On Puzzlehunts
Intro to MIT Mystery Hunt 2026
The chill of Boston is a little sweeter, and a little stronger, than that of my home state of Colorado.
Colorado air can be described with no better word than “cold snap,” the coldness and the dryness combining to give a bit of the feeling of breathing dry ice. It’s actually quite invigorating, like a cold shower after eight hours of sleep or a morning run.
Boston cold feels more enclosed, more musty. It’s a cold that drives you indoors, not one that drives you outside… it feels like you’re draped over with a cold blanket. I like Boston. As soon as I got here, my charm sensors were overloaded.
I’m here in Boston to fulfill an old dream: participating in the MIT Mystery Hunt. What is this? It’s slightly hard to describe…
A puzzle is a contrived problem, usually done on paper, posed by the AUTHOR to the PUZZLER. The puzzler tries to arrange the elements of the puzzle, usually in a way that requires some thought, logic, or background knowledge, in order to find the SOLUTION intended by the author.
A puzzle hunt is a competition where teams compete to solve a series of puzzles and whoever finishes the series first wins. These puzzles are a little different from normal puzzles:
They usually don’t have instructions. Figuring out what to do is arguably the main point of a puzzle hunt puzzle.
Often there will be some fairly obvious first step, like in MIT Mystery Hatch’s first puzle Recruited by the M.I.T. (link), where you’re supposed to fill in the blanks. But later, there will be an “extraction” step where you’re supposed to get a solution through possibly unconventional means.
They often involve unconventional representations of conventional forms, as in DP Puzzle Hunt’s first puzzle.
Sometimes they take even stranger formats… such as the famous duck konundrums.
I forget how I first learned about the MIT mystery hunt. I was in high school and it was through some blog, somehow. It became a weird hobby of mine to trawl through the dev/joe index and look at puzzles I liked. I generally did not get very far with this. I usually got stuck on a pretty early puzzle, so going very far into a single Mystery Hunt wasn’t super rewarding. Keep in mind that I was doing this solo in a Denver suburb, and I knew of no one else who was into puzzle hunts. At one point I tried to recruit a friend. We pondered over a particular MH puzzle, getting nowhere, and when we looked at the solution he said: “There’s no way I would have thought of that.” I was much more excited by the convolution of the solution than he was!
What I usually did instead was trawl through dev/joe looking for puzzles with keywords I liked and solve those. Board game-themed puzzles were a perennial favorite... Turnary Reasoning remains probably my favorite puzzle hunt puzzle ever.
I also looked through a lot of non-MH puzzles and generally had more success with those. I collected a lot of these, some very obscure. You can see these at the very bottom of my website’s links page.
Being the most difficult of all hunts, I didn’t have as much time to do the MITMH in college. As a result of this, I’m weirdly familiar with a lot of very old hunts but don’t know what happened last year or the year before! This should cause no problems whatsoever.