MIT Mystery Hunt Events (Part 2): Race to the Puzzlympics Finish
In my first post reflecting on the MIT Mystery Hunt, I focused on the individual puzzles I wrote for the event. In the follow-up post, I explained why Mystery Hunt events exist, and broke down what happened during the Nero Says event. Now, it’s time to discuss the Puzzlympics — a relay race that charged puzzlers with competing in individual physical challenges, paired with group mental challenges to find out which team brought the best all-around athletes to the competition.
Recruiting the Right People for Puzzle Events
The way the MIT Mystery Hunt is structured, teams are asked to send representatives to various locations across campus with almost no knowledge of what they’re expected to do upon arrival. All that was provided was a name of the event, and a brief description of who the event would be particularly enjoyable for.
For our year, those descriptions were:
- NIGHTCLUB Event — Send 1–2 team members who consider themselves creative, artistic, or performative;
- RELAY Event — Send 1–2 of your more competitive team members, who consider themselves nimble in body and mind;
- SCIENCE Event — Send 1 team member who has good manual dexterity and is good with colors, for a science experiment. Participants must be 18+ and will be required to sign a liability waiver;
- DIRECTIONS Event — Send 1–2 team members who are detail-oriented
From the experience design perspective, it’s important to have relatively clear descriptions of what type of person would enjoy particular events, because once they go, their teams are typically depending on them to come back with an answer (or at least, the path to an answer) because the reward for Events is frequently a free “puzzle unlock” to get the answers to some of the harder puzzles without having to do the heavy lifting of solving the puzzles. Because that’s a lot of weight on 1–2 teammates’ shoulders, the difficulty level of events are typically on the easier side of things, especially when compared to the full hunt.
For instance, the Science Event (which I won’t be doing a separate post about because Bella Guo was lead on that event) focused on doing actual science experiments, so we were fairly explicit in that language because we wanted to recruit people who would be more likely to look back fondly at their practical lessons from high school Chemistry, in puzzle form.
The Inspiration for the Puzzlympics
As soon as the Team To Be Named Later aligned on a Greek Mythology theme for the hunt, people immediately began saying that we needed to have an Olympics themed event. And because the Mystery Hunt is primarily a mental challenge, I latched onto the idea of creating a competitive event that combined physical and mental challenges, in much the same way that chess-boxing does. Ludwig Ahgren had just recently convinced chess phenoms Andrea Botez and Dina Belenkaya to engage in a bout as part of his “Mogul Chessboxing” event, bringing more attention to the niche event.
Of course, chess boxing doesn’t really scale out to an event that needs to accomodate 50–150 participants, and even if it did I wasn’t prepared to risk the potential liability of that kind of event. My unofficial goal was to avoid letting competitors even run, if it could possibly be avoided. So, the idea of alternating physical and mental challenges with a relay race came about.
Early drafts of the puzzle were fairly different from where we finally landed: I liked the idea of theming the event around the torch-lighting ceremony, so the first playtest involved forcing every team member to carry a ping pong ball on a spoon without dropping it, as the physical challenge. The mental challenges also started off as more traditional quick-to-solve puzzles like a Crossword mini and Sudoku puzzles, to make sure the event moved forward at a fast enough clip, likely inspired by how highly I regarded Crossword Fencing from the 2021 Hunt.
Ultimately, we aligned on a format that allowed for more variety in “not-running” styles, and more collaborative play for the more traditional puzzle sections.
The Puzzlympics Challenges
I had a lot of trouble finding the right mix of activities that would be fun for teams. Ultimately, what broke me out of the mental brainstorming block was theming the physical challenges around the Sphynx’s riddle, and the mental challenges around the history of communication.
So, the first “runner” was tasked with moving forward on all fours, the second was told to skip, the third had to power-walk, and the final “runner” had to inch forward by walking with the heel of the front foot touching the toe of the back foot. This was also a partial hedge against mobility concerns, as teams would hopefully be able to help people uncomfortable with crawling to avoid that particular leg of the race. Rules were left specific enough that players knew how those categories of movement were designed, but flexible enough that teams could embrace their inner rules lawyer and find a few workaround — particularly for the “Crawling” leg of the race.
