Category: puzzle
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2025 MIT Mystery Hunt recap
The 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt can be found here. This post will have spoilers.
This was my sixth Mystery Hunt and my usual hunting friends tagged along with TSBI again. This year, TSBI re-merged so we had about 70 people, 17 on-site, and we finally finished hunt (technically). It doesn’t really feel that way to me since we didn’t do the runaround and finish the story, though.
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2024 MIT Mystery Hunt recap
The 2024 MIT Mystery Hunt can be found here. This post will have spoilers.
Last month, during MLK day long weekend, I participated in MIT Mystery Hunt for the fifth year in a row. My usual hunting team assimilated into the TSBI Swarm again and we made up half of the on-site presence. We all flew in Thursday and met up for dinner. Even though half my hunting group also live in the Bay, I still only regularly see them in person all the way up in Cambridge. Hopefully with DASH coming back, that will change.
This year, our team ended up doing similarly well. Across Saturday, we had the second-most puzzles solved. I think during Sunday when the width of the hunt was extremely large, we slowed down as the collective focus of our team was weaker. We were farther away from finishing as well, but I still felt pretty accomplished by the end.
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2023 MIT Mystery Hunt recap
The 2023 MIT Mystery Hunt can be found here. This post will have spoilers.
Last weekend I participated in the annual MIT Mystery Hunt, a puzzle-solving competition traditionally held on MIT’s campus during the MLK day long weekend. I had a great time this year between the puzzles I worked on, seeing with long-time friends, making new friends, and of course making it far into Mystery Hunt for the first time. It was the first time a team I was on received the Phonecall, warning us about our leading position during late Sunday night. We ended up finishing just 40 minutes after the tracking period, placing us about 9th, but I’m nonetheless very happy with how everything turned out.
This year was my fourth Mystery Hunt and the first time back on campus since my first Mystery Hunt in 2020. For the last two years, the event was online-only, so I was really excited to attend in person again with more experience in the puzzlehunt hobby. I had clearer expectations about the hunt, was more confident about my puzzle-solving, and eager to contribute to the team.
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Bpuzzled Recap Part 2: 2020-2021
In Part 1, I wrote about what Bpuzzled is and my experience the first year it was hosted. In this post, I write about its second year. Because the puzzles were never made public, I can’t link to them and won’t reproduce them here. I kept an archive, so ask me if you’re curious about them.
Nov 13: Bpuzzled UMD
The 2020 COVID pandemic happened, so I wasn’t hopeful that I would win another trip to New York City, but was nonetheless surprised when I learned Bpuzzled would return. After doing many puzzlehunts from that spring until fall, I felt way more confident than before. Duck Gizzards, an essentially all-UMD student team, began finishing in the top 20 of popular hunts, so I expected to have a shot at taking first at Bpuzzled. It was also my final year at UMD, so I wouldn’t have another chance.
For this year, Josh and Steven returned as team members, while Grant (another UMD Puzzlehunt writer and regular Duck Gizzards teammate) took Ryan’s spot, since he graduated. Bpuzzled kept the same format: you initially start with 3 puzzles and unlock 1 more for every solve. The answer checker confirms partials (and more), and you are given canned hints every 10 minutes after the puzzle is unlocked. There would be 8 puzzles and 1 metapuzzle that you would have to solve in the 3-hour time limit.
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Bpuzzled Recap Part 1: 2019-2020
What’s Bpuzzled?
In 2019, I was still pretty new to puzzlehunts and wouldn’t really call myself competitive—the only online competitions I had done were Puzzle Potluck 2 and MUMS 20191. However, I did do some localized in-person hunts like DASH, DCPHR, and Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge (CPC) in 2018. CPC was the highlight of my freshman year; and after coming in fourth within UMD, I became obsessed with puzzles. I couldn’t wait until next year’s CPC to challenge the spot for first at UMD and see how I stacked up against other college teams. The prospect of competing against other college students was more exciting to me than other events, since I felt the pool of teams was more relatable, experience-wise. I also have friends who were more casual, so they preferred in-person events to online competitions.
Unfortunately, in 2019, Microsoft CPC was canceled, leaving this niche completely empty. I would just have to accept that there wouldn’t be any restricted competitions. Luckily, Bloomberg decided to get into running puzzlehunts aimed for college students the next school year, calling their events Bpuzzled. Unlike CPC, Bpuzzled consists of two events. The first Bpuzzled is local, held at different institutions throughout the year. The first place team at each university wins an expenses-paid trip to New York City and gets to compete at the Bpuzzled Finals held at Bloomberg’s Midtown Manhattan office2.
Since Bpuzzled is exclusive to certain college students and the finals is limited to each college’s winners, many members of the puzzlehunt community will never experience these events, meant for about 100 students each. Here, I’ll recount my experience for anyone who wants to live through these events vicariously. Unfortunately, most of these puzzles were not made public3, so there’s no link to them, and I won’t reproduce them here. I did keep an archive of them, so ask me if you want to see a particular one.