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MIT Mystery Hunt 2022
Sorry for how long it's taken to write this up. You're not interested in my excuses.
The MIT Mystery Hunt was held over MLK weekend. This was my third year participating (as part of a team named Halibut That Bass, which has roughly 50 members and favors fish puns). All of that participation has been virtual, although the first year the hunt was actually on campus, but I couldn’t get away since I was still working.
For those who are not familiar with the concept, a puzzle hunt involves a bunch of linked puzzles, which lead to metapuzzles - and eventually to some final answer. In the case of the MIT Mystery Hunt, the final goal is always to find a hidden coin. The winning team writes the next year’s hunt. So this year’s hunt was written by Palindrome, whose members include a number of big name puzzlers. People usually think of solving puzzles as a solitary activity, but hunt puzzles are generally too complex to be solved by a single person. They will also often require references. We spent a lot of time collecting information in google sheets, for example, and using the huddle feature of slack to talk through possible approaches.
There are some activities which are not quite as skill-based, but do require creativity. For example, there is always a scavenger hunt. I ended up contributing to that by putting two books in a Little Free Library up the block from where I live, which also had the advantage of letting me get a nice late afternoon walk. I also did one of the events - Crisis in Publishing, which involved collaborative writing of a book. This had been done as an activity at the National Puzzler’s League convention a few years ago and was just as much fun this time. The idea was that you were given a genre and constraints and had to write a page of a book that fit those constraints. This then got passed on to another person. You got a new genre and the previous page and new constraints to work from. There were some glitches with the software so someone in my group got his own page back three times, but I got a wide variety. The constraints were things like using only single syllable words, including particular words, including at least two palindromes, having a character call their mother, etc. This was easy and entertaining.
As for puzzles, there is always a theme. In this case, the theme was book-based. There had been a preview, called Star Rats, which was misleading, but the actual hunt started with one of the campus libraries having disappeared and books flying around. That round was based on children’s books and led to later rounds based on various genres. For example, Mysteries were in Noirleans, Horror in Lake Eerie, Cookbooks in Recipeoria, and so on. You had to solve a certain amount to open up more rounds. I should also note that the artwork was impressive. Between that and the sheer number of puzzles, it’s obvious how much work went into this. The downside is that I found the Hunt somewhat overwhelming. I know that I am never going to come close to looking at all the puzzles, but it’s hard to get the right balance between spending time on a puzzle that’s in my wheelhouse and looking at what else is there.
So, how did we do? We solved 123 (out of 192, I think) puzzles. Which means we were tied for 16th place (out of 393 registered teams). If you look just at the metapuzzles, we were 20th overall (that factors in time, as well as how many we solved). I’d call that respectable.
You can look at all of the puzzles (and their solutions) at the MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 website. A few of the puzzles I liked are listed below. Note that I started each puzzle name with which round it was, to make it easier to find.
The Investigation - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This is a Rows Garden, which is one of my favorite puzzle types.
The Ministry - Oxford Children’s Dictionary. There are some cute puns in this.
The Ministry - Charlotte’s Web. I always like crafting (crochet / knit) puzzles. One of my teammates got to it first, alas. I did offer some suggestions, however.
The Ministry - Kiki’s Delivery Service. I was able to make a few useful contributions to this one.
The Quest Coast - Magically Delicious. A cookie themed logic puzzle.
New You City - Everybody Must Get Rosetta Stoned. This was my favorite puzzle of all the ones I looked at during hunt. Yes, I am geeky about languages.
Reference Point - You Took the Fifth. Anything that makes fun of lawyers is good by me.
Sci-Ficisco - My Son, the Science Fiction Fan. I was raised on Allan Sherman records, so this is had a lot f potential. But we didn’t have enough time to get to the “aha” moment for it.
Let me finish with a few remarks on things that didn’t work so well for me. For one thing, I thought that the balance of puzzle types was somewhat too skewed towards cryptics, which is not surprising given the membership of Palindrome. I like cryptics, but I get tired of them after the 50th (or so it felt). I also found the pacing of unlocking puzzles frustrating. We had one point (fairly early on) when we didn’t really have enough puzzles for the number of people we had to work on. When you unlocked a new area, you only got two puzzles in it to start with, which makes things overly dependent on the skill sets of a small number of people.
The single biggest pacing issue we experienced had to do with one of the swag puzzles (and, in fact, the one I had gotten). There were three types of puzzles which had physical objects available. I had gotten one of the two boxes (there was also a puzzle using an envelope) and late on Sunday night, we still had not unlocked that puzzle. We even spent some free unlocks we had earned to try to get to it. And we were one of the teams that was doing fairly well! We did finally unlock the puzzle - more or less right after I went to bed. I got to look at it the next morning, but there was no way we could solve it in the few hours remaining. We did get some insight into the solution, so I think we would have gotten there if we had gotten the puzzle earlier. Oh, well, now I have some rather unusual 20-sided dice.
Overall, I had a good time and I expect to hunt again in the future. But it is also worth acknowledging that there are thing that could be done better.
