MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Recap

Last weekend I had the pleasure of spending it all doing the MIT Mystery Hunt with my favorite team, NES. We had the explicit goal of trying to finish for the first time, and while we fell a little short of that goal, I’m still extremely proud of how far we got. I selfishly wish the hunt was a little shorter so we could finish and less-selfishly I wish more teams had gotten the chance to see the end of the hunt and have a chance to finish. But I could tell from the direct interactions my team had with TTBNL, and also the love and care that went into the hunt as a whole, that TTBNL really cared and (as always) the Hunt was a labor of love. I really had an amazing time at hunt, and want to directly thank TTBNL for constructing a successful puzzling experience.

Like every hunt, the weekend was filled with devious and immersive puzzle-solving and while MITMH has many things that feel suboptimal (overwhelming amount of puzzles, you can only meaningfully look at a fraction of them, etc.) there’s something really exhilarating about MITMH compared to an average online hunt. Being with a larger team surrounded by great minds at work, and celebrating big ahas together brings a level of excitement and motivation that isn’t matched anywhere else for me. MITMH continues to be the highlight of my year.

One thing I worry about in terms of post-hunt reflection (for any hunt, not just MITMH) is that the most memorable puzzles will often be the ones that took the longest, or caused the most frustration, or the ones that you want to complain about. But oftentimes the best puzzles are the ones that solved cleanly, took less than two hours, and provided a great solving experience, but simply won’t stick in your memory compared to the puzzle you got stuck on for the whole day. So with this write-up, I want to make sure I call out and send some love to the puzzles that were really great and I loved in the moment, even if I don’t have a ton to say about them.

I’ll go through all the puzzles I liked and/or have something to say about. I’ll go as far as theme spoilers but will avoid answers and being too spoilery.

Corporate Changes: Pre-hunt I tried to brainstorm ideas with some teammates for current events that would be puzzle fodder. One that was mentioned was the exact theme of this puzzles so it was funny to see it as literally the first puzzle in the hunt. I think this is a great intro puzzle–thematic fun little word puzzle–and probably why it was often the first-solved

What a Mesh: The fun part about a puzzle like this is just making up fake clue combinations that sound funny. It’s even better when one of these jokes turns out to be right. I also got to flex my skill of “google a bunch of words together” to find ahas in this puzzles. We gathered a lot of extra information that could have been used for extraction so it was nice when the puzzle ended much simpler than we imagined.

Marathon: This was another puzzle that extracted much simpler than I thought it was going to, but the ahas were very satisfying. It’s hard to make a puzzle like this that toes the line between immediately obvious and basically impossible, and this did it very well.

Second Helpings: This is the kind of puzzle that is very simple when you look at it in hindsight–there’s not much too it and it’s pretty simple, but it felt nontrivial in the moment to deduce exactly what was going on so that it felt like it had a little meat to it. It was short and sweet and I love the theme (and getting to flex my knowledge in the area)

Rebus: This was one of the few Hole puzzles I worked on before it was clear that the Hole was a fish round and I decided to leave it to others. Even though I mostly avoided the Hole round, I am really glad it existed. I think a long round of shorter puzzles that exists throughout the hunt is great, and can smooth over a lot of the solver experience (easier respites, but also just better for more casual solvers on the team). Rebus was a fun idea that was well-executed and I’m really glad this idea could be in the hunt without feeling like it needed to be beefed up to be a “full MITMH puzzle”

A Triangular Space: This was one of the Hole puzzles that the table I was sitting at did as an explicit respite: “hey y’all want to take a break and do a Hole puzzle?” And I would like to say that I appreciate an extraction that is visual and defies spreadsheeting. Sure you could look at the crossed letters from each line visually and write it down in a sheet, but it’s fun to actually do it, in printed-out form or in MS Paint. Good fishy puzzling.

A Routine Cryptic: This was a fun variety cryptic that we plodded away at. It’s one of those cryptics where each individual clue feels like it carries the weight of an individual aha moment from any puzzle, which makes it really satisfying to solve. And when we were trying to understand the extracted messages, the aha of what we were supposed to do in the grid was so cool in a “how did I not see that?!” way. Unfortunately we could never figure out what the final final step was and looking at it, it’s simultaneously incredibly cool and I highly doubt I would have figured it out in infinite time, just because it’s so constrained that you would never consider it. I still liked this puzzle, though, and I’m glad it gave me the chance to troll the discord channel by baiting them into recreating the routine.

Opposites Attract: This was a great word puzzle on its own but the magnet theme bringing it all together (attracting it all together?) was the cherry on top. Don’t have much to say about it but this was a great solve. Clean and fun.

