MIT Mystery Hunt 2026

Over MLK weekend, I was in Boston to participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt. I haven't really done writeups of it before, but I've got this blog now, and it was my first time there in person so that's something special.

This will contain some general spoilers about the structure of the hunt, especially Land With No Name.

I hunt with Up Late, a mix of some Boston area/MIT people and some people from a variety of teams around the Seattle puzzling scene. There's been varying levels of remote presence in Seattle from year to year, where it's been nice to hang out and work with people I'd more often be competing against. But some of that crowd's been flying out to hunt in person, and this year things worked out that I was able to join them.

Thursday night I met up with a few teammates to do an escape room, U-Boat at Red Fox Escapes. I don't do enough escape rooms to compare, but I had a good time. (Apparently Body Shop at the same place is also really good)

Friday I braved the cold to head over to the classroom we'd be working in, then over to watch the opening skit. The hunt was off-brand Pokemon (Puzzmon) themed, and the website came with a little game we could wander around in to unlock puzzles. I only really got to work with the app in the first "kingdom" (area/round), since there was so much other stuff going on as later ones showed up. But it was the bird-themed one, so it's all good. We got a lute to play songs in the game to get birds to carry you around, and I enjoyed a little minipuzzle where you had to play a few Zelda songs on it as well.

Curiously, instead of more traditional metapuzzles the kingdoms each had a "capstone" puzzle that used data from the not-Pokedex that unlocked as we solved each puzzle, rather than their answers. (It's funny how in my meta talk I mentioned tokenized metas not really being a thing MIT does...) But that meant that we couldn't backsolve those puzzles as we got their metas, and there was a cap of eight (increased later) puzzles unlocked at a time, so "useless" puzzles we were stuck on were starting to clog up our cap...

What opened things up after unlocking a few capstones was discovering a new type of round, a "dimension." We were forewarned that the dimensions were harder and weirder than the kingdoms, and the first one certainly qualified: the Land With No Name. When we first unlocked the round, all 26 of its puzzles were available, but all of the letters were blanked out. However, some puzzles were mostly images so they could still be solved in that state, so when we got our first answer it revealed the letter Q in all of the puzzles. That made more puzzles solvable, revealing more letters, and so forth. They did a really good job of having puzzles whose difficulty would scale in different ways based on the number of letters you had, from ones that would be trivial if you had everything so the challenge was to get them as soon as possible, to ones that would be difficult but solvable with any number of letters (even 0). We weren't quite able to finish off the metapuzzle, but we understood it enough to backsolve the last two puzzles with 24/26 answers, so I consider that a moral victory.

(It's also funny how in my meta talk I also talked about cryptogram-type things gradually revealing a letter at a time as a good meta structure.)

And then there kept just being more stuff. As we solved more capstone puzzles we unlocked two more dimensions that I didn't do as much with: Hyperbolic Space, which had normal puzzles along with twelve completely blank puzzles you had to backsolve, and Atlas of Mosaics, which was all collaborative hexagon tile assembly that always seemed to have people working on it and having a good time. We eventually found out why the capstone puzzles didn't use answers as we unlocked a set of metapuzzles that used the puzzles from the kingdoms (but didn't tell you which puzzles go with which meta).

So there was a lot of stuff you could do in parallel:

• Solving "easier" Kingdom puzzles
• Solving weirder and/or more-difficult Dimension puzzles
• Doing tasks to get more research points
• Solving Kingdom capstone puzzles
• Solving Kingdom metapuzzles
• Continuing to beat our head against the Land With No Name metapuzzle

I mostly focused on metas and capstones, occasionally popping into regular puzzles to help out or if something fit with my interests.

By the time Hunt HQ closed down Sunday night, we'd solved 6/9 capstones and 7/8 of the Kingdom metapuzzles. (sorry) We could've hinted that last meta, but we didn't really know if that was going to lead to a meaningful thing or if we also needed the capstones. The last couple years have had some sort of "early hunt" milestone that led to an on-campus runaround or interaction, and I was hoping to at least get there, but this year there were a lot more puzzles to get there.

At wrapup, the organizers said that having a variety that people could choose whatever seemed interesting was a goal of theirs, so I guess they succeeded on that front. But if you had a goal other than completing the hunt, it was hard to know which of those things would get you there. For instance, there weren't even three Dimensions: there were actually six, three of which we never unlocked. I had to ask around afterwards to find out what we would've needed to do to see the rest. Some of their gimmicks seemed interesting, but since my team doesn't avoid spoilers and solve the rest of the hunt online afterwards like some do, I likely won't get to experience them.

I also made the mistake that a lot of first-time on-campus people do and mostly did solving in the room with people, only going out for food/sleep runs and one late-night drop by Hunt HQ to pick up a few items. In my defense, they did drastically change how in-person events worked this year, having a lot of events that showed up in a long list of "research tasks" as you unlocked them rather than having a separate page up front with all of them.

But I did have a great time overall. We solved a lot of puzzles, the hunt did a lot of stuff well, and being on campus for the first time is a milestone for me. I might have an addendum with some puzzles I liked when they're available publicly (other than the entire Land With No Name round, heh).