Ye Gods: The 2024 MIT Mystery Hunt
I normally write about the annual MIT Mystery Hunt within a day or two of its conclusion. The 2024 edition, however, seems to still be going on. Ostensibly a puzzle event that takes place over Martin Luther King weekend, my team is still submitting answers one week later, and I hear through the grapevine that the organizing team, TTBNL, is allowing teams that make it to the finish line to play through the event’s grand finale — which is superb and very much to their credit.
The part of the Hunt I did see was a lot of fun. The theme of the thing was that the ancient gods had sent you to the Underworld, from which you needed to escape. Several parts of the event were quite innovatively structured (some to a degree that I do not yet understand — I’m waiting eagerly for the solutions to make their way online). Puzzles were for the most part tight, varied, and very challenging. Let’s see if I can remember some of the stuff I worked on…
Marathon: A not-uncommon presentation for a Mystery Hunt puzzle: A list of words, some miscellaneous other information, and no instructions whatsoever — the better to preserve the joyful aha you’ll get after staring for a while and discussing matters with your teammates. The aha here wasn’t thunderous, but it was significant enough to make those of us solving it very happy, and it helped us make sense of that list of words in fairly short order. How you got the actual answer to this puzzle was a little surprising — I thought it left behind a lot of extraneous, unused puzzle material — but once we saw it we knew it had to be right.
🫰📝🧩: Gah, spare me from puzzles named after emojis. Although if any of them deserve to be named as such, it is this one, a mini-crossword with all-emoji clues. Deciphering them was perhaps the brainiest I felt all weekend — just one little firecracker after another. Super fun, and quite ingeniously constructed.
😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠: When I say the Hunt puzzles were “for the most part” very challenging, I am thinking of this puzzle, which was the opposite of challenging: My friend Ben and I solved it in under three minutes. He’d already had the initial observation by the time I arrived in the spreadsheet, and I had the next and final observation fifteen seconds later, and then it was just a matter of getting words where they needed to go. If I had been the editor of this puzzle, I would have suggested a couple of ways to beef it up a bit, but it cannot be denied that dismantling a Mystery Hunt puzzle with such rapidity can be pretty satisfying. (I thought we might earn some recognition for Fastest Solve, but apparently another team solved a different puzzle in… eleven seconds? Yeah, I can’t compete with that.)
Bringing Down The House: I know what this puzzle is about, I compiled a lot of information about it, and I never arrived at the answer. This is the first puzzle I’ll be checking the solution for once all of the answers are finally posted.
Reverse!: A very clever fusing of the board game Othello with a word search. And not too tough, as Hunt puzzles go.
Circus Circus: The great joy of the Mystery Hunt is when one of these crazy puzzles clicks over from “this is plainly impossible” to “oh! wait! I get it now!”, and this puzzle had that by the bucketful. Not sure I would have gotten there entirely on my own, but that is why I do not solve the Mystery Hunt entirely on my own.
Harrah’s: One of my favorite kinds of Hunt experiences: Lots of absurd pictures to analyze, a big aha lurking behind them, and then, once you finally see what’s going on, a lot of picking away at things with your teammates — with lots of room for multiple people to show their cleverness.
Planet Hollywood: Although the pictures here weren’t quite as absurd as Harrah’s, everything I said above also applies to this puzzle. Quite fun.
ENNEAGRAM: This one quickly got much too tough for me, but it sure was fascinating watching my team make every single nutty leap necessary to arrive at the final answer. This is a puzzle type I’d like to see again, but maybe not at quite such a Mystery Huntish level.
Look Before You Leap: The last puzzle I worked on as time ticked down to what I thought was the end of the Hunt — in retrospect I guess I could have kept going if I had wanted to. It was fun to recognize what this puzzle was turning into as the letters filled the grid. Ultimately I figured out everything but the final answer. Someone on my team took it the rest of the way, and looking at his work, I see that I was prepared to make this puzzle WAY more complicated than it needed to be, so maybe it’s for the best that I surrendered.
There were, of course, a ton of other puzzles where I said “That looks interesting!” — lots of variety crosswords and cryptics and so forth. But my team, Palindrome, is heavy on crossword people, and I have generally stopped trying to shoulder my way into those puzzles — those grids tend to get filled before you can blink. I did try to put some brain cycles toward the always important “meta puzzles,” but this year every single one of them proved impenetrable to my efforts. It was impressive and entertaining to watch my teammates work on them, but at nearly every breakthrough, my response was either “I never would have thought of that!” or a good old-fashioned “Holy %$&@^#!”
The 237-Headed Elephant In The Room
And now let us turn our attention back to the fact that the Hunt-construction team is still running the Hunt a week later. Only five teams completed the Hunt in regulation time, and they accomplished this only with some generous hinting and an unknown number of free answers. It came out during the event’s wrap-up that the constructors had put together 237 puzzles for us to solve.
