of a large-scale puzzlehunt is that you are trying to get from Point A to Point B, and it’s possible to do that without 100-percenting the obstacles between, so you are attempting to find paths of least resistance and jump from stone to stone within the lava. That’s not as satisfying if you end up standing on one of the stones when time runs out.

Now I know that many teams don’t finish the Mystery Hunt, and for many years N-1 teams didn’t finish the Mystery Hunt, so maybe my desire to reach the end is unreasonable. This year our team did reach the endgame (or what would have been the endgame) in the wee hours of Monday morning, while I was very asleep. But we did so with hints on multiple metapuzzles, and while I appreciate D&M offering this resource, for me that means it feels more like we were dragged through than that we actually finished. I know these hints started being offered early on Sunday, and I don’t know whether Cardinality ended up taking any; if they did, I trust that D&M offered them equitably (as Setec tried to in 2005, at the risk of triggering ACRONYM), and I absolutely assume Cardinality were deserving winners, but it would put a big asterisk on “we wrote a Hunt where the coin was found midday Sunday.” [Update: Multiple people have confirmed that Cardinality did not receive hints, so the only asterisk is on my argument.] I would really like to see a return to the days where multiple teams have time to reach the end without hints by Sunday evening, and I say that with full awareness that my team did not accomplish that in 2019.

Anyway, the point is that when faced with a task that might be too big to finish, Hunt becomes a microcosm for the finite life I described above. Suddenly every puzzle I pick up is a potential time-sink; if I haven’t made progress in five minutes, do I want to stick with this, or am I just going to end up investing time that doesn’t advance my team toward the goal? I usually love solving metapuzzles, but with the complexity of modern metas, we might make significant progress and still hit a wall at the Nth step. Just like at some point I worry about using my vacation days “right” to the point that I can’t enjoy them as much, at some point in every modern Mystery Hunt I become acutely aware that the end is approaching and it becomes harder for me to relax.

This is very much a me problem, which is why I’m burying it at the bottom of a very me post. For this reason and others, I would like to see the scope of Hunt decrease, so that it is more manageable for more teams. I used to think that was a community need, but as time goes on, I’m starting to recognize that it’s more of a me need, and I shouldn’t project my ideals onto other teams. But in the days after Hunt, I did see multiple Facebook friends of mine say similar things about wondering if Hunt has passed them by or isn’t for them any more. I’ve known for years that competitive logic puzzle solving is a young person’s game, and I’m starting to wonder if puzzlehunting has that trait as well.

In addition to providing puzzlehunt-related content, this blog also serves as a somewhat accurate measurement of how busy I am at work; for example, based on the last post occurring in January and another one appearing this week, you might speculate that my course grades were recently submitted, and you’d be right. So with time on my hands than normal, let me chime in with some assorted thoughts on the puzzling world before, during , and after my spring semester.

* First and most time-sensitive, P&A has been missing almost as long as this blog, and I was happy to see that Foggy has found time to assemble an issue that’s being published this Saturday. Awkwardly, that’s the same day as the Rubiks Cube Puzzle Hunt; I believe this is from the same folks that brought you 123 123 in December, which was charming and accessible and hey, who’s that handsome gentleman at the top of the leaderboard? I’ll probably prioritize P&A for tradition’s sake (even though my top ten streak is broken), but I plan to check out Rubik later on.

* When I went to the Puzzle Hunt Calendar to grab the Rubik link, I also discovered for the first time that Puzzle Rojak 2 is in a week! I remember having fun with the first of these, and while parenthood has greatly reduced the frequency with which I can devote an entire weekend to puzzles, I hope I can squeeze some of this in with a Mystik Spiral team.

* Speaking of which, no, I did not win the Kentucky Derby a week and a half ago. As a long-time captain of Mystik Spiral named Dan, I was taken aback when I looked at the Derby lineup and saw a horse named Mystik Dan. If I were a deep believer in fate, I would have put a ton of money on Mystik Dan to win (which he did!!!) and become rich. In reality, I am only a shallow believer in fate, so I put a small amount of money on Mystik Dan to show and won twenty whole dollars. (I actually know multiple people who made significantly more money than I did because I was talking about this before the Derby. I have not received a cut.)

