MIT Mystery Hunt 2025

Jan 21, 2025

I spent my weekend at the MIT Mystery Hunt making complicated spreadsheets for fun. (And tasting mystery liquids to try to identify their ingredients!) But good morning, time to get back to work today where I spend hours making different complicated spreadsheets instead!

I’ve been doing the Hunt every year since 2012 (when I was with Codex and helped write and illustrate the Producers-themed 2012 Hunt). Nowadays I solve with Small Llama Malls (which started as a small Codex offshoot), lauded at wrap-up this year as the team with the most number of team name changes (207).

It’s tons of fun…

“Well, this is either close to done, or about to completely wreck me.”
- a teammate in the midst of solving

…in that banging your head against a wall way, sometimes. But god that moment when things just click into place, there is no purer rush in this life

You may need to log in to see the puzzles linked to below. If so, username/password public_access/public oughta work.

Some puzzles I found really delightful this year (with spoilers, sorry) (plus each puzzle page now links to its solution):

A Recipe For Success - just a cute little set of lewd food puns
Bar_Talk - you get some bar tap images and end up with vowel sounds to spell out on an IPA chart
Dear Diary - a fun little easy one, with hidden letters
Doable Double - a fun little easy set of single-letter-distance word transformations
皇帝の暗号 - Caesar shifts and the Iroha ordering of the Japanese kana
Just F---ing Behave! - poem about naughty children that uses animals that are also verbs to clue connect-the-dots patterns that draw out letters
Kindred Spirits - cocktail ingredient transformations, which led to us being handed a set of mystery liquids to sniff and taste and try to identify what was in them (a nice nostalgic nod back to prior years, where we’ve tried to identify spice blend ingredients and mysterious white powders by taste)
Magic i - it helped to warm up with this simple ASCII stereogram (and eventually, when my eyes gave out, to find a stereogram solver to use instead). There were several layers to this journey, and I just found the final payoff really charming
Reuse and Recyclability - Jane Austen frocks. I had no idea movie costumes were reused this much!
Star Crossed - just gorgeous, starting off with a 1769-Transit-of-Venus-themed word search followed by a series of transformations wheeling across the sky that make me feel like John Ciardi

“One night I dreamed I was locked in my Father's watch
With Ptolemy and twenty-one ruby stars
Mounted on spheres and the Primum Mobile
Coiled and gleaming to the end of space
And the notched spheres eating each other's rinds
To the last tooth of time, and the case closed.”
- John Ciardi, My Father’s Watch

Synthetic Tagsonomy - this was a physical puzzle, where you were handed a bag of occlupanids (bread tags) and cards with cute little critter drawings. The critters were also secretly occlupanids, bless.
Taste Explosion - novelty flavor Lay’s potato chips, with a word search and beautiful blotches of color that match up with Lay’s wrappers/bags
Temporal Investigations - nothing fancy, but I gotta have a Star Trek puzzle
They Might Be Grad Students, But They’ve Got Your Number - I remember literally calling up TMBG Dial-a-Song on the phone from my Brooklyn land-line as a kid, so this puzzle was pure nostalgia for me!
T____OTT___P__Y - I trust you’ll understand the reference to / Another Scottish tragedy without my having to name the play (plus we got to learn about the Scottish Registry of Tartans’s official threadcount spec)
Zing it Again - rebuses cluing pun parodies of famous songs from Weird Al and Bob’s Burgers (and Hannah Montana but who cares)