There are two new offerings in the Puzzlesnacks Shop!

For kids, I’ve got a mini puzzle hunt: Crime For Breakfast! This is the set of puzzles I brought with me around the country when I was doing school visits in support of my Winston Breen books. I always did a presentation or two, of course, but then I gave the schools the option of a writing workshop or a team puzzle event — always crossing my fingers that they would choose the latter. I’ve run these puzzles for thousands of kids, and now I’m making them publicly available for the first time.

For the grownups, we have (at long last) a second volume of Puzzlesnacks Plus. The first set came out in 2020, and my goal was to produce a new set every year, and boy, did that not happen. Winning the 2021 Mystery Hunt put that and many other things on the back burner, and then 2022 kinda flew by as well.

But we’re back, baby! Twenty full-sized variety puzzles in the flavors my Puzzlesnacks subscribers usually enjoy in a far smaller size: Cascades, Jelly Roll, Patchwork, Drop-Ins, and many more. Plus I threw in two bonus puzzles — a supersized Patchwork and a crazy mishmash of a Checkerboard and a Labyrinth that I attempted on a lark and which I think came out pretty great. I honestly don’t think you’ve seen anything like it!

Back in the fall, I started getting itchy to do another puzzle project for charity. The Social Distancing Puzzles had done pretty well, raising thousands of dollars for Feeding America at the height of the pandemic. For my follow-up, where did I want to focus my efforts?

I decided that I was most interested in supporting an organization that sought to protect democracy and bolster voting rights. Too many politicians and pundits seem intent on nibbling away at both of those — or even taking big painful bites. It has been alarming to watch, and I have felt quite helpless to do anything about it.

So, a fundraiser, then. But what should the puzzles look like? The Social Distancing Puzzles had a neat hook, where two or more people could co-solve the puzzles without necessarily being in the same room–the project literally encouraged social distancing. What should the hook be this time?

The answer came soon enough: I would make one puzzle for each of the 50 states!

On the heels of that: No. It’s a good hook, but I am not making 50 puzzles. A charity project is all well and good but let’s not go insane here.

But I still liked the general idea. So I turned to the puzzle community — I recruited some people I knew, and some people I didn’t know; I sought out crossword types and logic types and adventurous hunt puzzle types.

Ultimately over 30 puzzle constructors joined, and together we indeed made a puzzle for each of the 50 states — plus one for Washington, D.C.

Fifty-one puzzles in a big ol’ pdf! And you can get them all with a contribution of any size to Common Cause, which since 1970 has been fighting those who would erode our country’s democracy.

Please give generously, and please enjoy the puzzles!

Another MIT Mystery Hunt is in the books, and in many ways it was a wonder. Teammate, the constructing team, packed the weekend with innovation after innovation. Early puzzles were preceded by a loading screen that was itself a puzzle — and if you failed to notice its puzzly nature, the loading screen stuck around for longer and longer, as if the site was having a breakdown, when really it was the constructors saying “You might want to pay a little more attention to this.” Damned clever. Grasping the meaning of the loading screen allowed you to step behind the curtain of the Mystery Hunt, and explore a Puzzle Factory where various AI puzzle bots needed help completing the very Mystery Hunt you were at that moment solving. Widgets on the factory floor actually changed elements of certain puzzles, requiring serious coordination between solvers to set things properly so that everything could be solved. This was all really quite special and ingenious, and exactly why the Mystery Hunt holds a special place in the hearts of so many hardcore puzzle people.

The 2023 Mystery Hunt was also, as has been observed by many, far, far too difficult overall. There was hardly a softball to be found — every puzzle seemed to take hours and hours. Many answers could only be gleaned after a grueling amount of work, or a pile of challenging ahas, any one of which could throw the solvers permanently off the track. The constructing team themselves saw the trouble early on, and began to give away free answers — a necessary but demoralizing thing to have to do. Even so, the Hunt extended into Monday morning, many hours later than is ideal.

Gauging the difficulty level — and thus the length — of your puzzle event is one of the most daunting challenges faced by a constructor or a constructing team, and this is by no means restricted to the Mystery Hunt: I run several small puzzle events each year, some for children and some for adults, and even though these events might be only an hour or two in length, it takes a lot of effort and forethought to get the timing right. Still, there is no question that the Mystery Hunt is on a whole other level of challenge in terms of calibrating the difficulty — it’s so sprawling and complex, and often it is put together by teams without a lot of experience in large-scale events, who are learning as they go along.

And so I would like to offer a word of advice to future Hunt-writing teams. I have theories about how you can accurately estimate your Hunt’s endpoint; I have thoughts about how many puzzles a Mystery Hunt needs to have. But neither of those topics is nearly as important as the following nine words:

YOUR PUZZLES DO NOT NEED TO BE INCREDIBLY HARD.