That’s… a lot of puzzles. I would even say it is too many puzzles. And I’m saying that as someone who really likes puzzles.
Look: A movie that is good when it is two hours long is not great when it is 15 hours long. Part of putting together an event of any kind is keeping in mind the amount of time it’s supposed to last. And I have a difficult time grasping how anybody could take in the sight of this mountain of puzzles, most of which were quite hard, and say “Oh, yeah, a bunch of teams will definitely wrap this up in 48 hours.” The math simply doesn’t work.
One of the most well-known maxims among writers is “Kill your darlings.” Every writer has wonderful ideas and brilliant paragraphs that, alas, do not serve the story they are trying to write. The savvy author excises this stuff mercilessly. And so it goes in many other artistic endeavors — and I certainly believe that puzzlemaking is an art.
In writing, you can do all that excising afterwards — you write a bloated first draft, you read it over, you say “Oy vey,” and you get out your red pencil. (I just looked: The “morgue” of trimmed stuff from my first book is over 15,000 words. And this was a not-particularly-long book for kids.) Nobody gets hurt, except maybe the author’s pride.
Making a puzzle hunt with a team of sixty people is a little different, and a little harder. You can’t create 237 puzzles and then trim it down to a more reasonable 150. You’ve got to keep your eye on the desired running time the entire way. “How many solving hours will all this add up to?” is a question the organizers on the team need to ask themselves near-constantly. I don’t doubt that TTBNL’s brain trust did ask it… but maybe not as often as they should have, and also plainly they arrived at the wrong answer.
It’s okay. The puzzles were fun, as is evident from the fact that as I type this, almost a week after the Hunt officially ended, some of my teammates are in a voice channel in our Discord, plugging away on the stuff we haven’t solved yet.
But I hope the experience of this 237-puzzle Everest is the shock the Mystery Hunt community needs to realize the weekend needs to pull way, way back, to somewhere between 125-150 puzzles, and a winning time of perhaps 35-40 hours. Maybe this way a dozen or twenty teams can cross the finish line, instead of a bare handful. (I am not absolving myself or my team from Hunt Bloat, by the way. The Hunt we ran in 2022 ended reasonably on time, before noon on Sunday, but only eight teams reached the very end. I would have loved for that to be more.)
Things Ain’t What They Used to Be
For reasons completely unrelated to the quality of the event’s puzzles, I found myself a bit maudlin over Hunt weekend. There have been dramatic changes to the Hunt over these past few years. MIT has cracked down on all these outsiders invading their campus over MLK weekend, and has aggressively curtailed the marathon, overnight nature of the event — as I understand it, even the constructing team had to abandon their headquarters in the wee hours, and set up camp in a hotel lobby instead. As a result, the event isn’t quite as freewheeling and anarchic as it was years ago.
This is not a complaint. MIT is fully within their rights to control their campus, and it is something of a wonder that I was allowed to roam the place freely one weekend a year for close to 30 years. But I think I’m allowed to miss those days. It is absolutely bananas, in the best way, that a past Hunt culminated with teams figuring out that they had to stop an elevator between floors in order to find the coin. Or the days before wireless Internet, where we would hack our way to online access any damn way we could, including threading wires out the windows and into classrooms we had not been assigned.
It hit me particularly hard when I saw that LaVerde’s has closed. Even though I knew it, I couldn’t quite believe it until I was standing there looking at where it used to be, covered over with white plastic sheeting. This was the on-campus convenience store and marketplace, and they made surprisingly good sandwiches. My brother and I were there multiple times a day during Hunt weekend. He and I would be co-solving something, and suddenly one would look at the other: “LaVerde’s?” Agreed. And off we went to get meatball heroes for lunch. Well, no more. Another change. So it goes.
And I also found myself pretty uncomfortable in our crowded headquarters. Many people were masked, and we had Covid tests for people to use, but the experience just wasn’t as carefree as it used to be. The specter of possible illness seemed to be hanging over the room. Perhaps that is my mishegoss and mine alone, and if so, I’ll own it. But it’s nonetheless how I felt, and after an hour or so I packed up and retreated to my hotel, and continued co-solving there. Another change — after years of struggling to integrate remote solvers into my team, now it’s the easiest thing in the world, thanks to Discord and Google Sheets. That is the route I am likely to choose myself from now on.
Of course, come next November or December, as the prospect of the Hunt appears on the horizon, the need to immerse myself in it (to whatever degree MIT allows) may yet rise up again. I’ve been doing this for a long time. Now as then, most of the puzzles are well beyond me, and there are sometimes long periods where I am watching other people solve instead of solving anything myself. But then there are other times where I say the right thing and all my smart puzzle friends say “Ohhhhh!,” and it is the best feeling in the world. Whether I attend in person or solve from home, and whether the whole thing ends right on time or two weeks late, I wouldn’t miss it for anything.
