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.

My new mini puzzle hunt is here! In Have Fun Storming The Castle, you’ll try to sneak your way to the king’s throne room. Explore secret passages, navigate the gardens, and tiptoe through the dungeon, solving crafty word puzzles as you go. Can you make it all the way to the throne room, and get past the king’s many guards? What will you say to the king when you get there?

Nine varied word puzzles, including a metapuzzle. Available now!

Starting this weekend, you’ll find a mini pencil puzzle by me on the puzzle page of the New York Times Sunday magazine! It’s an honor to have been asked, and I’m looking forward to giving the NYT audience lots of fun little puzzles to solve.

In the past few months, I’ve added not one but two new Puzzlesnacks collections to my online store. Puzzlesnacks Jamboree and Puzzlesnacks Gold Mine each contain over 50 snack-sized puzzles, in wide variety of fun formats: Cascades, Consonant Companions, Patchwork, Hexed, Spirals… eh, you get the idea. Lots of different puzzles, lots of different types. Download ’em, print ’em out, grab a pencil, and start solving!

Another MIT Mystery Hunt is in the books, and in many ways it was a wonder. Teammate, the constructing team, packed the weekend with innovation after innovation. Early puzzles were preceded by a loading screen that was itself a puzzle — and if you failed to notice its puzzly nature, the loading screen stuck around for longer and longer, as if the site was having a breakdown, when really it was the constructors saying “You might want to pay a little more attention to this.” Damned clever. Grasping the meaning of the loading screen allowed you to step behind the curtain of the Mystery Hunt, and explore a Puzzle Factory where various AI puzzle bots needed help completing the very Mystery Hunt you were at that moment solving. Widgets on the factory floor actually changed elements of certain puzzles, requiring serious coordination between solvers to set things properly so that everything could be solved. This was all really quite special and ingenious, and exactly why the Mystery Hunt holds a special place in the hearts of so many hardcore puzzle people.

The 2023 Mystery Hunt was also, as has been observed by many, far, far too difficult overall. There was hardly a softball to be found — every puzzle seemed to take hours and hours. Many answers could only be gleaned after a grueling amount of work, or a pile of challenging ahas, any one of which could throw the solvers permanently off the track. The constructing team themselves saw the trouble early on, and began to give away free answers — a necessary but demoralizing thing to have to do. Even so, the Hunt extended into Monday morning, many hours later than is ideal.

Gauging the difficulty level — and thus the length — of your puzzle event is one of the most daunting challenges faced by a constructor or a constructing team, and this is by no means restricted to the Mystery Hunt: I run several small puzzle events each year, some for children and some for adults, and even though these events might be only an hour or two in length, it takes a lot of effort and forethought to get the timing right. Still, there is no question that the Mystery Hunt is on a whole other level of challenge in terms of calibrating the difficulty — it’s so sprawling and complex, and often it is put together by teams without a lot of experience in large-scale events, who are learning as they go along.

And so I would like to offer a word of advice to future Hunt-writing teams. I have theories about how you can accurately estimate your Hunt’s endpoint; I have thoughts about how many puzzles a Mystery Hunt needs to have. But neither of those topics is nearly as important as the following nine words:

YOUR PUZZLES DO NOT NEED TO BE INCREDIBLY HARD.

Keep this maxim at the forefront of your minds as you plan your event, and success is all but assured.

To be clear, the first time I captained my team, Palindrome, as we ran a Hunt — back in 2008 — we did NOT understand this, and I in particular did not understand this. Not only were our puzzles too hard overall, but in several places I personally required solvers to all but read my mind in order to understand how a final answer was meant to be extracted. It was not a particularly good Hunt, and Palindrome spent the bulk of fifteen years trying to reclaim victory so we could show what we could do now that we had some experience under our belts.

For 2022, I (once again the captain) was laser focused on making sure the Hunt ended at a reasonable time. Not including the “Star Rats” prologue set of puzzles (which were released a month early), solvers faced approximately 167 puzzles across Hunt weekend, including metas. Of these, 47 were solved by a group of testers in about an hour, and 83 puzzles required two hours. We expected the remaining 37 puzzles to take three or four hours.

