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.

Expectations

First, the expectations. Every year, the group that hosts the MIT Mystery Hunt changes—as tradition, it is the responsibility of the winning team to write and organize the next event. Last year, the team “Palindrome” hosted a book-themed event, which was won by “teammate.” Palindrome’s last writing effort was way before my time, with the team changing significantly since then, so I essentially had no idea what to expect for their Mystery Hunt. Conversely, I was extremely excited for teammate’s Mystery Hunt because unlike Palindrome, teammate had recently organized two independent puzzlehunts, Teammate Hunts 2020 and 2021, both of which I adored for their memorable puzzles, unique features (including a virtual game system), and incredible art production value.

To get this out of the way, anybody who was involved in this year’s Mystery Hunt, solver or writer, knows that teammate’s event did not go as planned. Not in the ways that I mentioned above, but because of the combination of ambitious puzzles—many of which were very time-consuming because of their size and difficulty—and the sheer number of these puzzles, the event ran much longer than it should have. Logistically, the winner should have been crowned before 5 pm Sunday, 52 hours after the start, which was the original time teammate said they would shut down HQ (actively organizing the hunt by answering hints and whatnot). Instead, the first team finished at around 4 am Monday, after dozens of free answers letting you skip puzzles and hints on the final metapuzzles which were bottlenecking close-to-the-finish-line teams. By this point, there are numerous writings about this, both from solvers and writers perspectives, so there isn’t much I want to add to the discourse.

I have been on the organizing side of much lower stakes time-estimate mispredictions while running several UMD Puzzlehunts, including UMD Puzzle Hunt 2021, so I know how stressful it can be on the running side. In some early UMD Puzzle Hunts, no teams would finish, or few would with generous hints. We were lucky with UMD Puzzle Hunt 2021, since running longer/being harder than advertised ended up being a good thing, landing in a sweet spot for substantive puzzles, with basically no downside (we did have to answer hints for much longer than expected). In the end, I think teammate handled their situation as best as they could have and I appreciate all of their effort during the weekend. I’ll share some overarching things I liked during the hunt (puzzle-specific comments later).

  • The art was great, as usual. I especially liked the puzzle factory and all of the AI rounds.
  • The interactions with MATE were a really smart way of being fed the story. I was always engaged with reading and answering the polls.
  • I think the unlocked-puzzle width during the middle and later parts of the hunt was well-balanced.
  • Logistics were all handled perfectly. The events all started without delay, I never had issues with puzzle-pickups, hints had a quick turnaround time, and we had several checkups which I really appreciated.

Even though Mystery Hunt was more exhausting than I planned for (I had to attend the TRB Annual Meeting earlier that week, flying to Boston straight from it) and I didn’t even get to dive into some of the interesting-but-time-consuming-looking puzzles, want to reiterate I still had a great time. This is partly to do with the puzzles, which I’ll talk about later, and partly due to solving with an entirely new team this year, TSBI Swarm. TSBI Swarm, totaling around 55 solvers, much smaller than its previous iterations, much larger than Halibut that Bass, the team I solved with for the previous three years, adopted me, Angel, and five other friends from “Team Copypasta.” There were numerous other puzzlehunt-regular yet TSBI first-timers, too. Knowing this, I had higher expectations than previous years for how much of the event we would be able to see and finish. Even with a larger overall team, we only had about a dozen solvers who were on-site, the rest remote, so I could tell it would still be an intimate solving experience on campus. And other than my own friends, I didn’t know anyone else on the team so it was nice to meet some new people. MIT guest wifi blocking Discord VC aside, I felt that the team synergy was pretty good despite being split remote and onsite. We had a livestream of HQ and I heard plenty of different voices over VC over the weekend.

For next year, like Palindrome, I don’t know what to expect out of the winning team, TTBNL. As always, I hope their event presents some interesting round structures and novel ideas.

Contributions

At the very start of the hunt, I was mostly aimlessly hopping in and out of sheets since there weren’t many puzzles to look at. Thus, I mostly contributed to researching and data collection. It wasn’t until Sunday until I felt like I contributed a lot myself. On top of puzzles, I went to the Art, Café, and Dance event. I really enjoyed Art and Dance, with Dance being really hilarious and clever.

I also found myself in the position of looking for puzzles to use our free answers on. This was a pretty stressful task, since we didn’t know when HQ would close and wanted to see as much as possible, hopefully getting to the final runaround. At first we were good about announcing which puzzles were in consideration for free answers, but eventually it broke down when the rate of identifying/agreeing on using scrip was basically slower than the rate of accruing scrip. I don’t necessarily regret using as many free answers as we did or on the puzzles we used them on in particular, since it was evident we needed all the help we could get, but unfortunately a lot of free answer-usage ended up being poorly communicated.