As MetaTerminal pointed out to me, a recent iteration of the New York Times Connections game (or as it should be called, the New York Times We Blatantly Ripped Off Only Connect And Then Blatantly And Spinelessly Publicly Denied It game) included “Duck” and “Katz.” I would advice everyone to bet on that day’s grid to win the Preakness.

* I also have some follow-up comments on my most recent blog posts. One of these was Part 0 of my Mystery Hunt writeup. Attentive readers will notice there was never a Part 1. I had a long list of specific puzzles and metas that I intended to talk about, but I never got around to writing those thoughts down. This was partially because my semester started, but also because it took a long time for solutions to be posted, which is contrary to recent practice of having the solutions ready to go before the event begins (which is also really helpful when it comes to editing and hinting). Now, I’m aware that many teams, including ours, were able to advance through the remaining puzzles after the Hunt ended. I acknowledge that having that opportunity was cool, and it’s possible that posting solutions would have minimized that accomplishment.

Of course, everyone knows my take on recent Mystery Hunts (it rhymes with “they’re too ducking strong”) and I really don’t hope that people look at the extended hinting and solving period and consider it an excuse to write too many puzzles for one weekend. There are plenty of online hunts in the current community that last more than a few days and give players time to chip away at the puzzles over time. But to those of us who have participated in it for decades, and especially those with MIT connections, Mystery Hunt is an event that is deeply tied to spending a weekend on campus. I know that making it accessible to remote teams has brought a lot of people in who may not care about that aspect, but I hope that constructors will remember those of us who do. (I have a lot of faith in Death and Mayhem in that regard.)

Anyway, because I never wrote a sequel post, and especially because I never wrote an extended piece about the puzzles, I feel like I came off as rather negative about this year’s Hunt. I am admittedly down on the length and some other big-picture aspects (as promising as the theme was, the story didn’t really work for me, and there were some interactions that rubbed my team the wrong way), but it’s worth noting that the average puzzle quality was really high, and in fact higher than I expected given the size of the constructing team, since big constructing teams often suffer from poor editing due to volume. Puzzles I really enjoyed and intended to write more about included Why the Romans Never Invented Logic Puzzles, Flamingo, Paris, Revolting Developments, and the Hell and Hydra metas. I also enjoyed The Hermit Crab and Amykos’ Briefs for egotistical reasons. And I had a lot to say about both Junky Logic and A Routine Cryptic as puzzles that started off amazing but overstayed their welcome (by about eight hours in the case of Junky Logic), but those rants are now lost to the ages. All in all, when I talked about the 2023 hunt, I legitimately thought the entire third act should have been cut both due to Hunt length and complexity of those puzzles. In contrast, there wasn’t any particular part of the 2024 Hunt that I found problematic; but as an event intended for one weekend, I think cutting three or four (or even five) cities and perhaps repurposing those puzzles for a sequel event would have caused this peg to fit more snugly into an MIT hole (in the ceiling of Hades).

* My other most recent post was about Boda Borg and Level99. In that essay, I presented a lot of differences between these two locations, and one that I mentioned but did not emphasize was that I dislocated my shoulder at Boda Borg, but not at Level99. Level99 recently opened their second location at Providence (a stone’s throw from my workplace if you can throw a stone halfway across town), and I’ve been to the new location twice. I haven’t counted, but I would estimate that it’s about half made up of half rooms that exist in the Natick location, and about half new content. Most of the new stuff is really good, which is not surprising since most of the old stuff is really good.

However, our first visit was marred significantly by the fact, and I swear to you that I am not making this up, that I DISCLOCATED MY SHOULDER AGAIN. This time it came as more of a surprise since it was the result of falling forward into a wall instead of trying to swing from a rope, though in some ways it was also less of a surprise because at least this time I could immediately tell what had happened. That did not make it less painful. I’m still in physical therapy and have a follow-up doctor’s appointment tomorrow, but I have mostly been using the arm normally (if a bit cautiously), and as I said above, I’ve actually been back to Level99 Providence since the injury, though I stayed away from physically intense rooms and might do so permanently. I recently became aware of a place called Time Mission that exists in Rhode Island and recently expanded to New York state, and which looks very Level99-adjacent but with a bit more story-based theming, as the individual challenges represent portals to other times. I’m hoping to try this place some time this summer, with a primary goal of keeping my arm attached to my body.