Meanwhile, the mental challenges involved a Non-Verbal challenge of sorting teammates by number without talking, a Taskmaster-inspired Drawing challenge that required them to pass a picture up the line, and a Verbal challenge that asked them to find the word hidden in word fragments they pulled out of an envelope.
I ended up assembling roughly 50 “puzzle packets” for the event (40 for prelims and 10 for finals), each containing around 10 pieces of paper each that needed to be assembled just so — an “answer sheet” for teams to write down their mental challenge solutions, four slips of paper with numbers for the Non-Verbal challenge in Envelope A, a single picture for the Drawing challenge in Envelope B, and an additional four slips of paper with words for the final Verbal challenge in Envelope C. Assembly took me the better part of a day.
My Biggest Failing of the Event: Time Management
My initial hope was that teams could watch each other compete during the preliminary heats, because watching the competitors run was extremely funny, and the nature of the mental challenges meant that nothing would be spoiled by watching them compete. However, the room reserved for the event was about the size of a basketball court, and I wasn’t confident enough in there being adequate viewing room to make that work.
So, the revised plan was to have everyone meet in the gym, split into teams, learn the rules of the event, and then split into two groups. One group would move over into a nearby room to learn the “cheers” that hid this round’s secret puzzle that would be necessary for the finals, while another group would run the race. After timing things out, I estimated that a round of the competition would be approximately 10 minutes. Which would be a reasonable amount of time for Haley Moore, who I tasked with running the cheer lessons, to run said cheer practice sessions.
Unfortunately, I messed up that ideal event flow for the live event, and split teams off into separate rooms before explaining the actual rules…which meant I needed to tack on an additional ~5 minutes to each of the groups, explaining the rules. That threw off the timing enough that I’m afraid the cheer section stretched on longer than it should have, to maximize fun. Luckily Haley made the best of a bad situation and the cheering squads for the Finals really went all out, but if I could take back one mistake across any of the events, it would be that one. It wasn’t something that only affected the cheering room…because I was trying to rush the event along, I think I cut off one or two teams during their final laps, which was unfair to them.
I also did an atrocious job of tracking and remembering the team names I forced everyone to come up with, so sorry, teams!
The Puzzlympics Finals
As I earlier implied, the Final Championship round was largely a repeat of the preliminary heats, with one major difference: during preliminaries, all teams needed to do was complete the four “not-running” laps without blatantly breaking the rules, and successfully figure out the three words that were the solution for each of the mental challenges.
For the Championships, there was a final step added to the end: using the cheers as guide, teams had to figure out the final solution to the event to learn what reward I had in store for them upon completing my series of challenges.
But again, because we were looking to maximize fun for attendees, everyone was given a choice: they could stay and watch the Finals and find out the round’s solution once a winner was crowned, or they could download a “play at home” kit and go back to their teams immediately, by going to the URL bit.ly/PuzzlympicsGrandFinale.
I really love the trophies I ordered to celebrate the winners (with the puzzle solution) — presenting the winning team with a CAT AS TROPHY felt extremely satisfying.
As before, I created a print-and-play kit that can help you assemble your own Puzzlympics challenge, if you want to try it on some friends. The relay race kits can be found here, and the rules sheets for prelims and finals (along with a brief mention of the cheers) can be found here. I’ve even made the script available (which provides information on how the event was framed), although that is considerably less necessary for running an event on your own.
Other MIT Mystery Hunt summaries:
Puzzles — The Time My Puzzle Got Posted to r/GaylorSwift Mid-Hunt
Nero Says Event — Making an Impossible Game Possible with Time Loops
Nightclub Event — The Ship of Theseus School of Experience Design
Note: all opinions expressed, including those about how Mystery Hunt events should be messaged to prospective players, are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the broader TTBNL team.
