MIT Mystery Hunt Events (Part 1): The Time I Adapted a Dropout Show Into a Live Puzzle Event
Earlier this year, I helped run the MIT Mystery Hunt — an annual gathering of a couple thousand puzzle nerds looking to solve puzzles designed to be tackled in large groups. I’ve already provided a write-up of the individual puzzles I worked on for the Hunt, but my main responsibility for the weekend was leading the team responsible for the hunt’s live events. The event I was the most nervous about pulling off was Nero Says, which adapted Dropout’s Game Changers series of “Sam Says” challenges into an event, for 50–150 players.
But before we talk about that, let’s talk about why Mystery Hunt Events even exist in the first place.
Why Have Events at All? Making the Most of Physical Presence
These days, the MIT Mystery Hunt is a puzzle hunt that can largely be played (if not finished) remotely. However, it’s an event that brings over a thousand puzzlers onto the MIT campus and into the broader Boston area, and it’s important to reward puzzlers who make that trek with an experience that takes advantage of that physical presence:
- The Opening Ceremonies— Increasingly, the spectacle of the “opening skit” that introduces players to the year’s theme is a draw. These opening skits are also livestreamed on YouTube, but there’s something special about gathering up into an auditorium to see it unfold. Because I was leading Events under the guise of the Greek God Dionysus, I was one of the actors for this year’s performance, and am really proud of what we pulled off for that segment.
- Physical Puzzles and “Interaction Challenges”— Some puzzles are specifically designed to be delivered to teams as physical objects. I still have copies of Marked Deck and Send Yourself Swanlumps as artifacts from prior years, and this year we had everything from Game to Be Themed Later (which culminated in an invitation to schedule time at a custom pinball machine), to Oil Paintings (pictured above), which I spent over 40 hours testsolving. Badgesx9 even turned the event badges teams were required to wear into a puzzle.
- Scavenger Hunts and Runarounds — Scavenger Hunt challenges tend to be creative challenges, asking you to do daunting tasks…the best comparison would be to GISHWHES. And like GISH it’s possible to tackle challenges remotely but often more fun to do it in person, with a group. The Herc-U-Lease app was our version of the scavenger hunt. Runarounds are more location-specific, and mark major narrative beats of the story. We had a mini-runaround for players escaping the Underworld, as well as a larger runaround to stop scientists from destroying Pluto at the nefarious Professor Mike Brown’s bequest.
- Interactions — At regular intervals, the running team arranges for a number of “HQ visits” to teams, to see how things are going and sometimes to offer narrative or experiential rewards for finishing certain hunt milestones, like completing a meta puzzle to finish a round of puzzles.
The thing about so many of those reasons to come on campus, though, is that (with the exception of the Opening Ceremonies), participants only really get to experience the Hunt through their own teams. Events are one of the few opportunities the Mystery Hunt gives to not just take advantage of the fact that MIT gave us access to their campus for the weekend, but that we managed to lure over a thousand of the smartest puzzlers together, and we can make them do fun (and sometimes embarrassing) things together.
Events also come with a major downside: you rarely know how many people will actually come to the Events. There are typically around 100 teams that have a physical presence at the Mystery Hunt, although many of those teams are on the smaller side and don’t always bother sending participants. After crunching the numbers from prior years, I was fairly certain we’d be looking at between 60–125 people showing up for each event, if we asked teams to send 1–2 players.
The MIT Mystery Hunt Loves Dropout
I wish I could say I was the first puzzle constructor to make an MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle based on Dropout’s incredible game shows, but Foggy Brume beat me to the punch with his puzzling homage to Um, Actually. I loved that puzzle so much, I made it the focus of my article summarizing the 2022 Mystery Hunt. So when I was charged with running events, I knew I wanted to find a way to adapt another Dropout special into puzzle form.
I immediately latched onto the idea of turning Sam Reich’s devious twists and technicalities from Game Changer into a puzzle, and the “Sam Says” series of videos felt like the perfect mix of evil and fun. For Reich’s take on “Sam Says”, the format allowed him to get particularly creative and devious with his technicalities because getting a question wrong didn’t eliminate contestants from the game, it just prevented them from scoring points. And it’s that style of questions I wanted to mimic.
Because a points system for 50–150 participants would have been next to impossible, I turned the game into a time loop. Players would get eliminated if they got a question wrong…once everyone got eliminated, the game would start all over again, until someone managed to make it to the end of the game.
The Four Phases of Nero Says
The event was divided into four phases, with each round focusing on a different method of being unfair to players in a game of Simon Says.
The first round was all about teaching players the rules of the game, and what sorts of traps (and opportunities) to be on the lookout for. “Nero Says don’t be the last person to raise your hand” ensured at least one person would be eliminated early on, while the series of instructions “Nero says hold up a prime number of hands / Nero says put one of those hands down / Nero says raise your left hand” taught them that progressing is sometimes a matter of dumb luck…at least, for the first time. I also had to set the standard that Nero would always start commands with “Nero Says”, so I enlisted an assistant to be the voice of rules-based reason, alongside a handful of roving rules lawyers patrolling the crowd.
