MIT Mystery Hunt: A Quick Look at How I Spent My Last Year
In January 2023, Team To Be Named Later won the Mystery Hunt by claiming a coin from a puzzle factory assembly line. The “reward” for finding the coin? The knowledge that your team is responsible for putting on the next year’s Mystery Hunt. So, for much of 2023 I worked with a team of exceptionally smart and creative teammates to help create the 2024 hunt.
I’m finally starting to mentally bounce back from the process, so figured it would be a good time to reflect on some of what I worked on. Keep in mind, this overview is going to be absolutely filled with puzzle spoilers, so if you were planning on solving, you might want to stop after reading the list of puzzles.
Individual Puzzles
The Obelisks of Sorrel Mountain
Deep Conspiracy (132 solves)
The Other Scottish Play
Amykos’ Briefs
What’s the Pointillism (142 solves)
MGM Grand
Aphrodite’s Plutonic Affection Connection (Hawaii Meta)
Two of my puzzles were early enough in the hunt to be some of the most solved puzzles of the Hunt — Deep Conspiracy was one of the initial “Underworld” puzzles, while What’s the Pointillism was part of the Hera round, which was a series of ~50 puzzles designed to be a little easier and/or more accessible than standard Mystery Hunt fare.
I’m also credited for helping with Cards and Where on Earth is Carmina Suntigre, but my support on those was considerably less substantive (although my photo in the latter as The Aquaculturalist is likely going to haunt me in the years to come).
Events
Nightclub Event (Ambrosia Heist)
Relay Event (Puzzlympics)
Directions Event (Nero Says)
With that, we enter into spoiler territory…for the puzzles. I’ll likely do a separate rundown going through the events, because this is long enough as it currently stands.
Broadly speaking, most of the puzzles I designed weren’t particularly novel from a mechanical standpoint — my favorite part of the MIT Mystery Hunt is seeing people use the language of puzzles to introduce cool things to people who might not know about them in a way that highlights what’s so special about the source material. So, that was the mark I was aiming for when constructing puzzles. That approach likely comes through strongest in the four “big” feeder puzzles I worked on, which I’ll highlight first.
A Brief Overview of Puzzles I Constructed
The Obelisks of Sorrel Mountain was the first puzzle I wrote, and it remains the puzzle I’m the most mechanically proud of constructing. The hope was to mash up Parks and Recreation with the art series Subpar Parks, to create a sub-par Subpar Parks and Recreation puzzle.
This puzzle went through a number of drafts, both because test solvers really wanted this to be a Settlers of Catan puzzle that people wanted to “play” (the initial grid of 19 hexagons resembled the board even more), and because a lot of my ideas for final extraction were unsatisfying. I’m really proud of doubling down on National Parks theming by using trail blazes for the extract — it was on theme, and I think a relatively novel trick for puzzle hunts.
We briefly entertained the idea of making this a physical puzzle, but none of the mechanics here felt satisfying enough to warrant creating ~2,000 hexagonal tiles. I still might create a set for myself, though.
Deep Conspiracy is the puzzle I wanted to write the most for the hunt. It’s something of a tradition for (almost) every Mystery Hunt to have a Taylor Swift puzzle, but I wanted this year’s puzzle to directly introduce the Mystery Hunt / puzzle hunt community to the Swiftie puzzling community, through an homage that highlighted some of my favorite Taylor Swift puzzles. And that goal worked, with an r/GaylorSwift shout-out post dropping during the Hunt! I had already lost my voice by the time the news broke (more on that later), but I was pantomiming happiness something fierce once that news reached me.
I really wanted to make a puzzle that offered a tour of the incredible puzzling work Swifties have done over the years, so I featured hidden messages in the liner notes of Taylor’s early albums, the Lover House (which was the center of its own immersive experience), and the Google Search puzzle for 1989 TV’s release. I also added a few puzzles that Swifties wished existed, like the five rails in the fence countdown.
My main regret with this puzzle (other than the typo that led to the first errata of the hunt) was the final extraction method. Numerology does factor heavily into Swiftie solving, but I feel like I could have found a better way to pull together the final step. This puzzle received more hint requests than any other puzzle at the hunt by a considerable margin, and I do not view that as a badge of honor. Still, I’m really proud of what I pulled off with the feeder puzzles, particularly with the Lover House / Mansion of Secrets, since indexing twice into the same phrase for Taylor’s Version albums was extremely hard to construct around.
