MY FIRST MYSTERY HUNT IN-PERSON! I was so so excited for this, and hunted with the ECs of r/PictureGame, a larger puzzlehunt team who has generously adopted our small team for the third year in a row for Mystery Hunt.
highlights
While most of my weekend was spend puzzling, I also got to do a lot of other social things, which was pretty fun, including:
- meeting people on the team for the first time
- meeting people on Cardinality for the first time
- meeting up with some mutual friends on Providence and high school friends on other teams for lunch
- pulling an all-nighter for puzzles
- going to an escape room on Monday evening
IAP on campus tends to feel empty, so I was so excited to meet people from lots of different puzzling teams that I've loosely associated with in the past! This is definitely always a highlight of puzzling events BUT also importantly:
puzzles that I worked on
I was pretty busy with running around campus (as one of few people on the team who was familiar with MIT) so somewhat surprisingly, the number of puzzles I worked on was somewhat low. Small spoilers for puzzles, which can all be found here: https://puzzles.mit.edu/2025/hunt/all_puzzles
The Missing Diamond
- 📑🍝: funny in concept, I love puzzles which are funny and this one did not disappoint. I sent and received lots of copypastas
- An Argument: apparently I made the aha for this but I have no recollection of it
- On the Corner: did a little bit of work, then was told this meta was solved and that I could abandon it
- They Might Be Grad Students, But They’ve Got Your Number: did some early work
- The Thief (META): did some work overlaying and trying to extract
Stakeout
- Big Names: early ID work
- Borderline Personality: apparently I also made the aha for this
- Control Room: I woke up to my team doing this, so I helped on the instruction-side, on my phone and lying in bed
- It's Not Clear: did some ID work I think??
- Just F---ing Behave!: early ID work, I love funny puzzles
- Magic i: helped with extraction
- Mystery O's: just answered the final cluephrase
- Superlatives: I definitely looked at this puzzle but didn't contribute anything meaningful
- Chinatown (META): I ran around for this puzzle for like half of Saturday, but it was funny running into other solvers. then it became depressing when all the other solvers were done and we were still wandering
The Paper Trail
- A Weathered Note: some transcription work
- And Now, a Puzzling Word From Our Sponsors: some transcription work
- Eponymous Forensic Accountant: lots of fun, funny in theory, I wish I was there to get it because I loved the videos of the machine spitting out receipts
- The Eras Puzzle: did some work
- The Inspectre: put together the jigsaw! for some reason I had really good intuition about how to put it together but no actual reasoning
- The Shell Game + Shell Corporations 1-8 (META): fun, so interesting! def a highlight of the hunt
The Background Check
- Story Vision Contest: minor ID work
- Kindred Spirits: did some ID work during hunt, we were told this was a really fun puzzle but we didn't finish it... I did postsolve this one though!
- Reuse and Recyclability: some ID work but by this point my brain was so fried
- Celestial Rope: I took this to the room number, where there was Pluto in the scale model of the solar system, but unfortunately we didn't notice this, so we just played around with the rope... someone passed by and asked "can we take a picture of you guys? we know the author and they would think it's really funny"
The Illegal Search
- Given Up: I think I sent my teammate to like four other lecture halls before suggesting 32-123... sorry
- The Annual Massachusetts Spelling Bee: did a bit of work
The Murder in MITropolis:
- esTIMation dot jpg: this unlocked early and I spent 3 hours on Friday working on this puzzle, which was basically my whole Friday afternoon (which is related to not working on many puzzles in the Missing Diamond round). lots of fun though, my favorite event!
- Sounds Like a Dodo to Me: did the hard half of this puzzle, then someone guessed the answer lol
- We Can Do This All Day: this was so funny, I loved this scavenger hunt. definitely a unique take and our team was really insistent about asking how much time we had, so it made it so much funnier when we knew what "an infinite amount of time" meant
- The Killer (META): did some (unsuccessful) work on this during hunt, helped postsolve
events I attended
I only attended Tailing a Lead. This was probably fun for most people, but I was deeply embarrassed when I walked by one of my fall semester TAs in the fake-mustache-towel-over-head getup.
conclusion
I was left with so many keepsakes of this hunt because my team (who had mostly flown in from various cities) didn't have the space to bring them home. As a result, I now have:
- our team's first-aid kit
- like 50% of the puzzle pieces from The Inspectre, plus the frame
- various receipts from Eponymous Forensic Accountant
- various magnets from abstract art and poems / concerning a pale blue dot / and many more friends
- bread clips from Synthetic Tagsonomy
- a plastic cocktail glass with the scrabble tiles inside it, no idea which puzzle this came from
- a string with a bunch of pictures and words on it from Celestial Rope
- cereal box from Mystery O's
MITMH is such a fun time and campus feels so lively! I enjoyed seeing my high school friends and various puzzle acquaintances PLUS I got to rope all my MIT non-puzzler friends into doing it with me, and I think they had fun :) I am so so excited for MITMH26, which I might be working on writing... it's gonna be a good one.

| name | value |
| date | 2025-01-21 |