* There’s one more event from this semester I haven’t talked about, which is very near and dear to my heart: the Brown Puzzle Hunt. This also deserves its own post, and it might get one tangentially about choice in puzzlehunts (part of the hunt mechanism involved partially blind choices about which rounds to open first… I have strong opinions about this in general, and it was especially relevant in a hunt where some of the rounds were heavily interactive and the website was often unresponsive). I thought last year’s event was surprisingly good for a first iteration, and also surprisingly hard. I really like hard puzzles (within reason), but I was worried they might make the hunt inaccessible to Brown students who were only casual puzzle solvers. I mentioned this to people on the construction team beforehand, and they suggested they knew this was an issue and were working on it… I didn’t really see much evidence that it was addressed. But again, I like hard puzzles. So I liked this.

We increased our five-person team from last year to six people by adding Jackie (who paradoxically both is brilliant and has stayed married to me for almost ten years now), but two members (Wil and Jen) decided not to travel to Providence, so our on-campus contingent dwindled a bit. Also, none of the in-person members were going to be able to come back to campus on Sunday, so since Game Control was shutting down for quiet hours at midnight, we had a hard deadline. Unlike remote teams, we received one puzzle nuke each for participating in two events, and by the end we ended up nuking a puzzle tied to an in-person interaction that hadn’t started yet (which felt sketchy, but again, midnight deadline).

While we worked out the last two metapuzzles (one of which, the Data meta, is an all-timer as far as I’m concerned) and began the runaround, we lost Jackie to child care and then Dee to a train schedule, leaving Andrew and I as a duo to finish the last couple legs of the runaround (quote from one of them involving chemicals: “Should I touch it?” “No, you should definitely not touch it.”) We completed the last interaction less than ten minutes before midnight and were the only team to finish before things shut down for the night. Mission accomplished!

One thing I really respect about the Brown Puzzle Hunt is that whether or not they’re getting the difficulty right, the event themes and design are deeply rooted in Brown culture; as a former grad student and current faculty member, I don’t have the undergrad perspective, but I can recognize a lot of it and “feel” other parts of it, if that makes sense. I’ve had some frustrating conversations about the Mystery Hunt where people basically say, “Well, if you want it to have MIT culture, just change the rules so MIT students write it every year!” (These are frustrating because for years the Hunt felt very MIT-affiliated under the current rules, even when a team with many non-students took a turn writing it… you can learn things about the school you’re visiting.) That said, it’s really cool that so many undergrads have come out of the woodwork to write for Brown Puzzle Hunt, many of whom are not puzzle aficionados but are happy to contribute story, art, or just time. Going to an undergrad school with a significant puzzle culture did a lot to shape my life, and it makes me happy that some Brown students may start having the same experience. The kids are all right.

* I think the longer and more rambling a blog entry is, the shorter and more abrupt the ending should be.

(This is a post about the 2024 MIT Mystery Hunt, which happened this month. Puzzles and hints can currently be found here. This post contains spoilers for two puzzles, Boosted and Greek Girl Squad.)

This year’s Mystery Hunt ran much later than the average Mystery Hunt, but it also started quite a bit later than the average Mystery Hunt due to technical difficulties. Once we realized the website was probably not going to start producing interactive content imminently, I went to the front of the room, asked for a random word as a puzzle answer, and started leading the room in a puzzle construction jam session, remembering the time the first Galactic Puzzle Hunt apparently started to be written during Hunt downtime, though that was after that team finished a Hunt rather than before they started.

We finished cobbling together a fairly approachable puzzle and typed it up, and I was just trying to figure out how to print it out and slip it under the door of some of our hallmates (Unseen, Teammate, Swarm, Frumious… big Hunt party in Building 2 this year!) when the Hunt site woke up and we suddenly had other things to prioritize.

