The 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt can be found here. This post will have spoilers.

This was my seventh Mystery Hunt and my usual hunting friends decided to join up with TSBI again. This year, TSBI stayed pretty stable with about 70 people, ~15 on-site. Also we finally actually finished hunt (meaning we completed the runaround). This put us at third!

I decided to write a bit more about the non-puzzle stuff (mainly food) this year.

Like last year, I got to Boston Wednesday night as tickets were cheaper. Angel didn’t feel like coming this this year, so it was just me at Grant’s palce until Thursday, when Ryan would be showing up. That night, Grant and I went to Northeast Eating Club (Good!), where I ate a ton since I hadn’t yet eaten that day. Other than doing a small bit of work on Thursday, my only responsibility was to let Ryan into Grant’s apartment, since Grant had to go to attend a meeting. At around lunch time, I went to pick up a sandwich and a bag of chips at Cutty’s (Good!) and returned to Grant’s. When Ryan got there, Grant was already on his way back, so we took a walk to Trader Joe’s to pick up snacks for the team. I was curious about the hot honey popcorn so we got that, along with potato chips and three boxes of cereal. The cashier warned us that the popcorn was kind of spicy, but it really wasn’t at all. It was still good though. Drew was supposed to meet us for dinner at Noah’s Kitchen (Good!), but he got stuck in traffic getting out of the airport pickup, so dinner was just Ryan, Grant and me. We ended up order cumin lamb, garlic noodles, and chili chicken, which all ended up being pretty actually spicy.

Contributions

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

Friday

When we got back to the room, other teammates had already started looking at the nametags puzzle, so I just watched the intro video and waited for hunt to start. I spent a bit of time at the beginning of hunt campaigning for particular puzzles to be unlocked, leaving the MonQuest to the others on the team. Once we had a few puzzles unlocked I finally started solving some of the puzzles. Since puzzles were being solved relatively quickly, I took the initiative to get certain puzzles unlocked for remote solvers and people who were sitting near me.

A Wanderer’s Catalog: I think all I did here was help do the initial data organization of noting the colors and languages and creating a filter table in the sheet.

Gen Nu Brain ROT: I helped decode and unscramble some of the encoded words. I also wrote down the shifts and made a sortable table for this sheet as well.

Bird Nation: Around this time, I pre-made the sheet the Aviaria and a few other joined me in the sheet. We saw the flags right away, and I noticed they were specifically flags with birds on them. I also made the connection for the names of the birds and the Puzzmon species name being the same enumerations. We finally unlocked the capstone, and solved the puzzle pretty soon after.

Bringing Up Baby Shark: After finishing Bird Nation, I turned my attention to the PuzzMon in the next round. We hadn’t yet unlocked the capstone, but I made the sheet and was able to break-in to the items/sharks with MAGIC CARPET and FIDGET SPINNER. After the actual puzzle was unlocked, more solvers came to help and we finished the puzzle.

Maps: I didn’t make any a-has for this puzzle but I did do some of the geolocation and traced out the callout diagrams for around half of the maps.

Night Circus: Grant and I started work on this puzzle by identifying the symbols. We stared at the puzzle for a while, decoding the puzzle but eventually Grant and one remote solver figured out the rest of the puzzle.

Nine Lives: Someone else on the team started this puzzle by noticing the binary encoding on the PuzzMon. When Grant and I got to it, I figured out the main mechanic of identifying nine pop culture characters with the questions, and was confident when we got Sabrina to work. Then someone else noticed that she had a cat, and the rest of the puzzle was smooth after that. I ended up submitted errata for this puzzle regarding one of the questions about Taylor Swift, which did correct the puzzle.

Data Revisualization: Grant and I then turned our attention to this puzzle. I quickly got the second graph, and we eventually figured out the last one had to be a B or an M (depending on rotation). Grant ended up figuring out the first image, and we got the answer from that.

Convalarium: We then moved to Convalarium, and Ryan joined us. We got through most of this puzzle pretty quickly, but when trying to get the answer, we thought that we would have to redo the Greek translation when we saw the clue start with TRUE and thought it might end with AIR. That, plus we didn’t know how literal to interpret the symptons (i.e. was fainting the same as loss of consciousness) led to a bit of stumbling at the finish line.

Railway Terminal: I think Grant figured out what exactly to do in this puzzle, so he, Ryan and I filled out the rest of the information in the puzzle. We got from the cluephrase to the final answer pretty smoothly, too.

For Friday dinner, I group ordered Cava (Good!), which is a chain we don’t have in the Bay that I really like. It may end up being a personal hunt tradition for me.

Saturday

Let Her Cook(book)!: I woke up and decided to look at some of the metas. I spotted the connection to Salt Fat Acid Heat, but it took a while to fully figure out that we wanted two words for each component. We ended up only needing 4 answers to solve this meta, and I was able to guess the answer from ??RE?AZ?.

Adding and Abutting: When this puzzle unlocked, I pitched in by filling in some clues and creating a table, but I think I moved on to look at something else after enough people jumped in.

A Fake Artist Goes To Eland Islands: This puzzle got unlocked, so Grant and I stared at it for a while, coming up with wrong ideas, before someone else made the connection that the images represented other board games. We solved the puzzle pretty quickly after that.

Linework: I then pushed to get this puzzle unlocked. Grant and I opened it up and basically raced to see who could finish this first, and I won.

