A recap of the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt

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WARNING: This post contains spoilers for puzzles in the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt. If you want to access the hunt first, click here (you can log in as Public Access).?

It’s Friday, January 17, and the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt has just begun. A few members of my team for the hunt are in the front of the classroom, working on a puzzle involving finding missing words in song lyrics, and fitting them into a crossword. They had filled it out and obtained the phrase “KNOCK THREE TIMES” from a message in shaded squares in the crossword, but that phrase somehow wasn’t the answer. After some thinking, someone decided to try knocking three times on the roof of a radio that we had been given at the start of the hunt. The radio abruptly played a clip of a song we hadn’t heard before, followed by a message saying to tune the radio to a specific station.

All the heads in the room turned around to look at it. People cheered. The people by the radio listened carefully for their next instructions, ready to solve the next puzzle that came their way.

This was one of many moments of discovery from this year’s MIT Mystery Hunt. The 2025 hunt, run by the team Death & Mayhem, was themed around a ‘30s-style film noir. We solvers were told we had been invited to a wedding involving a powerful family who had come into possession of a priceless diamond, which had recently (gasp!) gone missing. The theming was evident throughout the whole weekend, as Death & Mayhem turned their HQ (where solvers can go to ask for hints, pick up physical puzzles, and talk to the hunt-running team) into a “gala,” complete with a fake “bar” and wedding cake. Every team got their own radio, custom-built by the team to play era-appropriate music and relay announcements in the voice of an old-timey newscaster (but, as noted earlier, the radio had a few secret functionalities).

Last week, I noted that Mystery Hunt puzzles could take all sorts of different forms, and this year’s puzzles didn’t disappoint. Puzzles were hidden in things like a bag of nails with painted heads, a stack of custom-printed receipts, a cigarette box, an interactive chatbot, and an Excel file with 10,000 sheets. Occasionally, you had to interact with MIT’s campus — I took a quick trip with a teammate to compare transparencies we had been given with sections on the Alchemist sculpture, and an eager MIT student who had just joined our team stayed up for hours (!!) looking under certain benches on campus in order to find “dead drops” planted by Death & Mayhem. All in all, there were over 2,000 people on campus (and 3,000 people participating remotely), working for days to try to be the first to finish the set of over 150 puzzles.

In the end, seven out of the 220 participating teams finished the hunt by Sunday night, after over 48 hours of puzzling. My team got a respectable second place, finishing the hunt a few hours after Cardinality, a great team that’s put together a few puzzle hunts of their own (their latest, Huntinality 3, contains one of my favorite puzzle hunt rounds, and I highly recommend checking out their work). As is tradition, Cardinality gets the honor/burden of writing the hunt for next year (as the Death & Mayhem captain told them, “congratu-dolences”). People on my team were evidently disappointed not to take home the win this year, but I feel like there was also an undercurrent of relief; how are you supposed to top a custom-built radio and an immersive gala?

All in all, this year’s Hunt was a wonderful experience, and it was fascinating to hear Death & Mayhem’s philosophy behind how they ran their hunt. They wanted to put together a hunt that was especially satisfying for in-person solvers, since the in-person nature of the MIT Mystery Hunt is a big factor in what makes it unique. I would say it paid off; the MIT Mystery Hunt is always a unique event, but this year’s especially combined puzzles, immersive experiences, and storytelling in a way I’d be hard pressed to find in many other places.

Want to try some Mystery Hunt puzzles for yourself? Read to the end of the newsletter for some recommendations.

?? Pinpoint: The Monday, January 20 things associated with magicians puzzle was the easiest of the week by far, with an average of 2.7 guesses needed, and a solve rate of 96%. On the other side, the Saturday, January 18 things with faces puzzle was quite difficult, with the solve rate dipping to 74.9%, and an average of 3.7 guesses needed, indicating that the clue that the later clues (“Front of your head” and “Mount Rushmore (it has four of them)”) were the most helpful. For reference, here’s what the last clue is referencing:

Another fun puzzle from this week was the Wednesday, January 22 “yes” in different languages puzzle, with these clues (the relevant languages are in parentheses).

