MITMH 2026 just ended today! I solved with V.AL.V.E as part of the α-betical Order merger, and we almost managed to finish. (We solved the final puzzle at 2:30pm, while hunt ended at 12pm.)
If you have no idea what a puzzlehunt is, it's essentially a collection of puzzles (like crosswords, not jigsaws) that you solve by extracting answers. Solving puzzles unlocks more puzzles, and there are metapuzzles that requre using previous answers to solve. The entire thing is wrapped up in a story that provides a theme for the hunt. I recommend reading betaveros' Introduction to Puzzlehunts for more information. MIT Mystery Hunt is held annually and is the largest and most difficult hunt, usually comprising around 150 puzzles over 1 weekend.
Overall Thoughts
I wasn't super invested in MITMH 2024 or 2025, and didn't get very far in 2021-2023, so this was my first time seeing all the rounds of a huge hunt! That was what I liked most about being on a big team, even if I couldn't contribute much after the first few rounds. I'm still happy with what I did: I think I solved a significant portion of 4 puzzles! The team was well-organized despite the large amount of solvers, and I met a lot of very impressive people throughout the weekend. I enjoyed the mix of tasks and puzzles and thought it was a much better system than having concentrated scavenger-hunt "puzzles". Multiple rounds were very interactive and detailed, and the art was amazing. I think the hunt ended up being on the longer/harder side; Providence found the coin Sunday night and we went super hard on hinting in the last 24 hours in order to fnish.
Individual Puzzles
The rest of this post will be rambling about puzzles. SPOILERS AHEAD!
[Post will be updated with links once the site becomes publicly archived.]
MonQuest
This was an incredible feat of programming and I'm sad I didn't play with it more. Being in a large team of ~70 active solvers, much of the world content was explored as soon as it was unlocked and there really wasn't that much to do. I still enjoyed solving a few of the world puzzles in Aviaria (movement tricks), Bubble Cove (word games), and Serpentine Hills (single-line drawings). I heard Eland Islands had synchronized time-limited puzzles, but I was unfortunately on transit when the team was working on them so I couldn't join in. I think background music would have made the experience better (I was initially sure I had muted it somehow), but it's more than fine without.
Crafts Materials (Kitty City)
I spent 80 minutes Friday night printing out the origami page and figuring out how to fold not-a-crane. It probably would have taken longer if a friend wasn't on call to work through the steps with me. I think the puzzle idea was great (I love crafts!), but identifying the results of some of them were non-trivial. It also had a strange extraction that needed two hints to solve.
����! ��� ����� (2129) (The Land of No Name)
A riichi mahjong puzzle! I've actually wanted to make a riichi puzzle for a long time now, and I've been thinking along this line so the solve path was fairly clear. Props for including a cool yakuman, nagashi mangan and a 100 fu hand! It was our team's first solve in this round, so it was pretty disappointing (but funny) to see we only unlocked the Z.
������ (6714) (The Land of No Name)
I only joined this puzzle after we had realized all of them were almost-pangrams, but I was pretty happy to work out a good number of them with only ~7 letters revealed! A team member came in clutch to Wheel-Of-Fortune the answer without needing the rest.
A wIZArd's (Or dOctOr's) Job Is to vAx chIMps QuIckly In fOG.
Still too funny.
Nominative Determinism (Elder Drifts)
Contender for best puzzle. Even though we solved it in less than 5 minutes, I thought it was a great play on the Bouba-Kiki effect.
Stray Child (Hyperbolic Space)
A Japanese crossword! Except not all of the answers fit...? We filled in most of it Friday night and then proceeded to be stuck for over 24 hours. I was surprised that practically no one on our team knew Japanese! I feel like anyone with working-level knowledge should be able to blitz through the crossword easily, but we were just continuously consulting dictionaries and being unsure of answers. Eventually we backsolved it; looking at the solution, there was no way we were going to be able to forward solve.
Devilish Devilries (Hyperbolic Space)
Printer's devilry puzzles, which on one hand, are impossible, but this puzzle has an amazing twist. I didn't contribute much, but got to experience a very... "interesting" conversation as I listened to team members solve it. The "Mature Content" warning is very appropriate for this puzzle.