Here’s the puzzle we wrote in that time, edited slightly because I just found a mistake that probably stemmed from my bad handwriting. It hasn’t been tested or objectively fact-checked, which all actual puzzlehunt puzzles should be, but I recommend solving or trying to solve this before reading the rest of this post if you are so inclined.

PEELS, a hastily written puzzle by Setec Astronomy

• “Benefactor, gaze into this crystal!”
• Female student at UCSD or Miami
• Frightening back end
• Gate with a keypad lock
• Metallically strengthened concrete magnifying glass
• Price to buy Christmas trees
• Slightly prefers tarts over other desserts

Here’s some spoiler space:

Have you solved it or at least made enough progress to get the gimmick? Great.

Now imagine writing that puzzle as we did, scanning through the first puzzles to appear in the actual Hunt, and seeing the flavortext for the puzzle Boosted. Boosted was our first team solve and, based on the formatting of the solve graph (which was posted on Discord but for some reason not included in the wrap-up… it’s below if you haven’t seen it), I believe it might have been the second solve in the Hunt. But that doesn’t seem fair given that we had just written almost the same puzzle. We might have been first if I hadn’t spent some time searching HQ for hidden cameras.

Moving on…

I normally write a pretty in-depth breakdown of Mystery Hunt. One could argue that with my infrequent posting, the Hunt report is the only consistent reason this blog still exists (other than to attract undeserved Bravo Award nominations; thanks to whoever threw me in there, you’re literally too kind). I have never been the type of person who runs out of stuff to say about Mystery Hunt, a driving force in my life since 1998.

So it’s strange that I can’t figure out what else I want to say about this year’s Hunt and in what format. If I were to write about this Hunt with no additional context, I’d basically be rewriting what I said last year (and to a lesser extent the year before). This Hunt was much too long for my tastes, and while it did not feel like we were given quite as many free answers as last year, it did seem like we were strongly encouraged to use the hint system pretty early. Once Hunt becomes about strategizing where to use hints and free answers, I no longer enjoy it because I feel like I’m being rewarded more for that strategy and less for puzzle-solving.

I also may have had an atypical experience because I spent more than half of my Sunday working on what seemed like a really engaging logic puzzle but eventually took multiple people all day and at least four hints to solve, partially due to our breaking the logic due to a rule misinterpretation (our fault) and partially due to the puzzle having far too many sequential ahas (not our fault). As a result, after 2pm on Sunday, I looked at every potential new puzzle with a sense of PTSD; if I work on this, am I going to be sucked into it for eight hours and miss out on everything else at the time? Instead I spent most of the rest of Sunday staring at metas, even more so than usual.

Most of the puzzles (and metas) I did work on and finish were quite good and well-designed, and even elements of the puzzle I’m ranting about were really cool, so it’s unfair to judge the entire Hunt based on that one single-puzzle experience. I honestly had a blast from Friday afternoon to Saturday afternoon, although then my attitude started to turn Saturday night as I started to realize the likely scope of the Hunt, combined with some annoyances from work and home, and then the Sunday slog just kind of pushed me over the edge. Nearing the end of the Hunt definitely would have given me a second wind, but we came nowhere near the end of the Hunt, so I stayed pretty cranky until after wrap-up.

One question that I’ve been asking myself and other people since Monday is this: Would the average Mystery Hunter (or given the diversity of teams, does the average Mystery Hunter within each solver experience demographic) prefer (a) guaranteeing puzzle content through the entire weekend, which apparently now includes Sunday night/Monday morning, or (b) achieving a sense of completion, whether that means finishing the entire Hunt or some sort of meaningful midgame. I am definitely in the (b) camp, and given my Hunt history, midgame isn’t enough for me. I realize that every Hunt goes unfinished by the vast majority of teams, but our team finished FIRST in 2016 and 2018, and in recent years despite minimal change in personnel, we’ve been multiple rounds away from the target of finishing, even with Sunday night tacked on to the Hunt period and the ability to hint and/or nuke lots of puzzles we don’t want to deal with. It feels like the solver goalposts are moving, especially if you’re not on a gigantic team (or Unicode Equivalence, who are alarmingly effective for a reasonably sized team).