This is also another puzzle that came close to having a physical / on campus component, since I brought all the pieces of the conspiracy corkboard (sans corkboard) to Cambridge in case we wanted to hang it somewhere for on-site solvers to visit after completing the puzzle.
The Other Scottish Play, on the other hand, was an homage of opportunity. When Sleep No More announced that it would be closing, I wanted there to be a puzzling homage to bid it adieu, taking advantage of the fact that fewer people would be annoyed at a puzzle spoiling a show that would only be open for a few more weeks. So, the question became: how could we make a puzzle steeped in as much Sleep No More lore as possible. I immediately enlisted No Proscenium’s Blake Weil to keep me honest, and got cracking.
That led to the puzzle’s eventual framing: you, the puzzler, have been trapped in the McKittrick halls and you need to engage with the puzzle in the same way you would engage with the show in order to escape. Try and figure out who the characters are, boldly explore the rooms you enter, and find the answer in the loops.
Since most puzzle answers had already been assigned by the time I pitched this and the constraints of “messages can only be spelled out using the first three letters of unambiguous character names” (sorry, Catherine/Mrs Danvers), I thought it would be neat if the final step could also be in theme with Sleep No More, so we went with the instruction to wear a mask in order to pick up a business card modeled after the Paisley Sweets card, for the final solution. That was paired with actual Sleep No More playing cards, as a nice memento of the experience (and a reward for forward-solving the puzzle, since backsolves / unlocks would only get the final answer).
Amykos’ Briefs was written in response to a challenge from Paul Melamud, who had initially recruited me to TTBNL. “The Onion wrote this brilliant amicus brief, and I want a puzzle that will force solvers to read it.”
The idea I came up with was something I wasn’t sure I could technically pull off, but was too compelling an idea to pass on: what if a legal brief about fair use and parody law was rewritten to be about fair use and puzzle design, with the answer literally spelled out by highlighting the “fairly used” words that were identical across both versions? Better yet, what if it was vaguely readable and presented halfway decent arguments?
Structurally, this puzzle was 90% red herrings, so I had to be as overt as possible with the window into the puzzle. So, multiple footnotes, an acrostic in the introduction, and a message in the table of authorities all provided a potential route into the puzzle.
What’s the Pointillism was written on a whim for our “Fish” round (a round of easier puzzles), when I was in between drafts on other puzzles and testsolving instances. The alternate reality game for Unknown 9 had a similar color-themed puzzle players took to calling “Color Hell” that introduced me to the concept of additive vs subtractive colors.
It was one of the first puzzles that had me thinking “I love this puzzle, but there has to be a more elegant way to do that”. So, on and off over the next few years I’d experiment with variants of the puzzle to signal the color theory step more overtly.
Because it was an easier puzzle, it was also my most solved one — I believe it was the #8 most solved puzzle of the Hunt.
MGM Grand is one of the rare puzzles where I got collaborative in the writing process (I tended to go solo or near-solo on design). Chilli Qin came up with the core idea of the puzzle (using semaphore as letters traveled across the globe to spell out the answer), and I helped execute on that vision, during a puzzle writing retreat in NYC. Other than the fact that I did a lot of the “art” for this puzzle, I honestly don’t remember who did what — which is exactly what I want out of a collaboration.
The Aphrodite Meta pulled me in because initially we were thinking about using reality television as the framing device, and I am absolute trash when it comes to reality television. We toyed around with a number of different data sets (reality TV dating shows, Survivor winners, etc.) until aligning on the idea of using popular anime shows and came up with the idea of making them form literal love triangles using characters’ canonical heights.
My main contribution from then on was poring through hundreds of anime series to find characters with canonical heights that didn’t change over the course of the series, to serve as a puzzling corpus. Eventually we settled into “seeing if it was possible to index into numbers embedded into the anime name” as an additional constraint, letting me feature Spy X Family and Nana.
Other MIT Mystery Hunt summaries:
Nero Says Event — Making an Impossible Game Possible with Time Loops
Puzzlympics Event — Running a Relay When You Don’t Trust Players to Run
Nightclub Event — The Ship of Theseus School of Experience Design
Note: this is a personal reflection on what I worked on for the Hunt, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of the broader TTBNL team — I’m not saying that because I expect there were differences of opinion, but rather because I legitimately don’t know if there’s anything that others might disagree with.
