On the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt

Earlier this month I enjoyed one of my favorite weekends of the year, a trip back east for the venerated MIT Mystery Hunt. I made nearly a full week of it this time around, heading out on Tuesday to play a few escape rooms on Wednesday and Level 99 on Thursday. I enjoyed success both days, though I’m still feeling my biggest failure, in which I foolishly attempted a physicality-forward Level 99 room and banged the hell out of my tailbone. Maybe it’ll heal by ACPT.

As for the Hunt itself, I thought it was extremely nifty and I’m envious of Death & Mayhem for what they were able to do. (Not enough to want to win again anytime soon, but still.) Congratulations to Cardinality, and apologies for any maniacal laughter I may have done in your presence after your win. As for my team, the more competitive half of TTBNL, we unfortunately did not come particularly close to finishing. This was for a number of reasons I don’t need to go into here, but I know many of us are determined to reorganize and do better next year. (Without winning.)

Over the last few days I’ve gone through the puzzles to see what I missed as well as to compile the puzzles I significantly contributed to solving. Mostly for posterity, I present the latter list here along with some notes where appropriate. (Consider this your spoiler alert, though I don’t think there are too many.) You won’t see any metas here; I typically don’t do well with them and thus stay away. Maybe I should change that someday. Anyway:

The Missing Diamond

Synthetic Tagsonomy: I recalled an occlupanid puzzle at the Berkeley Mystery Hunt years and years ago; I think this one was quite a bit more complicated.

Also: Downright Backwards, In a Different Direction, Introduction to Decryption, Shrinkage, Unreal Islands, Zing It Again, Zulu Lima

The Stakeout

It’s Not Clear: This was probably my favorite solve of the weekend that was in a sizeable group consisting mostly of people I didn’t know. The first building we assembled looked so weird that we thought we were assembling mash-ups of several different structures. Oh, Gehry.

Also: A Badly Broken Quote, A Sudoku?, Big Names, Doable Double, Just F—ing Behave!, Read Between the Lines, Superlatives

The Paper Trail

His Life-Story: OK, all I really did here was write out all the strings from the videos, as it was all I felt myself capable of handling before I needed to go to bed.

Incognito: Every year I do almost all the work on a puzzle and then completely beef the extraction. This was that puzzle this year. Missed one of the key entries. Dammit.

World’s Largest Crossword Puzzle: I correctly predicted that I could help with the crossword part and then would back the hell away when it became something else.

Also: And Now, a Puzzling Word From Our Sponsors

The Background Check

O, Woe Is Me

Yeah, that’s it for this round. I did a lot of stuff on that puzzle, but for the most part I guess I was focused on other rounds.

The Illegal Search

This Is Just a Test: I did a lot of the first phase of this, then couldn’t find the energy at that hour to do the second phase before getting some sleep. In the morning, I managed to Wheel-of-Fortune the right answer, which was extra lucky because we had a 3 where we should have had an E. I was surprised to see in the solution write-up that there was no l33t involved!

Also: Bermuda Triangle, Jargon, Networking Event, Passage of Time, The Annual Massachusetts Spelling Bee

The Murder in MITropolis

Do the Packing: It took me an embarrassingly long time to see the answer after filling everything in. Weird beginning, in my defense.

Good Fences Make Good Otherwise Incompatible Neighbors: Proudest solve of the weekend for me. Worked with two teammates on the Slitherlinks, then one of them and I carefully plotted the movements. We had an ambiguity somewhere in there that we never did resolve, but getting confirmation of that final answer brought the sort of feeling a good Mystery Hunt should.

What Do They Call You?: Now this was probably the most fun solve of the weekend, especially the bewilderment of teammates who didn’t know why our name had been changed.

Also: A Dash of Color