MIT Mystery Hunt 2025 Recap

Posted on January 26, 2025

I participated in the MIT Mystery Hunt last week with Cardinality. This was my first time hunting with them; I defected from ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎ because Cardinality was making a serious push to try to win this year, and a good friend of mine on the team asked me to help. Astute followers of this blog might notice that the last time I wrote a Mystery Hunt recap was in 2020 when ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎ won; I guess I'm just too lazy to write recaps for years when I'm not on the winning team.

Hunting with Cardinality was a pretty interesting experience since I've only ever done Mystery Hunt with ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎ for the past 8 years. One thing that surprised me was the turnout for onsite hunters, especially later into the hunt. Cardinality and ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎ have a similar number of registered hunters, but the number of hunters physically in the room on Cardinality on Saturday evening was easily 2x/3x the number of hunters in the room when I visited ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎ on Sunday. It's a bit apples-to-oranges though since ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎ hasn't tried to seriously win hunt for a while now.

The puzzles are currently available on two-pi-noir.agency, but will eventually be moved to the Mystery Hunt Archive. Lots of puzzle spoilers below:

The Art Gallery—I got pretty confused here because I assumed that UNICODES couldn't clue extended ASCII (a couple letters were even just ASCII!). We wasted a bunch of time looking into the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs Unicode block.
ChatGPT—This was pretty fun. I usually enjoy doing black-boxy puzzles and this was no exception. I think I submitted the first valid input of "a".
Check-a-deez Words Out—We were pretty quick about finding all the bird names since word search solvers exist. We had to manually look for the "not in a row" answers, which were fun. I was super surprised that Ryan Gosling didn't show up in the answer, because that was first name we proposed when we made the first/last name aha.
In a Different Direction—We wasted a lot of time on a contradictory grid because we assumed that the first down right clue had to start in the first column; oops.
An Exchange of Vows—Cute little fish puzzle. I like how the title tells you exactly what you need to do.
Dear Diary—I really enjoyed the typo-hunting part of this puzzle. This was my favorite fish puzzle this hunt.
Some Assembly Required—I did notice that PRIVATE SECTOR was the only reasonable "answer" pretty early on. I regret not submitting it earlier; that would've been pretty funny.
Maze of Lies—My main contribution on this puzzle was to help recreate the grid in Google Sheets.
Papa’s Stash—I only looked at this puzzle a little bit near the end. We got stuck for a while because we thought that the only valid options for the girl was Batgirl and Supergirl. I was very surprised (and a little upset) to learn the existence of Ant Girl.
Cross Spread—Our solve for this was pretty smooth since we got the picross connection almost immediately. We were confused for a bit about the Chainsaw Man clue because we thought it was only referencing a single arcana.
Networking Event—I helped solve a couple of the clues and then stopped looking at this puzzle once we needed to construct graphs.
皇帝の暗号—I spent a bunch of time staring at this puzzle but didn't make any progress. I did learn that the Touhou doujin song 色は匂へど散りぬるを's first line was a reference to the Iroha.
The Killer—I spent a quarter of my hunt staring at this puzzle. We weren't stuck at any point but progress was very slow. Before we found the time hints in the text, I tried ordering the pictures based on sun/moon location, but I assumed the viewer was facing North (instead of South ???) so it was completely wrong. After we identified every category, got every feeder, and assigned every feeder answer to a page, we still couldn't extract the cluephrase because a few answers were misassigned.
esTIMation dot jpg—This was a great in-person event. I was really confused why so many other teams showed up at the first estimathon we went to (at 11pm Friday), since I hadn't expected that many teams to have unlocked this round already. I only learned during wrap-up that this puzzle was automatically unlocked for all teams even if they hadn't unlocked its associated round yet. I'm curious what the scoring algorithm was, since we got a lot more 0/5s than I expected based on how we felt during the estimathon.
Splits Used as History—I helped reorder the n-grams and solve cryptics, but was actively unhelpful in solving the rest of the puzzle. I was very skeptical that the cryptic answers were supposed to be converted into real stocks, because POT is a stock that delisted in 2018 and DOG is a 1x short DOW inverse ETF. I'm glad that my teammates ignored my skepticism and solved my puzzle.
Weirdo Threaded Doodads—I didn't work on this puzzle. In fact, nobody on the team worked on this puzzle. We unlocked it and hoped that we could backsolve it with a phrase referencing the tasseled hat (?) in La Grande Odalisque, since it seemed topical. Once we failed to do that, we immediately used a free answer to skip this.

Those were all the puzzles I worked on. I'm looking forward to being on the writing team once again!