2025 MIT Mystery Hunt
My team, Death and Mayhem, organized the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt. The hunt was a great success. Many people commented that it was the best mystery hunt ever.
This year, we added a new and interesting feature. Not only were teams allowed to choose which puzzles to unlock, but they were also given a short description of each puzzle in addition to its title. So, small teams who liked crosswords could choose to work only on crosswords.
As usual, I will list the mathy puzzles, including our official puzzle descriptions. All the puzzles can be found at the hunt’s All puzzles page.
We had a special round called Stakeout, with easy puzzles. My team isn’t too nerdy, so we didn’t have too many mathematical puzzles overall, and just two puzzles with a math flavor in the Stakeout round, incidentally coauthored by me. Somehow, I like designing easy puzzles. There were two additional puzzles in this round that I enjoyed during testing. I loved the popsicle puzzle so much that I brought it to my grandchildren to solve.
- A Math Quiz: A list of math questions.
- A Sudoku?: Grids with numbers.
- Anything Is Popsicle: Physical Puzzle — popsicle sticks.
- Some Assembly Required: A list of phrases and a word bank.
The first round wasn’t too difficult either. Several people praised the ChatGPT puzzle, though it’s not mathy.
- ChatGPT: A blank textbox with a text entry field below it.
Now, moving to more difficult puzzles, Denis Auroux is famous for designing fantastic logic puzzles. His puzzles below aren’t easy, but many people loved them. I even heard magnificent as praise.
- Maze of Lies: A text adventure exploring a maze.
- Bermuda Triangle: Triangular battleship puzzles.
- This is Just a Test: A bunch of grid logic puzzles.
- Good Fences Make Otherwise Incompatible Neighbors: A hexagonal logic puzzle.
Here are two puzzles I test-solved and enjoyed. The first one is a logic puzzle, while the second one isn’t math-related.
- Unreal Islands: A grid filled with letters and numbers.
- To Do: Tile That Rectangle: Rectangles of different lengths with words on the center and edges.
Here are two puzzles that I edited and highly recommend. The first puzzle was initially called Gin and Tonic; I wonder if anyone can guess why.
- Follow The Rules: An interactive interface with a grid of toggle switches and a grid of lights.
- Incognito: Cryptic crossword.
These are math-related puzzles that people liked.
- The Inspectre: Physical Puzzle — A bag of acrylic pieces and a sheet of paper.
- Knights of the Square Table: A 9×9 grid logic puzzle.
- Do The Manual Calculations (Don’t Try Monte Carlo): Some unusual chessboards and graphs with rules.
I asked only a few people for recommendations. These are math-related puzzles that weren’t mentioned but seem cool. The fourth puzzle was an invitation to the Mystery Hunt, which, not surprisingly, was a puzzle.
- The 10000-Sheet Excel File: An Excel file with 10000 sheets.
- Eponymous Forensic Accountant: Physical Puzzle — Bring your own bag (The PDF with receipts is available).
- _land: A thin, multicolored horizontal line.
- Engagements and Other Crimes: A printed invitation.
- A Map and a Shade (or Four): A chart with letters, colors, ticks, crosses, and a series of pie charts below.
- Garden Anecdotes: Post-it notes and some gibberish text.
I also got a recommendation for a non-math puzzle, which I would definitely have enjoyed watching solved. I’m not sure I’d enjoy solving it alone.
- Men’s at My Nose: A series of quotes.
Finally, here is the list of non-math puzzles that seem cool. A warning about the first puzzle: It’s rated R. The first three puzzles are relatively easy; they are from the Stakeout round.
- A Recipe For Success: Several completely normal and reasonable pickup lines.
- Charged: Interactive interface with text entry boxes and lines between them.
- Magic i: Two columns of text.
- Star Crossed: A large isometric grid of letters in the shape of a circle.
- Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt: A series of colorful dropquote puzzles.
Here is a video from Cracking the Cryptic, joined in this episode by Matt Parker, titled Matt Parker Sets Us A Challenge!. The video is devoted to the second part of the puzzle Maze of Lies, mentioned above, by Denis Auroux and Becca Chang.
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