Acquisitions (Hyperbolic Space)
An interactive auction! Figuring out the mechanics is pretty interesting, and even after you understand how it works, it's non-trivial to identify the winning bids. I helped a bit, but ultimately a team member did most of the work around the auction. Unfortunately, we were stumped by a large portion of the crossword clues which prevented us from extracting an answer, so this puzzle also ended up backsolved.
"Blue Puzzles" (Hyperbolic Space)
It was fun guessing thematic 7-letter answers at first, but we went off-track for a while trying to assign doors and stairs to particular letters. After we figured out the relation to the Klein map, it was easy to backsolve the rest. Even though I understood nothing of hyperbolic space after that, I at least understood enough to backsolve Back and Forth!
Strand-Type Game (Royal Groves)
Strands! This was a pretty straightforward puzzle; I enjoyed contributing by finding words and helping figure out the aha's. One thing about having a huge team: the puzzle spreadsheet gets cluttered really quickly when people start making duplicates of the info to try their own ideas, and it gets hard to figure out where the most up-to-date information is! We had like 6 different copies of the grid going at the same time.
Atlas of Mosaics
This round was another technological feat. Huge hexagonal puzzles, updating live in a group of ~70 people, and for every team in the hunt that made it up to that point? It was stunning. I didn't help very much at all in this round, just glanced at a few puzzles since they were all too hard.
Pursuit of Liberty (The Brights)
We were off-track for a while thinking about the Declaration of Independence, but eventually a team member pointed out the link to go (the board game). I've known how to play go for many years, but I've never been particularly good at it: I'm 18kyu on OGS, which is better than only ~25% of the users there. Thankfully, I have some practice with life-and-death problems so I was able to work out most solutions after an hour and a half, with help from another teammate. It was very surprising that I might have been the best go player on the team!
Lights Down Mode (The Brights Capstone)
I didn't interact with this puzzle very much, but it relied on differences between having your device on light/dark mode. Not only was that extremely clever and thematic, we didn't even notice until after a portion of the puzzle was solved and had a moment of realization.
Adding and Abutting (Eland Islands)
An approachable wordplay puzzle. There was some sidetracking where we thought the words would share two consecutive letters, but the title of this puzzle was very helpful in figuring out the correct path. It's quite incredible that this puzzle could even be constructed, after looking at the result. The extracted answerphrase was quite strange, possibly as a result of that, but luckily a team member was able to guess the answer.
Keep Going! (Eland Islands)
An interactive word-related puzzle. It wasn't incredibly clear what the goal was, even as we began to understand different parts of the mechanic, but I always enjoy a simple interactive puzzle. We were grinding through the entire alphabet when a team member figured out the answer (thankfully). Very funny answer.
Post-mortem Problems (Serpentine Hills)
Ooh, a bridge puzzle! Unfortunately, it's also impossible. Struggled for a bit before being completely confused and giving up. This is one of the only puzzles our team never solved or backsolved.
Common Scenes (Fate's Thread Casino)
This entire round was fascinating to go through, but I was only able to help with the Art banner. I'm happy it was relatively straightforward once a good chunk of the paintings were identified, since all the other puzzles open at the time looked way too intimidating. This was thankfully just a lot of grunt work identifying the overlaps and doing the logic puzzle. We did use a hint to confirm some answers, since it was rapidly approaching Sunday evening and we had 2 rounds still to go.
Meme Scenes (Fate's Thread Casino)
I moved to this puzzle at 10pm Sunday with ~50% identification, but the round meta was unlocked shortly after and solved, which meant this puzzle could be backsolved and was no longer useful to progressing the hunt. Still, I felt invested and unable to contribute to the other active puzzles, so I kept at it with just a couple others. And by that, I mean watching Never Gonna Give You Up, Pen Pineapple Apple Pen, What Does The Fox Say, Baby Shark, and Turn Down for What (among others) over and over again. RIP my YouTube recommendations.
At 5am I decided to call it, since I had identified almost everything but the extraction wasn't working out. But when I woke up in the morning, I saw the final video had been identified by a team member. After some more frantic extracting we managed to solve it at 11:56am, 4 minutes before the end of the hunt. A useless solve (most likely), but a solve nonetheless.