Keep this maxim at the forefront of your minds as you plan your event, and success is all but assured.

To be clear, the first time I captained my team, Palindrome, as we ran a Hunt — back in 2008 — we did NOT understand this, and I in particular did not understand this. Not only were our puzzles too hard overall, but in several places I personally required solvers to all but read my mind in order to understand how a final answer was meant to be extracted. It was not a particularly good Hunt, and Palindrome spent the bulk of fifteen years trying to reclaim victory so we could show what we could do now that we had some experience under our belts.

For 2022, I (once again the captain) was laser focused on making sure the Hunt ended at a reasonable time. Not including the “Star Rats” prologue set of puzzles (which were released a month early), solvers faced approximately 167 puzzles across Hunt weekend, including metas. Of these, 47 were solved by a group of testers in about an hour, and 83 puzzles required two hours. We expected the remaining 37 puzzles to take three or four hours.

So fully 75% of our Hunt’s puzzles were solvable in under two hours: Does that mean our puzzles were easy? I don’t think so, no. They were in many ways typically bananas Mystery Hunt puzzles, just the sort of thing someone who attends the weekend expects to see: There were many puzzles about esoteric subjects, and rarely were there any instructions. And when our puzzles tested at two hours or less, that was because of an effort by a team of four to eight people working together — a single solver would have taken far longer. “Easy” is not the first word to leap to mind as I page through the archive of the 2022 Hunt, nor do I recall anybody complaining about the simplicity of our puzzles in their post-event write-ups.

With the data from our testsolves, and with the knowledge that teams would be working on different puzzles in parallel, we felt comfortable that a team would find the coin by Sunday at noon. In the event, the winning team crossed the finish line just before 10:00 a.m. Had the proportions of our puzzles been reversed — if 75% of them had been three- and four-hour solves, and just a quarter in the one-to-two-hour range — we could well have needed to resort to desperate measures to make sure someone won at a reasonable time.

Am I suggesting that Palindrome ran a perfect Hunt in 2022? Not hardly. There was a midpoint meta that proved an unexpected bottleneck for many teams, and it was pointed out in several places that we could have done a better job integrating the Hunt’s storyline. But for the most part I think we absorbed the lessons we learned back in 2008, the most important of which is to resist what I call Mystery Hunt Fever: The uncontrollable desire to amp up the difficulty of your puzzles again and again, draining away much of the puzzle’s fun in the process.

It is possible that this important lesson can only be learned with direct experience — Lord knows that was my main teacher. But I lay it out here in case it does someone a little good. The Mystery Hunt may have a reputation for extreme difficulty, but that reputation obscures the truth of the matter: Your Puzzles Do Not Need To Be Incredibly Hard.

The MIT Mystery Hunt is just a few days away, which means it’s time to sharpen your puzzle-solving skills on something that is in no way actually a puzzle. A puzzle by its nature is something purposefully constructed, often with painstaking effort so as to have the right difficulty for its intended audience. When I was part of the Mystery Hunt constructing team last year, many of the puzzles took weeks or longer to put together.

As opposed to a round of Spaghetti, which I construct by choosing five words at random from a pocket dictionary.

You’re saying to yourself, “Wait, how can a handful of random words be a puzzle?” To which I respond: It isn’t. But in the game of Spaghetti, we pretend these words are a puzzle, and then we try to solve it.

If that sounds ridiculous and impossible, you are both right and wrong. It is ridiculous. But we have seen over the years that it is not impossible — every time we run this bizarre experiment, participants point out complex patterns in the given words. Sometimes those patterns are convoluted and absurd, and there is a certain amount of fun in that. But other times what the solver discovers is so surprising and elegant it makes you wonder if the words really are chosen at random (they are).

Here are the five words for this round of Spaghetti:

VERIFY
WHITE
EMULSION
JOCULAR
SQUAT

To help you arrive at your solution, you may add a sixth word of your choosing to this list. Perhaps obviously, don’t just say “The answer is [whatever]” — you need to explain how you arrived at that answer.

Even if you can’t come up with a solution to this puzzle (and why should you, seeing as it is NOT A PUZZLE), check back on this post throughout the day, and read the submissions from other solvers. Give a thumbs-up to the solutions that you like. You can vote for as few or as many comments as you wish. The player who submits the solution that attracts the most likes will be the winner of the game.

(Pictured above: What DALL-E returns on the prompt “spaghetti puzzle.”)

