First off, if you don't know what MITMH is, or what a puzzlehunt is in general, then, uh, this post is not going to make much sense! Okay fine, a puzzlehunt is an event where teams of people compete over a set period of time to solve a series of usually quite difficult and very creative puzzles that can be about literally anything. This blog post is the canonical introduction to the concept. The MIT Mystery Hunt is the biggest puzzlehunt by I think every metric? Most puzzles, most participants, most clout. It is the puzzlehunt on the yearly calendar. Hosted at MIT (the Cambridge university) by the winning team of the previous year, traditionally an MIT thing though in recent years has been more and more open to remote online teams - you can complete most of the puzzles and even get to the finish line with a fully remote team, but you cannot win, and certain puzzles and story elements will require physical presence at MIT campus (like being given a little electronic trinket that hides puzzle content, or the climactic final "runaround" puzzle).
Couple more bits of housekeeping. This post is going to have unmarked spoilers for stuff from MITMH '26 because it would be harder to write otherwise and, realistically, you're probably not going to go play it after the fact. Also this is going to be really weird structurally because this felt like one of those things where a million things happen in three days and then there's no obvious way to assemble it into a coherent sequence of events afterwards. This is also not going to be like a normal Mystery Hunt retrospective blog post because I have never done one of them before and I have nothing to compare it to. So this is more going to be, here's what I learned from playing in Mystery Hunt for the first time. Okay!
I hunted with the team ⛎ Unicode Equivalence, who I would describe as probably one of the strongest puzzling teams out there? I knew them from my previous hunt experience of getting some friends together to play in the 2024 and 2025 Galactic Puzzle Hunts, and the 2025 Teammate Hunt, because they were always at or near the top of the leaderboard. How I got into this situation is that December 2025 I got a DM from a friend, who incredibly is one of the frighteningly good puzzlers on Unicode Equivalence, essentially saying, hey, my Mystery Hunt team wants a few more people, are you in?
I do want to get across how weird and unexpected this was, and how it still feels kind of surreal to me. Let's say, for an analogy, that you play a lot of basketball. You're really interested in basketball, some of your friends know you as the "basketball friend", and you're certainly far better at basketball than the average person who plays very rarely if at all, but you're not a pro and you're not even really on a team, you just kind of play pickup games whenever you get the chance. And then you get a DM from a friend, who happens to play for the Phoenix Suns, saying, hey, a lot of us are busy this year, do you want to fill in for us in the 2025-2026 NBA season? It kind of felt like that. I don't know why I used basketball for this analogy I don't know anything about it. You get the idea.
So going into it I would say my main concern was something of an imposter syndrome. In a team with some of the best puzzlers out there, how much would I really be able to contribute? Somewhat, it turns out!
The thing is, Mystery Hunt is really big. In my view, you benefit a lot from having strong puzzlers for puzzles like this nightmare22 or that round with the hexagons that I still don't understand, but you really do just need a lot of people to work on stuff. Not every puzzle is an impenetrable nightmare! And you benefit from having a big diverse set of puzzlers so that when a puzzle about crochet or France or bird calls drops, you've got someone for it. So, especially on the first day, I was able to contribute a decent amount! There was one about identifying board games which was well within my wheelhouse, there was this really cool logic puzzle meta which I think I really got to show my skills on, and I even got a moment to shine in the final runaround by solving one of its 24 minipuzzles. I will admit that under the pressure I did the puzzle wrong at first and took like twice as long as I should have and also told the in-person team to submit the wrong answer the first time, but still! I also had a great time on voice call with my team in either the night shift crew or day one's roving gang of like 5 people who bounced around getting random stuff done.
There's an interesting note there for me; prior to this, I have never gotten on voice call with people who I know exclusively "from the internet". And I never really thought about why I did this. Weird to admit that I guess it's just a kind of shyness? On the internet you can construct this version of yourself that is exactly who you want to be, but your voice will unavoidably give something away of who you are irl. But... my team needed me, and it is so much easier to communicate and solve puzzles over voice, so I just went for it.