Now we can talk about some of the more memorable contributions. I’ll do this roughly chronologically, but it’s honestly all a blur.

Scicabulary: Instantly, I recognized LEAKFAST and FOON as reverse portmanteaus since we once did a puzzle that used this at UMD Puzzle Club.

Art Event: Angel and I were excited for the Art Event as we both do/did a lot of it. We were joined by two other TSBI members. In the first task, we were in charge of giving origami instructions with a list of banned words. This was probably the most challenging of the three tasks for us, since we had trouble figuring out the diagrams in hte first place. The second and third tasks went more smoothly and I was pretty happy with what we ended up making in the end.

Formula Deluxe: I got the staff ghosts aha, and started to help extract, but left the tedium of measuring the racetracks to my more patient team members.

Café Event: I went to do Café with Matt. For me, it was the first thing I did after waking up, while for Matt, this was near the end of his night shift. At first it wasn’t clear what was going on in the event; that it was supposed to be an escape room. It took a few hints from the organizers to get us (and it seems a lot of other teams) on the right track. Since the room itself filled up, we were sitting at a table doing the puzzles outside—making it harder for us to realize what we were meant to use as puzzle data. The puzzles and concept of an escape room was neat, but it ran much longer than the other events I went to. However, it felt like I was just doing more puzzles. I did appreciate the coffee and hot chocolate provided, though.

Exhibit of Colors: From the three subpuzzles, I got the aha for how to solve the rest of the puzzle, which was a fun throwback. I’m always especially happy to solve a physical puzzle, so they no longer taunt us sitting in the room.

Noise Apparatus: I broke into the puzzle by getting matching words to the fourth equation, and stayed to help finish this puzzle. I think this puzzle was a nice difficulty level with a good theme.

Tissues: After Angel spent the better part of the whole day identifying the tissue samples, I helped figure out how to read the message from tissues. We ended up needing a hint to figure out how to construct the logic puzzle. Nonetheless, this was another physical puzzle that we conquered.

Subterranean Secrets: Me, Angel, Matt, and Andrew went down into the tunnels which was a neat break from sitting all day. We didn’t end up finishing the puzzle, but I did like the riddles.

Dance Event: I was the only volunteer from TSBI Swarm for this event. This was actually more fun than I thought—I had no idea how to dance or what to expect. I ended up roleplaying as one of several Hooded Grebes, using my neck muscles to copy their mating dance. At the end of a tiring Saturday, this event reenergized me. I also met some solvers on a different team who recognized me by my t-shirt, which had the name of our high school.

Second-Rate Tiles: I did very little work on this one, but I spent some time before going to bed helping fill out the data and reading out the cluephrase.

Reactivation: In this puzzle, I helped solve the redactle and spotted an error in our EYE recreation. We solved this Sunday morning, with the lights still off in our room. teammate later told us that because of this, they didn’t have the opportunity to turn off the lights as they left at the end of the interaction.

Laugh: A team mate asked for help after they did basically all of the work and so I spotted the final extract :)

Lost at Sea: I got the break-in by interpreting the years and flags, matching them to the ships. I was totally lost on how to pair the ships or order them, but I spotted the answer from what we extracted.

Space Modules: I contributed to the solve by finding the rebuses, spotting the missing letters, and then spotting the rebuses from the unused letters. I think this was a really cool way of using answer formatting.

Period of Wyrm: After helping pair the answers, I also helped by verifying the pairs and getting the extract.

Fountain: I worked on this after-the-fact, as I was told it was something I should have looked at. I really liked the core idea and the extraction aha was neat. The research step took a lot of time for me since it seemed unconstrained—speaking as someone very familiar with the subject matter.

Reflecting on my solves this year is pretty helpful, because I can see that I did make some meaningful contributions, but can improve in a lot of areas. I noticed that during Mystery Hunt, more so than the smaller scale hunts, I have a shorter attention span on puzzles, often hopping around seeing if I can make near-immediate ahas. This is probably because I spend a lot of time staring at metas instead of feeders during Mystery Hunt. In at least one case this year, I called for a free answer when if I had just taken the time to read what was in the sheet for more than five minutes, I probably could have made some headway. One thing I can try to do in the future is put in more effort to help unstuck a puzzle by understanding the work done up until the current point. Writing this post only made me more excited for upcoming events and TTBNL’s Mystery Hunt.

Once again, thanks to teammate for making this really cool and high-effort event. The story was really neat, I liked the OC’s for once, and all the new tech/interactive portions were amazing. I’d have to say it is one of my favorite puzzle hunts I have done.