It’s a new puzzle hunt! Eleven fun and varied puzzles, including a metapuzzle. Originally commissioned by the Mohonk Mountain House and run during its “Wonderful World of Words” weekend. Now you can solve it at home — do it solo or grab a friend or two!

Come meet Eureka K. Jones and his amazing inventions right here.

At this year’s convention of the National Puzzlers’ League, the traditional Saturday-night extravaganza was constructed by over a dozen people, each contributing a single Lord of the Rings-themed puzzle. Here is my contribution. I watched one team solve it exactly as I intended (stare stare stare, Oh!, solve solve solve) and another team get totally stuck (stare stare stare stare stare stare….) Hopefully more of you will fall into the former category, should you try it.

It’s a new puzzle hunt for kids! Summer Camp Color War features puzzles based on Tug O’ War, Capture The Flag, Scavenger Hunt, and many others — nine interlinking puzzles for ages 12 and up. You can grab the set for your brainy, puzzle-solving kids over at Puzzlesnacks.

On the most recent episode of Dave & Ethan’s 2000″ Weird Al Podcast, I’m interviewed (along with my friend Joe Bohanon) about the work I’ve done with “Weird Al” Yankovic — the New York Times crossword he and I co-authored back in 2018, and the cameo appearance he made during this year’s Mystery Hunt.

A few scattered thoughts on putting together a Mystery Hunt, for the 2023 constructing team and anybody else who aspires to do this.

Put on the best Hunt you can and don’t worry about expectations

It is often debated, particularly in the weeks immediately following the event, whether or not the MIT Mystery Hunt has grown too large. It absolutely has. I don’t mean for the solvers; I mean for the constructors. Each team that takes on the responsibility feels an urge to match or exceed what came before. There is only so far this can go before it is simply not possible to put together the Hunt in one year’s time, and I think we might be nudging that limit right now. For a number of people on Palindrome, the 2022 Hunt became a full-time job on top of their actual full-time jobs. I do not recommend this. A constructing team should carefully judge what they can accomplish in the time allowed, given their resources and keeping in mind that a year is barely sufficient to put together a Hunt of the size people have grown to expect. If you need to pull back to a mere 125 or so puzzles, no one in the Hunt community will say boo.

Life finds a way…

…of messing with your plans, and you would do well to keep that in mind from the start. When Palindrome put together the structure of its Hunt near the start of 2021, our team mailing list was 117 members strong. But as aspirations turned into responsibilities, some people drifted away. Others intended to stay but were sidelined by the usual travails of life — medical emergencies, legal emergencies, family emergencies, work emergencies. What we planned to accomplish with 100+ people was in fact accomplished with 50-60 people. If we’d had 50-60 people at the start, our plans might have been a little different.

There are going to be small teams and there are going to be large teams

I like to think Palindrome did a few things right this year, but nothing in my mind was righter than having different tiers of accomplishment — only nine teams reached the Hunt’s grand finale, but sixty teams successfully thwarted the Voracious Bookwyrm, earning the midpoint token. Another 48 teams on top of that solved the opening meta. There is a lot to be said for allowing every team, large or small, to succeed at something significant.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

Sixty teams conquered the Voracious Bookwyrm, but it would have been an even larger number if Palindrome had been clearer that there was a midpoint reward to be earned. We wanted it to be a nice surprise, which may have seemed reasonable, but it left some teams out in the cold — they moved on to the Pen Station rounds without completing The Ministry, and so they missed out on the midpoint token. The Hunt has room for surprises, but what the teams are trying to accomplish should perhaps not be one of them.

Similarly, we were unclear when communicating with teams about when our HQ would shut down, and what exactly that meant. So you had some teams thinking the door to the Hunt would be slammed shut entirely at 6:00 p.m. on Sunday evening, when in fact we thought teams would keep solving — it was only that hints and interactions with Palindrome would end at that time. This caused some confusion here and there. I fully shoulder the blame for that. Sorry.

And that’s only talking about outward communication, toward the solving teams. I could go on at length about internal communication, with the fellow members of your construction team over the course of the year. As team captain, I sent out weekly updates about how we were faring as our deadlines zoomed toward us — but there were elements of our Hunt, including the unlocking structure, that were not as well communicated, and that caused avoidable problems late in the year.

Do as I say, not as we did

Our set of prologue puzzles, the “Star Rats” round, was a big hit. I’m glad we were able to do it. But future constructing teams should feel NO OBLIGATION WHATSOEVER to make a prologue set part of their responsibilities. The Hunt is hard enough to put together without layering on even more, optional puzzles. Seriously, I hope a prologue round DOESN’T catch on.