But maybe I’m in the minority in prioritizing a completable Hunt over maximizing content. I thought it was a consensus opinion that Teammate’s hunt had too much content–remember that they ultimately decided to cut enough content on the fly to be its own online hunt, and still needed to give out free answers like candy to get teams through the rest–and I don’t understand why a team would follow up on that by INCREASING the number of puzzles, unless they either can’t say no to constructors or think the content flood is a good thing. So maybe there is an increasing proportion of the Hunt community that believes that having more puzzles is inherently better. Whether or not that’s the case, it also seems like an increasing number of competitive teams are publicly stating that it would be impossible to their team to write Hunt, and some have (allegedly) intentionally stopped solving near the end of Hunt to avoid it. At the current scale, that impossibility might be true. But no one should be expected to write a Hunt at the current scale, and reining things in would be a quality-of-life improvement both for the constructors and for me as a solver. Maybe it wouldn’t be for other solvers. Please debate this in the comments!

Given the nature of recent Hunts and the size of the team writing this year, I expected this Hunt to be too long by my standards, and in considering the intersection of teams likely to win a too-long Hunt and teams I have faith in to do something about scope sprint (I usually say scope creep but let’s be real here), Death and Mayhem was in the dead center of my Venn diagram, so I’m really happy that they won. I personally hope they make the changes in Hunt that I want, but they should only make them if they’re also what the community wants. If they’re not, it may just be that Mystery Hunt is finally passing me by. Which makes me sad.

If I get over that sadness and find some time, I may be back with another post about specific puzzles and metas I enjoyed, and some thoughts on story and structure. But next week I start my first semester back at work after a sabbatical, so I might just see you again this summer when the chaos calms down.

Bear with me… this essay is going to be a stretch for a puzzlehunt blog. (But hey, posting anything is a stretch for this particular blog, amiright?) Some of the ideas are relevant to puzzlehunts, but I’m mainly going to talk about a video game, a card game, and two escape-room-adjacent Boston-area entertainment complexes. There will be the mildest of spoilers; I will explicitly avoid talking about game content, but I may use some vague references to specific L99 and BB rooms (for example, I might truthfully say that the third phase of Bollkoll at Boda Borg is delightful).

Celeste, a critically acclaimed platformer video game, came back to XBox Game Pass this summer. I’m on leave this semester and have thus had some more time for video games in the summer and fall, so I have Game Pass and decided to give Celeste a whirl.

I finished the main part of the game today, and during that process, I died a lot. (The game tracks how many times you fail, and I think I racked up a four-digit number of fatalities.) This had the potential to be very frustrating, but the game designers paid attention to user experience. When you do die, the reset of the game is almost instantaneous… no Mario flying upside down with a music sting for the 99th time. (Years ago I played Super Meat Boy, another killer platform that benefitted from the same rapid-reload.) And every time you traverse a screen, the game auto-saves, so when you advance in the linear sequence of hurdles, you know you don’t have to worry about the last part again.

Some of those hurdles require a handful of tricky maneuvers in a row, and it did reach a level of tedium a few times. There were at least half a dozen boards where I said to myself that I was going to try three more times before giving up. About half of those times, I actually succeeded within three tries, and in several others I made enough additional progress in one of those attempts that I kept going. This game wants you to keep going. This is explicit in the game’s story, but it’s also implicit in the game design; somehow whenever it was brutally hard, it gave me just enough encouragement to keep going. (I recently found out there is an assist mode for people who want to experience the game without the difficulty, though the given difficulty turned out to be just right for me.) It was after one of these “got it on one of my last three tries” incidents that I started revisiting some thoughts I already had this summer about Level99 and Boda Borg.

