How Hard Is Your Hunt?

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.