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.

I think this will have to be a shorter blog post than last year’s because of how busy I’ve become, but hopefully I may get around to adding more thoughts when I remember to.

Contributions

Roughly chronologically, these were all of my contributions I remember:

Friday Afternoon

Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges Badges: I worked on my own badge, decoding the dancing man cipher. Then when we got a visit from HQ, we continued with the puzzle. We split up, where Angel and I went to three of the locations.

Dating Stars: I started looking at this, got the Chinese Zodiac ones, then pulled some of my friends in and we finished it up before the round unlocked.

Deep Conspiracy: I saw at the corner of my eye in discord that there was a TS puzzle, so I called Angel to come look at it with me. Most of the sub puzzles were done, but we filled out the Secret Pseudonyms.

The Laboratory: After Grant tried the correct extraction, I helped finish it off by piecing the cluephrase together and interpreting it.

Nightclubbing Event: Grant and I went, which was the same time when our team unlocked the Escape from the Underworld runaround. This was the first time this MH I had to do a musical performance.

Transcendental Algebra: Helped translate a few clues, but ultimately the puzzle was solved by a linguistic olympiad-head on our team. Unfortunately, TTBNL didn’t respond to the puzzle’s answer request for a few hours (it was sleeping hours), so we had to backsolve it.

Hell, MI: Solved most of the Word Search-related puzzles. Just before I slept, I saw Matt got the torus aha. When I woke up, the round was solved.

Saturday morning

Product Placement: Right after waking up and before going to HQ, I took a look at some of the easier puzzles in the Hole in the Ceiling round. I ended up mostly solo-ing this, with some backup from teammates on Discord.

The Best IT: Helped fill data-collect for this one.

Luxor: I think at this point we were back on campus. I helped Grant data-collect as he had the ahas for this one.

Circus Circus: Matt got the aha for this. I think I mostly watched as a lot of people hopped into this one after it was identified to be a past-MITMH related puzzle.

Wynn: TTBNL came to our room, and I was part of the volunteers who sang All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey.

How to Quadruple Your Money: Angel was looking at this puzzle, which was abandoned after the initial movies step. She came up with the quarters idea and pulled me in to help. We figured out the rest from there.

Isle of Misfit Puzzles: Helped do the Kitchen Island sub-puzzle.

Maybe Not To Scale: Solved this with Matt and then Ryan. I really liked this puzzle.

Julia and Friends: At some point I helped do a few of the clues.

Sumantle: I really don’t understand why each semantle was so hard compared to regular semantle. The solution doesn’t explain why. This puzzle took so much effort from Grant, Ryan, Matt, me and especially Angel. It took the span of hours of setting it down and coming back to throw in dozens of words to finish it. We also took a hint to get two of the first-round words. Ultimately, Angel was the most persistent and got many of the words.

Mosaic: I figured out the albums aha and finished it quickly from there.

Sorry Not Sorry: Picked this up from an abandoned state and figured out the Sorry! board and grid. Ended up writing a hint to fix one of our entries.

Augmented Raility: Was pulled into this to help ID Plaza Mayor in Madrid. Ended up jumping somewhere else soon after that, though.

Sunday Morning

Persephone META: I woke up and looked at this meta. I made the aha about the substrings and someone else figured out the puzzle titles. I placed the answers in the grid and extracted/wheel-of-fortuned the answer.

Until They Come Home: Grant was working on this and pulled me in to help extract.

Hera META: Helped by theorizing the solution path using the Juno puzzles, but mostly by pulling Grant in to the puzzle, as he figured out many of the actual ordering and letter extractions.

Oil Paintings: I was the one who finally recognized the Boston Celtics logo.

Split the Difference: Was called in to look at this so I pulled in Grant. We finished up the last few clues needed to read the answer out.

Toy Chest: Angel was looking at this and so I hopped in. I got some sets to come out by googling, and pulled Grant in. We ended up using a hint to find the Smurfs set. We solved it soon after all the sets were identified.

Final Thoughts

As with last year, I find it helpful to reflect on how I solved. I think one notable thing was that on more than one occasion, I made the right call to pull my friends in to what I was looking at, which helped unstick several puzzles. I also directed Matt towards A Radical Fishing Trip, which was exactly up his alley. In the past, I think hopping around different puzzles wasn’t very productive, but I think approaching it more managerially, seeing who might fit with which puzzles, was. Last year I said I stared at metas too much. In contrast, this year I didn’t work on metas during the first two days, which did make me feel more productive and I think I had more fun.

Overall this years hunt was fun, like always, even if it ran long, again. I’d much prefer a shorter and more distilled hunt experience, as this one felt a little bloated, structurally and narratively. Still, I thought many of the individual puzzles were very well-tuned, so I always had fun.

On another note, I wish there were more events, events mattered more, and each took less time. I’d love to spend lots of my weekend doing events, but with all the hunts I’ve been to, they’re more like side events and they’ve only ever contributed free answers. As someone on a team who doesn’t really want/need those, the events don’t feel like they add to the hunt structure. I go because I just want to do events, but it feels a little unproductive. I appreciated the complimentary soda at the nightclub this year though.

Well, I’m excited for what Death and Mayhem will bring us next year.