If you haven’t lived in or visited Boston, you may not know what Boda Borg and Level99 are, so let me try to describe them, starting with Boda Borg since it opened first (in 2015). Boda Borg is a Swedish “questing” franchise (their only American location is in Malden, MA) where you pay for access to a building full of doors that open to themed challenge rooms. Like a puzzlehunt puzzle, these rooms rarely come with instructions; your multi-person task might involve solving puzzles, pressing buttons at the right moments, or a ninja-warrior-style climb across the room without touching the ground. (Before you scoff at the physical aspects, I want to emphasize that I DISLOCATED MY SHOULDER on my first Boda Borg visit, in a quest called Jungle. I’ve been back, more cautiously, three times since.) Depending on whether you do what you’re supposed to do, you’ll be served a red failure screen and buzzer, a green screen and admission to the next room of the quest, or if you’ve completed the last room, access to an ink stamp to add to your quest card. Quest names range from the evocative (Pirates, Alcatraz, Spook House) to the abstract (Wumplefrump, Nostalgia, Tough Tougher Toughest).

The easiest way to describe Level99 (in Natick, MA, with a second location opening this year in Providence, which is super-exciting) is to steal a comment I saw on Reddit that called it “real life Mario Party.” The second easiest way is to start with the Boda Borg description above and emphasize some differences:

1. At Level99, all the quests (called rooms) are one room, and instead of succeeding or failing, you can earn 0, 1, 2, or 3 stars depending on your performance. Rooms are grouped into categories, so they have names like Space Void, Space Nebula, Retro Pinball, and Retro Vinyl.
2. Instead of stamping a card, you tap into each room with an electronic wristband which tracks your progress on all rooms (progress that is saved between visits).
3. In addition to the rooms, Level99 includes “hunts” (memory quizzes about the local art throughout the building) and “arena games,” one-on-one games such as a Pong climbing wall and a race to press colored panels in order.
4. Although one of the room categories is “mystery,” meaning part of the challenge is figuring out what to do, I personally don’t think any of the room objectives are particularly unclear after two or three attempts.
5. Boda Borg has a taco bar on the premises, and Level99 has a brewery. (Doing well in Level99 rooms earns currency you can exchange for free merch and/or free pretzels or french fries at the restaurant.)

Last month I went to Boda Borg for the first time since before the pandemic (fourth overall), and Level99 for the fifth or sixth time. I like Boda Borg. I LOVE Level99. The progress system might be enough to make the difference by itself; I’m a sucker for achievements and incremental progress, and just writing this makes me want to go back and increase my star count. (I desperately wish they would let you access your account outside the facility… if/when you do go, make sure to tap your icon after tapping into a room and before entering, because there’s a ton of account interactivity available that’s not immediately obvious.) But in terms of the quests/rooms themselves, the Level99 rooms are almost all designed with the care that Celeste is. Some of the Boda Borg quests are too, but some of them are designed like Mao. I’ll get to that in a bit.

As I mentioned earlier, two of the things that make the challenge of Celeste bearable are the frequent saving and speedy restart; these features ensure that while you may be doing a lot of repetition, it’s mostly productive repetition. Since L99’s version of quests are only one room, they avoid the undesirable experience of failing the third room and then having to repeat two previous rooms (possibly with some waiting around if another group is in the next room) before you can try again.

(One of the newest rooms, Wavelength Flux.0, is arguably an exception to this; we put a lot of effort into getting to the very last of a long series of challenges, and we ran out of time before we could figure out what to do with it. We’d now need to do a lot of the same work over again in order to possibly just get stuck again. I feel like this room would benefit from some sort of progress save, but that’s not consistent with the L99 structure. Starship Evacuate also has a sequence of tasks you have to repeat, but the tasks change more from attempt to attempt unless you have a group of six.)

But there’s another thing that kept me going in Celeste, which is that on every replay I knew what I was expected to do. Sometimes it took some thought to decide exactly where I should be dashing/climbing/hanging on, but the objective was generally clear. As I noted in my rundown of the differences between BB and L99, the objective is also generally clear at L99. BB, not so much. The peak of this is where I think BB stops working with their customers and instead works against them.

In at least two quests, Spook House and Potions, there is a room (notably) not the first, where you can passively fail; you walk or crawl in and encounter a buzzer and the failure screen. That’s fine, we’ll try it again… but my group has done each of these probably a dozen times and tried many different things with no additional progress. If every attempt was auto-loading as fast as a Celeste level, I might be more willing to keep spamming attempts. But both of these booby traps occur after a non-trivial physical activity, and repeating that activity just to get the same mysterious rejection is exasperating. And unlike a typical Level99 room, where a failure is often accompanied by an on-screen comment summarizing what went wrong, these two rooms have the same complete lack of feedback.