The worst part was actually that I had to reinstall Zoom because Discord voice call wasn't working on MIT wifi for some reason??
Actually playing in Mystery Hunt has made me think that keeping your team organised is a kind of puzzle in itself. When I was just hunting with my friends, we made new discord channels for individual puzzles manually and worked out of different tabs of the same google sheet. And this worked fine for like 7 people and a couple dozen puzzles, but with Mystery Hunt's (typical) upwards of 30 people and a few hundred puzzles, you really need a better system! So perhaps unsurprisingly there is software written specifically for this,23 a program named Cardboard that keeps track of everything and manages the discord channels and makes new google sheets for you. We used it on our team and I genuinely think the hunt would have been impossible without it.
Of course, "organising your puzzles" being a skill means that they can write rounds that test your ability to do that. Land of No Name, my favourite round from the hunt, did just that by starting with every puzzle's name blacked out. We went through many ideas for how to refer to them; almost every puzzle in the round got renamed in Cardboard several times!
It's never in anyone's introduction to puzzlehunts but I think it's worth mentioning that google sheets specifically24 seems to be a major part of hunt culture. Every puzzle has a button on the page that copies the puzzle content in a format that you can paste right into a spreadsheet! It just happens to be the perfect tool for this kind of real-time collaboration that involves a lot of semi-structured data. And grids. Lots of puzzles have grids. Sometimes the format gets weird and you gotta pull out the Excalidraw, but for the most part it's all sheets. I enjoyed this kind of collaboration a lot! Especially for the final runaround, we had the in-person players sending the online team everything that could be done remotely, and then like 15 online players trying to do 10 minipuzzles simultaneously all scrambling around this one google sheet like a colony of ants. I've never seen anything quite like it before.
Maintaining the sheets is one thing but keeping track of everything that's actually happening is quite another. One particular challenge for me is that I am Australian. This means that a lot of stuff happened very early in the morning for me while I was asleep. I was able to get my bearings on day 1, but then by the morning of day 2 there was a lot going on and I was very out of the loop. This is not to fault my team in any way; this is sort of an eternal unsolvable problem for me. I'd love to build a life that happens online, but so much of online happens overnight. But, shoutout to my fellow off-timezones night shift crew, and those of you who probably shouldn't have been there but stayed up way too late anyway, you were great to hunt with.
Okay, nobody actually hunts for two and a half days straight. I hope. You do need to sleep, puzzling performance drops off pretty quick after 24 hours awake. Also, you do have to take care of yourself! One of my favourite aspects of the hunt was that every few hours I'd get @everyone'd on the discord to be told to eat, stretch, and hydrate. This was genuinely very helpful.
Still, I don't know how you can stay focused on essentially the one task for a whole weekend. Sure, there are a lot of different puzzles with different topics to bounce between, and they had this fun gimmick called "research tasks" where you had to do little scavenger hunt-esque things like "send us a photo of you touching grass" or minigames on the site to get points you had to use to unlock puzzles, but by day 2 I found myself getting distracted by other things and needing to go take a break from the hunt for a bit. Maybe in future big hunts like this I'll deliberately schedule time to do non-hunt stuff just to refresh.
What didn't help was that I learned on the morning of day 1 that someone I interact with a lot had covid. And then by that afternoon I started to feel unwell myself. I don't think I have covid but it's weird and I'm not enjoying it. Mystery Hunt is one of those events that feels like you get transported to an alternate dimension for two days,25 it's just a shame that the real world still finds ways to cause problems.
Anyway. I guess I had a lot of fun! Thank you so much to Cardinality for putting the hunt on - playing in one of these has made it clear that it must be an incredible amount of work - and to my beloved ⛎ Unicode Equivalence for having me. Couldn't work out where to put it in the post but I also want to say that the keeper from the gacha round gave me gender envy.26 So shoutout to the artists behind the hunt. Also @google sheets please make it so that if someone else selects multiple cells you can see their coloured box change to match. That'd make indicating things a lot easier. Okay that's all thanks!