The MIT Mystery Hunt was held over MLK weekend. This was my third year participating (as part of a team named Halibut That Bass, which has roughly 50 members and favors fish puns). All of that participation has been virtual, although the first year the hunt was actually on campus, but I couldn’t get away since I was still working.
For those who are not familiar with the concept, a puzzle hunt involves a bunch of linked puzzles, which lead to metapuzzles - and eventually to some final answer. In the case of the MIT Mystery Hunt, the final goal is always to find a hidden coin. The winning team writes the next year’s hunt. So this year’s hunt was written by Palindrome, whose members include a number of big name puzzlers. People usually think of solving puzzles as a solitary activity, but hunt puzzles are generally too complex to be solved by a single person. They will also often require references. We spent a lot of time collecting information in google sheets, for example, and using the huddle feature of slack to talk through possible approaches.
There are some activities which are not quite as skill-based, but do require creativity. For example, there is always a scavenger hunt. I ended up contributing to that by putting two books in a Little Free Library up the block from where I live, which also had the advantage of letting me get a nice late afternoon walk. I also did one of the events - Crisis in Publishing, which involved collaborative writing of a book. This had been done as an activity at the National Puzzler’s League convention a few years ago and was just as much fun this time. The idea was that you were given a genre and constraints and had to write a page of a book that fit those constraints. This then got passed on to another person. You got a new genre and the previous page and new constraints to work from. There were some glitches with the software so someone in my group got his own page back three times, but I got a wide variety. The constraints were things like using only single syllable words, including particular words, including at least two palindromes, having a character call their mother, etc. This was easy and entertaining.
As for puzzles, there is always a theme. In this case, the theme was book-based. There had been a preview, called Star Rats, which was misleading, but the actual hunt started with one of the campus libraries having disappeared and books flying around. That round was based on children’s books and led to later rounds based on various genres. For example, Mysteries were in Noirleans, Horror in Lake Eerie, Cookbooks in Recipeoria, and so on. You had to solve a certain amount to open up more rounds. I should also note that the artwork was impressive. Between that and the sheer number of puzzles, it’s obvious how much work went into this. The downside is that I found the Hunt somewhat overwhelming. I know that I am never going to come close to looking at all the puzzles, but it’s hard to get the right balance between spending time on a puzzle that’s in my wheelhouse and looking at what else is there.
So, how did we do? We solved 123 (out of 192, I think) puzzles. Which means we were tied for 16th place (out of 393 registered teams). If you look just at the metapuzzles, we were 20th overall (that factors in time, as well as how many we solved). I’d call that respectable.
You can look at all of the puzzles (and their solutions) at the MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 website. A few of the puzzles I liked are listed below. Note that I started each puzzle name with which round it was, to make it easier to find.
The Investigation - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This is a Rows Garden, which is one of my favorite puzzle types.
The Ministry - Oxford Children’s Dictionary. There are some cute puns in this.
The Ministry - Charlotte’s Web. I always like crafting (crochet / knit) puzzles. One of my teammates got to it first, alas. I did offer some suggestions, however.
The Ministry - Kiki’s Delivery Service. I was able to make a few useful contributions to this one.
The Quest Coast - Magically Delicious. A cookie themed logic puzzle.
New You City - Everybody Must Get Rosetta Stoned. This was my favorite puzzle of all the ones I looked at during hunt. Yes, I am geeky about languages.
Reference Point - You Took the Fifth. Anything that makes fun of lawyers is good by me.
Sci-Ficisco - My Son, the Science Fiction Fan. I was raised on Allan Sherman records, so this is had a lot f potential. But we didn’t have enough time to get to the “aha” moment for it.
Let me finish with a few remarks on things that didn’t work so well for me. For one thing, I thought that the balance of puzzle types was somewhat too skewed towards cryptics, which is not surprising given the membership of Palindrome. I like cryptics, but I get tired of them after the 50th (or so it felt). I also found the pacing of unlocking puzzles frustrating. We had one point (fairly early on) when we didn’t really have enough puzzles for the number of people we had to work on. When you unlocked a new area, you only got two puzzles in it to start with, which makes things overly dependent on the skill sets of a small number of people.
The single biggest pacing issue we experienced had to do with one of the swag puzzles (and, in fact, the one I had gotten). There were three types of puzzles which had physical objects available. I had gotten one of the two boxes (there was also a puzzle using an envelope) and late on Sunday night, we still had not unlocked that puzzle. We even spent some free unlocks we had earned to try to get to it. And we were one of the teams that was doing fairly well! We did finally unlock the puzzle - more or less right after I went to bed. I got to look at it the next morning, but there was no way we could solve it in the few hours remaining. We did get some insight into the solution, so I think we would have gotten there if we had gotten the puzzle earlier. Oh, well, now I have some rather unusual 20-sided dice.
Overall, I had a good time and I expect to hunt again in the future. But it is also worth acknowledging that there are thing that could be done better.
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I'm also glad that two of the puzzles you enjoyed so much were ones I helped write ;-)
If your team captain hasn't already sent you a link for our post-Hunt survey, let me know, and I'll pass it along. Teammate is as interested in the results as we are!
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