Just to keep this post somewhat relevant to the blog theme, puzzlehunt design has a similar pitfall, in that some puzzles call for a task or extraction that requires a lot of work with no confirmation that you’re doing the right thing until you’ve done the right thing. These are sometimes called “guess what I’m thinking” puzzles, since without guidance, you have to either read the constructor’s mind or fail. Modern puzzlehunts (at least the hardest ones) have undergone a troublesome trend where few if any solvers solve some of the puzzles without hints. I think some constructing teams don’t mind this, because they enjoy engaging with the solvers through hinting. But if everybody needs hints to progress, the hints should have been in the puzzle. Video games can have DLC, but DLC shouldn’t kick in before the main storyline concludes. Stepping off my soapbox.

Level99 and Boda Borg also have some form of hinting. Level99’s is more formal, as you can access hints from the pre-room tap-in interface. (I’ve only ever done this once, for Pirates Brig, which effectively told me, “No really, we want you to do the thing you think we want you to do.” I have zero stars on Pirates Brig.) Boda Borg has attendants who apparently sometimes give hints, I’m told. But when they first opened, I got the sense that this was not a thing. Even now, the BB decor includes slide shows with memes about how everyone at Boda Borg fails, laughing about how hard their quests are. I imagine this is meant to normalize failing, but what I’ve learned from Level99 and Celeste is that you normalize failing by minimizing the discomfort of the failure process. I think Boda Borg fails to do this in the rooms in question (and some others), and I think their design mentality violates my trust as a player. I don’t want to engage someone I don’t trust in a subjective hinting interaction.

So if these Boda Borg rooms don’t feel like playing Celeste, what game do they feel like? That’s where Mao comes in. I believe I discovered the card game Mao through math competitions where people played it after hours. It’s an Uno-style card game (played with a standard poker deck) where there are secret rules you’re meant to figure out while playing, and breaking these rules is penalized by being given extra cards and no explanation. In theory, this could be a good foundation for a mental challenge. In practice, every social group that I’ve ever played with Mao was a school-aged clique that used it as an excuse to laugh at newcomers. Make it through the initiation and you will share our secret information that we can use to torment others! Or you could just talk to people as equals and make friends. Sorry, I think I’m processing something from decades ago in real time.

Anyway, I don’t get the sense that Boda Borg wants every visitor to figure out Potions on their first visit… I’m not actually sure they want *every* visitor to ever figure it out. A wise constructor (I think Mark Gottlieb, but I may be misquoting and/or misattributing) described a puzzle as a battle of wits between the constructor and solver that the constructor intends to lose. When I got frustrated playing Celeste, I always got the sense that things were set up for me to eventually win, and that kept me going. A challenge where the player is not intended to win, like Mao or Spook House, might be fun for the challenge-maker, but if the challenge-maker keeps frustrating their audience, they’re going to run out of audience.

Now, I realize I’ve been slagging on Boda Borg throughout this essay, and I want to be clear that I still encourage you to go there, and there is lots of entertainment to be had. While some of their content seems unfair to me (and whether or not it’s actually unfair, the net result is unpleasant), I’ve really enjoyed others. In my most recent trip, some of the new quests we completed and enjoyed were Wumplefrump, Access Denied, and especially Eye of the Storm, which for me benefits from the multi-room model in a way other quests don’t. But I went to Boda Borg once this summer, and Level99 three times, and I think it’s likely to be that way in the future. Level99 feels fun and sometimes sadistic, and Boda Borg feels sadistic and sometimes fun. I would recommend trying both. And also Celeste. But not Mao.

I have one more observation to tie things together, but it involves significant Celeste spoilers, which I said I’d stay away from. So if you intend to play that game and don’t want to know how it ends (for some definition of ending), step away from the blog.

All clear?

Okay. Here we go.

