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.

Contributions

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

Friday

Missing Connections: Helped data collect, noticed the cable-length numberlink connection.

Battle Factory: This puzzle went pretty fast, since it was a Pokemon puzzle. I helped match the transformations and organized the sheet.

Check-a-deez Words Out: Also went fast; I spotted the flamingo shape and noted that we were finding full names in the grid.

MITropolitan House of Fashion: I hopped on this puzzle right away, since fashion is something up my alley. I pulled Angel and Grant into this puzzle and we were able to find most of the dresses and celebrities without much issue.

📑🍝: Traded a few copypasta with Matt, who was solving with Setec Astronomy this year.

Mastering the Art of Conch Frocking: Helped with some clues.

The Art Gallery: I don’t think we ever got the order from the first letters of the titles, so it took us a while to get the answer even though all our other steps were correct. At some point I bashed out that it was plausibly going to say BOX… and the rest of the team solved it from there.

Paw Print Detective: Luckily for us, Grant was very familiar with the BLAST database from writing his own puzzle back in UMD Puzzlehunt. While he did the querying, I identified the dogs and organized the sheet. Looking at the solution now, we entirely skipped the Paw Print Genetics database, as Grant just matched the diseases listed at the bottom with his own intuition. We breezed through this one pretty quickly.

And Now, a Puzzling Word From Our Sponsors: From our activity log, it looks like there were 3 hours were I didn’t solve a puzzle. I must have also bounced around a lot. I did some of the cryptics in this puzzle, and I remember now that we stared at this one for a while before Drew realized that the scrabble words could be found inside each subpuzzle.

Formula Won: This was one of the puzzles I bounced around to. I was the first person on our team to try to draw the last circuit out. I showed the G to the others working on the puzzle and then left it to them.

Reuse and Recyclability: This was one puzzle I wanted to unlock based on its description; I like looking at dresses I guess. Right away, Sam, Grant and I made the Jane Austen connection and worked slowly filling out the diagrams. I put together the small jigsaw at the end and remembered that I had heard about the costume reuse in film making, and even knew of a database for it. This might have been my favorite puzzle; it spoke my sensibilities the most, at least.

The Eras Puzzle: This was the other puzzle I vouched for unlocking, since I was pretty sure it’d be a puzzle about Taylor Swift. When we unlocked it, Angel spotted the mechanic fairly quickly. Angel and I, along with another person in the sheet, did all the data collecting, and we figured out that each was cluing surprise songs. I was working on this puzzle as we moved from campus HQ to Grant’s house. After getting back, I filled the blanks at the bottom, and did the final extraction.

Saturday

I slept from 2-8 am on Saturday, so we ended up getting back to campus HQ around 10. Smoke ’Em If You’ve Got ’Em: I’m pretty sure a lot of my dead time on Saturday was spent working on this puzzle, which we never finished. I’ve expressed to my friends before that I hate mini-meta puzzles because there’s often so many parts in the puzzle, and “mini/easy” is not something puzzle writers often succeed at. You get stuck on one or more minipuzzles that prevent you from finishing the puzzle, and it ends up feeling bad regardless of making progress on all the other minipuzzles. So that’s exactly what happened on this puzzle. After the hunt, I kept telling my friends that I couldn’t believe I got roped into doing a mini-meta despite my dislike for them.

Given Up: Other than Smoke ’Em, much of my Saturday was spent working on this puzzle. I think Grant, Sam and I were outside of HQ for three or four consecutive hours. We ended up going to each location twice, and I assume we weren’t the only team to do so. Luckily, Grant had a friend who went to MIT who knew where many of the locations were. The first time around, we just went to each location to find the letters. It wasn’t until the last location where I was trying to figure out the order that I had the idea to listen to the end of the song to see if there was more information. We ended up doing another run at all the locations to finally solve the puzzle.

Half Baked: I helped do a significant amount of data-collecting and figured out the missing ingredient mechanic for this puzzle. Grant and I went to the Gala to present a peanut butter whole wheat toast with M&Ms and Bugles.

A Dash of Color: Someone found the exact nail-polish brand and I helped gather the data for extraction from the painting. After we got back the physical component, I transcribed the information to the sheet and did the final extraction.