Believe the testsolvers

I almost certainly do not need to tell you the importance of testsolving. Nearly every puzzle constructor has learned that how they think solvers will interact with a given puzzle, and how solvers will actually interact with it, are frequently two different things. Testsolving reveals all: Oh look, your clever joke in the flavortext sends solvers down a completely unforeseen rabbit hole. Gee, the aha moment you thought might be too blatant is in fact utterly invisible. Golly, solvers are failing to recognize which of the many possible solving paths is the correct one.

On Palindrome, the testsolve sessions were almost always set up and attended by the author, and in my opinion that is 100% the way to go. Handing off a puzzle to be tested out of the author’s sight is not nearly as valuable — that might do the trick for something like a newspaper crossword, but not for a many-layered experience like a Mystery Hunt puzzle.

Testsolving only works if you believe the testers’ experience will be typical, and if you believe what the testers say in their feedback. (Have a way for testers to give feedback!) It will be tempting, now and again, to say “Well, the testers went down this particular false road, but that was a freak occurrence that real solvers will be unlikely to duplicate.” No. Your puzzle has a flaw, and the testsolvers were good enough to reveal it to you. Figure out how to fix it.

We tried very hard to allow a puzzle into the Hunt only after two clean testsolves. One is not sufficient. I had a puzzle in the 2022 Hunt called The Messy Room. It was a variant on a standard type called the dropquote, in which letters above a grid drop down into that grid to spell a quote reading left to right row by row. In my version of the puzzle, letters could drop down into one grid or rise up into another — and also the words in the quote were presented out of order. This was hard enough, but in the original version, words in the puzzle’s seven quotes were intermixed — some words from quote A could be found in quote B, and words from quote B fell into quote C, and so on. The first group of testsolvers to tackle this… knocked it clear out of the park. They weren’t stopped for a moment. They solved the puzzle in a little over 75 minutes. It was perfect. I organized a second testsolve largely to set a good example — surely it wasn’t necessary. And you have already jumped ahead to the punchline: The second test was a disaster. My testers couldn’t make sense of any damn thing. I cut our misery short after 45 minutes and sent the puzzle back to the drawing board.

There exist puzzlemakers who will give extra weight to the good test over the bad. Don’t be one of them. I try not to lean toward pessimism in general, but when it comes puzzle testing, it’s definitely the way to go. Assume your puzzle’s worst test is what every group of solvers will experience, if you don’t do something about it.

Post-production: Oh, right, this is important

Palindrome was so focused on getting its 200 or so puzzles over the conveyor belt, we didn’t start preparing the puzzles for the website until late November. This caused quite a crunch throughout December. Get your website going earlier and you will be a happier team for it. Plus this will let you get in one more testsolve after the puzzle is theoretically absolutely final — errors can and will creep in at this stage.

But wait, there’s more

Scriptwriting. Costumes and props. Logistics. Creating and editing videos. Making sure everything is as accessible as possible. Getting permission from MIT for this, that, or something else. Dealing with the forms MIT insists on having signed by every solving team. It’s easy to overlook or underemphasize these things when there are so many puzzles to create. The non-puzzle elements will demand to be dealt with, so best to have a plan from the start.

Maybe it is time to retire the scavenger hunt

I don’t speak for my team on this point, but I believe it nonetheless. Particularly if the Hunt continues to be virtual, which inflates the number of participating teams, give serious consideration to whether or not to include a scavenger hunt. Administering the results has become a brutal time sink. This year we received submissions from 168 teams, and each resulted in a process that took approximately one hour to complete. You do the math.

Yes, the scavenger hunt can be fun, and yes, it’s a good way of making sure you’re in contact at least once with every team. But there are other fun ideas out there, and other ways of making sure every team gets contacted.

Don’t underestimate the personal toll

Winning the Mystery Hunt is exciting! Getting started on the next year is also exciting! Anything and everything is possible. But it won’t be long before reality seeps in. Decisions will get made that not everybody agrees with. Some people will find it difficult to find a place for themselves in the construction process. Pressure will mount, and that pressure will be handled by different people in different ways. Personal relationships could become strained. Following in ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈’s footsteps (that’s where the apostrophe S goes, right?), Palindrome had an ombudsperson who specifically fielded concerns from the construction team and relayed them to the organizers, and several course corrections were made over the year as a result of this.

The most important part of constructing the Mystery Hunt, in my opinion, is not pleasing the Hunt community with the result (that’s a close second), but coming out of the experience healthy and with all the same friendships (if not more) that you had at the start. Take a breather if you have to. Sit down with the person you’re butting heads with, assume you are both working in good faith, and talk out the problem. The Mystery Hunt is work, yes, but it should also be fun. Keeping it fun, however, may take a little effort. Time spent on that effort will be time well spent.