So fully 75% of our Hunt’s puzzles were solvable in under two hours: Does that mean our puzzles were easy? I don’t think so, no. They were in many ways typically bananas Mystery Hunt puzzles, just the sort of thing someone who attends the weekend expects to see: There were many puzzles about esoteric subjects, and rarely were there any instructions. And when our puzzles tested at two hours or less, that was because of an effort by a team of four to eight people working together — a single solver would have taken far longer. “Easy” is not the first word to leap to mind as I page through the archive of the 2022 Hunt, nor do I recall anybody complaining about the simplicity of our puzzles in their post-event write-ups.

With the data from our testsolves, and with the knowledge that teams would be working on different puzzles in parallel, we felt comfortable that a team would find the coin by Sunday at noon. In the event, the winning team crossed the finish line just before 10:00 a.m. Had the proportions of our puzzles been reversed — if 75% of them had been three- and four-hour solves, and just a quarter in the one-to-two-hour range — we could well have needed to resort to desperate measures to make sure someone won at a reasonable time.

Am I suggesting that Palindrome ran a perfect Hunt in 2022? Not hardly. There was a midpoint meta that proved an unexpected bottleneck for many teams, and it was pointed out in several places that we could have done a better job integrating the Hunt’s storyline. But for the most part I think we absorbed the lessons we learned back in 2008, the most important of which is to resist what I call Mystery Hunt Fever: The uncontrollable desire to amp up the difficulty of your puzzles again and again, draining away much of the puzzle’s fun in the process.

It is possible that this important lesson can only be learned with direct experience — Lord knows that was my main teacher. But I lay it out here in case it does someone a little good. The Mystery Hunt may have a reputation for extreme difficulty, but that reputation obscures the truth of the matter: Your Puzzles Do Not Need To Be Incredibly Hard.

The MIT Mystery Hunt is just a few days away, which means it’s time to sharpen your puzzle-solving skills on something that is in no way actually a puzzle. A puzzle by its nature is something purposefully constructed, often with painstaking effort so as to have the right difficulty for its intended audience. When I was part of the Mystery Hunt constructing team last year, many of the puzzles took weeks or longer to put together.

As opposed to a round of Spaghetti, which I construct by choosing five words at random from a pocket dictionary.

You’re saying to yourself, “Wait, how can a handful of random words be a puzzle?” To which I respond: It isn’t. But in the game of Spaghetti, we pretend these words are a puzzle, and then we try to solve it.

If that sounds ridiculous and impossible, you are both right and wrong. It is ridiculous. But we have seen over the years that it is not impossible — every time we run this bizarre experiment, participants point out complex patterns in the given words. Sometimes those patterns are convoluted and absurd, and there is a certain amount of fun in that. But other times what the solver discovers is so surprising and elegant it makes you wonder if the words really are chosen at random (they are).

Here are the five words for this round of Spaghetti:

VERIFY
WHITE
EMULSION
JOCULAR
SQUAT

To help you arrive at your solution, you may add a sixth word of your choosing to this list. Perhaps obviously, don’t just say “The answer is [whatever]” — you need to explain how you arrived at that answer.

Even if you can’t come up with a solution to this puzzle (and why should you, seeing as it is NOT A PUZZLE), check back on this post throughout the day, and read the submissions from other solvers. Give a thumbs-up to the solutions that you like. You can vote for as few or as many comments as you wish. The player who submits the solution that attracts the most likes will be the winner of the game.

(Pictured above: What DALL-E returns on the prompt “spaghetti puzzle.”)

It’s a new puzzle hunt! Eleven fun and varied puzzles, including a metapuzzle. Originally commissioned by the Mohonk Mountain House and run during its “Wonderful World of Words” weekend. Now you can solve it at home — do it solo or grab a friend or two!

Come meet Eureka K. Jones and his amazing inventions right here.

At this year’s convention of the National Puzzlers’ League, the traditional Saturday-night extravaganza was constructed by over a dozen people, each contributing a single Lord of the Rings-themed puzzle. Here is my contribution. I watched one team solve it exactly as I intended (stare stare stare, Oh!, solve solve solve) and another team get totally stuck (stare stare stare stare stare stare….) Hopefully more of you will fall into the former category, should you try it.

It’s a new puzzle hunt for kids! Summer Camp Color War features puzzles based on Tug O’ War, Capture The Flag, Scavenger Hunt, and many others — nine interlinking puzzles for ages 12 and up. You can grab the set for your brainy, puzzle-solving kids over at Puzzlesnacks.