Inspectre: We didn’t solve this puzzle until after I went to bed, but most of my contribution to this puzzle happened before we left HQ. Our other teammates solved the jigsaw so Grant and I started figuring out if there was a smart way to obtain the symbolic lengths of each line (reading the solution, I don’t think there is). We gave up and decided to do the tedious approach of listing unit vectors to compose. We got through about half the lengths before I started falling asleep so we left it for others to pick up.

Papa’s Stash: Most of the work was already done on this puzzle when I looked at it right before bed, but I extracted the letters in the right order and figured out the final answer.

Sunday

Sounds Like a Dodo to Me: We didn’t end up actually solving this puzzle because it was low-priority, but I did spend some time in the morning trying to do some data-collecting.

Given Up (Under Blacklight): Of course, it was our responsibility to run around with the radio again, with the twist that one location had changed due to another event on campus. We did this one pretty quickly, with only going to about half the locations.

Papa’s Bookcase (Under Blacklight): My teammates got the ahas on this puzzle, but I helped data-collect the audible narrators.

He Shouldn’t Have Eaten The Apple: I think my contribution here was making a column in the sheet converting episode number to letter.

We Can Do This All Day: Our teammates organized the logistics, so Angel and I were told to go to 4-3, where we were assigned the task of “Pretending to be Mens et Menus.” Mens et Menus. (Angel and Dawson vers.)

Kindred Spirits: Thankfully my teammates tasted all of the cocktails for me, but I ended up fixing some misidentified ingredients for first three. I extracted the puzzle with Grant after that.

The Oversight: We took a hint for this set of metas to figure out we had to use the backgrounds on the puzzles. Then, Sam and I figured out how to construct the grids and hypothesized the correct extraction, while another teammate actually figured out the correct thing to do with each puzzle.

The Grand Illusion: We figured out the Czech Republic connection, and I helped extract.

Alias: We took a few hints to error-correct, which we needed because we didn’t have the correct grid for the redo of The Oversight. I helped solve the redo of The Grand Illusion, and we were able to guess the answer with SHIRLEY and an M and a Y.

The Killer: I basically just watched them solve this puzzle, because it was too deep to jump in at this point, and it was electrifying when we finished 13 seconds under the HQ close time of 10 pm.

Final Thoughts

It looks like I did contribute to a lot of puzzles this year, except it seems like I was in a slump on Saturday. Also, I realize I didn’t do any of the puzzles from the Stakeout (the fish/smaller-sized puzzle round), and I guess I remember saying to Grant that I’d leave those to the remote solvers. I definitely knew that I spent tons of time outside of HQ on one puzzle, but that’s fine. It was really memorable. My puzzling highlights were Reuse and Recyclability, MITropolitan House of Fashion, The Eras Puzzle, and Given Up. I’m not as much of a Taylor Swift fan nowadays, but I really like how well-integrated that puzzle was. I liked Reuse and Recyclability and MITropolitan House of Fashion for their subject matter, mostly. For puzzling lessons, I think I should be less afraid of re-doing others’ work, since you really shouldn’t trust anyone’s prior work. A little redundancy could have gone a long way on The Killer, for example, as I probably could have spreadsheeted their information which would have made it easier for remote solvers to help with.

I think this was my favorite hunt experience since I started. The fact that my friends and I were on-site, we finished, and the overall quality of the hunt made this experience nearly perfect. To touch upon a few key aspects of this hunt, I thought the key system was done pretty well, especially the puzzle descriptions. As a team, I think we could handle their usage in a more streamlined way. While I loved how on-site focused this hunt was, the on-site contingent of TSBI is still a bit thin, which we felt during this hunt with the numerous pickups and running around. In my blog post last year, I talked about how I wish there were more events that mattered (and didn’t just give a free answer). While technically there were still only four events, all of them rewarding a free answer, there were a lot of actual puzzles that required in-person interaction with the hunt team. I didn’t do any events this year as we let the on-site first-timers have priority, which I was fine with. I actually didn’t do many interactions for puzzles either, just when I delivered the baked good for Half Baked. Still, I really do like that these puzzles existed, so I hope future hunts continue having a lot of in-person elements.

I’m excited for Cardinality’s hunt next year.