MIT Mystery Hunt Events (Part 3): Turning a Nightclub into a Heist
When I was tasked with running Events for the MIT Mystery Hunt, I couldn’t get one particular question out of my head: “what would it look like to run an immersive theater event for a puzzle crowd?”
There were quite a few examples to draw from: when I wrote about the first escape room in the United States back in 2012 it was an adaptation of a “stadium game” in Japan held in a baseball stadium, and my first time working behind the scenes as a GM was for Boxaroo’s 100 Earth Days, a “ballroom game” that happened as part of the Reality Escape Convention. Club Drosselmeyer (which I previously reported on) even won two of No Proscenium’s “Immy” Awards for its unique blend of theater and puzzle.
One of my early Event puzzle ideas was turning Hot Ones into a logic puzzle: divide attendees into small groups, provide them with a flight of 7 unlabeled hot sauces, and only let each person try 3 of the sauces, forcing them to fight over which sauce is the hottest. The only problem? It was an event that would probably take 10–15 minutes…too short to justify setting it up as a full Event.
However, as one station in an “open-sandbox” immersive event, where players could wander from challenge to challenge, themed around a Nightclub? That could be fun. We had a number of ideas under consideration for those stations, including:
- Hot One Through Sevens–Ranking unlabeled hot sauces based on spiciness, as an homage to Hot Ones;
- Foreign Language Karaoke– Inspired by one of the UHaul trucks at the Lost Horizon Night Market called “Voice of Eurovision”, a karaoke station that uses the foreign languages used for the song selections to spell out an answer;
- Begin at the Berghain — A fashion-based logic puzzle where attendees need to guide guests on the fashion needed to get into the VIP section;
- Appetizing Art — Replicating famous artworks using a crudité platter and other “appetizing” snack foods; and
- Wooly Willy Guess Who — You spotted someone across the bar, and need to accurately describe them…using a Wooly Willy magnetic board
For logistical reasons, an “open-sandbox” design was sacrificed for a more linear progression through stations — there were just too many unknown variables to prevent throughput issues of running 50–150 people through an event without knowing what that number would be. And for a variety of reasons, none of the individual stations made it through to the final version. But I love this Ship of Theseus puzzle all the more, for its many evolutions.
The Ship of Theseus That Set Sail — Heisting Into the Club
Eventually, we settled on a core narrative structure for the event: teams may have been informed that a Nightclub event was happening that night and given a timeslot for the festivities, but upon arrival a bouncer at the door informed them that it was a private Ambrosia tasting event, and they couldn’t get in without their VIP wristbands.
Once the confused crowd had gathered a scalper would approach the group and promise to be able to sneak them in, and guide them to three stations to “earn” their way into the club. After each station, their Nightclub Entry card would receive an additional stamp explaining what happened, hiding clues to a final secret message when taken together.
So Make the Friendship Bracelets, Take the Moment and Taste It
The first station was a “completely legitimate” wristband manufacturing plant, where teams would create three cipher-laden wrist bracelets according to guidelines, and “test” that they properly encoded the message by having other tables check their work. After they finished, plant supervisors would test the passwords on the security door…only to learn that the password, VENI VIDI VINO, was out-of-date and didn’t work. Disheartened, the scalper then shepherded teams off to the next station.
I came up with the idea for this station as a way of giving participants a tactile reminder of the Event — and not just because creating a friendship bracelet station gave me yet another way to inject Taylor Swift into a puzzle. One of our teammates tested the puzzle with their family and it was safely doable within 10–15 minutes, so I felt safe about the length of the puzzle being just about right.
That turned out to be only half true, as attendance for that first event in particular was higher than anticipated — while we had enough supplies, the more cramped space made the event run slower than expected, and we had to rush teams through this station more than any of the others to keep the event running on time.
A Dance, Dance, Revolution for Club Admission
Jessica Li was the mastermind behind our “speakeasy dance” challenge, which tasked attendees with showing off their dance skills in order to earn admission through the speakeasy entrance. Half of the group was given signs with dance instructions and access to a video of the dance that needed to be replicated, while the other half had to follow those instructions as best they could.
After successfully completing the station, the speakeasy entrance hosts clarify that admission is only good for Dance Hall access — the Ambrosia event was still off limits.
We always wanted a dance challenge for this event, but none of the ideas felt satisfying enough until Jessica came up with this structure, which was a nice callback to the 2018 puzzle Under Control. This ended up being my favorite activity of the night, all the more impressive since it was also the last one to come together.
Cat Keyboards Make Everything Better
Alina Khankin headed up development of the final event of the night, as the beleaguered scalper gets caught trying to flat-out sneak the group into the venue by nightclub employees who confuse the large group as applicants for a gig as House Band at the venue.
As a reward for successfully knocking the judges’ socks off, attendees land a gig as the House Band and are offered a drink on the house, as a way to celebrate their new gig. Finally, Ambrosia Event admission has been secured!
A lot of the fun of this stage of the event came from the musical instrument selection. I insisted on the inclusion of cat keyboards because they’re hilarious, and we rounded that out with a handful of other relatively cheap and easy to use instruments like ukuleles and kazoos. But the event really came together when we tried to find a cheaper alternative to otamatones (which would have strained the budget of an already involved event a little more than I was comfortable) and learned that the company that makes cat keyboards also makes dog guitars, turning the station into something of a Bremen Town band.
Putting It All Together (From a Narrative Perspective)
I really loved the idea of ending this event with a “the answer was with you all along” moment, so started testing out ways to write the Event’s answer on the back of the card attendees are handed as soon as they enter, in a relatively undetectable fashion. There’s quite a few options that can deliver that promise (Brett Kuehner impressed me with his invisible-CMYK-ink holiday cards), but ultimately the most reliable method turned out to be writing out the message by hand, using invisible ink pens.
So, participants who made it out of their musical auditions had UV light-wielding bartenders very conspicuously check their event badges to reveal that the tools to solve the puzzle were available, and poured a glass of extremely non-alcoholic soda from Harmony Springs (a local soda company) as reward.
Putting It All Together (From a Structural Perspective)
While John Bromels wasn’t involved with the individual puzzles for the event, it still wouldn’t have been possible without him. I was prepared to run the event in the Stratton Center like all of the other events, but John flagged that we had reserved the Kresge Auditorium for the full day, and that it could serve as the perfect venue for our first event.
After spending the next hour or two poring over building blueprints with him the heist structure and pathing emerged, letting us capture the almost transgressive feel that Hunt runarounds give of taking players to corners of the campus they wouldn’t expect. Coming to the Nightclub event led puzzlers through basement hallways, inside rehearsal rooms, and even onto the Kresge stage itself. And that exploratory process itself (even if it was a guided one) helped give substance to the more immersive elements of the Event, by giving it more of a sense of place.
Previous 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
Puzzlympics Event — Running a Relay When You Don’t Trust Players to Run
Note: all opinions expressed, including those about the construction of individual Nightclub Event “stations”, are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the broader TTBNL team.