The second round doubled down on that theme, introducing both physical and knowledge challenges (lifting the question “touch your philtrum” directly from Sam Says, as well ask tasking players to do an arrabesque), as well as getting downright unfair with the dumb luck challenges, by issuing a series of five questions that were all “Nero says take one step to the right if this answer is “Yes”, with different answers for every question.
The third round introduced group challenges — first by asking players to pair up with someone born in their same birth month, then by having them play a game of rock paper scissors (that could only be “won” if both players forced a tie), and even getting in larger groups to strike a dramatic pose, leading to one of my favorite moments caught on video.
The fourth and final round of the puzzle asked teams to put everything they learned together for a final round of challenges. But to solve this round, they’d need to pay attention to the puzzle elements that were snuck throughout the experience: because the final question of the event was “Nero Says, tell me the answer to the puzzle I’ve hidden in our little game”.
Nero Says’ Hidden Puzzle: The Worksheet for the Fallen
The biggest problem with an event designed around eliminating people quickly and unfairly is the game becomes kind of boring for people once they’re eliminated. I implemented two stopgaps to try and make being out of the game almost as fun as being in it. The first one of those stopgaps was an easy way to get everybody back into the game. After at least one player got the group reaching a checkpoint? All they needed to do to get everybody back in was convince a set number of players to stand in front of me, and shout a keyword.
The first mechanism for that was the “Worksheet for the Fallen” — a series of 10 questions that could only be answered by paying close attention to the game as it proceeds, and even by attempting to contort the game into scenarios that would not naturally happen.
For example: that unfair series of challenges where Nero said “step to the right if the answer to this question is ‘Yes’”? Spelled out a letter for the final answer in 5-bit binary. Each of those commands that could reset the game at set checkpoints? They were all songs off Taylor Swift’s album, Evermore.
My favorite trap for players, though, was a line on the workshop that read, “What phrase do you unlock if everyone fails after the first command?” Getting that kind of consensus is relatively easy if you have 5–10 people playing. But for the ~100 players we had in the room? It was next to impossible, and multiple runs were killed by having everyone except 4–5 players eliminating themselves on the first question.
Because MIT Mystery Hunt puzzlers are really smart, I had to add one additional layer of obfuscation to make it harder for them to get the final answer: every new loop started with instructions on how to rearrange the answers on the Worksheet for the Fallen, to spell out the final message: OMEGAPHONE.
The puzzle was designed so that players didn’t need to figure out all of the answers to the questions on the worksheet, although I’m glad they did manage to satisfy all of the criteria needed to unlock those various “bonus” states. All told, it took teams 40 minutes and under a dozen loops to successfully complete the game.
This event was designed to be a bit of a chaotic mess, and it delivered on that promise. It was the final event of the weekend and my voice was failing (I lost my voice for about a week after the Mystery Hunt due to overuse), and that meant I made one or two unfortunate gaffes — most notably, only giving four of the five binary instructions the one and only time players made it fully through that round. Luckily, dropping a leading zero got the point across, so it wasn’t a game-breaking mistake. Other than that, though, the event went off as well as I could have hoped…especially because it was a fairly big gamble.
My Biggest Fear for the Event
The core of the Nero Says event was that it was a game about trust. Did I trust players to work together to earnestly progress through the event, and did I trust that trollish behavior wouldn’t “break” the event? The biggest points of failure for this puzzle were players taking advantage of the reset mechanism to prevent the game from moving forward (it would have only taken five players for me to have to execute a contingency plan I didn’t want to have to use), or general disinterest meaning not enough players were interested in progressing the game of Nero Says to its conclusion.
However, players approached the game in good spirits, and the best illustration of that was the envelope taped to my back at the beginning of the experience. The final item on the Worksheet for the Fallen that could be unlocked if events proceeded as designed was the answer to the question, “What note did my assistant tape onto my back at the start of this little game of ours?” As written, that note would be given as apology to the player who succeeded in holding a note for the longest, that I eliminated out of jealousy for being too good. And inside that envelope, was the word “NOTHING”. Because they still got nothing from me, even if that did come in physical form.
At numerous times during the event, players not-so-subtly tried lifting up the envelope to see what was written on the back side. It didn’t work, because it was written inside the envelope, but it was a valid attempt. Others approached me between rounds and asked me if they could take it — to which I replied, “I’d strongly prefer that you didn’t”. They could have still taken it, and I wouldn’t have stopped them. But their willingness to feel out the edges of the rules and trust that the envelope would come into play naturally meant that the longest note holder got to receive the envelope, mere moments before the final answer was provided to end the game.
If you’re interested in seeing the Nero Says script, you can find it here. It also includes a copy of the Worksheet for the Fallen, so you can inflict it on friends at home (although based on initial playtesting, you’ll have to make some modifications to make it more friendly to smaller groups). You can also find the writeup of the puzzle solution on the Mythstory Hunt website.
Other MIT Mystery Hunt summaries:
Puzzles — The Time My Puzzle Got Posted to r/GaylorSwift Mid-Hunt
Puzzlympics Event — Running a Relay When You Don’t Trust Players to Run
Nightclub Event — The Ship of Theseus School of Experience Design
Note: all opinions expressed, including those about the purpose of Mystery Hunt Events and other location-specific elements of the Hunt, are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the broader TTBNL team.