Common Scenes: Then we unlocked Fate’s Thread Casino, and Grant and I turned all of our focus to the gallery and quests for the Art banner. We took to the art history puzzle. As Grant identified the paintings, I figured out how to fill the diagram and started filling it out. With information from the diagram, we figured out the last few paintings and finished the puzzle.

Cryptozoologist: Throughout Saturday, I popped into the sheet and helped solidify the mechanic by finding the connection for Rhea Silvia. However, someone else had spotted the cryptic extraction after I moved on to a different puzzle.

Graphs: I spent the rest of Saturday focusing on Fate’s Thread Casino, which at this point had unlocked the Charts banner. I actually don’t think I contributed to Plots at all, and mostly solved the Graphs images. I figured out the heatmaps, the presidents-related charts and helped break into the bar charts, which was enough for someone to guess the answer of the puzzle.

Hear Me Out: We finally unlocked the Characters banner and I mostly helped other people fill out the data. By this time, it was pretty late so I didn’t contribute much more to the banner. By the time I woke up, the entire round was solved.

For dinner, we got Beantown Taqueria (Good!). We have plenty of Mexican food in the Bay, so I think I just picked it because it was nearby.

Sunday

Chart Your Course: Our remote solvers made tons of progress Saturday night, so when I woke up on Sunday, there were mostly metas and puzzles from the Glitch round left. I decided to look at Chart Your Course, which had some work started in it, but looked abandoned. Our team never noticed the titles of the puzzles being relevant, so I spent most of my morning trying to finesse the answers/buildings to clues that would plausibly work. I ended up getting the phrase to end with -FUL, as well as some other letters (even though it turns out I had the wrong building for the last clue). When more solvers came to look at the puzzle, we ended up getting some more letters and throwing in a couple guesses to finally solve the puzzle.

Point of View: At this point, the Glitch puzzles were the only normal puzzles left, so when Point of View was unlocked, I hopped into it. We ended up getting all of the ID and the two crossword grids pretty quickly. Grant came up with the extract mechanic idea, but we thought it was small picture-to-small grid and large-to-large. It took a bit to just try only using the large grid, but we eventually got it.

These Questions are Not Clever: The last regular puzzle I looked at, which already had numerous eyes on it. I managed to help identify some past hunts, but this puzzle was solved pretty quickly.

snalC ehT tcennoC and To the Edge: At this point, the hunt width was 1 so there wasn’t anything to do but look at the Glitch meta. I can’t say I contributed much to the actual solving, really. Once this was solved, we got to schedule the final runaround. During the first part of the runaround in the tunnels and conference room, I solved some of the minipuzzles, but once it got down to the final part, Ryan, Drew and I (and eventually Tom) let the most enthusiastic people on the team do most of the work. It was pretty hard to get everyone involved on the final puzzle without tons of cross-talk, so it was the right call to let Grant take the lead on it in my opinion. We ended up completing the runaround at 7:44, which was great, as we still had time to get dinner afterwards.

Grant, Ryan, Tom, Drew and I ended up at Area Four (Good!), a pizza place that happened to still be open.

Final Thoughts

Overall, it was a great year! We finished the runaround, which is a new personal best for my friends and I, so there’s really nothing else I could ask for. This year, I spent a lot more time on capstone puzzles and metas. For many of the capstone puzzles, I started looking at the MonArch entries before the capstone had even unlocked, which I think was helpful both organizationally (I pre-filled the sheets with MonArch information) and for solving. I never really felt like I had a slump period this year, and I even took quite a few breaks and paced myself. Given that I took care of our group’s dinner orders and picked them up for us, I’d say I still was pretty productive.

My favorite round that I worked on was definitely Fate’s Thread Casino, as it had the art history puzzle and I also liked solving the Charts. Unfortunately I basically did not touch the MonQuest at all, since it was mostly used for unlocking puzzles, so I wish there were puzzles (other than the Glitch meta) that made you interact with the MonQuest. Other than that, I really enjoyed my experience this year. All of the puzzles I did were very well-edited and clean, and the dimension rounds definitely had the wow-factor of MITMH. I’m pretty happy the unlock system returned, and I think it definitely improves hunt experience. It felt a little bad to have abandoned puzzles in rounds where we finished the capstone (not knowing about the meta-matching structure). I’m not sure how the abandoned puzzles affected capstone unlocks in different rounds so we felt a bit constrained on width at points, but I think it was okay in the end.

And one last story: we (Ryan, Grant and I) typically want to take home some souvenir from hunt, but the only thing that particularly spoke to us this time was Puzzmon: the Card Game. I even told Ryan that I might have even paid $50 for it. Since another team member ended up claiming the team copy, we planned to ask at the merch table if they were for sale during wrap-up, since Ryan had seen plenty of copies when he went to the tournament. Unfortunately, they weren’t at the time so after wrap-up+lunch, we went back to Grant’s place somewhat unfulfilled. My flight was scheduled to leave at 6, so I packed my stuff and waited around when Cardinality suddenlty sent out the email that extra copies of Puzzmon TCG were going on sale back at campus, first come first served. Grant called an Uber and the three of us all rushed back to campus (I brought my suitcase because I would probably leave from campus at that point). We reached out to Drew, who was staying at Kendall, to see if he could secure us some copies, but unbeknownst to us, Drew and Matt had already headed to campus planning to pick up copies for all of us. When we got there Drew handed them off to us, and we were evean able to pick up a copy for Sam. So it turns out that Cardinality had one last surprise for us, but nonetheless I’m glad I got my copy of the card game. Anyways, my flight ended up being delayed 4 hours so at least I didn’t also have to rush to the airport, too.