Every year, I participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt, a weekend-long competition that pits teams of solvers against each other in a series of increasingly difficult puzzles, eventually culminating in a physical scavenger hunt around the MIT campus to find the championship coin, which is usually literally a coin or some other small trinket. If it’s hard to understand the allure of a sleepless weekend of mental debasement at the hands of some of the most sadistic puzzle writers imaginable, it bears mentioning that it’s always incredibly fun. (If you’ve ever chased a Ballmer Peak or done something equally difficult for its own sake, you might instinctively understand this. If not, every couple of years there’s some fairly prominent media coverage that attempts to unravel the whole ordeal. Here’s a “This American Life” episode featuring a story on team Palindrome and the 2007 Mystery Hunt; here’s Chris Hardwick following my team around for “Attack of the Show” in 2009.)
Last January, my team, Codex, won the whole thing. The winning team’s reward - or “reward,” depending on how you look at it - is the responsibility to design and run the following year’s hunt. It takes a phenomenal amount of effort to write a Mystery Hunt; we produced 120 puzzles and metapuzzles of varying complexity with interlocking answers, spent tens of thousands of man-hours fact-checking and testing the thing, and staged a complicated physical production over three days at MIT. (Each Mystery Hunt has a running theme; ours was “The Producers,” and every couple rounds teams would have to produce terrible short musicals, which we’d critique. If you’ve never seen multiple grown adults with postgraduate degrees crooning selections from something called “Okla-Holmes-A!” at three in the morning, you haven’t really lived, etc.)
At 10:27 pm Saturday evening, team Manic Sages found the coin. Congratulations, suckers.
Here’s this year’s Hunt site, if you’d like to check it out. Note that some of the puzzles either required a physical activity or a server-side component that can’t be replicated after the fact; for the sake of people wanting to get their hands dirty, I’ve gone through and picked out a dozen puzzles or so, in rough chronological order of when they were unlocked by teams during the competition, that exemplify the ridiculous nature of your average Mystery Hunt activity.
Fight Choreography
Star Search
The Wicked Switch
Slash Fiction
Yo Dawg, I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts
Winning Conditions
B.J. Blazkowicz in ‘Wintertime for Hitler’
Critical Thinking
Tax..in…Space
Pirates of the Tyrrhenian
Award Winning Poetry
Get Your Dog Back…
JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS
Cookin’
Screen Test
And in the interests of self-promotion/flagellation: Google Bodyslam, which Matt Garber and I wrote. It was one of two puzzles we got into the hunt; the other, a physical puzzle which was much more fun than Google Bodyslam, currently exists only on a deck of cards in my rental car. Once I figure out how to convert it to a digital format, I’ll post it as well.
And that’s as much Mystery Hunt writing as I need to do for a few years.