• Sim (Portuguese)
• Shi (Mandarin)
• Ja (German)
• Sí (Spanish)
• Oui (French)

It was interesting to see comments from people who spoke Portuguese, and who recognized the first clue as a Portuguese word, but convinced themselves that the category would be something else. “Ja” was fun to include, since it may have reminded you of last week’s German words puzzle (although “Ja” wasn’t one of the clues that day).

Play today’s Pinpoint?

?? Crossclimb: The shortening of Crossclimbs will continue until morale improves — the Monday, January 20 puzzle ending with two common sushi ingredients (FISH/RICE) had only three internal rungs.

How did you feel about this? Do you like the quicker puzzle to start off the week, or do you prefer a more substantial puzzle? Whatever you think, comment below with your opinion.

Later in the week, the Thursday, January 23 puzzle ending with a container that a house pet may eat from, and a (general) term for what a pet eats (BOWL/FOOD) was inspired by updates I get from my parents about the neighborhood cats that come in their backyard. Here are a few pictures:

Inspiration for puzzles can come from anywhere, but these were some of the more adorable muses.

Play today’s Crossclimb?

?? Queens: The puzzle for Monday, January 20, named “Triple T,” had an abnormally low solve rate for a beginning-of-the-week puzzle, at 82.6%. Let’s take a look at one way you can break in:

The blue and gray regions are entirely contained within the rightmost two columns, so you can X out any square in those columns that’s outside of those regions.

Similarly, the green and gray regions are entirely contained within two rows in the middle, so you can X out any square in those rows that’s outside of those regions.

This leaves only one place for a queen in the red region. Of course, there are other ways you can break in. In particular, you could have noticed that the purple region takes up the entire leftmost column, so you can X out any square in that region that’s outside of the first column. This leaves only one available square in the second column from the right, and you can place your first queen.

Play today’s Queens

?? Tango: The Tango puzzle for Tuesday, January 21, titled “Snake,” had the highest solve rate of the month, at 98.4%. It may be surprising to hear that this puzzle only had two pre-filled squares, but that statement may make more sense when you see the grid:

If you know how the = and × signs work, you can fill in eight more squares right off the bat. Those squares include many pairs of suns and pairs of moons, so you can make even more progress by placing suns and moons to block three-in-a-row patterns.

All together, this added up to a puzzle where many people set personal best times, and most of the results looked like

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or?

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Play today’s Tango

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This week’s topic: Puzzle highlights from the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt

One nice feature of the Mystery Hunt is that the puzzles are made available after the event finishes, allowing people who didn’t attend the event to browse the puzzles. The puzzles from the 2025 hunt are available here (with this link, and the ones below, you can click “Public Access” to see the content), but I wanted to highlight a few that were especially approachable, while giving a sense of the “freewheeling” nature of a Mystery Hunt puzzle.

• Cruciverbal: A crossword, with a twist.
• Dear Diary: A simple presentation (two paragraphs of text), but with a surprising amount of depth to be discovered.
• XOXO: A puzzle that likely needs a bit of research, but is approachable once you know what you’re looking for.

And, here are a few puzzles that were much harder, but that I enjoyed working on. These puzzles may take a bit more time to solve, but they’re worth it (if you don’t want to solve them through the whole way, it’s at least worth reading through the solutions):

• The Eras Puzzle: Only attempt if you’re very willing to research a lot about Taylor Swift’s body of work. A really intricately made puzzle, based on a very interesting property.?
• Drunkens and Flagons: A fun logic puzzle where you have to piece together eight peoples’ bar orders based on their conversations the next day (if you solve through the puzzle and get a phrase that looks like an instruction, submit that phrase in the answer box).?
• Fechtbuch: A puzzle I admit I only helped out with the first few steps for (there were people on my team who knew the subject matter for the later steps much better than me), but it’s a very cool example of a puzzle that looks like one thing, but is actually about something else.

Did you try these puzzles? What did you think?

Share your thoughts in the comments below??

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