I came close to not writing a wrap-up of the time I spent at this year’s MIT Mystery Hunt, as I felt there was so much I never got to experience. From my chair in the corner of our on-campus headquarters, I could see others looking at what seemed to be an online slot machine. Elsewhere, a significant number of people were doing something involving a close-up of a large grid of hexes, as if a tabletop wargame had been infused with puzzles. I had absolutely no idea what my teammates were doing in either instance. That was the first time I thought, how am I supposed to talk about this weekend when I don’t understand so much of what is going on?

But, what the hell. Do you not tell your friends about your trip to Disneyland just because you didn’t go on every single ride? The rides I did go on — which is to say, the puzzles I got to solve, and the experiences I got to have — were largely superb. This was my first time back on campus for the Hunt since 2020 (aside from the briefest of visits in 2023), and it was delightful. Cardinality, the group that presented this year’s Hunt, did a stellar job, and even if I can’t give the most comprehensive overview of their work, I definitely want to give them some much-deserved appreciation.

For those of you who don’t know, the MIT Mystery Hunt is a weekend-long puzzle event hosted by MIT in Cambridge, MA. It is by far the largest event of its kind in any given year — many hundreds of puzzle lovers flock to campus, backed by many thousands of teammates sitting at computers all around the world, all eager to solve 150-200 of the toughest, craziest, most innovative puzzles you are likely to see anywhere. The team that solves them all first, and thus finds a coin that has been hidden on campus, gets many kudos… and also the responsibility of producing the following year’s Hunt.

The theme of this year’s Hunt was Pokemon — or rather, Puzzmon. Teams were tasked with rounding up dozens of adorable little critters, some of whom (if I have this right) had opened portals into other dimensions. On top of capturing the various Puzzmon, teams were tasked with getting all those portals closed again.

Those “alternate dimensions” were the source of this year’s most astonishing innovations. The first dimension we opened, Land of No Name, was among my favorite things I have encountered in my many, many years of Mystery Hunting, and if the other dimensions — the thing with the hex grid and the thing with the slot machine — were even half as good, then I am very sorry I missed out on them.

The Land of No Name consisted of 26 puzzles. Unusually, all of those puzzles were given to us simultaneously (it’s more typical that you get three or four puzzles and then unlock others as you solve them). Even more unusually, the letters in those puzzles had been completely blacked out. You read that right. All the letters were gone. The titles had been blacked out, the clues had been blacked out, instructions (if a puzzle had any to begin with) had been blacked out. It was as if a CIA agent in charge of redaction had gone slightly mad.

So how, you might well ask, are you supposed to solve these things? Well, one or two puzzles, despite their heavy redaction, still had a couple of small, fragile toeholds — one puzzle, for example, was more pictures than words, and thus was reasonably accessible. My team solved that one… and upon submitting the solution, a letter (Q) was placed in the remaining 25 puzzles, wherever it was meant to appear. This gave us just enough information to solve something else, which earned us another letter, which gave us a grip on yet another puzzle… it was amazing to see how far we could get on some of these puzzles with 90% of the letters missing, and the solving experience was spectacularly satisfying.

But most of my solving time was focused not on the portal puzzles but on rounding up Puzzmon, who were scattered about various different “lands” — Kitty City had a bunch of feline critters, the creatures in The Brights were luminescent, the Puzzmon in the Elder Drifts looked like they had come out of a child’s version of the D&D Monster Manual, and so on. Each land concluded with a “capstone” puzzle that used information gleaned about that land’s monsters, and a final “metapuzzle” that used all of that round’s puzzle answers. Knocking down a metapuzzle is a big deal in any given puzzle hunt — it’s a big step forward in your team’s progress.

“You and I are going to co-solve a metapuzzle this year,” my friend Foggy Brume declared to me the evening before. I feigned full confidence in this assertion, but these past few years, the metapuzzles have been pretty rough — it had been a long time since I’ve been of any use in solving them.

But lo and behold, Foggy’s prediction came true, and this points to one of the things Cardinality got most right in producing this year’s Hunt: An excellent range of difficulty for these important puzzles. The metas connected to their “dimension” rounds were every bit as crazy as the rounds themselves. (I spent close to two hours with some other teammates just preparing to tackle one of them.) But other, earlier metas were far more approachable. These were by no means easy, but they were not so intimidatingly laden with bells and whistles. I solved one of them more or less by myself, and I don’t need more than one hand to count the number of times that has happened across nearly 30 years of attending the Hunt. For others, I indeed worked with Foggy, who is quite gifted when it comes to seeing the “aha” that fuels a given metapuzzle. Our collaboration, three or four times across the weekend, went something like this:

Me: {makes an innocuous observation about a puzzle, in no way enthusiastic that it will lead to anything}

Foggy: YES! That’s it! I know how this is going to work! {meta is solved three minutes later}

It’s a bit like passing the ball to Michael Jordan, who goes in for the dunk — it’s a thrill to be on the court, participating in the play in any way at all.

All in all, it was a puzzle-filled weekend that left me pleased and deeply contented… despite the fact that my team, Palindrome, came nowhere close to actually completing the event. Only a few teams are able to make it to the finish line in a given year, and that is because there are simply too many puzzles for a typical team to solve. The Hunt website this year shows 222 puzzles! That’s an awful lot of solving to expect of a team — even a large team — for an event that is supposed to last 48 hours or so. (I say “supposed to” because my team has solved a couple of our remaining puzzles as I write this on Tuesday morning.)

Look: I get it. For a substantial number of hardcore puzzle lovers, the Mystery Hunt is Broadway. And when you get a chance — quite possibly a once in a lifetime chance — to perform on Broadway, you want to leave it all up on the stage: All your innovation, all your creativity, everything you’ve got. It is easy to forget that editing your overall creation is also a crucial skill. It’s vital, in my opinion, to achieve a balance between endless dazzling originality… and presenting something that a team of let’s say fifty or sixty dedicated solvers has a decent chance to finish. (And a team of 125+ people will finish on Saturday night.) With very few exceptions, Mystery Hunt construction teams do not accurately understand what they have wrought, and the result is an event that very few people will complete.

This has been the case for so long now that maybe it’s simply considered an intractable part of things — a feature and a bug. But the Mystery Hunt has improved in many other ways over the years. When teams have a choice about what puzzles to unlock, they used to have to do so blindly. Now a short description of the puzzles lends a little guidance. The tech for the Hunt — how the solving teams interact with the puzzles and with the constructors themselves — has gotten a little bit better seemingly every year. Maybe now it’s time for a team to turn its attention to the Hunt’s length, and present an event that allows dozens of teams to cross the finish line.

Congratulations to Cardinality on their amazing achievements, and congrats to Team Providence for their decisive win — long, short, or somewhere in between, I look forward to seeing what you offer us in 2027.