Shifting Times: This was a tricky puzzle, and I’m not sure the different transformations were all connected, but finding the last one was very satisfying. And the funny sentences you would get out of it made this a fun solve

Harrah’s: Love love love this puzzle. This might be my favorite of the hunt, because to me it’s the platonic ideal of a puzzlehunt-style puzzle. The presentation is oblique with lots of absurdities that make you say “what the heck is going on here???” and this leads to discussion in person and on our discord channel that seemed unhinged and actively weird. We get into wild conspiracy mode wondering what on earth would possibly tie these together, and then the shoe drops, the aha moment is revealed, and raucous celebration and applause ensues. Honestly a 10/10 experience. The quality of an aha moment could be measured by how much chaos it resolves (like entropy of the dataset in your mind before minus after) and this maximized that gap. Very good

Circus Circus: Finding the link in the archive and just cold posting it in our chat was a fun moment. This is the puzzle that sparked the discussion within my teammates of “what makes a puzzle memorable”. This puzzle has fun embedded information in external sources, and is honestly a really surprisingly clean and fun solve. This is the kind of puzzle that should be memorable even if it took a small fraction of my time over the weekend. Great puzzle all around

Casino Royale: This is a good example of a puzzle being very dense in its presentation. There doesn’t seem like a lot of information in the puzzle, but it’s enough to be a meaty enough puzzle with a fun aha and a nice solving experience.

Julia and Friends: My teammate was the one who found the big break-in and after that the mass team pile-on to try and do the individual clues was very exciting. Another good puzzle which is not too “big” per se, but put up enough of a fit before the aha moment that it felt substantial.

Do I Hear A Waltz?: This was the second musical-based puzzle I worked on in a row, and it was fun to have one where the identification is simple but hard. It really was a puzzle that was much easier if you had musical experts. I am not an expert but I could contribute one identification, and then go off on random conspiracy theories about Sondheim cryptics. I really thought this was going to use Mark Halpin’s Sondheim Cryptics, or the cryptics written by the man himself. Fortunately it was much simpler than I thought it was, and the puzzle was (thankfully) just identifying enough to get what was going on.

Field of Clovers: This was the big one. The puzzle I spent the most time on over the weekend. It caused all the emotional highs and lows throughout the weekend, the frustrations and the heady joys. I was immediately drawn to it after playing So Clover many times with my friends (I really think it’s the superior form of Codenames), so seeing this puzzle come up was a delight. It was incredibly satisfying to slowly piece together all the connections and rules, and it’s fun that this is the kind of puzzle that makes you feel like an expert in the puzzle’s ‘language’, such that you start speaking in words that sound like indecipherable tongues to passersby. The way the puzzle evolved into adding dimensions on top of So Clover was quite neat. We did, however, get incredibly stuck near the end and need a hint to push us through. I could theorize editing decisions in the flavor text or the diagram at the bottom that would have made this smoother to solve, but all in all it was a fun experience and a memorable puzzle.

I would like to note that this is the specific puzzle that should be the most memorable, and it was quite good and I enjoyed it, but it’s what made me realize that it had an unfair advantage for being long and (sometimes) frustrating. So while I want to give this puzzle the praise it deserves, it made me realize I don’t want to forget the puzzles that were smooth, shorter, breezy, and refreshing. But I also appreciate that this is the kind of puzzle that likely can only exist within MITMH. I think in an online hunt with less adrenaline and excitement, I would have been less motivated to push through the frustrating parts and probably would have given up long before the end. So still a strong shout-out to this puzzle for delivering a unique and appreciated hunting experience.

League of Their Own: This is a dataset I’m extremely glad to be used. My teammate and I were laughing constantly as we solved this puzzles and it was a good time all around. I think the extraction is questionable here and we did get stuck and need a hint. Probably there was a way to use the show’s data more directly–it was hilarious to find a complete and well-structured database on github with all the information, and using something like whether they laughed would have been great. That aside I’m glad I had an excuse to just be an <answer> for the entire length of this puzzle.

Musical Scores: This was the first of two musical-based puzzles I worked on in a row, and I thought this was a really fun idea. It was pretty smooth and the only hitch was that–as far as I could tell–the final musical on the upper half of the bracket was on Broadway in 2008 and in previews elsewhere in 2007, which meant this was actually tricky to find since most sources would list it as 2008 and I believe this is how the rest of the puzzle was using the years (but I didn’t check too closely after the fact). Besides that, I think this was a fun romp, and I enjoyed how this puzzle made me look up specific months of playbills to check their casts (eBay is very thorough it turns out!) And the way the final answer was extracted is fun (and led directly into solving Do I Hear a Waltz?…)

Inside Scoop: Fun breezy word puzzles. Perhaps it could have been beefed up a little but I enjoyed it as is and it was refreshing. I truly do like puzzles like this even if I don’t have much to say about it–it was giving P&A Magazine in a good way. It’s even better that the final task is perfect for being maximally silly.

Flower Power: If Inside Scoop was equivalent to a P&A Magazine word puzzle, this was more like a tough Mark Halpin Labor Day puzzle (both are compliments!). It was a tricky solve where each letter felt earned. This had my favorite red herring of hunt where I posted if anyone could think of an answer for “Ratio measuring reactivity” and someone posted DAMKOHLER which just HAD to be right, and it indeed unblocked our progress and let us keep going. Unfortunately it was not right but boy did it seem so. I also really wanted the theme to be Bloomin’ Onions based on the flavor text, but maybe I can write that puzzle. Very fun solve all around.

Thanks for reading and I look greatly forward to next year’s MITMH and all the online hunts in between! Thanks again to TTBNL for making my weekend awesome