The main storyline of Celeste ends with Chapter 7 and an epilogue. Then an unexpected Chapter 8 kicks off. After a few screens teasing a different dash mechanic, I encountered an impenetrable wall. Based on my experiences in previous levels, I assumed there would be a straightforward way to move through, but nothing worked. So I went back a screen to a character I’d just talked to and talked to them again, at which point my character asked about the wall, and was told something cryptic about retracing my steps through the entire game.

So that’s when my Level99 game turned abruptly into a Boda Borg game. It’s also when I stopped playing.

Hi all! It’s a pleasant Friday in April, and Brown is about to commence Spring Weekend, which makes me suspect that my office hours are going to be very quiet. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong [Edit: I was], but it seems like a good time to check in about some recent and future puzzling.

First and foremost, let me provide a plug for the upcoming Microsoft Puzzlehunt, which is online and open to the public next weekend (May 6-7). I’ve never participated in MSPH for real, but over the last few years I’ve had opportunities to test puzzles for the event. Usually due to the crowdsourced nature of the event (and because I’m often not available for long stretches of time), this mostly feels like grabbing individual puzzles from a big stack. But this is the first MSPH in a long time that’s been entirely written by a cohesive group, and I was also able to carve out more continuous time, and I have to say I *really* enjoyed it. I will obviously spoil nothing, but it felt on the nose in terms of difficulty relative to team size, and the puzzles, structure, and theming were all delightful. As I understand it, this was originally going to be on-site and closed to partially-Microsoft teams as is tradition, but it had to switch to online which led to the open registration the event has now. Take advantage of this! It’s worth your time.

It’s not often that in-person puzzlehunts come to me, but I was really psyched that there was a Brown Puzzle Hunt this year! And written by over a dozen current puzzlehunt-interested students, which is not a demographic I realized currently exists in my workplace! Unlike years past, that demographic doesn’t seem to exist in the math department; I tried to wrangle some grad students to form/join a team, but nobody bit. But talking about the event on Facebook, Wil Zambole, Jen McTeague, Dee Williams, and Andrew Esten all expressed interest in coming to campus from various definitions of out of town (Chicago, for example, is more of a trek to Providence than Boston is, not that it’s a competition) so I ended up on an adult ringer team. Which felt a little weird for a hunt on home territory… In fact, at first I didn’t know whether I should be on a team, since maybe this was for students? But then a shadowy figure delivered me a personalized invitation at the end of my multivariable calc course one day(!), and I figured that’s as clear a signal I was going to get that I was welcome.

I really didn’t know what to expect from the event itself, and the initial description suggested it would be BAPHLesque, so even though the event was Saturday/Sunday, I only made plans to be there on Saturday (with Simon home on weekends, that’s likely the most I was going to contribute anyway). It was not BAPHLesque from my perspective… if anything I’d say it was close to Puzzle Potluck? There were definitely some puzzles, even in the first round, that seemed crunchy for an event happening on a campus where puzzlehunts are not the norm, and some very technical (but nice!) metapuzzles. I hope this event happens again, and personally, I’d like to see some more newbie-friendly content in the first round; after that if you want to ramp things up, that’s cool. But in some ways, this felt more geared toward the ravenous internet audience than the undergrads that I’d love to see addicted to puzzling.

Despite my nitpicking about calibration, I enjoyed this hunt a lot as well, and my team was a lot of fun to solve with. And maybe it’s a combination of my preexisting awareness of Blueno and my predilection for dark themes, but I noticed and appreciated the round art more than in most hunts. In terms of individual puzzles, the most memorable ones for me were Financial Crimes, which is one of the more immersive logic puzzles I’ve ever solved (information in classic logic puzzles tends to feel a bit clean and contrived, and this was… not that), Remixers (very up my alley), and the Lamp meta. I was also pleased to see Community Photos, having written the similar-in-spirit Alma Mater in the 2002 Mystery Hunt. Which was over two decades ago? Excuse me while I send myself out to sea on an ice floe.

I have a few more things I’d planned to talk about, but I ended up spending the majority of these office hours actually doing my job (go figure!), so I’ll hit “Post” and try to find time to resume later.